John Finnis

John Mitchell Finnis (born 28 July 1940) is an Australian legal philosopher and jurist specializing in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law.

He is an original interpreter of Aristotle and Aquinas, and counts Germain Grisez as a major influence and collaborator.

He has made contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy.

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.

His best known work is 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 eight basic goods; life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability of friendship, practical reasonableness, religion and marriage.

His Fundamentals of Ethics collect six Carroll Lectures Finnis delivered at Georgetown University in 1982.

He has published five collections of essays: Reason in Action, Intention and Identity, Human Rights and Common Good, Philosophy of Law, Religion and Public Reasons.

Below is a complete list of his publications.

A unifying theme running through Finnis' writings is the importance he attributes to human freedom, as the ability to make decisions about the kind of life one wants to live.

Such decisions involve choices among incommensurable basic goods, which practical reason must order to achieve desired ends.

A mature exercise of freedom would avoid intentionally infringing any of the basic goods, and would in different ways and to different extents, foster their realization.

At the collective level, we find a similar logic guiding the making of Laws (Natural Law and Natural Rights) and political decisions.

In view of this, the discussion has been largely structured around notions of intentionality, prudence, moral choices, and notions of fairness.

The discussion on Religion appeals to wider considerations.

This is followed by a brief discussion of Finnis's Philosophy of Law.

The last section summarises the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of Finnis' philosophy, as captured in his Fundamentals of Ethics.

This selection of topics included in this short article cannot do justice to the vast corpus of Finnis' writings, encompassing philosophical, legal, political and religious topics, and argumentation with leading thinkers in those fields.

The reader is directed to explore his writings.

On the basis of experience of facts, possibilities and outcomes, one easily understands basic forms of human good as good for oneself and other human beings, and one's will is fundamentally one's response to this understanding.

"Ought" does not follow from "is", since the first principles of practical reasoning are not deduced logically but are understood immediately by the intellect.

Morality is a consequence of reflecting on the basic goods as a whole and their implications for human flourishing.

Finnis dismisses David Hume's identification of morality as a sentiment of sympathy leading to approbation or disapprobation, by noting that Hume also expected such sentiments to be recognised and agreed to by others.

Thus, Hume's morality is based on reasonableness rather than sympathy, notwithstanding "Hume's formal and vigorous protestations to the contrary".

Finnis identifies reasonableness with the disinterested and impartial perspective which seeks to understand what is best for everyone at a certain point in time.

Finnis was Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1989 to 2010, where he is now Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus.

He is also 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 acted as adviser to several Australian State governments, especially Queensland and Western Australia, mostly on the States' relations with the federal Government and with the United Kingdom.

His practice at the English Bar saw him in cases in the High Court and in the Court of Appeal.

He is a member of Gray's Inn.

Finnis is a friend of Aung San Suu Kyi, also an Oxford graduate, and, in 1989, 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.

Finnis is an author of several philosophical works.

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".

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 was appointed an honorary Queen's Counsel in 2017.

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.

He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to legal scholarship.

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.