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The secularization of the doctrine about Ethics was not a result of the protestant mentalities, but a work of much of the Catholic theologians during the late Middle Ages. Those men were faced with the need to fight against the pelagian and semipelagian doctrines which, since not distinguishing between the natural and supernatural world, so easily led to Pantheism. This task (let us call it apologetic) was not carried out by the Aristotelians, but by those who we now call Nominalists though, perhaps, we should better call them Nominals. Their solution consisted in heavily separating the natural world from the supernatural one, so that the natural, including the Natural Law, as it is natural, is part of what already is or exists, in the same way as the rest of Nature, and its compliance is morally irrelevant. Momentarily they moved away from Pelagius, but they contributed to spread the idea of a natural ethics which would exist out of Theology and would have a «rational» force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the seventeenth century we have lost sight of justice, which has been confined within the “theories of justice". Throughout Modernity, these theories were prsented under the guise of Natural Law Systems and, they continue to be so, today, as theories on justice. The autor indicates that these theories have historically disguised the form of synthesizing, a priori, nuclear definitions in which the initially proposed axioms were sufficient for posterior development. In this paper the author presents a review of that situation, with special attention to its historical genesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]