Pontificium consilium de legum textibus interpretandis pontificium consilium pro familia pontificia academia pro vita

JOHN FINNIS



NATURAL LAW - POSITIVE LAW
When we deliberate as intelligently as we can, in order to choose as reasonably as possible, we recognise certain fundamental reasons for action.  These primary or basic reasons, from which all other reasons for action are derived, direct us towards certain correspondingly primary and basic benefits which our action might yield, certain fundamental or primary human goods which our action might instantiate and actualise.   The propositions which pick out those basic benefits as goods to be pursued, and their negations as bads to be avoided and prevented, are called by St Thomas the first principles of natural law.[1]

In this traditional term, ‘natural law’, the word ‘law’ has of course a sense analogous to ordinary talk of the laws of states, armies, clubs or games.  But in this analogy the differences are at least as important as the similarities.  The directiveness of  the principles of natural law, their normativity, their claim upon our practical reasoning and choices, is nothing other than the directiveness, normativity, rational claim of  truth -- of what is-to-be-affirmed because grasped by clear understanding and unconfused insight;[2] of what is known in right judgment.[3]  This normativity is the attractiveness of living in light rather than darkness,[4] in reality rather than illusion, confusion, or inauthenticity.

And these principles are not only intelligible and true but also, as the philosophical, biblical and theological tradition says, are ‘natural’ or ‘of nature’.  For two reasons.  (1) They are principles of reason (since from them all our practical reasoning and reasonableness [prudentia] derives and proceeds), and acting (including thinking) according to reason is what our human nature heads towards as the form of flourishing appropriate to human nature;[5] it is also, we may add,[6]what assimilates us most closely to the creative reason which is the absolute source of all natures and the whole of Nature.[7]   And (2) the basic human goods picked out and directed towards by practical reason’s first propositional principles are the perfections, the intrinsic aspects of the flourishing, of  beings whose nature it is to flourish by instantiating these goods.[8]  For by knowing what it is intelligent and reasonable to choose, i.e. the intelligent and reasonable objects of human willing, we understand actual and eligible human actions, but by understanding human actions we understand human capacities, and by understanding these capacities or potentialities we understand human nature.[9]  So, by theoretical reflection upon truths first grasped in practical understanding, we can reach those theoretical (speculativa) judgments about human nature which Evangelium Vitae calls anthropological.[10] The realities affirmed in these non-practical judgments have just that priority which is entailed by the fact that we can only be fulfilled through actions, can only do those acts for which we have the capacity, and only have the capacities we have by virtue of that fundamental gift, our being beings of a human kind, of this nature.

But Evangelium Vitae and the document which elaborates its foundations, Veritatis Splendor, rightly give expository priority to the principles of practical reason and to the goods to which those principles direct us.  Evangelium Vitae’s title is De vitae humanae inviolabili bono and Veritatis Splendor explains that human life, though it is a ‘fundamental good of man’ (hominis bonum praecipuum)[11]  is one of a number of such fundamental goods (bonorum praecipuorum).[12]   Each of these basic human goods has its moral relevance, not because it is (though indeed it is) the object of a natural inclination (e.g. the inclination to preserve one’s own life),[13] but because it is by reference to these goods that one can understand, affirm, respect, and promote the ‘authentic fulfilment’ of human persons each and every one of whom, body and soul (corpore et anima unus), is an end and not a mere means to anyone else’s purposes or fulfilment.[14]  As St Thomas teaches, the absolutely first principle of practical reason directs us towards goods which are the object not merely of  natural dynamisms and of emotional inclinations but in particular of inclinations of will,[15] that is of our interest in and responsiveness to precisely those goods which practical reason begins by understanding. And as Veritatis Splendorteaches, in line with a sound philosophy, our orientation towards intelligible goods[16] takes on moral significance precisely by directing us to choose not merely some intelligible good (which even the wicked do)[17] but rather purposes and actions which are consistent with all the goods which are essential elements of an integral fulfilment[18] which involves not merely the good of the spiritual and bodily being of the acting person but the good, the fulfilment of all his neighbours and the ordering of all these purposes, actions and persons to God and to the possibility of  all these human persons living in communion with him.[19]  One element ‘ by no means the only element, but one of fundamental importance -- in this integral ‘reference’ to the ‘goods of the person’ (i.e. of every person) is the requirement of respect for the basic human goods, such as life, or marital communion,[20]  the requirement of  an exceptionless ‘No’[21] to every choice to directly violate such a good.[22]  The exceptionless moral norms of natural law (and also of the Commandments and the Gospel) recalled in Veritatis Splendor and exemplified in Evangelium Vitae are the precepts which direct us away from options whose objects would involve us, whatever our further intentions, in violating one of these inviolable goods.[23]

