John Finnis Quotes on Virtue
John Finnis's Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980, second edition 2011) and Fundamentals of Ethics (1983) reorganized the New Natural Law tradition that Finnis developed in collaboration with Germain Grisez and Joseph Boyle. The principal thesis is that there are seven (or sometimes nine, in later refinements) basic human goods — life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability or friendship, practical reasonableness, religion — each of which is incommensurable with the others and self-evident to any agent capable of practical reasoning. Practical reasonableness — the capacity to direct one's life intelligibly toward these goods without arbitrarily favoring or excluding any of them — supplies the master virtue from which the more familiar moral norms (the requirements of justice, the rejection of consequentialist calculation, the absolute prohibitions on certain kinds of intentional act) follow.
Quotes
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“There are basic human goods that reason grasps as good in themselves.”
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“Natural law is what reason perceives in the structure of the goods of human nature.”
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“Practical reason proceeds from the basic goods to the principles of reasonableness.”
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“Reason and faith share the goods of the human person; they are not foreign to each other.”