scholarly journals «Natural Law and Natural Rights» and the Negation of the Objective Priority of Speculative Truth

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-133
Author(s):  
Steven Long
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eternal Truth ◽  
Practical Object

This essay explores the nature and implications of John Finnis’s express negation in his work Natural Law and Natural Rights of the objective primacy of speculative truth with respect to the derivation of practical reason and agency. The essay observes two senses of the speculative/practical distinction. One sense concerns whether the object known is a contingent matter ordered to an end or whether it concerns a universal, necessary, or eternal truth. The other sense concerns the mode of the knowledge itself: whether its end is simply knowledge, or whether the end is the good of an operation. Because prior to desire and intention all knowledge is speculative in its mode, and this knowledge is absolutely necessary for knowledge that is practical in its mode; and because knowledge that is practical in its mode is absolutely prior to knowledge that is practical merely in that it concerns a practical object – because without knowledge practical in its mode there will never be such knowledge that is practical in its object – it follows that practical reasoning is derivative of knowledge that is speculative in its mode. Implications of Finnis’s error – about teleology, common good, and God – are considered.

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.

Plato on Practical Reason and Practical Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. M. Olfert
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
The Other ◽  
Normative Structure ◽  
The One

In Chapter 1, I argue that in a number of dialogues, Plato proposes that when we reason about what to do, we are equally and inseparably concerned with two sets of aims or concerns: grasping the truth and gaining knowledge on the one hand, and acting and acting well on the other. That is, from the perspective of practical reasoning, the goals of grasping the truth and gaining knowledge is inseparable from, and equally fundamental as, the goals of acting rationally and well. I argue that this Platonic idea is a plausible and worth examining both on its own terms, and because it has a legacy in Aristotle’s notion of practical truth. As I argue in the remainder of the Book, Aristotle uses his innovative conception of practical truth to formalize and make explicit the dual normative structure of practical reasoning suggested by Plato.

scholarly journals Practical theology: A critically engaged practical reason approach of practice, theory, practice and theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Klaasen
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Theology ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practice Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Dependent Relationship ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The One

Browning’s influential use of practical reason for his fundamental practical theology is analysed. His correlation of theory and practice in his three stages of theory, practice and theory is also critiqued because his approach reduces practical theology almost to professionalism and principles for ministry. His approach could also result in an antagonistic relationship between practice and theory as practice is reduced to theory or academics. This article seeks to present a critically engaged practical reasoning approach in which theory and practice have an in-ter-dependent relationship. Practical reason is an activity in which engagement happens at every stage. For this to happen, theory and practice interact as equal variables that have a bearing on each other not to reduce the one to the other, but to complement each other in a lateral hermeneutical process. This process has four stages, unlike Browning’s three-stage correlation. The stages are schematically presented as practice, theory, practice and theory.

Are there Natural Rights? The Sceptical Critique and Rights after 1776

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-73
Author(s):  
Nigel Biggar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Survey ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
The Common

This chapter moves to extend the testing of the Sceptical Tradition’s objections to natural rights from the pre-modern or early modern periods to classic modern affirmations. It begins with the American and French declarations of the late eighteenth century, before proceeding to two famous treatises of the same period, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and then ending with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants of the mid-twentieth century. The chapter concludes that its scrutiny of modern affirmations has found ample evidence to substantiate many of the sceptics’ charges: some of the rights asserted are truistic or merely aspirational; others are ludicrously or dangerously abstract, licensing unrealistic hopes and political recklessness; yet others conflate conditional positive rights justified by natural morality with natural rights, misleadingly endowing the former with the universality and inviolability of the latter. Further, David Ritchie’s claim has been substantiated: the content of certain rights cannot be determined by a sheer appeal to ‘nature’, and apart from consideration of the common good in the relevant circumstances. On the other hand, the critical survey of modern natural rights-talk also shows that it can acknowledge the insufficiency of rights for overall political well-being, talk of duties too, and recognise the need for virtue and a cultural matrix that generates it.

Confronting Kant and Kierkegaard

2019 ◽  
pp. 202-247
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
The Right ◽  
Ethical Demand

This chapter considers in more detail how it is that the kind of natural law approach embodied in Løgstrup’s ‘ontological ethics’ puts him at odds with both Kant and Kierkegaard, and leads him to convict them of formalism. Løgstrup’s claim is that by failing to adopt his approach, neither Kant nor Kierkegaard can do justice to the ethical demand, as they see it as deriving from the authority of a commander. The difficulty is that such authority is ‘content-independent’ in H. L. A. Hart’s sense, making the reason to act that one has been commanded, rather than the vulnerability of the other person, which in these situations should be the right reason on which to act. If Løgstrup is correct, it is argued that his critique also has significant implications against contemporary attempts to ground ethical obligation in the authority of practical reason and divine command respectively.

