ABSTRACT
With respect to natural law theory in analytical jurisprudence, John Finnis set himself three tasks in Natural Law and Natural Rights. The first was to deny that a number of absurd theses that have been associated with the natural law doctrine are in fact asserted by that view; the second was to provide a more adequate formulation of the central natural law jurisprudential thesis; and the third was to offer an account of the sort of argument that is needed to establish the truth of central natural law thesis. One way to understand the basic natural law thesis is what the author calls is the strong reading of the natural law thesis. It is obvious that the strong reading of the natural law thesis is incompatible with legal positivism. There are three interesting and initially plausible lines of argument toward the central natural law thesis: Finnis's "internal point of view" argument, Michael Moore's functional-kind argument, and Raz's self-image-of-law argument.
