Reason, Morality, and Law: The Philosophy of John Finnis ed. by John Keown and Robert P. George (review)

THIS IS NO ORDINARY Festschrift. Comprising twenty-eight contributions and one hundred and twenty-five pages of detailed responses from Finnis, all on oversized paper in a diminutive font, Reason, Morality, and Law is a decidedly weighty tome. And if we include the publication in 2011 of the second edition of Natural Law and Natural Rights, and then in 2013 the five volumes of Finnis’s collected essays, Finnis’s position as the most important contemporary defender of the natural law tradition has now been powerfully, and deservedly, established for some years to come. Here, alongside the encomiums of former students, John Keown and Robert George have included a very broad range of important criticisms (how fun it is, for example, to read Joseph Raz’s attack on knowledge as a basic good!), and for the adventurous of heart, I can think of no better way of coming to terms with Finnis’s work than to read the whole thing straight through, flipping to Finnis’s penetrating individual responses after each essay.

Reason, Morality, and Law, after Robert George’s substantive and historical introduction, is divided into five parts: (1) Reasons, Goods, and Principles (Joseph Raz, Roger Crisp, John Haldane, Joseph Boyle, and Jeremy Waldron); (2) Intentions in Action (Luke Gormally, Anthony Kenny, Kevin Flannery, and Cristóbal Orrego); (3) Justice, Rights, and Wrongdoing (John Gardner, Matthew Kramer, Leslie Green, Christopher Tollefsen, Jacqueline Tasioulas and John Tasioulas, Patrick Lee, Gerard Bradley, Anthony Fisher, and John Keown); (4) Philosophy of Law (N. E. Simmonds, Timothy Endicott, Timothy Macklem, Julie Dickson, Maris Köpke Tinturé, Richard Ekins, and Neil Gorsuch); and (5) Philosophy, Religion, and Public Reasons (Thomas Pink and Germain Grisez). These divisions repeat the five-fold division of his collected essays and, a little more loosely, the structure of Natural Law and Natural Rights itself. Helpfully included at the end is a detailed index and a complete bibliography of Finnis’s published works, as well as the table of contents for each of the five volumes of his collected essays.

The remainder of this review will be woefully selective and tuned particularly to the interests of readers working within the Thomistic tradition. What follows is a development of three contentious themes in Finnis’s work that reflect the first three of the five divisions.

Finnis has long argued that the primary principles of morality are self-evident in themselves and cannot be derived from any speculative account of human nature. John Haldane’s essay raises this problem once again, though he begins with a sympathetic summary of Finnis’s position: “[Finnis’s] idea is that propositions regarding human goods are known not derivatively but by insight as self-evident, and that this is compatible with the objects-acts-power-essence principle since we come to know our nature through first knowing our acts, and the objects of human inclination and will are the primary goods. On the other hand, since acts flow from natures the value of human goods is derived from the nature whose realization and perfection they promote or constitute. In short, practical principles prescribing the pursuit of certain goods are epistemologically prior and underived, but ontologically dependent upon the nature of the agent” (46). Despite some sympathy with this view, Haldane argues that Finnis “gives insufficient consideration to the possibility that one might also invoke knowledge of natures to argue for certain directions of action, and that there may be circumstances in which this course is likely to be more helpful and a corrective to an overly aprioristic interpretation of understanding practical principles directly in virtue of their very content” (47). The point is an important one. Finnis thinks that an account of human nature unmediated by practical knowledge and experience is impossible. Haldane responds that intrinsically self-evident practical principles that have no grounding in a prior account of human nature are either “too thin and ambiguous...