S adam seagrave the foundations of natural morality on the compatibility of natural rights and the natural law university of chicago press 2014 174pp 3500 hbk isbn 9780226123431 reviewed by andrew pinsent university of oxford a premise of s adam seagrave is that there are two antecedent schools of thought regarding the relationship . With the foundations of natural morality s adam seagrave addresses this controversy offering an entirely new account of natural morality that compellingly unites the concepts of natural law and natural rights seagrave agrees with strauss that the idea of natural rights is distinctly modern and does not derive from traditional natural law despite their historical distinctness however he argues that the two ideas are profoundly compatible and that the thought of john locke and thomas . This book argues for a concept of natural morality that unites the concepts of natural rights and the natural law in a new and compelling way drawing on the thought of john locke and st thomas aquinas it is argued that natural rights and the natural law are each derived independently from the single underlying fact of self ownership through self consciousness from an intellectual historical standpoint this argument includes the claim that while the idea of natural rights is a distinctly . The foundations of natural morality on the compatibility of natural rights and the natural law by s adam seagrave pp ix 174 chicago london the university of chicago press 2014 2982