The moral natural law’s precepts or norms (I use the terms interchangeably) direct one, in relation to specific types of choice and action, to respect and promote good in oneself and in the person of one’s neighbours.  Insofar as the choices about which these norms give directions affect other human persons, they are norms of  justice, of a will in accordance with natural right.  When and insofar as right (ius) ‘ or indeed iustitia -- is considered systematically from the viewpoint of the other(s), the person(s) whose good the norm protects or promotes, it is a matter of  rights (iura).  By adopting and articulating this viewpoint systematically ‘ a viewpoint certainly implicit, but not fully articulated, in classical and high mediaeval discourse[24] ‘ moral and political culture could be said to have ‘discovered the idea of ‘human rights’’.[25]  Through reflections upon the difference between goods which (like life, or communion with God) are ends in themselves, intrinsic to the human person, and goods which (like property) are not, it has become possible to identify some human or natural rights as fundamental: ‘fundamental human rights’.[26]

A primary task of  a state’s government and law is to do what they can to prevent any injustices of the kind involved in violations of fundamental human rights, and punitively to restore the public order (of just rights) whose disturbance is entailed by every such violation.[27]  The responsibility of state government and law goes beyond this indispensable minimum to embrace  ‘[i] the effective safeguarding and peaceful harmonising (pacifica compositio) of every citizen’s rights, [ii] adequate provision for that decent public peace which consists in an ordered living together in true justice, and [iii] a due  upholding of public morality’.[28]  It is the clear teaching of Aquinas,[29] as of  Evangelium Vitae,[30] that the responsibility of state government and law is not a paternal responsibility; the human choices and acts which are the objects of its concern are those which involve or affect the interpersonal relationships compendiously signified by the phrase ‘justice and peace’.

So human positive law ‘ what Evangelium Vitae usually calls civil law, the law of a state (civitas)[31] ‘ is not properly concerned to re-enact or impose the whole of the natural moral law; it can rightly enforce only those requirements of natural law which concern justice and peace including public morality qua public.

The whole of a state’s law is positive  This is true even of those parts (e.g. the law of murder) which should and normally do simply reproduce, or are strict entailments of, the natural law’s moral norms (e.g. the exceptionless moral norm against intentionally killing an innocent human being).   It is only in Aquinas’ late works that we find this fully explicit concept of  a subject-matter with an integrity of its own: the human positive law of a political community, a legal order embracing, precisely as posited and positive, (i) all those parts of the natural law, the ius gentium, which are or ought to be adopted by the community’s law-makers and judges, as well as those (ii) many parts and provisions which neither do nor should reproduce, and are not deducible from, the precepts of natural law.[32]   Aquinas’ account of the distinctive rational but non-deductive and rationally under-determined connection between legal provisions of this kind and the precepts of  natural law, the connection which he names determinatio -- and which enables him to show that all just positive law is derived (whether by deduction or by determinatio) from the natural moral law[33] ‘ is an unsurpassed contribution to juristic thought and the philosophy of law.[34]

