Natural law and natural rights / John Finnis.
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 thinking.
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
2011.
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| Edition: | Second edition. |
| Series: | Clarendon law series.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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 thinking. The book closely integrates the philosophy of law with ethics, social theory and political philosophy and has offered generations of students and other readers a thorough grounding in the central issues of practical philosophy from a perspective both new and in close continuity with a classical mainstream. This fresh edition includes a substantial Postscript by the author, in which he clarifies and develops the theory in the light of thirty years of critical discussion and further work on these issues. 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. |
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| Physical Description: | xvi, 494 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 480-483) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0199599130 9780199599134 0199599149 9780199599141 |