when a child tearfully exclaims it s not fair that or when viewing a documentary about the suffering of war we feel pain because we re reminded of the horrors of human evil and in doing this we are also providing evidence for the existence of natural law a well accepted example of natural law in our society is that it is wrong for one person to kill another person 
philosophers of natural law often do not explicitly concern themselves with economic matters likewise economists systematically refrain from making explicit moral value judgments yet the fact that economics and natural law are intertwined has been borne out consistently in the history of economics natural law and the u s legal systemto many natural law is the foundation upon which the u s legal system was built natural law is witnessed in the country s laws systems covenants and how its citizens live and interact one of its earliest documents the declaration of independence asserts that every human is granted unalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and it was that assertion that formed the frame of the united states legal system however many early laws were exclusionary affording rights only to a few it took hundreds of years for some inhabitants to be considered legally human and even longer for them to be afforded the same unalienable rights as inscribed by thomas jefferson over time the moral push of activists and natural law proponents led to the ratification of some laws and the enactment of others such as the civil rights act to blanket every human with the ability to exercise these rights and freedoms because natural law as an ethical theory can be understood to be an extension of scientific and rational inquiry into how the world works the laws of economics can be understood as natural laws of how economies should operate moreover to the extent that economic analysis is used to prescribe or proscribe public policy or how businesses ought to conduct themselves the practice of applied economics must rely at least implicitly on some ethical assumptions 