The theory of determinatio teaches that many issues for social and political choice and/or legislative decision are not fully settled by the precepts of the natural law.   In relation to these issues, a conscientious application of those precepts still leaves the deliberating person or society with more than one reasonable option.  The theory of positive law as a whole, however, teaches that many issues, or many aspects of many issues, are truly settled by morality’s intrinsic requirements (whether affirmative and therefore subject to exceptions or contingencies, or negative and therefore rationally capable of being exceptionless and absolute).[35]  Where, for example, an option includes the proposal that public funds be diverted from the relief of destitute earthquake victims to improving the marina for the legislators’ yachts, or that a witness be authorised to lie on oath, or that judges convict certain persons known to them to be innocent, or that an innocent person be put to death, the issue is in those aspects settled by reason.   Each such option is simply excluded by the natural law from further conscientious deliberation, private or public.  This settling of  issues is a matter of public reasons ‘ i.e. of reasons which, because true and applicable in principle to everyone, are available or accessible to all,[36] and binding and directive for everyone’s deliberation towards private or public choice, even if in fact they are reasons which are widely rejected, or depend upon difficult and/or controverted (‘controversial’) premises,[37] such as that motherhood is a high vocation, or that two-day-old human embryos have the reality and dignity of human persons.  And this settling of issues by the public reasons which the tradition calls natural law settles also the juridical validity or invalidity of positive law in the one forum which is of truly practical significance, the forum of the conscience of legislators, judges, and citizens.  In that decisive forum, an unjust law, though endowed with the social-fact phenomena of  ‘legal validity’ (positivity), is not truly a law.[38]  It lacks what all just positive laws ‘ even those which might reasonably have been left unmade, or made with different content ‘ rightly claim, the rational force of serious moral obligation.[39]  Even the positivity of the unjust positive law is only, so to speak, a phenomenon, and lacks the moral truth and reality which just positive laws properly have.[40]  Such laws ‘are completely lacking in authentic juridical validity’.[41]

The English translation of Evangelium Vitae 73.2 adds: ‘in the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it’’[42]  But how could one obey a law which merely permits’  The Italian is ‘non è mai lecito conformarsi ad essa’, and the Latin ‘‘eidem se accommodare’, and these are more readily intelligible. 

How, then, might one be tempted to accommodate oneself , illicitly, to an intrinsically unjust positive law’  One way arises from the inter-connectedness of the norms of a legal system.  Health care professionals, for example, have a legal duty, whether it be founded on contractual or delictual rules, to provide all efficacious and lawful procedures to their patients.  So the criminal law’s permission of abortion and euthanasia imposes upon such professionals, by juridical implication, a legal duty to perform (and/or to refer their patients to a professional who is willing to perform) abortions and assist in suicide or euthanasiast murders. Conscientious judges, however, are bound to deny the premise upon which that implication is founded, for to accept it is to conform and accommodate themselves to ‘ in a sense, to obey ‘ the intrinsically unjust criminal law, and is to treat as valid what is properly speaking a nullity.[43]  And the same is true of the health care professional themselves; their contractual or delictual duty to perform these unjust acts (or to cooperate in them ‘ by the morally illicit formal cooperation involved in referring a patient to another professional precisely as someone willing to do the deed) is ‘completely lacking in authentic juridical validity’[44] and must be resolutely treated as merely an occasion of sin, howsoever often the courts may declare it to be their duty.

