From my brief life experience, natural law doesn't exist. The only constants in nature are competition and randomness.
Law is simply a conversion rate between wealth/resources and social behavior. Having greater wealth allows a greater margin of error until the law doles out the punishment, such as dodging wartime conscription, paying bail/fines or bribing the judiciary. With or without constraint of the law, individuals tend to make almost perfectly-rational decisions, occasionally skewed by emotion, family obligations, charity, etc.
For example, German historian Karl Wittfogel coins the term "Oriental despotism" as a result of "Hydraulic Civilzations". Why was Europe so fragmented in comparison to the stable Indian and Chinese civilizations? Because Chinese/Indian civilization sparked along the Yangtze/Ganges rivers, where cooperative irrigation was required for survival. So the Chinese/Indian families sent their eldest sons to dig ditches, accepting their despotic state in exchange for a higher chance of crop surpluses and water access. The richest European settlements all shared the Mediterranean pond (Carthage, Syracuse, Athens, Alexandria, Anatolia, etc), so they had the geographic luck to not have to engage in "Hydraulic civilizations". Therefore, the price of resources/wealth Europeans had to pay to engage in some "unfriendly social behaviors" was less. Galileo's head was fortunate to have been spouting blasphemy in Italy, not China. But Europe spawned Christianity, the Renaissance, Archimedes, Epicurus, Aristotle... all the creative stuff. If you ask indigenous tribesmen today in Papua New Guinea or South America, those untouched by modernity, they likely won't condemn murder and rape. There is no natural law; all human behavior is a fairly rational decision based on geographical luck/resources and behavior, and the law is the conversion rate between the two.
Although outdated, I would say Anacyclosis (Polybius) does a pretty decent job predicting trend of human behavior.
Law is simply a conversion rate between wealth/resources and social behavior. Having greater wealth allows a greater margin of error until the law doles out the punishment, such as dodging wartime conscription, paying bail/fines or bribing the judiciary. With or without constraint of the law, individuals tend to make almost perfectly-rational decisions, occasionally skewed by emotion, family obligations, charity, etc.
For example, German historian Karl Wittfogel coins the term "Oriental despotism" as a result of "Hydraulic Civilzations". Why was Europe so fragmented in comparison to the stable Indian and Chinese civilizations? Because Chinese/Indian civilization sparked along the Yangtze/Ganges rivers, where cooperative irrigation was required for survival. So the Chinese/Indian families sent their eldest sons to dig ditches, accepting their despotic state in exchange for a higher chance of crop surpluses and water access. The richest European settlements all shared the Mediterranean pond (Carthage, Syracuse, Athens, Alexandria, Anatolia, etc), so they had the geographic luck to not have to engage in "Hydraulic civilizations". Therefore, the price of resources/wealth Europeans had to pay to engage in some "unfriendly social behaviors" was less. Galileo's head was fortunate to have been spouting blasphemy in Italy, not China. But Europe spawned Christianity, the Renaissance, Archimedes, Epicurus, Aristotle... all the creative stuff. If you ask indigenous tribesmen today in Papua New Guinea or South America, those untouched by modernity, they likely won't condemn murder and rape. There is no natural law; all human behavior is a fairly rational decision based on geographical luck/resources and behavior, and the law is the conversion rate between the two.
Although outdated, I would say Anacyclosis (Polybius) does a pretty decent job predicting trend of human behavior.