Intention and Identity Collected Essays Volume II

The essays inIntention and Identityexplore themes in Finnis's work touched on only lightly, if at all, inNatural Law and Natural Rights, developing profound accounts of personal identity and existence; group identity and common good; and intention and choice as action- and self-shaping. In his many-faceted study of what it is to be a human person, and a human community, Finnis not only engages with contemporary philosophers and bioethicists such as Peter Singer, Michael Lockwood and John Harris, with thinkers from other traditions such as Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II), and with judges in the highest courts. He also offers illuminating and deeply considered readings of Shakespeare and Aquinas, and debates with Roger Scruton, Joseph Raz, Hans Kelsen, John Rawls, Glanville Williams, Richard Posner, Ronald Dworkin and others. The role of intention in the criminal law and the law of civil wrongs is searchingly explored through case-law, as are judicial attempts to understand conditional and preparatory intentions. Moral or bioethical issues discussed include in vitro fertilization, cloning, abortion, euthanasia, and 'brain death', patriotism, multi-culturalism and immigration. The papers show the power of a sometimes neglected aspect of the new classical theory of natural law. The volume includes previously unpublished papers on whether brain life is relevant to the beginning of a person's life, on its relevance to the end of one's life, and a substantial introduction in which John Finnis reflects on the changes in his thinking on personal reality and on how intention is to be analysed and understood and its moral significance appreciated.

John Finnis is Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of University College. He is the Biolchini Family Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame.

Introduction
Nature, Freedom, and Value in Personal Identity
1. The Priority of Persons
2. The Worth of Persons
3. Personal Identity in Aquinas and Shakespeare
Group Identity and Group Acts
4. Persons, Public Acts, and Personification
5. Persons and Their Associations
6. This Common Good and That
7. Law, Universality, and Personal and Social Identity
8. Truth, Universality, and Nations
Acts and Intentions
9. Human Acts
10. Intentions and Objects
11. Intentions and Side-effects
12. Intention in Tort
13. Conditional and Preparatory Intentions
14. Intention in Direct Discrimination
Persons Beginning and Dying
15. Organic Unity, Brain Life, and the Human Person's Beginning
16. When Most People Begin
17. On Producing Human Embryos
18. The Unborn Baby's "Status"
19. Brain Death and Peter Singer
20. Intentionally Killing the Brain Dead