Again, one might be tempted, in one’s practical deliberations, to treat the law’s permission as making it the case that those (whether oneself or others) who carry out or formally ‘ or indeed materially, but without justification -- cooperate in abortion have the legal and thus too the moral right not to be interrupted and prevented, i.e. the right not to be treated as someone engaged in homicide is typically treated when detected: by forcible prevention.  If conscientious citizens who like the good Samaritan are presented by circumstances with the opportunity (not excluded by their vocation) of  trying to prevent a homicide such as is involved in abortion or euthanasia, [45]  may it not be morally licit for them to try, using such force (even lethal force) as is proportionate in other instances of legitimate defence against homicide’   Evangelium Vitae neither affirms nor denies the liceity of such attempts.  One reason for its caution may be this.  In a society which has legalised these homicides, and treats them as matters of right and even of allegiance to law, attempts to use force to prevent the injustices will be met by force and could normally have no practical benefit unless conceived and carried out as a kind of revolutionary war against the tyrant state[46] ‘ or rather its law and government -- which has authorised the injustices.  Such an option should not be chosen unless it meets the conditions for a just war or revolution, and among these is the condition that there be real prospect of success, a condition which in our societies is unlikely to be satisfied.

The injustice of immoral positive laws goes wider than the commands, permissions and authorisations which is their immediate juridical purport.  For: the making of positive law is always a matter of moral responsibility, and legal reasoning, despite its technicality and its frequent reliance upon premises not supplied but only bounded by natural law, is properly given its limits, its deepest premises, and all its true directive force by morality’s principles and requirements.   Positive law, in short, is essentially a human enterprise of practical reason seeking to promote human goods and practical truths.  As St Thomas teaches[47] and experience confirms, even corrupt and perverted legal orders retain something of this character.  This makes the corruption of law even the more obnxious, in two ways.

First, injustice in one part of the law will spread to other parts, carried by the juridical concern for connectedness which I have already mentioned, and by reasoning ‘from analogy’, that is by the discovery or invention of a wider norm or principle which will rationalise (‘justify’) not only the initial injustice but other injustices which powerful people desire to commit and can deem to be ‘in like case’.  So abortion for motives of physical health broadens to include motives of psychological health, which in turn broadens to include motives of mere powerful desire and aversion.  The principles which purport to justify abortion go wider to embrace eugenic abortion and infanticide.[48]

The same or similar principles are taken to support the intentional termination of ‘sub-personal’ lives at other stages of a human life.  We will soon witness the juridical artistry by which, in the United States of America, voluntary euthanasia will rapidly mature into the killing of many persons without their consent, persons of whom it will be asserted (and perhaps believed) that, if they could and/or if they were reasonable, they would wish to be killed.

Second, promulgation of a law is always, willy nilly, an act of teaching which purports to give an account of what natural law and human nature and dignity invite if not require.  Unjust positive laws ‘ and above all, a law whose injustice is not merely a matter of improper motivations or procedural improprieties, but intrinsic ‘ are, then, false teachers.  The intrinsic injustice of their immediate invitations to cooperate in wrongful conduct is compounded by the falsehoods they propose and insinuate: an academy of further and wider violations of human good for all who do not instead recoil from error’s tentacles and conscientiously find their way back to true principles.

[1] Summa Theologiae I-II q. 94 a. 2.  Cf. Finnis, Aquinas: Social, Political and Legal Thought (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997), ch 3.  While ‘the Magisterium does not intend to impose upon the faithful any particular theological system, still less a philosophical one’ (Veritatis Splendor [VS] 29.4), ‘the Church has often made reference to the Thomistic doctrine of natural law, including it in her own teaching on morality’ (VS 44.1).  VS 59.2 adopts (without citing) Aquinas’ account (ST I-II q. 94 a. 2, cited and paraphrased, however, in VS 51.2) of the absolutely first principle (and thus of the form of the other first principles) of practical reason.

[2] That human life is a good is said in Evangelium Vitae [EV] 34.1 to be a matter of insight, intuitio, not unrelated to experience (experientia); the English translation questionably offers ‘instinctive perception’ in place of  intuitio or the Italian intuizione.  But ‘intuition’, too, could not be safely used in English, lest it be (mis)understood as meaning a kind of data-less inspiration, or alternatively the convention-shaped opinions which contemporary English-speaking philosophers regularly appeal to under than name.