Riccardo Saccenti, Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016, XIII, pp. 155.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 318-320
Author(s):  
Scott L. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
University Of Notre Dame ◽  
Conceptual Shift

Saccenti’s volume belongs to the category of Begriffsgeschichte, the history of concepts, and more particularly to the debate over the existence or nonexistence of a conceptual shift in ius naturale to encompass a subjective notion of natural rights. The author argues that this issue became particularly relevant in mid-twentieth century, first, because of the desire to delimit the totalitarian implications of legal positivism chez Hans Kelsen; second, in response to Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being and its progeny; and third, as a result of a revival of neo-Thomistic and neo-scholastic perspectives sometimes labelled “une nouvelle chrétienté.”

Development within the limits of order, 1820–70

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Toye
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Common ◽  
State List ◽  
The French Revolution

After the upheavals of the French Revolution, Enlightenment thinkers were blamed for loosening the bonds of society. In nineteenth-century France, Saint-Simon advocated a social compromise whereby scientists and artists planned the path of progress while the propertied classes retained political power albeit acting as trustees for the interests of the poor. Comte called for a scientific sociology to inform the design of political institutions. In Britain, Bentham rejected the doctrine of natural rights in favour of the principle of utility, while J. S. Mill flirted with Comte’s positivism briefly. Marx made little impact and socialism came in the guise of Fabianism and middle-class trusteeship for the poor. In Germany, Hegel interpreted the French Revolution as a phase in a moral struggle for freedom and called for freedom to be reconciled with the idea of the common good embodied in the state. List envisaged the common good as protectionist trade policy.

“Ambiguist” Statesmanship

Worldview ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-8
Author(s):  
Will Herberg
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Fixed Points ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Actual Situation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
The One

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.

scholarly journals Evangelical and Catholic Timespace in Work: An Argument against a Homeless Eschatology

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Maria Ledstam
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Other ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Business As Mission ◽  
Achievable Goal ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

This article engages with how religion and economy relate to each other in faith-based businesses. It also elaborates on a recurrent idea in theological literature that reflections on different visions of time can advance theological analyses of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. More specifically, this article brings results from an ethnographic study of two faith-based businesses into conversation with the ethicist Luke Bretherton’s presentation of different understandings of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. Using Theodore Schatzki’s theory of timespace, the article examines how time and space are constituted in two small faith-based businesses that are part of the two networks Business as Mission (evangelical) and Economy of Communion (catholic) and how the different timespaces affect the religious-economic configurations in the two cases and with what moral implications. The overall findings suggest that the timespace in the Catholic business was characterized by struggling caused by a tension between certain ideals on how religion and economy should relate to each other on the one hand and how the practice evolved on the other hand. Furthermore, the timespace in the evangelical business was characterized by confidence, caused by the business having a rather distinct and achievable goal when it came to how they wanted to be different and how religion should relate to economy. There are, however, nuances and important resemblances between the cases that cannot be explained by the businesses’ confessional and theological affiliations. Rather, there seems to be something about the phenomenon of tension-filled and confident faith-based businesses that causes a drive in the practices towards the common good. After mapping the results of the empirical study, I discuss some contributions that I argue this study brings to Bretherton’s presentation of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism.

Behavioral flexibility in Belief-Desire- Intention (BDI) architectures

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 343-377
Author(s):  
Adel Saadi ◽  
Ramdane Maamri ◽  
Zaidi Sahnoun
Keyword(s):  
Critical Review ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Behavioral Flexibility ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Simple Experiment ◽  
Bdi Agents ◽  
Popular Approach ◽  
Other Hand

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model is a popular approach to design flexible agents. The key ingredient of BDI model, that contributed to concretize behavioral flexibility, is the inclusion of the practical reasoning. On the other hand, researchers signaled some missing flexibility’s ingredient, in BDI model, essentially the lack of learning. Therefore, an extensive research was conducted in order to extend BDI agents with learning. Although this latter body of research is important, the key contribution of BDI model, i.e., practical reasoning, did not receive a sufficient attention. For instance, for performance reasons, some of the concepts included in the BDI model are neglected by BDI architectures. Neglecting these concepts was criticized by some researchers, as the ability of the agent to reason will be limited, which eventually leads to a more or less flexible reasoning, depending on the concepts explicitly included. The current paper aims to stimulate the researchers to re-explore the concretization of practical reasoning in BDI architectures. Concretely, this paper aims to stimulate a critical review of BDI architectures regarding the flexibility, inherent from the practical reasoning, in the context of single agents, situated in an environment which is not associated with uncertainty. Based on this review, we sketch a new orientation and some suggested improvements for the design of BDI agents. Finally, a simple experiment on a specific case study is carried out to evaluate some suggested improvements, namely the contribution of the agent’s “well-informedness” in the enhancement of the behavioral flexibility.

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