REV - Persona y Derecho - Vol. 82 (2020)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10171/61643
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- «Natural Law and Natural Rights» and the Negation of the Objective Priority of Speculative Truth(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Long, S. (Steven)This essay explores the nature and implications of John Finnis’s express negation in his work Natural Law and Natural Rights of the objective primacy of speculative truth with respect to the derivation of practical reason and agency. The essay observes two senses of the speculative/practical distinction. One sense concerns whether the object known is a contingent matter ordered to an end or whether it concerns a universal, necessary, or eternal truth. The other sense concerns the mode of the knowledge itself: whether its end is simply knowledge, or whether the end is the good of an operation. Because prior to desire and intention all knowledge is speculative in its mode, and this knowledge is absolutely necessary for knowledge that is practical in its mode; and because knowledge that is practical in its mode is absolutely prior to knowledge that is practical merely in that it concerns a practical object – because without knowledge practical in its mode there will never be such knowledge that is practical in its object – it follows that practical reasoning is derivative of knowledge that is speculative in its mode. Implications of Finnis’s error – about teleology, common good, and God – are considered.
- La ausencia del derecho natural en «Ley natural y derechos naturales»(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Cruz-Prados, A. (Alfredo)Because of his normativistic background, Finnis departs from Saint Thomas Aquinas in two important points. First, he identifies ius naturale and lex naturalis, and transforms Aquinas doctrine on natural law into a theory about the process through which reason alone can draw moral precepts from some evident principles. But, in this way, the kind of reason that Finnis is talking about is theoretical reason, and natural law becomes a construction by theoretical reason, instead of being the precept of practical reason, as in Saint Thomas. And second, in Finnis thought –as in normativism in general– the true idea of ius naturale disappears, because the juridical question on the existence of something naturally just is replaced with the moral question on the due connection between positive law and moral law.
- La «practical reason» nel pensiero di Finnis alla luce di Grisez(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Scandroglio, T. (Tommaso)This contribution investigates the concept of practical reason developed by John Finnis according to Grisez’s approach, interpretation explicitly accepted by Finnis himself. Practical reason is the main player within the complex interaction of multiple elements that will lead to the particular moral norm. These elements, without any intrinsic moral features, are the inclinationes naturales, the basic goods and the requirements of practical reasonableness. The nature of practical reason is indicated by the first principle of practical reason which holds a descriptive rather than a prescriptive character.
- Crítica a la teoría del conocimiento práctico de Grisez & Finnis(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Poole-Derqui, D. (Diego)The present work is divided into three parts. In the first part, I briefly explain the ontology of natural law from the perspective of the «New Natural Law Theory» (NNLT) and I contrast this with what I consider to be Aquinas’s own view. In the second part, I deal with knowledge of natural law according to the NNLT and according to St. Thomas. Here, I attend closely to Aquinas’s view of the nature of practical knowledge in order to highlight the differentiating features that separate it from the NNLT view. In the last chapter, I deal with the NNLT’s marginalization of the virtues in knowledge of the natural law, and conclude that Grisez and Finnis’s theory of moral knowledge is closer to Kant than to Saint Thomas.
- On not saying more than we know: New Natural Law Theory and anti-theoretical ethics(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Chappell, S.G. (Sophie Grace)I say something about the relationship of Finnis’s work in ethics to my own, then summarise and criticise Finnis’s new natural law theory. My own view is an anti-theoretical view: there is no reason to expect any neatly systematic ethical theory to be true just because it is neatly systematic. The doubts that naturally arise about new natural law theory are mostly of this nature: they are based on suspicion of schematisms. I close with some positive suggestions about resources for ethics, in particular «the common understanding of humanity».
- El florecimiento humano integral. Reflexiones acerca del estatuto, función e introducción del primer principio de la moral en «Natural Law and Natural Rights»(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Retamar-Jiménez, J.A. (José Antonio)Moral philosophy plays a fundamental role, together with political philosophy and Jurisprudence, in Finnis’ argument present in his two editions of Natural Law and Natural Rights, to answer the question of how natural rights are based on natural law. Finnis’ explanation of natural law and its functioning is inspired in some relevant texts of Aquinas; however, the roots and reasonings of both authors are diverse here. The first edition presents a moral philosophy proposing the interaction between two types of principles: basic human goods and the requirements of one of them (practical reasonableness). The second edition introduces a new moral principle, called «integral human fulfillment», to moderate the interplay of the said principles. This work explains why the moral assumptions under the first edition were restrictive and shown the insufficiency for human goods to fill the teleological perspective of morality. Likewise, I explain the doctrinal evolution of the concept of integral human fulfilment in the author’s work as well as the difficulties deriving of the introduction of the new moral «guide» (formally recognized from 1987 on), within an existing theory. I have focused on the following possibly problematic aspects of the new principle: the use of denominations with different meanings as synonyms (flourishing, fulfillment, realization.../ end, objective, goal, good, not good, key premise, master principle of morality, ideal, precept...), its not precise comparison with the thomistic beatitudo imperfecta, its problematic assembling with the «evident» practical principles as explained in the first edition, the circularity of the system, and the possible doubts about the preceptive role of the ideal of the integral human flourishing, by assuming that it does not involve, necessariliy, the idea of an end.
- The relation between reason and goodness in John Finnis(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Flippen, D. (Douglas)John Finnis joins Grisez in providing a new foundation for Thomistic natural law theory. To accomplish this, they closely associate good as perfection with good as to be pursued and have both senses grasped together by the practical intellect independently of the speculative intellect. The practical intellect then presents good to the will and motivates it to act for the first time. Since good as perfection is inherently speculative and since the intellect becomes practical only depending on the will, their notion of the practical intellect is incoherent and their new foundation is deeply flawed.
- Observaciones críticas acerca de «Natural Law and Natural Rights», de John Finnis(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Martínez-Valls, N. (Néstor)After selecting some key theses from Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights, the author’s acceptance of «Hume’s law» is critically analyzed, and also the resulting separation between practical reason and speculative reason and the lack of distinction between the speculative level proper to moral philosophy and the practical level proper to individual decision, the thesis of knowledge of human nature from the principles of practical reason, and the attempt to reduce human nature to rationality, as the foundation of natural law; the insufficient explanation of moral obligation by the demands of the common good, and of the existence of intrinsically evil acts, the denial of a single ultimate end for all men, the denial of the moral character of the first principle of practical reason, and the reduction of the thesis of the divine foundation of moral obligation to mere voluntarism.
- On what a theory of natural law is supposed to be(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Pakaluk, M. (Michael)A theory may properly be called a theory of natural law, if either it functions as such a theory is expected to function; or it has the expected content; or it is a plausible interpretation of a theory generally acknowledged to be in the tradition of natural law. It functions as such a theory if it supports appeals to natural law intended to ‘contextualize’ human law. It has the expected content, if it adverts to providential, natural teleology as the basis for a law given to us prior to convention. It would clearly be located in the tradition, and rightly accounted as such a theory, if it were a plausible interpretation of Aquinas’ Treatise on Law, which is the locus classicus for the philosophical treatment of natural law. But the ‘New Natural Law,’ first expounded in Natural Law and Natural Rights (NLNR) of John Finnis, meets none of these criteria. NLNR seems best construed, then, as a contribution to the «law and morality » debate, not a theory of natural law. It gives merely another ‘method of ethics’ along with the many others put forward in the 20th c. If so, the philosophical work needed for a persuasive, contemporary revival of natural law still remains to be done.
- Cuarenta años de la publicación de Natural Law and Natural Rights de John Finnis(Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2020) Retamar-Jiménez, J.A. (José Antonio)