Is There A Source for the Basic Goods?

Those familiar with the "new natural law" articulated by John Finnis are familiar with Finnis's notion of "basic goods". For Finnis there are seven basic goods: life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability of friendship, practical reasonableness and religion. From these basic goods other moral (and legal) principles can be derived, and these principles, together with the basic goods themselves, are the natural law. "Natural" in the sense that they are constitutive of embodied human social life, and natural in the sense they are the nature of things; they are not necessarily revealed by God. Indeed these goods would be basic even if--etiamsi daremus--there was no God.

Notwithstanding the success of Finnis's project in retrieving natural law from the antiquarian dustbin, some doubters remain. And not the simple doubters that there can be such a thing as natural law even in a secularized form, but inside-natural-law doubters like Jonathan Crowe. For an excellent (and short) review of Crowe's 2019 book, "Natural Law and the Nature of Law" go here. Reviewer Joshua Neoh is on the faculty of law at Australian National University. Neoh has weighed in on the Christian religious influences on the historical development of the Western legal tradition in his own book, "Law, Love and Freedom: From the Sacred to the Secular" (2019) (YouTube promo here).

In any event, the burden of Neoh's review develops Crowe's rejection of Finnis's claim for the timeless, self-evidential nature of the basic goods: that "they exist in the world; just as prime numbers exist in the world. They could be grasped, not by empirical validation, but by ethical introspection." But Crowe, whom Neoh is reviewing, asserts that Finnis is hiding the ball, that in reality Finnis must think that natural law comes directly from God. And Crowe, who believes this is the case, is willing to come out and say so.

More central in Neoh's review, however, is how Crowe believes the natural law comes to be. If God created the world and human beings, did he also create natural law once for all? Or "is possible that ‘God intend[ed] natural law to be progressively shaped and discovered by humans through social and historical processes'?" In other words, is the natural law part of humanity's creation commission? Crowe and Neoh (and I, for what it's worth) believe the latter:

God and humans are co-creators of natural law. God needs human cooperation, inasmuch as humans need divine providence, for the unfolding of natural law in the world. Humans do not receive the full revelation of natural law all at once. ... Even now, the full content of natural law has not been revealed. It will only be brought to its fullness – full-filled – at the end of time. Its final fulfilment is eschatological: ‘its fulfilment is not to be found at some past point in history, but rather in the promise of a future yet to come. ... As natural law is meant to guide human action in a time-bound world, it makes more sense to think of natural law as time-bound, not timeless.

In his review Neoh goes on to supplement Crowe's developmental account of natural law with the insights of Alasdair MacIntyre into the nature of practices. You will need to read the review to see how he does it. For now, however, I will end by commending Neoh's review to the attention of my readers.