The End of an Academic Career

Faculty and students celebrate Professor John Finnis as he moves to emeritus status https://t.co/Mf2T1X67vY

— Rick Garnett (@RickGarnett) September 21, 2020

Feser Responds to Finnis

CWR: Unnatural Lawyering: John Finnis’s brief against traditional Catholic teaching on capital punishment

John Finnis is a prominent Catholic law professor and chief apostle of the “new natural law theory” (NNLT) invented by the late Germain Grisez in the 1960s. At Public Discourse, Finnis and I have been [...]

Russell Shaw on Germain Grisez

CWR Dispatch: The quiet, wide-ranging influence of Germain Grisez by Russell Shaw

The late moral theologian, who died on February 1st at the age of 88, had a profound impact on moral theology over the past sixty […]

Thomistica.net: NCBQ Issue Devoted to the Critique of the New Natural Law Theory Available for Download - link

I may pick up a hard copy regardless...

Should pick up an copy of the recent The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly - could be useful.

The Latest in the Hart Debate over Natural Law

Ed Feser links to some of the posts and writes his response: Hart stopping.

John Creech's Summary of a Lecture by Robert George

The Imaginative Conservative: The Persuasiveness of Natural Law by John Creech

Two on Natural Law

Thomistica.net: de lege naturae by Michael Pakaluk
Natural Law Ain’t About Falling Apples by Andrew Haines

Steven Long on Formal Cooperation

Steven Long, The Dubious Guidance of the New Natural Law Theorists on "Formal Cooperation"

Mirror of Justice: Finnis on Justice - a paper by John Gardner

What is Natural Law Like? by Jeremy Waldron (via MoJ)

Abstract:
“The State of Nature,” said John Locke, “has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one.” But what is “a law of nature”? How would we tell, in a state of nature, that there was a natural law as opposed to something else — like positive law, a set of customs, natural morality, natural ethics, a set of natural inclinations, the truth of certain prudential calculations, a widespread but perhaps false belief in some transcendent law, the voice of God, or just a natural disposition on the part of some pompous people to make sonorous objective-sounding pronouncements? What form should we expect natural law to take in our apprehension of it? This paper argues three things. (a) John Finnis’s work on natural law provides no answer to these questions; his “theory of natural law” is really just a theory of the necessary basis in ethics for evaluating positive law. (b) We need an answer to the question “What is natural law like” not just to evaluate the work of state-of-nature theorists like Locke, but also to explore the possibility that natural law might once have played the role now played by positive international law in regulating relations between sovereigns. And (c), an affirmative account of what natural law is like must pay attention to (1) its deontic character; (2) its enforceability; (3) the ancillary principles that have to be associated with its main normative requirements if it is to be operate as a system of law; (4) its separability form objective from ethics and morality, even from objective ethics and morality; and (5) the shared recognition on earth of its presence in the world. Some of these points — especially 3, 4, and 5 — sound like characteristics of positive law. But the paper argues that they are necessary nevertheless if it is going to be plausible to say that natural law has ever operated (or does still operate) as law in the world.

The Evidence of the Precepts of Natural Law

Is the Natural Law Persuasive? by R.J. Snell

The theory of natural law, not the precepts of natural law.

One can try to persuade not through demonstration of the principles (i.e. human goods), but through dialectic.

The first-person aspect of natural law explains also the appeals to the self-evident. As John Finnis articulates in Fundamentals of Ethics, “ethics is not deduced or inferred from metaphysics or anthropology,” and principles are self-evident precisely in that they are not deduced from previous principles, but in no way is ethics merely intuited or asserted or mystically known. Rather, by adverting to the object(ive)s of human action—the for-the-sake-of-which rendering action intelligible—we can attend “to precisely those aspects of our experience . . . in which human good(s) became or can now become intelligible to us.” In other words, we can understand human goods rather than deduce human goods, but while understanding is not an inference it nonetheless involves insight into our experience, and without the experience and insight we would not understand. Basic goods are not deduced or derived, for they are self-evident, but there are conditions for our understanding of the goods.

The condition of coming to understand basic human goods, which serve as grounds for reasonable action, is a first-person understanding of our own reasons for acting. That is, we have to understand why we act and what we seek when we act. If an action is intelligible, that action will have some grounds which are understood as worth seeking in themselves, not requiring justification or demonstration on the basis of some other good(s). Understanding this entails self-understanding, adverting to the reasons for acting always operative in our knowing and choosing. Such self-understanding, Finnis explains, is not simply “opening one’s eyes” to take a look at oneself, nor is it an “intuition”; it is an “insight” gained by “reflecting on one’s own wanting, deciding and acting,” which occurs not by “peer[ing] inside oneself” but by noticing and understanding one’s own reasons for acting.

While these goods are assumed in ethics, they can be shown to be such in metaphysics? What about the precepts dealing with the means to these goods? Can they be demonstrated (through moral science)? Even so, would such demonstrations be persuasive to the man of vice(s)? Probably not.

[We have a natural inclination to know truth. But moral truth is not the same "truth" as speculative truth.]

A final response by Tollefsen to Miller and O'Brien ?

Natural Causes, Divine Commands, and Human Wellbeing by Christopher O. Tollefsen

A notice by Robert George from earlier this month: In Memoriam: Two Catholic Philosophers

Alfonso Gomez-Lobo wrote a short introduction to the NNLT.

In Memoriam: Alfonso Gomez-Lobo


Michael Dummett
Remembering Michael Dummett
A faculty page.
Gifford Lecture Series bio
The Revision of the Roman Liturgy: A Review
A Conversion Story
Michael Dummett On the Morality of Contraception

Marriage and Procreation: The Intrinsic Connection
by Patrick Lee, Robert P. George and Gerard V. Bradley

First Things: Natural Rights Trump Obamacare, or Should by Hadley Arkes

Only the natural law can explain the deep wrongs of the recent health-care bill.

Robert George: Remarks on Natural Law at Notre Dame

MoJ

Steven Long responds to Christopher Tollefsen regarding capital punishment

Thomistica.net: "Goods" Without Normative Order to the Good Life, Happiness, or God: The New Natural Law Theory and the Nostrum of Incommensurability

A typical NNLT appeal to "dignity"

Capital Punishment, Sanctity of Life, and Human Dignity by Christopher O. Tollefsen

Laura Inglis interviews Robert George (via MoJ)