Abysmal jurisprudence: On the genesis of John Finnis’s practical guide to statesmen
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".