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«Natural Law and Natural Rights» and the Negation of the Objective Priority of Speculative Truth

This essay explores the nature and implications of John Finnis’s express negation in his work Natural Law and Natural Rights of the objective primacy of speculative truth with respect to the derivation of practical reason and agency. The essay observes two senses of the speculative/ practical distinction. One sense concerns whether the object known is a contingent matter ordered to an end or whether it concerns a universal, necessary, or eternal truth. The other sense concerns the mode of the knowledge itself: whether its end is simply knowledge, or whether the end is the good of an operation. Because prior to desire and intention all knowledge is speculative in its mode, and this knowledge is absolutely necessary for knowledge that is practical in its mode; and because knowledge that is practical in its mode is absolutely prior to knowledge that is practical merely in that it concerns a practical object – because without knowledge practical in its mode there will never be such knowledge that is practical in its object – it follows that practical reasoning is derivative of knowledge that is speculative in its mode. Implications of Finnis’s error – about teleology, common good, and God – are considered.