John Finnis
Biographic Data
| ID | 1050372 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Finnis |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Finnis |
| SIGNATURE | FINNIS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus at Oxford University and Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Aquinas and Natural Law Jurisprudence
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Natural Law and Legal Reasoning
Legal reasoning is, broadly speaking, practical reasoning. Practical reasoning moves from reasons for action to choices guided by those reasons. A natural law theory is nothing other than a theory of good reasons for choice. The law seeks to provide sources of reasoning—statutes and statute-based rules, common law rules, and customs—capable of ranking alternative resolutions as or wrong, and thus better and worse. Lawyers' tools of trade—their ab…
Absolute Rights: Some Problems Illustrated
Joseph Boyle, building on an argument of Elizabeth Anscombe, showed that absolute (indefeasible, exceptionless) moral norms would, as a set, be incoherent and paradoxical, even self-contradictory, unless they are specified in terms, not of what the forbidden kind of act actually or foreseeably causes, but of the precise intent with which the act is done. The present article extends the argument to absolute human rights, such as the right not to b…
Reflections and Responses
This chapter presents John Finnis' reflections and responses to the preceding chapters. After a brief introductory paragraph thanking the contributors and explaining the chapter's purpose, it follows the exact order of the previous chapters, and each of its sections is numbered accordingly, 1 to 27. Nos. 1 to 5 respond to Joseph Raz's questions about the good of knowledge; to Roger Crisp's observations about the usefulness of philosophy, about fr…
The Priority of Persons Revisited
This essay, in the context of a conference on justice, reviews and reaffirms the main theses of “The Priority of Persons” (2000), and supplements them with the benefit of hindsight in six theses. The wrongness of Roe v. Wade goes wider than was indicated. The secularist scientistic or naturalist dimension of the reigning contemporary ideology is inconsistent with the spiritual reality manifested in every word or gesture of its proponents. The tem…
Religion and Public Reasons: Collected Essays Volume V
The twenty-four chapters in this volume seek to argue for and illustrate a central element in the author's theory of natural law: that the main tenets of personal and political morality, and of a good legal order, are taught both by reason (arguments accessible to everyone) and by authentic divine revelation (teachings accessible to all who have a reasonable faith in its witnesses). The first Part includes eight chapters. Two attend to the idea o…
Philosophy of Law: Collected Essays Volume IV
This volume collects twenty-two chapters, grouped in four parts. These include two recent appreciations and critiques of Hart's legal and political theories; a thorough appreciation and critique of Dworkin's Law's Empire, and of Raz's theory of authority and coordination; and critiques of John Gardner on legal positivism and of Jules Coleman and Brian Leiter on positivism and naturalism. Aquinas is celebrated as founder of a sound account of law'…
Intention and Identity: Collected Essays Volume II
This volume contains nineteen published and unpublished chapters from 1987 to 2009. They are grouped into four parts. The chapters in the first part examine the ways in which being a person grounds the equality of all human beings, acknowledged as law's point even in Roman law and, rather shakily, in modern legal theory (Kelsen, Hart, Dworkin); legal rules can be seen as relationships between persons; persons are primary bearers of meaning and ob…
Reason in Action: Collected Essays Volume I
This book collects nineteen published and unpublished works presented here as chapters on practical reason. The first nine date from 1970 through to 2008. They include extended critiques of Hume's thesis that reason, being the slave of the passions, concerns means, not ultimate or intrinsically desirable and intelligible ends; of Christine Korsgaard's Kantian development of her successful critique of Hume; of Jürgen Habermas's theory of discourse…
Religion and Public Life in Pluralist Society
This chapter presents a 2004 Princeton address which concerns the rational status of public revelation in public reason. The issue is introduced with some reflections on Newman's thesis that it can be right to be economical with one's public statements of one's reasons for belief or action, and on the method by which Aquinas's teachings are presented in the author's book Aquinas (1998). Rawls's idea of public reason is shown to be radically ambig…
Human Rights and Their Enforcement
The Maccabaean Lecture in Jurisprudence for 1985, this chapter is in part a response to Ronald Dworkin's Maccabaean Lecture for 1977, and to Patrick Devlin's famous Maccabaean Lecture for 1959. It critiques Dworkin's claims about equality of concern and respect, about the role of utilitarianism in political theory and practice, and above all about enforcing ‘majority opinion’ as such. It also critiques Devlin's claim that it is right to enforce a…
Religion and public reasons
H. L. A. Hart: A twentieth-century Oxford political philosopher
