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Natural Law and Natural Rights (Clarendon Law Series)

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Finnis's background is that of a lawyer and legal philosopher, and so this book is ostensibly a contribution to philosophy of law, but in effect it is a wide-ranging treatment of ethical and political theory aimed at supporting a broadly Natural Law conception of the foundations of law. Finnis's starting point is a teleological but anticonsequentialist ethical theory originally developed by Germain Grisez. Grisez, and following him Finnis, attempt to combine the Aristotelian insight that human actions are fundamentally directed toward realization of or participation in certain human goods, with the Kantian (and traditionalist Catholic) position that certain actions are never morally permissible, no matter what human goods may be achieved by doing them. The justification for this restriction lies in the "incommensurability" of multiple human goods: because goods cannot be commensurated, it is never rational to say that acting against a certain basic good is justified by the overall "better" effect of doing so. This moral principle supplies a justification for certain specific political rights (e.g., the right of innocents not be killed) and so for certain (not all) rights protected in e.g., in the American Bill of Rights.

Finnis's political philosophy is based on the necessity of political communities for the realization of certain kinds of human good, which in turn is the basis for the justification of political authority and of law in particular.

The foregoing is a very brief and selective sketch of a theory that Finnis develops in great detail over the course of the book's ten central chapters. Although much of Finnis's theory is necessarily controversial--especially his account of the incommensurability of goods--the book offers a subtle, rich, and I think largely compelling alternative to purely consequentialist and purely deontological theories of law and political morality. Finnis's work clearly comes out of a specifically Catholic intellectual tradition, but I think this book can be profitably read by a much wider audience. Finnis never relies on specifically Catholic (or Christian, or religious) doctrine, and he seems to have intentionally focused the discussion away from specifically Catholic moral controversies.

The book presupposes some familiarity with moral and political philosophy, e.g., Aristotle's _Ethics_ and modern consequentialist theories. Familiarity with Aquinas will reveal some of Finnis's influences but I doubt such familiarity is strictly necessary to understand what Finnis is saying. Certainly the book's arguments stand (or fall) on their own merits, without appeal the authority of Aquinas.

John Finnis's book is revolutionary, and it is owing to this brilliant, though not uncontroverted work that Aquinas' theory of natural law has regained its appeal and even prestige. Finnis' arguments can be hard to grasp, principally because natural law is not argued for, but is self-evident, and can only be submitted to a defense. Precisely on this count Finnis, and his collaborators with him, Germain Grisez and Robert P George (themselves also excellent catholic intellectuals) have found criticism amongst more conservative readers of Aquinas' moral theory. For Finnis, the reasonable grasp of basic goods, i.e., the awareness of first practical principles, i.e., the natural law, is known per se nota, not derived from anything. Especially exciting his defense of knowlegde or truth as an undeniable basic good, although his treatment and defense of other basic goods require development Also interesting is his treatment of Aquinas' notion legal validity in positive law, which he argues admits of a certain abstraction from morality, thereby aligning himself somewhat with Hart's positivism. Issues of Thomistic exegesis aside, this is a magnificent work in its own right, and compulsory reading for ages to come in jurisprudence. A good and perhaps even essential companion is his Fundamentals of Ethics.

Finnis, encouraged by the late H.L.A. Hart (20th Century leading English legal positivist), wrote this introduction to legal theory from the Natural Law Tradition point of view. In 13 chapters he shows what is a science of Law, why Natural Law classical (Plato's, Aristotle's and Aquinas') theory has been misunderstood (even by Hart or Kelsen), which are the basic principles of practical reason (corresponding to the basic human values) and the basic requirements of practical reasonableness (which allow us to reason in a morally right way), and which are the most fundamental truths regarding the community and its common good, justice, (legal and natural) rights, authority, the Law and obligation, unjust laws and, finally, the place of God in this order or practical knowledge. The book is difficult to read, but a source ot true intellectual joy. I have translated this book into Spanish, and this, I guess, might be a sign of how much I think it is worthwhile reading and using it, along with Finnis' "Aquinas" (1998).

