’natural law’ was, more than anything, just the common idiom in which talk about morals and politics was couched in the 17th/18th centuries. the substantive claim that all of those people shared was limited to a commitment about there being a providentially instituted normative order to everything, in analogy to the divinely created order of matter. so, for people, ‘morality’, or whatever, was discovered rather than created, given rather than constructed. they differed wildly over how exactly to cash out this naturalism, so when you see someone waxing nostalgic about some unitary “natural law tradition”, it’s probably horseshit. the seedbed for an alternative approach was already being laid during the same timeframe, and you can see something like a full fledged moral constructivism being staked out around the turn of the 19th century. but thise guys still used the idiom of ‘natural law’, which shows how confused the whole thing is.
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paine is rad sometimes