Herbert Hart's significance can be understood only when his work is measured against conceptions of political philosophy that were dominant in Oxford in the years between his postwar return and the publication of The Concept of Law. In Hart's own terminology, the central case of morality understood from the internal point of view is critical, that is, justified, morality. Hart's exclusive focus on positive morality cut the debate off from the mai…
Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation’
This chapter is the last and shortest version of a paper that emerged out of testimony and counter-testimony in a court in Colorado in 1995. It omits parts that in the earlier published versions surveyed the false claims made by a learned witness. The chapter begins with a statement of the legal position — standard in 1995/7 throughout Europe — about homosexual conduct (decriminalized but legally discouraged), a position subsequently swept away. …
Reason in action
Philosophy of law
Intention and identity
"The essays in Intention and Identity explore themes in Finnis's work touched on only lightly, if at all, in Natural Law and Natural Rights, developing profound accounts of personal identity and existence; group identity and common good; and intention and choice as action- and self-shaping. In his many-faceted study of what it is to be a human person, and a human community, Finnis not only engages with contemporary philosophers and bioethicists s…
Human Rights and Common Good: Collected Essays Volume III
This volume collects twenty-two published and unpublished chapters on a variety of topics related directly to human rights, justice, and the common good. The first nine date from 1970 through to 2007. They begin with a study — in dialectic with Dworkin's earlier lecture on the same themes — of the bearing of contemporary legal and political theory on the incorporation of a declaration of rights and freedoms in British law. There follow chapters o…
Marriage: A Basic and Exigent Good
Journal Article Marriage: A Basic and Exigent Good Get access John Finnis John Finnis University College Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 91, Issue 3-4, 1 October 2008, Pages 388–406, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist2008913/421 Published: 25 November 2014
Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics
This address to a philosophical conference on truth and faith in ethics engages in an extended critique of the account of truth in Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002). For any jurisprudential, moral or political theory that affirms natural law needs to respond first to sceptical denials that reason can discover any truths about what ends all human individuals or groups ought to pursue…
Grounds of Law and Legal Theory: A Response
Linking theses of Plato, Wittgenstein, and Weber, section I argues that identification of central cases and settling of focal meanings depend upon the theorist's purpose(s) and, in the case of theory about human affairs—theory adequately attentive to the four irreducible orders in which human persons live and act—upon the purposes for which we intelligibly and intelligently act. Section II defends the reasonableness (and hence entitlement to univ…
The Secret Sharers: "Anthony Rivers" and the Appellant Controversy, 1601-2
Historians have known of the letters of “Anthony Rivers,” recounting religious, political, and military affairs from the court in London in 1601–3, and of certain dispatches from Rome forwarded to Robert Cecil by Thomas Phelippes, “the Decipherer,” in 1602. In this article, Patrick Martin and John Finnis show that the letters and dispatches were integral to a coordinated effort by William Sterrell, secretary to the Earl of Worcester and long-time…
“The Thing I Am”: Personal Identity in Aquinas and Shakespeare
Questions about identity are questions about what some object of attention and inquiry is and whether it is the same as, or different from, another object of attention and inquiry. So, for example, one might attend to the uttering of this paragraph, on some occasion, by a speaker. Considering the speaking source of the beginning of the utterance and the speaking source of the end of it, one might ask whether—and if so, how and why—one and the sam…
Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited
Journal Article Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited Get access John Finnis John Finnis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Volume 50, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 109–131, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajj/50.1.109 Published: 01 June 2005
Natural Law: The Classical Tradition
This article explores natural law theory as traditional and then modern theory. The former works with the idea of natural right but, unlike the latter, has no concept of natural or human rights. Classical natural law theory offers reason for considering general descriptions of law fruitful only if their basic conceptual structure is derived from the understanding of good reasons. This article presents the reality of law, both as a ‘social phenome…
Natural Law: The Classical Tradition
This article explores natural law theory as traditional and then modern theory. The former works with the idea of natural right but, unlike the latter, has no concept of natural or human rights. Classical natural law theory offers reason for considering general descriptions of law fruitful only if their basic conceptual structure is derived from the understanding of good reasons. This article presents the reality of law, both as a ‘social phenome…
Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited
