FINNIS ON NATURE, REASON, GOD

Legal Theory ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 187-209
Author(s):  
Mark C. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Way

It is often claimed that John Finnis's natural law theory is detachable from the ultimate theistic explanation that he offers in the final chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. My aim in this paper is to think through the question of the detachability of Finnis's theistic explanation of the natural law from the remainder of his natural law view, both in Natural Law and Natural Rights and beyond. I argue that Finnis's theistic explanation of the natural law as actually presented can be, without too much strain, treated as largely detachable in the way that his readers have by and large supposed it to be; indeed, Finnis's account as actually presented really amounts to no explanation of the natural law at all, theistic or otherwise, and that fact accounts in part for the ease with which Finnis's natural law view can be detached from theism of that final chapter. Nevertheless, the considerations raised in that chapter militate in favor of a much more thoroughgoing, largely nondetachable theistic account. And it is just such an account that we find Finnis affirming in the development of his views after Natural Law and Natural Rights.

scholarly journals God, New Natural Law Theory, and Human Rights

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 613
Author(s):  
Christopher Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Full Theory ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Epistemological Dimension

Critics of the “New” Natural Law (NNL) theory have raised questions about the role of the divine in that theory. This paper considers that role in regard to its account of human rights: can the NNL account of human rights be sustained without a more or less explicit advertence to “the question of God’s existence or nature or will”? It might seem that Finnis’s “elaborate sketch” includes a full theory of human rights even prior to the introduction of his reflections on the divine in the concluding chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. But in this essay, I argue that an adequate account of human rights cannot, in fact, be sustained without some role for God’s creative activity in two dimensions, the ontological and the motivational. These dimensions must be distinguished from the epistemological dimension of human rights, that is, the question of whether epistemological access to truths about human rights is possible without reference to God’s existence, nature, or will. The NNL view is that such access is possible. However, I will argue, the epistemological cannot be entirely cabined off from the relevant ontological and motivational issues and the NNL framework can accommodate this fact without difficulty.

PERSONS PURSUING GOODS

Legal Theory ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 285-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Basic Goods ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Law And Morality ◽  
Basic Good ◽  
Theory Of Law

John Finnis's powerfully and deservedly influential modern classic, Natural Law and Natural Rights, expounds a theory of law and morality that is based on a picture of “persons” using practical reason to pursue certain “basic goods.” While devoting much attention to practical reason and to the goods, however, Finnis says little about the nature of personhood. This relative inattention to what “persons” are creates a risk—one that Finnis himself notices—of assuming or importing an inadequate anthropology. This essay suggests that the “new natural law” developed by Finnis suffers in places from the inadvertent adoption of (or, more likely, acquiescence in) a flawed anthropology—an anthropology under the thrall of modern individualistic commitments. To explain this suspicion, this article discusses three difficulties (or so they seem to me) in his natural law theory: difficulties in accounting for the basic good of friendship, for obligations we owe to others, and for legal authority. These difficulties may seem disconnected, but this article suggests that they may all reflect an inadequate anthropology—one that Finnis does not exactly embrace (in fact, I suspect that he would reject it) but that is pervasive today and that in places may affect his theorizing.

Grotius, Stoicism, and Oikeiosis

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
General Structure ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Practical Deliberation ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Close Fit

This chapter turns to Hugo Grotius and to the origins of the modern natural rights tradition in a reworking of Ciceronian Stoicism. It first argues that there is a close fit between the general structure of a Ciceronian Stoic natural law theory and the argument that Grotius builds in his Prolegomena to De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1631). Next, the chapter notes that the Stoic concern with autonomy combined with regulating practical deliberation is what gives us this distinctive argument, in which strong claims about the natural sociability of human beings end up issuing in a theory characterised above all by rights that separate people and their property off from one another. Finally, although Grotius calls oikeiosis (a desire for society) the appetitus societatis, he in fact works far more closely with Stoic sources on the side of personal oikeiosis rather than on the side of social oikeiosis.

