© 2020, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 2 pp. 273–304 doi: 10.5840/acpq2020312202 Is there a Punishment for Violating the Natural Law? Scott J. Roniger Abstract. Is there a punishment for violating the natural law? is important ques- tion has been neglected in the scholarship on omistic natural law theory. I show that there is a three-fold punishment proper to the natural law; the remorse of conscience, the inability to be a friend to oneself, and the inability to be a friend to another work in concert to provide a natural penalty for moral wrongdoing. In order to establish these points, I first analyze sources of St. omas Aquinas’s natural law theory by discussing St. Augustine’s notion of law and fundamental ideas in Aristotle’s political philosophy. Next, I show how Aquinas unites aspects of Augustinian and Aristotelian thought in his treatment of natural law and thereby provides a framework for answering our question. Finally, I turn to Plato’s Gorgias and to Aristotle’s discussion of self-love in order to integrate these ideas with Aquinas’s natural law theory. [Father Zeus], what frame of mind would [a mortal] have whenever an unjust and wicked man who does not avoid the wrath of any man or god commits wanton outrage and rolls in wealth, while the just are worn out and consumed by harsh poverty? — eognis A man contrives evil for himself when he contrives evil for someone else, and an evil plan is most evil for the planner. — Hesiod, Works and Days I. Introduction I n Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates argues that doing injustice is always worse than suffering it. 1 Based on this principle, he concludes that even if a wicked man were to become powerful enough to kill him without suffering punishment from the city’s laws, such an action would be worse for the killer than for Socrates because “it will be a villain killing an honest man.” 1 See Plato, Gorgias, trans. Terence Irwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 469b, 472d– 475e, and 489a–b.