John Finnis
b. 1940 · Australian legal philosopher in the Thomist tradition
John Finnis (born Adelaide, 1940) is an Australian legal philosopher whose work draws on the Thomist tradition and is a central reference in contemporary natural law theory. He has taught at the University of Oxford and at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, where he is professor of law and legal philosophy.
He studied law at the University of Adelaide and then completed a doctorate at Oxford with a thesis on the concept of judicial power. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1962. His best-known book, Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980), restates natural law doctrine around the idea that there are several basic goods, such as life, knowledge, play, friendship and religion, which practical reason orders freely. Other important works include Fundamentals of Ethics (1983) and Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (1998). He has also examined moral intention, distinguishing between the end one directly pursues and the foreseeable side effects of an action, a distinction much debated in criminal law and in the ethics of war.
His influence extends to legal theory and applied ethics, and he is associated with the revival of Aristotelian and Thomist ideas in contemporary debate.
Key ideas
- Basic goods. Human goods such as life, knowledge and friendship are plural and cannot be reduced to a single one.
- Practical reason. 'Ought' does not follow logically from 'is'; the first principles of action are grasped immediately by the intellect.
- Intention. The morality of an act depends on what is directly intended, not on foreseeable side effects.
Curiosities
A proposed Nobel
In 1989 he nominated Aung San Suu Kyi for the Nobel Peace Prize. She received it in 2012, and recalled that the news reached her through her late husband, Michael Aris, during her house arrest.
A doctoral student on the Supreme Court
Among his doctoral students is Neil Gorsuch, who later became a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
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