Wow! Over a decade after I first picked this book up, I remain impressed with its clarity and thoroughness. Finnis's range and comprehensiveness are remarkable. Those who know Finnis only for his--regrettable and thoroughly inappropriate--support of Colorado Amendment 2 or his opposition to contraception may think of him as a stuffy fuddy-duddy. But such an assessment--utterly unfair--would all too likely blind prospective readers to the many virtues of the position he develops here and in _Fundamentals of Ethics_. In evidence here is the Finnis critical of Nozick's libertarian views of redistribution and implacably opposed to strategic nuclear weapons--hardly the right-wing ogre some of his detractors may suppose him to be. For those who find Kantian moral theory sterile, consequentialism unjust, and intuitionist approaches unclear, Finnis presents an impressive alternative in the Thomist tradition. There's something here for everyone--lawyers, ethicists, political theorists, and theologians will all be stimulated by Finnis's reflections. This book is a call to personal integrity and to political justice that deserves to be heeded.

This is a very good book. Nevertheless, readers should be warned: it is not about the HISTORY of Natural Law; it brings a THEORY on Natural Law (a theory based, mainly, in Aristotle and Aquinas). Anyone looking for a simple, historical look at Natural Law (as seems to be the case with the reviwer Ace Custodio) should look elsewhere. But those who care enough to face the dificulties of the text will be well rewarded.

This interesting but difficult book lays out a comprehensive theory of moral and legal philosophy. Early chapters argue that certain forms of human flourishing (such as the good of knowledge) are self-evidently valuable; the final chapter paints a lovely picture of how "playing" in the "game of God" may be the ultimate purpose of human existence. The intervening 200+ pages of text, however, are a tedious analysis of core legal concepts such as "obligation" and "rule of law." Conceptual distinctions are laboriously identified; sentences are sometimes hundreds of words in length. The basic idea is that natural law is the law necessary to achieve the good of human beings and communities. However, only masochistic students of jurisprudence will stay interested in the entire argument. I found myself inadvertently skimming entire sub-chapters. Readers just getting started on philosophy of law really must begin with authors like H.L.A Hart or Ronald Dworkin.

It is a striking fact, often mentioned by depth psychologists, that human beings leave tell-tale signs of undoing of their own point of view in plain sight. That is, if they are operating in some sense covertly, even with themselves and others. This book, which is famous in its own little world of Natural Law theorists, is one of the best exemplars of that psychological phenomenon. It is a chief concern of these modern fans of Aquinas to somehow leave the impression that the continuity of Natural Law reasoning is something easily discovered in intellectual history, and especially that dealing with legal thought. You need special help, which they provide, but once you have it, it would be very obvious. Well, if that were the case, then highly educated people in these matters would long have noticed at least something in that direction. There would be a trail, even if not very pronounced. But, I think it was safe to assume that Finnis was always a quite educated person, and he himself -- perhaps unwittingly -- has given away the farm, so to speak, on the whole matter early in this book. On p. vi of his Preface he mentions the very educated legal "milieu" he participated in and the very informative fact that it "antedated the time in which I first began to suspect that there was more to the theories of natural law than superstition and darkness." Now for sake of argument, let us leave aside every other contention in this book as possibly brilliant. What the author has admitted here is what is obvious to anyone who knows intellectual history, up to the intellectual fashions of the 20th Century. Namely, that the Natural Law field connected with Aquinas was everywhere in the educated "milieu" seen as a thing of the past at least shrouded in some "darkness" and possibly "superstition". Let me say as an aside, that for younger scholars such as myself, who have benefitted from more up -to -date research on the medieval era, have NEVER thought of that age as simply darkness, and always known that the adjective "dark" for the whole period was profoundly imprecise. But the more central matter is surely whether anyone in serious intellectual circles in the fairly recent past ever thought that the thought that under-wrote modern societies had any real debt to this natural law thought at all. Clearly NOT, and the author HIMSELF has admitted as much here, amazingly.

