When is Human Normativity First Known? A Response to Finnis’s ‘Nature, Normativity, and Creation’

Like many others, I have learned a lot from John Finnis’s works on natural law and St. Thomas Aquinas’s political thought. There are numerous questions I would like to ask and issues I would like to raise in response to Finnis’s Barry Lecture, such as my different reading of Alasdair MacIntyre’s works. But I will focus on one question that targets two of the three topics of his lecture: when is human normativity first known? I argue that, given Finnis’s other commitments, he should answer: it depends on which order of human normativity is in question. Human normativity is first known by a theoretical insight into theoretical goods of human beings from the 1st order of normativity. And human normativity is first known by a practical insight into practical goods within the 3rd order of normativity. This practical insight is informed by the 1st order of normativity’s fields of possibility known by initial theoretical insights, but this practical insight discerns something more concerning human normativity which is not grasped by any theoretical insights. This practical insight from the 3rd order of normativity grasps basic goods of human normativity as being rationally desirable and rationally directive of human actions. If my argument here is sound, then it has shown that with respect to the problem of how we grasp the first principles or basic goods of the natural law, there is less principled distance and disagreement than is commonly supposed between Finnis’s theory of natural law and some rival theories of natural law. Granted, there are still significant disagreements concerning whether the basic goods are incommensurable, pre-moral, and other issues, but I hope my arguments can forge a path toward some significant points of agreement.