Da lei natural como fundamento supramoral da ação humana em John Finnis: considerações sobre metodologia, teoria normativa e aspectos fundacionais.

Abstract

In the John Finnis’s thomistic conception of natural law, the foundations of human action are explained by the first principles of natural law. In fact, these first principles are primary directives to the basic human goods - foundational goods of the reason of every human being. Therefore, the natural law as exposed by Finnis was set as a comprehensive conception of good. For the author, in addition, the basic human goods of natural law are pre or "supra moral" and constitute the matrix rules under which all moral judgments are grounded on. So, moral values in its totality as well the justification of all social institutions, political and legal, are founded upon those first principles of natural law. While foundational and intelligible, these principles provide intelligibility points that give meaning to human action (something that feelings alone could not do), thus constituting a foundational conception of practical reason. Our proposal here is to investigate those first principles to establish an approach on the philosophical methodology, normative theory and ethics foundational concept that they implicate. Our basic intention is to present the Finnis’s natural law account as a consistent and plausible alternative in the actual debate of moral philosophy. We believe Finnis’s normative-descriptive methodology (that is, the normative being a point of departure but, at same time, not suppressing the descriptive aspect of the action, allowing the link with descriptive sciences such as anthropology and sociology) of free action, explanation of the morality by pre or supra moral principles and notion of intelligibility of the action (that is, of the point natural law as a law of the intelligence gives to the action) are points that speaks considerably in favor of the ethical potential of his theory.