To reveal the problem of natural law and human rights, I analyzed the news from May 22, 2022, “Man Fatally Shot on Manhattan Subway in Unprovoked Attack”. According to the investigators’ report, 48-year-old Daniel Enriquez was killed on a train in Lower Manhattan, heading for a late lunch (Southall & Schweber, 2022). The murder was unprovoked, and the other train passengers were not injured during the murder attempt.
This piece of news is an illustrative example of one of the main theories of natural law. According to MacKinnon and Fiala (2018), there are moral laws found in nature and discernible by reason. One of such laws is the right to life, which an unknown shooter violated in a train carriage. Even though the murderer has not been caught and his motives remain unknown, an ethical dilemma can be deduced from his behavior. The shooter was faced with a moral question, to kill or not to kill, and the chosen answer violated the natural human right to life.
The murderer broke such principles of ethics as nonmaleficence and justice. The nonmaleficence aspect is obvious because his action resulted in the death of an innocent person. The justice aspect is not that apparent since it is unknown whether the killer’s action was revenge for deeper reasons. The principle of justice is also violated since the identity of the murderer has not yet been discovered, and the person remains unpunished. For the same reason, considering this issue from the standpoint of ethical concepts, it is impossible to say whether the action performed was absolute good or absolute wrong. Thus, only the fact of violation of the natural law that led to the death of a person and the absence of punishment remain clear.
References
Southall, A., & Schweber, N. (2022). Man fatally shot on Manhattan subway in unprovoked attack. The New York Times. Web.
MacKinnon, B., & Fiala, A. (2018). Ethics: Theory and contemporary issues (9th ed.). Cengage Learning.