[3] This is not to say that the normativity of truth is always of the same force.  Truths grasped without reasoning (per se nota), and truths which one has actually deduced from such first principles, as such leave no room for a free choice to reject them; truths grasped and to be affirmed by reasoning which is not fully deductive beckon the reasoner with a normativity that directs and does not exclude free choice to abandon the search or fudge the argument so as to ‘reach’ a desired conclusion: see Aquinas, De Malo q. 3 a. 3c; In Boethii De Trinitate I q. 2 a. 1 ad 5; etc.  On the normativity of ‘rationality norms’, see Finnis, ‘Historical Consciousness’ and Theological Foundations (Etienne Gilson Lecture No. 15, Pontifical Institute of  Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1992), 17-23.

 [4] So EV’s three doctrinal pronouncements are each said to be predicated not only upon revelation but also on ‘the natural law’ (EV 62.3, 65.4) which in the first of the three is described as ‘that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom. 2:14-15)’ (EV 57.4) (emphasis added).  And this light is a sharing in divine light:VS 42.2.

[5] Thus St. Thomas: ‘Moral precepts are in accord with {consequuntur} human nature because they are the requirements/prescriptions of natural reason {cum sint de dictamine rationis naturalis}’: IV Sent. 2 q. 1 a. 4 sol. 1 ad 2;likewise, repeatedly, ST I-II q. 71 a. 2c; also q. 94 a. 3 ad 2; q. 18 a. 5c; q. 78 a. 3c; In Rom. c. 1 lect. 3 [148]; etc.  See likewise the explanation of the term ‘natural law’ in VS 42.2.

[6] See VS 40, 41.2, 42.2, etc.

[7] On natural law as participation in divine reason and providence, see VS 43, citing ST I-II q. 90 a. 4 ad 1; q. 93 a. 1 & a. 2.

[8] On the tight conceptual link between ‘good’ as in ‘good is what all things desire’ and perfection, see  e.g. ST I q. 5 a. 1 c & ad 1; De Veritate q. 21 a. 1 c; Compendium Theologiae II c. 9.

[9] See Aristotle, De Anima II.4: 415a16-22; Aquinas, In De Anima  II.6 nn. 304-8; III.9 n. 803; ST I q. 87 a. 3c; Finnis,Fundamentals of Ethics (Clarendon Press, Oxford; Georgetown U. P. 1981) [FOE] 21-22.

[10] EV 82.1.

[11] VS 50.1; see also EV 2.2 (hoc suum principale bonum);  34.1 (Vita semper bonum est.).

[12] VS 48.3; see also 13.3, 67.2, 78.2, 79.2.   We should not, I think, say that life is an exception to the incommensurability of the basic human gods, or has a priority of value or special organisng centrality among those goods considered precisely as reasons for action, though it is obviously a kind of precondition for instantiating any of the other human goods.

[13]  ‘Indeed, natural inclinations take on moral relevance only insofar as they refer (referuntur) to the human person and his authentic fulfilment, a fulfilment which for that matter can take place always and only in human nature’: VS 50.1.  Thus: ‘To give an example, the origin and the foundation of the duty of absolute respect for human life are to be found in the dignity proper to the person and not simply in the natural inclination to preserve one’s own physical life.  Human life, even though it is a fundamental good of man, thus acquires a moral significance in reference to the good of the person (cum ad personae bonum refertur), who must always be affirmed for his own sake’: ibid.  On ‘integral human fulfilment’ see Martin Rhonheimer, Praktische Vernunft und Vernunftigkeit der Praxis (Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1994), 125; Grisez, Boyle, and Finnis, ‘Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends’, American Journal of Jurisprudence 32 (1987) 99 at 127-33 (= Finnis (ed.), Natural Law (Dartmouth, Aldershot; New York University Press; 1991) vol.  1, 236 at 265-71; Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes [GS] 35.