CLASSICAL NATURAL LAW THEORY, PROPERTY RIGHTS, AND TAXATION

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Feser
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Natural Law Theory

AbstractClassical natural law theory derives moral conclusions from the essentialist and teleological understanding of nature enshrined in classical metaphysics. The paper argues that this understanding of nature is as defensible today as it was in the days of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. It then shows how a natural law theory of the grounds and content of our moral obligations follows from this understanding of nature, and how a doctrine of natural rights follows in turn from the theory of natural law. With this background in place, the implications of the theory for questions about property rights and taxation are explored. It is argued that classical natural law theory entails the existence of a natural right of private property, and that this right is neither so strong as to supportlaissez fairelibertarianism, nor so weak as to allow for socialism. Though the theory leaves much of the middle ground between these extremes open to empirical rather than moral evaluation, it is argued that there is a strong natural law presumption against social democratic policies and in favor of free enterprise.

Burke and Natural Rights

1951 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Kirk
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Church

Edmund Burke was at once a chief exponent of the Ciceronian doctrine of natural law and a chief opponent of the “rights of man.” In our time, which is experiencing simultaneously a revival of interest in natural-law theory and an enthusiasm for defining “human rights” that is exemplified by the United Nations' lengthy declaration, Burke's view of the natural juridic order deserves close attention.Unlike Bolingbroke and Hume, whose outward politics in some respects resembled the great Whig statesman's, Burke was a pious man. “The most important questions about the human race Burke answered … from the Church of England's catechism.” He takes for granted a Christian cosmos, in which a just God has established moral principles for man's salvation. God has given man law, and with that law, rights; such, succinctly, is Burke's premise in all moral and juridical questions.

David Hume and the eighteenth-century conception of natural law

Legal Studies ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Milton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Modern Writer ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
John Finnis

Natural law is discussed by almost every modern writer on jurisprudence; but with a few exceptions - of which John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights is the most substantial - the impression given is that it is of historical interest only, that it has in some way been discredited, or at least superseded, by legal positivism. The implicit idea - and here legal positivism borrows from Comte - is that natural law represented some earlier ‘metaphysical’ stage which was then followed by ‘scientific’ legal positivism. This account requires the existence of a natural law theory that dominated juristic and philosophical thinking until the eighteenth century, when it was overthrown by Hume and Bentham. Hume, the story goes, found the decisive argument against the natural law theory; while Bentham created the new theory oflegal positivism. The argument Hume discovered was that ought cannot be derived from is; and this, it is widely supposed, is fatal to all varieties of natural law.

The Law in Plato’s Laws: A Reading of the ‘Classical Thesis’

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-126
Author(s):  
Luke William Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legal Ontology ◽  
The Way

Abstract Plato’s Laws include what H.L.A. Hart called the ‘classical thesis’ about the nature and role of law: the law exists to see that one leads a morally good life. This paper develops Hart’s brief remarks by providing a panorama of the classical thesis in Laws. This is done by considering two themes: (1) the extent to which Laws is paternalistic, and (2) the extent to which Laws is naturalistic. These themes are significant for a number of reasons, including because they show how Laws might be viewed as a sophisticated forerunner of natural law theory. The upshot is that Plato’s metaphysical commitments about legal ontology allow him to base the truth of legal propositions on the way they relate to the truth of corresponding moral propositions.

Thomas Jefferson, Nature's God, and the Theological Foundations of Natural-Rights Republicanism

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 662-688
Author(s):  
Kody W. Cooper ◽  
Justin Buckley Dyer
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
Natural Law Theory

AbstractWhile the role of theology in Jefferson's political thought and its implications for how we should understand the role of “Nature's God” in grounding natural-rights republicanism are topics of ongoing scholarly interest, scholars have missed important continuities between Jefferson's natural-law theory and that of classical, theistic natural-law. Many scholars who have considered Jefferson in this light have emphasized Jefferson's discontinuity and even subversion of that tradition. In critical dialogue with this vein of scholarship, we argue that Jefferson espouses a creational metaphysics and a natural-law theory of morality that has surprising continuities with classical natural-law. We seek to shed new light on Jefferson's theory of the moral sense and his the earth belongs to the living principle, which we contend encapsulates his theistic understanding of equality and property.

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