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Since there was no longer the countervailing power of the papacy and since the Church of England was a creature of the state and had become subservient to it, this meant that there was nothing to regulate the powers of the king, and he became an absolute power. In theory, divine, natural, customary, and constitutional law still held sway over ...
In political philosophy, the phrase consent of the governed refers to the idea that a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is justified and lawful only when consented to by the people or society over which that political power is exercised. This theory of consent is starkly contrasted with the divine right of kings and has ...
The very idea of an ordering of organisms, even if supposedly fixed, laid the basis for the idea of transmutation of species, whether progressive goal-directed orthogenesis or Charles Darwin's undirected theory of evolution. [20] [21] The chain of being continued to be part of metaphysics in 19th-century education, and the concept was well known.
The state as the family writ large was the most harmonious, orderly, and natural form of government. This was later expanded to cover international relations (e.g. the emperor of China is treated as the older brother of the Korean king). Confucian family theory is still espoused in North Korea to justify their method of leadership succession.
In the period of the eighteenth century, usually called the Enlightenment, a new justification of the European state developed.Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract theory states that governments draw their power from the governed, its 'sovereign' people (usually a certain ethnic group, and the state's limits are legitimated theoretically as that people's lands, although that is often not ...
An earlier development of the theory of popular sovereignty is found among the School of Salamanca (see e.g. Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) or Francisco Suarez (1548–1617)). Like the theorists of the divine right of kings and Locke, the Salamancans saw sovereignty as emanating originally from God.
The Catholic Church takes the position that the Church itself has a proper role in guiding and informing consciences, explaining the natural law, and judging the moral integrity of the state, thereby serving as check to the power of the state. [143] The Church teaches that the right of individuals to religious freedom is an essential dignity.
Divine command theory (also known as theological voluntarism) [1] [2] is a meta-ethical theory which proposes that an action's status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God. The theory asserts that what is moral is determined by God's commands and that for a person to be moral he is to follow God's commands.