NO, in fact this field was waiting for Finnis himself as the real Queen Bee of all the later drones of natural law to conjure this new realm out of an historical vacuum. The way was paved somewhat why the (Leo) Straussians who somehow got Aristotle brought into historical discussions of modern law. Of course, Leo Strauss has been the subject of the most withering criticism since then, and not always from liberals even, but from people with an honest sense of history. Though he is no longer a serious character in legal academic kabuki, his example was paramount. That is the example of a successful smuggler. It is like honor amongst thieves, he was skillful enough to pull it off; it made others think: I can do that too! But you always need a new angle, and Aquinas was it. So Finnis, who is massively clever, started his long trek towards the apotheosis of the Summa and modern legal theory. Since, as he himself admits, there was no real acceptance of the fact that there was any kind of continuity between m he previously considered avatars of "superstition" and "darkness" and the Enlightenment ideals that run modern democracies, he had to slip them in under the carpet, so to speak. This he does with a very slippery and elusive sense, best seen on p. 28. He there quotes a source, whose reasoning he later calls a "travesty", but is useful apparently to him because the source claims that the natural law thinking that Aquinas apotheosized "dominat[ed] the period 'from the church fathers down to Kant." Remember, this is a source he called a travesty, and that the source was referring to specifically those (presumably Catholic) natural law thinkers so engaged with this special endeavor. In that limited sense -- only!!! -- the statement is correct. Namely, that minority of thinkers so inclined natural law approaches (again likely mostly Catholics) were indeed dominated by this view from the church fathers down to Kant. But the rest of the intellectual world in the West, the vast majority, were not. And definitely not those upon whole thought modern democracies are based. But Finnis just proceeds then in his book as if this idea of "down to Kant" is unproblematic, when it is clearly faulty from the evidence in his own book! So there may be many clever moments in this book, and corners of insight, for the natural law view is not without some insight historically. But as a description of anything whatsoever relating to law in modern democracies it is a pure fantasy. An elaborate and, yes, quite erudite chimera.

But it gets worse. This fantasy has been taken up by de facto drones of Natural Law like Robert George, who claims Finnis as "mentor". In fact on the Mirror of Justice site George just described his glee to atttend the "Finnis-Fest" at Notre Dame, and with that the whole cultic guru fragrance of the whole thing finds confirmation. In light of the fantastical origins of this trend amongst Catholic thinkers, it might have been best to call it a Finnis-Festivus, after the made-up holiday on Seinfeld. It is a conjured realm, with no historical support but a lot of acolytes. And in the US at least, many of those acolytes, like George are engaged in the most grotesque politicization of these natural law ideas . Using this fantasy to prop up their contempt for fellow citizens in the democracy they are privileged to call home. A democracy great enough and resilient enough to withstand regular assault by fanatical thinkers of all sorts, claiming they have great insight into the Founding vision. Even when it is the anti-thesis of that vision. They are only the latest crowd to attempt it. But, freedom is on guard!

Natural Law and Natural Rights by John Finnis is, by far, the worst book I have ever read. The author maps his arguments in an outline format, in the hope of capturing his audience. Though, this outline format is way of organizing ideas within different topics, it lacks the extensive explanation and cross-referrences a reader needs. Real-life examples are out of the question, since the author neither give them nor explain them fully. In addition, to the lack of explanations, the author speaks as if he has intelligence. It is clearly obvious that he knows nothing about keeping his audience awake. Despite the fact that this book is boring, the author also loses the audience by making simple arguments sound complex, thus, using uneccessary vocabulary. Granted, this book is not intended for neanderthals, however, anyone would agree that this book is not worth the paper its printed on.