I. Three Modes of Natural Law
Natural law is that law which is natural to practical reason; it consists in a rational, and rationally recognizable, ordering of action to good shared in common, and thus is the intrinsic human potential for forming reason-structured communities. As such, it is not merely a disparate set of precepts, but what might be called a legal system. As a legal system, I would suggest that natural law has three aspects, which might very roughly be called the moral, the judicial, and the ceremonial modes of natural law.
Most discussions of natural law focus on the moral mode, which is in a sense the foundational mode. The moral mode is concerned with what is required to be good as a rational person, and as such requires virtue and requires what is required for virtue. We could also think of this as natural law seen in light of the virtue of prudence, or, perhaps more exactly, seen immediately in light of the virtue of prudence.
However, one of those virtues required by and regulated by natural law is justice, the virtue that involves rendering adequately to others what is due to them. In light of justice, therefore, natural law has a second mode, the judicial mode, in which natural law is the measure specifically of what is rationally due to a person. Natural law in the judicial mode is what measures and regulates the 'due'. While natural law in its moral mode is reasoned out through deduction and derivation of principles, natural law in its judicial mode is reasoned out through determination and application to cases.
There are many justice-like virtues besides justice in the proper sense, however; Aquinas calls these potential parts of justice, but we could consider them satellite virtues of justice. These are virtues like respectfulness, filial piety, honesty, generosity, and so forth. In light of these, and in particular in light of these insofar as they concern persons, I think that natural law has a third mode, the ceremonial mode. The ceremonial mode is specifically concerned with natural law as the measure for what is appropriate for respect or deference toward persons, in light of both obligation (moral) and right (judicial). Like the judicial, it is reasoned out through determination and application to cases, but in a much looser way than we find with the judicial mode, in somewhat like the way that showing someone respect involves a looser standard than respecting someone's rights. This difference arises because the potential parts of justice are like but not entirely like the virtue of justice itself.
The last of the three is interesting and under-considered, but the judicial mode of natural law is what concerns me here.
II. Judicial Natural Law and Jural Good
While not all particular precepts of natural law specifically concern particular interactions between people, any particular precept can have applications that affect such interactions. Of the kinds of interactions to which precepts of natural law can be applied, some are such that we can identify a standard of equality in goodness, so that the interaction is 'equal' or 'even' or 'on the level' or 'not crooked'. For instance, if I take something from you, that benefits me, but leaves you worse off unless we determine a way to do it in which you also benefit in a sufficiently appropriate way. Of these kinds of interactions the 'sufficiently appropriate way' sometimes has a well-defined character that allows for the completion of the interaction according to a recognizable standard. In such interactions, there is some kind of good exchanged to keep the interaction level or even. Natural law in judicial mode concerns this kind of good, because justice concerns this kind of interaction. This kind of good we can call jural good.
Jural good has had many names throughout the years. Justice is rendering to each what is due to them, the jural good is what is due (in Latin: debitum) in light of justice. What is due one is in some way one's own (in Latin: suum). Since it is the kind of good with which justice is concerned, the jural good is the just or the just thing (in Greek: dikaion; in Latin: justum). It is also concerned with making right; we talk about jural good as 'making things right' because it has also been called the right or what is one's right (in Latin: ius). Because this latter is somewhat different from the sense in which we say that people 'have rights' (you have rights to what is your right), this last has sometimes also been called objective right, i.e., right as an object of justice, in contrast to subjective right, which is right in the sense of 'having right to something'.
Jural goods arise because natural law in judicial mode provides a standard of what is due to a person, and under what conditions. For something to be your own, you need both rule and title. We need, in other words, a standard, an obligation or system of obligations telling us that something can be due to something, and a fact of some kind telling us that the rule is applicable to your particular case, which we call a 'title'. Titles can be either intrinsic or extrinsic, based on whether the possession of the title is necessary to a situation or not. The title to basic respect as a person is just being a person; every person has such title intrinsically. On the other side, no one has intrinsic title to another person's labor; title to another person's labor has to arise from some extrinsic condition like punishment or restitution or contract. There are important aspects to this distinction, but my point here is simply that whether title is intrinsic or extrinsic does not fundamentally change the shape of the situation. To deny someone a jural good to which they are entitled is harm, or, more strictly, juridical injury (which is in injury in the strict sense -- the Latin iniuria literally means 'deprivation of right').
III. The Juridical Realm
Natural law therefore requires us to recognize the world in which we live as not merely an arena for practical and moral action but a juridical realm consisting of potential and actual jural goods and titles to them, with respect to natural law. It is literally part of practical reason to see the world in terms of persons, as something capable of being mine and yours and his and hers -- meum, tuum, suum. This juridical aspect of the world is not separate from it; the juridical realm is not a separate realm, but literally the realm in which we live as rational beings. It is the world as relevant to practice under natural law in its judicial mode, the world as providing cases to which moral principles must be applied for us to act morally within it, the world in light of obligations of justice.
This natural juridical realm is itself the context in which human beings construct institutions and community offices and legal/juridical statuses and the like; that is to say, the natural juridical realm is what makes possible the juridical artifacts, the positive juridical elements, that play such a large role in our societies. We construct these in exactly the way you would expect: we make our own laws, including positive judicial laws, to protect, maintain, or develop the common goods in light of which we form communities. But the whole point of such juridical artifacts is that they are supposed to construct a specific order of justice within a more general order of justice. Our juridical artifacts are instruments we use more easily to situate ourselves within the natural juridical realm in ways that let justice be done; they may be better or worse as such instruments, but they still have to be structured as instrumental in this way.
Within the juridical realm, we can be said to 'have rights', i.e., to have particular title to particular jural goods under particular precepts of law, whether natural or positive. To have rights is to be situated within the juridical realm, to have relations of particular kinds to particular kinds of jural goods as in some way yours. Natural rights in this sense are natural entitlements to jural goods appropriate to human nature, by virtue of human nature itself as the title. Civil rights in this strict and proper sense are entitlements under positive law to jural goods appropriate to civil society, by virtue of citzenship (constitutive membership in civil society) as title; but we also sometimes use 'civil rights' to include natural rights of citizens or positive rights of citizens where the titles are something other than citizenship itself, or even any rights of people, whether citizens or not, within the context of civil society. In the strictest sense, my rights and yours cannot conflict; but in an accidental way, they can, when distinct jural goods end up linked -- for instance, when the only ways available to render what is due to you happen to make it more difficult to render what is due to me. One of the major things we need civil society for is to work out how to handle such cases. But 'conflict of rights' in this sense is only possible because the suum in my case is clearly distinguishable from the suum in yours, and thus each clearly identifiable; if that were not the case, we could not give any clear content to saying that there is a conflict. But the juridical realm itself cannot be incoherent; it's given unity by justice, and treating the juridical realm as something that can be incoherent is tantamount to holding that there is no real right and wrong in interactions with other people.
