First published in 1980, Natural Law and Natural Rights is widely
heralded as a seminal contribution to the philosophy of law, and an
authoritative restatement of natural law doctrine. It has offered
generations of students and other readers a thorough grounding in the
central issues of legal, moral, and political philosophy from Finnis's
distinctive perspective. This new edition includes a substantial
postscript by the author, in which he responds to thirty years of
discussion, criticism and further work in the field to develop and
refine the original theory.
The book closely 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, modern,
and contemporary writers in ethics, social and political theory, and
jurisprudence.
The preliminary First Part reviews a century of analytical jurisprudence
to illustrate the dependence of every descriptive social science upon
evaluations by the theorist. A fully critical basis for such evaluations
is a theory of natural law. Standard contemporary objections to natural
law theory are reviewed and shown to rest on serious misunderstandings.
The Second Part develops in ten carefully structured chapters an account
of: basic human goods and basic requirements of practical
reasonableness, community and 'the common good'; justice; the logical
structure of rights-talk; the bases of human rights, their specification
and their limits; authority, and the formation of authoritative rules by
non-authoritative persons and procedures; law, the Rule of Law, and the
derivation of laws from the principles of practical reasonableness; the
complex relation between legal and moral obligation; and the practical
and theoretical problems created by unjust laws.
A final Part develops a vigorous argument about the relation between
'natural law', 'natural theology' and 'revelation' - between moral
concern and other ultimate questions.
