Whatever
the merits you think Natural Law theories may have, you have to acknowledge at
least two great achievements of the Australian philosopher John Finnis: having returned
philosophical plausibility and dignity to the Natural Law tradition and having mixed
Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s schemes of thought with some of the best legal
philosophical insights from contemporary thinkers as Hart, Rawls, and Raz.
Those are two reasons good enough for you to take a look at Finnis’s biggest
work, “Natural Law and Natural Rights”.
The main thesis
of the book is simple: Since law is functional to protect and realize some
basic goods of human life, the only kind of descriptive theory of law which is
satisfactory is one that show how much the existing law manages to reach that version
in which those goods are best protected and realized. So the book is an attempt
to proof Finnis’s thesis to be true and to expose various parts of a Natural
Law theory as components of the descriptive approach to law best suited to
fulfill that task.
I would
like to do an introductory presentation of some issues in Finnis’s book and to
make some critical remarks on those issues, which are: (1) Finnis’s conception
of “description” of law; (2) Finnis’s argument for the basic goods; (3) the
relation of Finnis’s Natural Law theory and democracy; and (4) Finnis’s
conception of the authority of law. My considerations will be put in the
following posts of this Blog.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário