The Cognitive Theory Of John Finnis's Natural Law Theory

JOHN FINNIS’S NATURAL LAW THEORY

Finnis provides a set of seven equally valuable basic goods: life; knowledge; play; friendship; aesthetical experience; religion and practical reasonableness. These basic goods are not illogically inferred from nature. They are self-evident, as they have grasped their fundamental goodness by intelligent reflection. Finnis is trying to provide an account of where Natural Law comes from. He is defending a strong view of moral objectivity.

Finnis broadly endorses Lon Fuller’s eight requirements of ‘the inner morality of law’ through his conceptualisation of the ‘rule of law’. Laws should be prospective and not retroactive; possible to comply with; promulgated; clear; coherent; stable enough that people can use

He rejects any conceptual separation between law and morality. Instead, he argues that moral reasoning is required to determine what the law is in any legal system. He also rejects the ‘sources thesis’ which asserts that all law is source based, contrary to Hart and Finnis.

Dworkin conflates the question of adjudication with the question of legal validity, equating ‘law’ with ‘what judges are obligated to apply’. This is contrary to legal positivism, which holds that in ‘hard cases’ when the law runs out, judges must exercise their discretion by reasoning morally in order to make new laws. According to Dworkin, the law never runs out. Therefore, judges do not have open-ended discretion to make new law. He asserts that all cases, including ‘hard cases’, have one right answer. He asserts that not all laws derive their validity from factual tests of pedigree provided by a rule of recognition. Instead, some laws (i.e. legal principles) necessarily depend on moral reasoning by judges for their legal validity. Dworkin asserts that laws cannot simply be understood as authoritative directives issued by