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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Natural Law And Legal Reasoning Natural Law, John Finnis
Natural Law And Legal Reasoning Natural Law, John Finnis
Cleveland State Law Review
In sum: Much academic theory about legal reasoning greatly exaggerates the extent to which reason can settle what is greater good or lesser evil, and minimizes the need for authoritative sources which, so far as they are clear and respect the few absolute moral rights and duties, are to be respected as the only rational basis for judicial reasoning and decision, in relation to the countless issues which do not directly involve those absolute rights and duties. A natural law theory in the classical tradition makes no pretense that natural reason can determine the one right answer to those countless …
Natural Law Without Metaphysics: The Case Of John Finnis, Jeremy Shearmur
Natural Law Without Metaphysics: The Case Of John Finnis, Jeremy Shearmur
Cleveland State Law Review
Finnis, in Natural Law and Natural Right, sidesteps certain problems by taking a largely internalist view of natural law. First, for Finnis there is no problem of moving from facts to values, because within his starting-point-the "internal" reflective analysis of action-values are already there to be found. Second, Finnis suggests that what is today often cited as "the" statement of a fact/value problem, Hume's analysis, is in fact better understood as directed towards a different problem: one of the relation between truth and motivation. Here Finnis also offers a solution, suggesting that "one is motivated according to one's understanding of …