Journal Article Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited Get access John Finnis John Finnis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Volume 50, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 109–131, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajj/50.1.109 Published: 01 June 2005
Human Rights and Common Good: Collected Essays Volume III
This volume collects twenty-two published and unpublished chapters on a variety of topics related directly to human rights, justice, and the common good. The first nine date from 1970 through to 2007. They begin with a study — in dialectic with Dworkin's earlier lecture on the same themes — of the bearing of contemporary legal and political theory on the incorporation of a declaration of rights and freedoms in British law. There follow chapters o…
Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics
This address to a philosophical conference on truth and faith in ethics engages in an extended critique of the account of truth in Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002). For any jurisprudential, moral or political theory that affirms natural law needs to respond first to sceptical denials that reason can discover any truths about what ends all human individuals or groups ought to pursue…
Natural Law and the Ethics of Discourse
Natural Law and the Ethics of Discourse Get access John Finnis John Finnis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 53–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajj/43.1.53 Published: 01 June 1998
Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: A Philosophy and Public Affairs Reader
The Basic Principles of Natural Law: A Reply to Ralph McInerny
In the preceding volume of this journal, Prof. Mclnerny criticized certain theoretical positions of Finnis and Grisez as well as their interpretation of St. Thomas. In the present article Finnis and Grisez reply that Mclnerny's criticisms lack cogency, because he has misunderstood their theories, judged their exegesis by his own different interpretation assumed gratuitously to be correct, and mixed philosophical and historical criticism in a way …
Fundamentals of Ethics
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Fundamentals of Ethics. By John Finnis. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Pp. 163. Price £14.00, Pb. £4.95) Geoffrey Brown Geoffrey Brown University of Sheffield Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 35, Issue 139, April 1985, Pages 210–211, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219351 Published: 01 April 1985
Law as Co‐ordination
The concept of co‐ordination problems helps solve the problem of authority and obligation in legal theory, but only if the concept is carefully distinguished from the game‐theoretical concept of co‐ordination problems and their solutions. After explaining the game‐theoretical concept, the author defends its application to legal theory by reviewing the exchange he has had with Joseph Raz about the authority of law. Extending that debate, he argues…
Object and Intention in Moral Judgments According to Aquinas
OBJECT AND INTENTION IN MORAL JUDGMENTS ACCORDING TO AQUINAS JOHN FINNIS U'flkueTBity Oollege Unwersity of Oa:ford INTENTION IS OF END, choice is of means. A human aict ~s specified by (and s? is co.rrect:ly describe~ in terms of) its end. A human act IS specified by (and so Is correctly described in terms of) its object. An a:ct which is bad by reason of its object cannot be justified by its end (its: good intention ) . A human a:ct is specified…
Shameless acts” in Colorado: Abuse of scholarship in constitutional cases
C o n s t i t u t i o n a l more than other kind of deterlitigation, perhaps legal any mination, should be based on fact not fiction, truth not untruths, reality not myth. For it makes a unique contribution to shaping us as the people, the community, we constitute, and the persons, the individuals, we are. Any serious constitution has its significance as shaping a people's present willingness to regard themselves as this people, ready to act (bot…
Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory
Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought Series Editor: Dr Mark Philp, Oriel College, University of Oxford Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought present critical examinations of the work of major political philosophers and social theorists, assessing both their initial contribution and continuing relevance to politics and society. Each volume provides a clear, accessible, historically-informed account of each thinker's work, focu…
Natural Law and the Ethics of Discourse
Natural Law and the Ethics of Discourse Get access John Finnis John Finnis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 53–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajj/43.1.53 Published: 01 June 1998
Natural Law and the Ethics of Discourse
This essay argues that Plato's critical analysis of the ethics of discourse is superior to Habermas', and more generally that Habermas has no sufficient reason to propose or suppose the philosophical superiority of “modernity.” The failure of Hume and Kant and much modern philosophy to understand the concept and content of reasons for action underlies Habermas' attempted distinction between ethics and morality, and Rawls' concept of public reason…
Natural law and natural rights
This book firmly integrates the philosophy of law with ethics, social theory and political philosophy. The author develops a sustained and substantive argument; it is not a review of other people's arguments but makes frequent illustrative and critical reference to classical, medieval, modern, and contemporary writers in ethics, social and political theory, and jurisprudence.
“Direct” and “Indirect”: A Reply to Critics of our Action Theory
The Thomist 65 (2001): 1-44 "DIRECT" AND "INDIRECT": A REPLY TO CRITICS OF OUR ACTION THEORY jOHNFINNIS University of Oxford Oxford, England GERMAIN GRISEZ JOSEPH BOYLE Mount St. Mary's College St. Michael's College Emmitsburg, Maryland Toronto, Ontario, Canada I The adjectives "direct" and "indirect" have been used in some documents of the Magisterium to qualify nouns that refer to certain ways in which one brings about bad outcomes. Those adjec…
Aquinas on ius and Hart on Rights: A Response to Tierney
Of course Aquinas uses the term ius in an “objective” sense, to mean “the just,” “the just thing,” or the “just state of affairs” called for by the virtue of justice. But he also uses ius in a “subjective” sense, to refer to a right or rights that someone, the “subject,” has . Brian Tierney fails to see this, for three reasons, I think: though he has been an effective critic of Villey's historical analyses, he now seems gripped by Villey's non se…
Natural Law: The Classical Tradition
This article explores natural law theory as traditional and then modern theory. The former works with the idea of natural right but, unlike the latter, has no concept of natural or human rights. Classical natural law theory offers reason for considering general descriptions of law fruitful only if their basic conceptual structure is derived from the understanding of good reasons. This article presents the reality of law, both as a ‘social phenome…
Helping Enact Unjust Laws Without Complicity in Injustice
The form of enactments must be distinguished from their legal meaning (their "juridical effect"), that is, from the propositions of law which those enactments, properly interpreted, make legally valid. This distinction makes it possible, and rationally necessary, to conclude that, in certain contexts, a certain statute which declares or textually implies that some abortions are legally permitted (but others prohibited) is not apermissive law with…
“The Thing I Am”: Personal Identity in Aquinas and Shakespeare
Questions about identity are questions about what some object of attention and inquiry is and whether it is the same as, or different from, another object of attention and inquiry. So, for example, one might attend to the uttering of this paragraph, on some occasion, by a speaker. Considering the speaking source of the beginning of the utterance and the speaking source of the end of it, one might ask whether—and if so, how and why—one and the sam…
Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited
Journal Article Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited Get access John Finnis John Finnis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Volume 50, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 109–131, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajj/50.1.109 Published: 01 June 2005
The Secret Sharers: "Anthony Rivers" and the Appellant Controversy, 1601-2
Historians have known of the letters of “Anthony Rivers,” recounting religious, political, and military affairs from the court in London in 1601–3, and of certain dispatches from Rome forwarded to Robert Cecil by Thomas Phelippes, “the Decipherer,” in 1602. In this article, Patrick Martin and John Finnis show that the letters and dispatches were integral to a coordinated effort by William Sterrell, secretary to the Earl of Worcester and long-time…
Grounds of Law and Legal Theory: A Response
Linking theses of Plato, Wittgenstein, and Weber, section I argues that identification of central cases and settling of focal meanings depend upon the theorist's purpose(s) and, in the case of theory about human affairs—theory adequately attentive to the four irreducible orders in which human persons live and act—upon the purposes for which we intelligibly and intelligently act. Section II defends the reasonableness (and hence entitlement to univ…
Marriage: A Basic and Exigent Good
Journal Article Marriage: A Basic and Exigent Good Get access John Finnis John Finnis University College Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 91, Issue 3-4, 1 October 2008, Pages 388–406, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist2008913/421 Published: 25 November 2014
Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics
This address to a philosophical conference on truth and faith in ethics engages in an extended critique of the account of truth in Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002). For any jurisprudential, moral or political theory that affirms natural law needs to respond first to sceptical denials that reason can discover any truths about what ends all human individuals or groups ought to pursue…
Religion and Public Reasons: Collected Essays Volume V
The twenty-four chapters in this volume seek to argue for and illustrate a central element in the author's theory of natural law: that the main tenets of personal and political morality, and of a good legal order, are taught both by reason (arguments accessible to everyone) and by authentic divine revelation (teachings accessible to all who have a reasonable faith in its witnesses). The first Part includes eight chapters. Two attend to the idea o…
Philosophy of Law: Collected Essays Volume IV
This volume collects twenty-two chapters, grouped in four parts. These include two recent appreciations and critiques of Hart's legal and political theories; a thorough appreciation and critique of Dworkin's Law's Empire, and of Raz's theory of authority and coordination; and critiques of John Gardner on legal positivism and of Jules Coleman and Brian Leiter on positivism and naturalism. Aquinas is celebrated as founder of a sound account of law'…
Intention and Identity: Collected Essays Volume II
This volume contains nineteen published and unpublished chapters from 1987 to 2009. They are grouped into four parts. The chapters in the first part examine the ways in which being a person grounds the equality of all human beings, acknowledged as law's point even in Roman law and, rather shakily, in modern legal theory (Kelsen, Hart, Dworkin); legal rules can be seen as relationships between persons; persons are primary bearers of meaning and ob…
Reason in Action: Collected Essays Volume I
This book collects nineteen published and unpublished works presented here as chapters on practical reason. The first nine date from 1970 through to 2008. They include extended critiques of Hume's thesis that reason, being the slave of the passions, concerns means, not ultimate or intrinsically desirable and intelligible ends; of Christine Korsgaard's Kantian development of her successful critique of Hume; of Jürgen Habermas's theory of discourse…
Religion and Public Life in Pluralist Society
This chapter presents a 2004 Princeton address which concerns the rational status of public revelation in public reason. The issue is introduced with some reflections on Newman's thesis that it can be right to be economical with one's public statements of one's reasons for belief or action, and on the method by which Aquinas's teachings are presented in the author's book Aquinas (1998). Rawls's idea of public reason is shown to be radically ambig…
Philosophy (26 works) · Political science (26 works) · Law (23 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (10 works) · History (9 works) · Natural law (9 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (8 works) · Law and economics (8 works)