Reason, Morality, and Law

John Keown DCL holds the Rose Kennedy Chair in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, one of the world's premier centres of research into ethics. Having graduated in law from Cambridge he took a doctorate at Oxford and was then called to the Bar of England and Wales. Before being elected to the Rose Kennedy Chair he taught the law and ethics of medicine in the Faculty of Law at Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Queens' College and of Churchill College. Professor Keown has written widely in the field of the law and ethics of medicine. His research has been cited by distinguished bodies worldwide, including the United States Supreme Court, the Law Lords, the Court of Appeal, the House of Commons, the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics, and the Australian Senate, one of several bodies before which he has been invited to testify. He has served as a member of the ethics committee of the British Medical Association.Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. He holds a D.Phil from Oxford, where he studied under John Finnis and Joseph Raz. He is the author of numerous books, including Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, and In Defence of Natural Law.

Reason, Morality and Law reminds us of how far-ranging Finnis's intellectual endeavours have been, not just in legal, moral, political, literary, and theological disputes, but also in the less abstract contributions of work at the Bar and political advice to Parliament. There is great value to reading Finnis's views on the many subjects covered in this book, certainly for those whose sympathies on these issues are similar to Finnis's, but perhaps even more so for those of us who may be inclined to disagree sharply.

• REASONS, GOODS, AND PRINCIPLES ; INTENTIONS IN ACTION ; JUSTICE, RIGHTS, AND WRONGDOING ; PHILOSOPHY OF LAW ; PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND PUBLIC REASONS ; REFLECTIONS AND RESPONSES