Abysmal jurisprudence

• Department of Law

The Constitutional Law and Politics Working Group hosts Professor Coel Kirkby (Sydney Law School) for a presentation of his article 'Abysmal Jurisprudence', which is part of a larger project on the intellectual history of modern jurisprudence in the context of the Cold War and decolonisation.

Abstract:

John Finnis’s central role in Brexit was only the latest intervention in a long life of practical action that recommends a closer examination of the genesis of his distinctive philosophy. He always insisted that it was intended ‘primarily to assist the practical reflections of those concerned to act, whether as judges or as statesmen or as citizens.’ In this article, I argue that Finnis crafted his philosophy as a practical guide for conservative actors in the disenchanted Cold War world of the 1960–70s. My first aim is to excavate the theoretical foundations of his Thomist theory of natural law. While his turn to practical rather than speculative reason is well known, few if any appreciate how Finnis radically refounded Thomist natural law on an implicit theory of history. By accepting that the world was historically contingent and changing, he needed to show how we could know the timeless truth of practical reasonableness and the basic goods. In the final chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights, Finnis introduced an ‘abysmal’ philosophy of history that explained how a spoudaios (wise man) could reason his way out of the historical contingency of the human world to access the timeless moral truths that transcended it. My second aim is to show how Finnis used his Thomist theory of natural law as a practical guide for action in our contingent world. He followed Eric Voegelin in describing humanity as two ‘hostile camps’ – the ‘transcendental’ Christians and their secular allies versus the ‘immanentist’ liberals, communists, and fascists all committed to ‘consequentialist’ ideologies. In this eternal battle of good versus evil, Finnis saw his philosophy as a practical guide for this ‘creative minority’ of transcendentalists for collective action against the heretical faith of immanentist movements aiming to perfect mankind and build heavens on earth. 

The article is available on SSRN.

Speaker bio:

Professor Coel Kirkby is Senior Lecturer at Sydney Law School and Director of the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence. He was elected the Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge for 2017-8. Before that he was a McKenzie Fellow at Melbourne Law School, an Endeavour Fellow at University of New South Wales and a researcher at the Dullah Omar Institute. He has also worked on contemporary constitutional reform projects from Fiji and Tuvalu to Victoria and South Africa.