John Finnis

John Mitchell Finnis, , (born 28 July 1940) is an Australian legal philosopher, jurist and scholar specializing in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. He is the Biolchini Family Professor of Law, emeritus, at Notre Dame Law School and a Permanent Senior Distinguished Research Fellow at Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. He was Professor of Law & Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1989 to 2010, where he is now professor emeritus. He acted as a constitutional adviser to successive Australian Commonwealth governments in constitutional matters and bilateral relations with the United Kingdom.

His academic focus is in the areas of jurisprudence, political theory, and constitutional law, while his practice at the English Bar saw him in cases at the High Court and at the Court of Appeal. He is a member of Gray's Inn. He was appointed an honorary Queen's Counsel in 2017. In 2019 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), Australia's highest civilian award.

Early life and education

Finnis was educated at St. Peter's College, Adelaide and the University of Adelaide, where he was a member of St. Mark's College. He obtained his Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree there, winning a Rhodes scholarship to University College, Oxford, in 1962, where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree with a thesis on the concept of judicial power, with reference to Australian federal constitutional law. Also in 1962, Finnis converted to Roman Catholicism.

Finnis was a friend of Aung San Suu Kyi, also an Oxford graduate; and, in 1989, Finnis nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize. Aung San Suu Kyi won the prize but did not receive it until June 2012, when she recalled how her late husband, Michael Aris, had visited her under house arrest and brought her the news "that a friend, John Finnis" had nominated her for the prize.

Career

Finnis is a legal philosopher and author of ''Natural Law and Natural Rights'' (1980, 2011), a seminal contribution to the philosophy of law and a restatement of natural law doctrine. For Finnis there are seven basic goods; life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability of friendship, practical reasonableness and religion. In his book on Finnis' student Neil Gorsuch while at Oxford University, John Greenya has described Finnis's views by stating: "Some of John Finnis's views are very controversial. For example, in defending his long-held position against same-sex marriage and same-sex coupling, he once compared them to bestiality."

Philosopher Stephen Buckle sees Finnis's list of proposed basic goods as plausible, but notes that "Finnis's account becomes more controversial when he goes on to specify the basic requirements of practical reasonableness". He sees Finnis's requirement that practical reason requires "respect for every basic value in every act" as intended both to rule out consequentialism in ethics and also to support the moral viewpoint of the Catholic Church on a range of contentious issues, including contraception and masturbation, which in his view undermines its plausibility.

Finnis's work on natural law ethics has been a source of controversy in both neo-Thomist and analytical circles. Craig Paterson sees his work as interesting because it challenges a key assumption of both neo-Thomist and analytical philosophy: the idea that a natural law ethics must be based upon an attempt to derive normative (or "ought") statements from descriptive (or "is") statements.

According to Andrew Sullivan, Finnis has articulated "an intelligible and subtle account of homosexuality" based on the new natural law, a less biologically-based version of natural law theory. Finnis argues that the state should deter public approval of homosexual behaviour while refusing to persecute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation, basing this position not on the claim that homosexual sex is unnatural but on the idea that it cannot involve the union of procreation and emotional commitment that heterosexual sex can, and is therefore an assault on heterosexual union. Sullivan believes that such a conservative position is vulnerable to criticism on its own terms, since the stability of existing families is better served by the acceptance of those homosexuals who are part of them. Other scholars, such as Stephen Macedo and Michael J. Perry, have also criticised Finnis's views.

He has supervised several doctoral students including Neil Gorsuch, Justice Susan Kenny of the Federal Court of Australia, Robert P. George of Princeton University, and John Keown of Georgetown University. In 2013 George and Keown summarised some of Finnis's media work as "He has, for example, debated embryo research with Mary Warnock on BBC's ''Newsnight'' and with Jonathan Glover in the Channel 4 Debate; discussed euthanasia with a leading Dutch euthanasiast on the same channel's '' After Dark'', and written on eugenic abortion in ''The Sunday Telegraph''".

In the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours for Australia, Finnis was appointed a Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia, the country's highest civilian honour, for his eminent service as a jurist and legal scholar.

Publications

Books

In May 2011, Oxford University Press published a five-volume collection of essays by John Finnis and a second edition of ''Natural Law and Natural Rights''. Their release was marked by an all-day conference at the Notre Dame Law School on 9 September 2011.

* ''Natural Law and Natural Rights,'' Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; 2nd ed., 2011. .
* ''Fundamentals of Ethics,'' Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1983. .
* ''Nuclear Deterrence, Morality, and Realism'', with J. M. Boyle Jr. and Germain Grisez, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. .
* ''Natural Law'', 2 vols (as editor), New York: New York University Press, 1991. and .
* ''Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision and Truth,'' Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. .
* ''Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory,'' Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. .
* ''The Collected Essays of John Finnis'', 5 vols, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. .

Articles

Aquinas' Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy

The Profound Injustice of Justice Posner on Marriage

Natural Law: The Classical Tradition
PDF (Internet Archive)

The Priority of Persons
PDF
*

The Good of Marriage and the Morality of Sexual Relations
PDF

Law, Morality and "Sexual Orientation"
PDF

Video lectures

God and Man

Religious Liberty

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Finnis, John
1940 births
20th-century Australian philosophers
21st-century Australian philosophers
Australian legal scholars
Australian political philosophers
Fellows of University College, Oxford
Living people
Philosophers of law
Catholic philosophers
Adelaide Law School alumni
University of Notre Dame faculty
Notre Dame Law School faculty
Legal scholars of the University of Oxford
Companions of the Order of Australia
Honorary King's Counsel
Fellows of the British Academy
Alumni of University College, Oxford
Australian Rhodes Scholars
University of Malawi faculty