Reason, Morality, and Law

I’ll tackle each section of this impressive Festschrift in order, with the exception of the fifth and final one, which is entitled ‘Philosophy, Religion, and Public Reasons’. In this section, Thomas Pink asks whether religious belief can and should be coerced, while Germain Grisez discusses the transcendent source of human fulfilment. Since their papers are of mainly ecclesiological and theological interest respectively, and contain very little by way of philosophical argument, I won't comment on them in this review. The first section of Reason, Morality, and Law is entitled ‘Reasons, Goods, and Principles’, and deals with foundational issues in Finnis’ moral theory. Joseph Raz homes in on one of Finnis’ seven basic goods, that of knowledge, and asks: what makes it good? This is a pressing question, according to Raz, since it is difficult to see how knowledge can be good ‘in itself’ when much of it seems without value at all (e.g. knowing how many cats were born on November 20th 720 A.D.) In his replies, Finnis answers that knowledge is valuable because through it we avoid being ‘the dupe of falsehood and illusion, ... myth-ridden, or simply benighted, ignorant’ (p. 460). But this seems to me to conflate matters: although being ‘myth-ridden’ or subject to ‘illusion’ is seriously disvaluable, being ignorant of a host of trivia is not (indeed, such ignorance may be an essential precondition of sanity). What would clarify the debate between Raz and Finnis here is noting two key disparities in their assumptions. Whereas Raz assumes that if x is valuable ‘in itself’ it is necessarily valuable, Finnis’ Aristotelian background affords the notion of being valuable ‘always or for the most part [epi to polu]’. This leaves room for some instances of knowledge that have little or no value. And whereas Raz assumes knowledge is simply justified true belief, Finnis indicates (p. 461) that knowledge is paradigmatically (following Aristotle) knowledge of ‘causes’ (i.e. explanations). This underlies his denial that Raz's cat example is a central instance of knowledge. So pace John Haldane, who argues that Finnis needs to supplement his list of basic goods with a ‘phenomenological value theory’ (p. 49) showing how they are good, I think Finnis first needs to make explicit, and then defend his (eminently defensible) Aristotelian assumptions.

Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Ignorance · Illusion · Morality · Mythology · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Value (mathematics) · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

• Baruch Brody and the principle of justifiable homicide

  Open Access•Timothy J Furlan•Metamedicine•2024

  Add to list

• A Conservative Critique of Blacksburg

  Open Access•Phillip W Gray, Sara Mattingly-Jordan•Administration & Society•2018

  Add to list

• Competition Within the Church

  Open Access•Ennio E Piano, Benjamin W Bauer et al.•Kyklos•2025

  Add to list