[14] ‘The spiritual and immortal soul is the principle of unity of the human being, whereby it exists as a whole’corpore et anima unum [GS 14]’as a person. ‘ It is in the light of the dignity of the human person’a dignity which must be affirmed for its own sake’that reason grasps the specific moral value of certain goods towards which the person is naturally inclined.  And since the human person cannot be reduced to a freedom which is self-designing, but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure, the primordial moral requirement of loving and respecting the person as an end and never as mere means also implies, by its very nature, respect for certain fundamental goods’’: VS 48.3.

[15]  See e.g. ST I-II q. 62 a. 3c; q. 85 a. 1c; q. 93 a. 6c;  etc.  Indeed, the will itself is a natural inclination: I-II q. 6 a. 4c.

[16] The plural term bona intellecta is not used by Aquinas; but the plurality of understood goods implicitly referred to by his very frequent phrase bonum intellectum is evident in many passages, notably ST I-II q. 19 a. 3; ScG III c. 88 n. 2 [2638]; De Virtutibus q. 1 a. 5 ad 2; a. 8 ad 13; In Eth. VI.11 n. 3 [1277]; cf . also ST I-II q. 9 a. 1c; q. 10 a. 1c; q. 94 a. 2c.

[17]  ‘Every choice always implies a reference by the deliberate will to the goods and evils indicated by the natural law as goods to be pursued and evils to be avoided’: VS 67 (emphasis added)

[18]  As Aquinas makes plain, what it is that really counts as fulfilment is not identifiable otherwise than by identifying its component goods (see De Veritate q. 22 a. 5c), which are known to us in practical reason’s first and indemonstrable principles (ST I-II q. 94 a. 2).

[19]  VS 13.2, 48.3, 50.1, 78.2, 79.2.  As VS 86.1 pithily says: ‘Freedom then is rooted in the truth about man, and it is ultimately directed towards communion.’

[20] VS 13.3.

[21] EV 75.2; see also EV 54.1, 41.

[22]  Cf VS 75.2, 78.2.

[23] The link between (i) the basic human goods to which first practical principles direct us, (ii) the supreme moral principle of love of those goods in every person and community, and (iii) the exceptionless moral norms taught in the tradition reaffirmed in Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae is not sought to be made perspicuous in those documents;so what counts as ‘violating an inviolable good’ is not fully explicated in them; this task (along with many others) is undertaken above all in Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus vol. 1, Christian Moral Principles (Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1983), vol. 2, Living a Christian Life (Franciscan Press, Quincy, Illinois, 1993).  See also Finnis, Moral Absolutes (Catholic University of America Press,  Washington DC, 1991), 40-47.

[24] See Fred Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, 87-139; P.N. Zammit OP, ‘The Concept of Rights according to Aristotle and St Thomas’, Angelicum 16 (1939) 245-266; H. Hering, ‘De Iure Subiective Sumpto apud S. Thomam’, Angelicum 16 (1939) 295-7; Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980) [NLNR] 206-210, 228.

[25] EV 18.3.

[26]  See EV 5.3, 5.4, 20.1, 58.2, 71.2, 72.2, etc.

[27] On the priority of protection of fundamental human rights, see EV 71.3; VS 97.2.  EV 2.2 makes fundamental the recognition of the fundamental right to life.  On punishment’s primary function as the restoration of an order of justice, see EV 56.1; FoE, 128-33.

[28] Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae 7.3, cited and incompletely summarised or paraphrased in EV 71.3.

[29] See e.g. ST I-II q. 96 a. 3c; q. 99 a. 5 ad 1; In Eth. V.3 n. 13 [925]; Finnis, Aquinas (forthcoming), ch. 5.

