Cicero's On the Republic: Searching for the True Nature of Law

From the earliest times that human beings organized into groups they have created laws to govern themselves. Broken down to its simplest core, laws are nothing more than sets of rules all people in a particular society must obey. But as far back as human beings could reason and ask questions about themselves and the world around them, the origins and nature of law has been a topic of much discussion. Some of the earliest philosophers have thought about law and asked important questions about its nature. Why do societies need laws? Should all law be objective and reflect universal morality or should laws be subjective and fluid based on the individual society? Is law human-made or divine? Is law timeless and unchanging or should it adjust with the changing times and the attitudes of the people living under it?

One of the great philosophers who thought about these questions and attempted to answer some of them was a Roman philosopher, statesman and orator who lived in the first century BCE by the name of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero's stance on the true nature of law is that it is objective and universal. As he says in his On the Republic, "[t]rue law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting" (125). n order to understand what Cicero means by the statement, "true law is right reason in agreement with nature," we must first break the quote into two parts. The first part of the statement is that law is "right reason."

When Cicero says that true law is "right reason," he essentially gives it a divine, infallible and universal quality. To Cicero, reason is the most divine of all human characteristics as it is reason that separates man from all other creatures that God created and is therefore the one quality that man and God have in common. As he says,
"that animal which we call man... full of reason and prudence, has been given a certain distinguished status by the Supreme God who created him; for he is the only one among so many different kinds and varieties of living beings who has a share in reason and thought, while all the rest are deprived of it" (125). Because law comes from right reason, and reason is divine as one human aspect that connects us to God while separating us from the rest of the creatures on the planet, it stands to reason that the law that comes from reason contains a divine element as well. As Cicero says, "since right reason is Law, we must believe that men have Law also in common with the gods" (126).

The significance of this divine law is that it makes law universal, infallible and unchangeable. If laws were human and made by humans, then they would be imperfect just as humans are. They could change, mold and evolve with time just as people and societies do. They could also be different and diverse just as humans are. But just as God, by definition, is the epitome of universality and infallibility, any law that comes from God must be perfect as well. It must be single and universal and transcend all time and all cultures. Cicero clearly recognizes this when he says,
"there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all..." (125).

The second part of Cicero's quote claims that law is also "in agreement with nature." What Cicero means by this is that law is in agreement with our nature as human beings. Cicero recognizes that "anyone who thinks it will be profitable to him will, if he is able, disregard and violate the laws" (126). So if it followed that it was not within our nature to follow these laws, pure utility would dictate that there would be no laws and no justice. Yet despite this fact, laws and justice do exist and people freely follow laws despite it sometimes being against their best interest. Cicero claims that this because true law and virtues like justice "originate in our natural inclination to love our fellow men" (126).

Despite Cicero's great skill in presenting his argument, it is hard to agree that true law is reason in agreement with nature and that it should be universal, unchanging and everlasting. Firstly, law should not be universal. One of the beauties of human beings is that we are all different and we all choose to live our lives differently depending on how we were raised and where we grew up. What we as a society may value as important, someone in another part of the world may consider less important and vice versa. To say that the same laws should apply to us as to them would be unfair. Even places that are as seemingly similar as the fifty states of the Unites States of America have different laws depending on what the people of each individual community have decided is important to them. One commonwealth should not have the right to impose its laws on another commonwealth that may not share its values.

Where Cicero is perhaps correct is in the need for a universal moral code. While the thought of imposing morality on people who may not share your moral view certainly seems wrong and oppressive, allowing for subjective morality opens up a Pandora's box of problems. Taking the extreme example of murder, if we say that murder is only immoral relative to a person's personal beliefs, it essentially gives moral approval to an entire segment of the population who may not believe that murder is immoral to go out and kill people since it is not wrong or immoral to them. The only way to combat this is to put objectivity on certain aspects of morality and say that certain things are absolutely right or absolutely wrong no matter who or where you are.

In a world where law only governed morality, perhaps the idea of a single, universal law grounded in reason would work, but in today's complex world where laws control many aspects of people's lives besides just traditional morality, there should be more regional influence in how people choose to govern themselves. The idea of a universal law would simply be impractical and inappropriate.

Another reason to disagree with Cicero's assessment of the true nature of law is to argue against the view that law should be unchanging and everlasting. People and societies are constantly changing and evolving. We are always learning more about ourselves, the world around us and coming up with new and different ways of thinking and doing things. Less than two hundred years ago, slavery was legal in the U.S. Today, the thought of enslaving other human beings and treating them like property makes a reasonable person cringe. Law should be able to mold and adapt to these changing times and to our evolution as people and as communities. So while one can certainly make the argument that morality, as previously discussed, should be objective and everlasting, because of law's broad reach beyond just simply governing morality it needs to be fluid and be able to adjust to the changing times.

Marcus Cicero was undoubtedly a great philosopher, and his idea of a static and universal Law based in right reason and nature would work well in an ideal and perfect world. But even looking at the issue from a religious angle, we as human beings are not God and are therefore not perfect and infallible. Our human laws, therefore, cannot be perfect and infallible either. And as long as that remains the case, Law, as an ideal, and our practical everyday laws, must respect our differences as people and leave room for our growth and development as human beings.