Natural Law Ethics

    Natural law ethics could be described as the attempt to find values within nature, which is the image of what should be. That is a very sketchy definition of nature, but then from this understanding of what nature is, one could set up a way of carrying out those values to other image-bearers, who are those who hold to these values. (The values are concepts which are shown through actions.) So this is a theistic account of how we understand ethics through natural law theory, which is on the internet somewhere.

    So once we look at nature, we will then look for a certain 'oughtness' about how things work within nature. This 'oughtness' is a feeling that we have when we see how nature should act. Down below, there will be a distinction between how things should be and how things ought to be. Let's call this the difference between how we feel about something and how things actually are in themselves.

    For example, if there is a glass of water on the table, then one could look at how the water is settled within the glass, and then from there conclude that the water acts in such a way that it should be settled within that glass. However, this is a fallacy because nature does not tell us anything about how things should act, but rather those, who have a sense of how nature should be, are the ones who make a judgement about how nature should act.

    Thus, our judgments depend on nature to give us an idea of how things ought to be, but we already have an idea of how things should be. And as we look to nature for how things ought to be, let us keep in mind that 'should' tells us about our feelings that we have about nature, while 'ought' is how things are to be in our world that is sensible to the image-bearers within it. So we get knowledge about the world through how we interact with it, since nature is the source of science, but math guys have to give you a schema to find out how to understand science.