[30]  EV 71.3

[31]  See EV 71.1 & 71.3 treating ‘civil law’ (lex civilis) as synonymous with ‘positive law’ (lex condita).  Of course, besides human positive law there is ‘the positive or revealed law of God’ (VS 45 .2), which includes the whole of the natural law (VS 79.2, citing ST I-II q. 100 a. 1 ‘ the citation seems inapt and should be replaced or at least supplemented by q. 100 aa. 3 & 11) but also can go beyond it.  In this paper, I shall restrict my discussion of positive law to human or civil law.  But it is important to remember that in the New Covenant the function of divine positive law on moral matters (as distinct from matters touching the constitution of the Church and the sacraments) is essentially that of reaffirmation (cf. e.g. EV 57.4)  and of making the natural law, which is in principle accessible to reason, accessible to all ‘with firm certitude and without admixture of error’ (see VS 36.3 citing Pius XII Humani Generis AAS 42 (195) at 561-2 and thus Vatican I DS 3005 and thus, implicitly, Aquinas, ST I q. a. 1c).

[32] For a detailed account of the novelty and development of Aquinas’ thought on legal positivity, see Finnis, ‘The Truth in Legal Positivism’ in Robert George (ed.), The Autonomy of Law (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996), 195-214.

[33]  ST I-II q. 95 a. 2c.

[34]  See NLNR, 284-6, 294-5, 380; Finnis, ‘Natural Law and Legal Reasoning’ in Robert George (ed.), Natural Law Theory (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992), 134-57.  The power of Aquinas’ ideas can, I believe, be seen in some recent writing by the Oxford legal philosopher most assiduous in defending a ‘positivist’ theory of law:

   ‘Legal reasoning is an instance of moral reasoning.  Legal doctrines are justified only if they are morally justified, and they should be followed only if it is morally right to follow them. ‘ When morality runs out, however,’ the courts’have to rely on artificial reasons.  In those cases legal doctrine takes on a life of its own.  There it is quite properly independent of’rather than haing to reflect’moral considerations.  Within these bounds legal reasoning is autonomous.  How extensive this autonomy is depends on the extent to which morality runs out and leaves the courts faced with incommensurable options’

Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994), 340.

[35]  On praecepta affirmativa and negativa see e.g. VS 52; EV 75; Moral Absolutes, 27-30, 91.

[36]  See e.g. EV 62.4 (‘written in every human heart, [and] knowable by reason itself’); 77.2 (‘can be recognized by everyone through the light of reason’); VS 74.4 (‘the moral order, as established by the natural law, is in principle accessible to human reason’).  De facto, of course, there can be ‘a tragic obscuring of the collective conscience’ (EV 70.5).

[37]  See Finnis, "Liberalism and Natural Law Theory" , Mercer Law Review 45 (1994) 687 at 701-4; ‘Is Natural Law Theory Compatible with Limited Government’’ in Robert George (ed.), Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996) 1 at 10-18, against the theses, based on conceptions of ‘public reason’, of  John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1993) and Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990).  Theses such as these are doubtless among those sketched in EV 68.3 and/or 69.1.

[38] EV 72.2(3): ‘completely lacking in authentic juridical validity’; ‘a civil law authorizing abortion or euthanasia ceases by that very fact to be a true, morally binding civil law’.  It is ‘not valid as a law’: EV 90.3.  Also EV 72.1 citing Aquinas, ST I-II q. 93 a. 3 ad 2; q. 95 a. 2.

[39]  EV 73.1 & 73.2.

[40]  NLNR, 351-68.

[41]  EV 72.2.

[42]  EV 73.1 has already stated that ‘there is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws’, and although this is a less demanding proposition it still raises the question how obedience and disobedience are possible in the case of permissive laws.

[43]  It is also, no doubt, a form of illicit cooperation, in many cases formal, with the injustice itself: cf EV 74.2

[44]  EV 72.2(3).

[45]  With abortion ‘we are dealing with murder’: EV 58.3; likewise, in varying ways, with euthanasia: EV 65.5, 66.3, 72.2.

[46]  On the truly tyrannical character of state government and law, howsoever democratic in form and procedure, which subject the weak to the strong and influential, see EV 20.2, 70.3; see also EV 96.2.

[47]  ST I-II q. 92 a. 1c & ad 2.

[48]  EV 14.2 & 14.3.