Under the heading ‘Vitoria, Founder of International Law’ Blackfriars of October 1946 devoted a whole issue to the Spanish Dominican who had died 400 years earlier. The timing could not have been more appropriate: what one might call the ‘legal audit’ of the Second World War was in full swing. Uppermost in the minds of the contributors were the Nuremberg Trials (verdicts delivered that month). Article 6 of the Tribunal Charter defined crimes against ‘humanity’ (the contemporary, secularized version of natural law) in terms that would have been recognizable to Vitoria, and indeed—via 400 years of development—owed much to his original concept of the law of nations. Then there were the atomic bombs used the previous year. The end of the world war had left a legacy of guilt about the practice of destroying whole cities by strategic bombing, culminating at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This put the principle of non-combatant immunity—fully integrated with just war theory for the first time by Vitoria—at the centre of the arguments for and against the new weapons. Further, the revival of international law in the first half of the twentieth century had issued the previous October in the United Nations Charter and would lead in 1948 (just 50 years ago last month) to the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention; and three years later, in 1949, there was to be the first of the Geneva Conventions on the limitation of warfare.

The most impressive attempt of which I am aware which argues that minimally decent treatment, human rights, for all human beings is a necessary requirement of reason is the one put forth by John Finnis in Natural Law and Natural Rights.’ The object of Finnis’s project is to show that the liberal morality of human rights can be derived from the requirements of reason (per se nota truths), without having to invoke any special Divine revelation or metaphysics (although Finnis is careful to note that his theory is not incompatible with these). Finnis contends that every moral obligation, every ought and its cognates, is derivable from practical reason, and then, by extension that law should reflect this morality which is required by reason. It is in this sense that Finnis’s theory is one of natural law, as opposed to positive law. What is especially noteworthy about Finnis’s project is that he alleges that the minimal requirements of morality can in toto be got out of what he calls the principles of practical reasonableness. Practical reasonableness, for Finnis, amounts to the human capacity for exercising freedom and reason, the characteristics of human personality which enable one to grasp the requirements of practical reasonableness, which are requisites for one to express, shape and select one’s participation in what Finnis calls the “basic goods” or “basic values”. If one behaves in accordance with the principles of practical reasonableness and promotes the basic goods, i.e., if one acts in a manner which is self-evidently reasonable, human rights (what Finnis prefers to call “natural rights”), the minimally decent treatment of all persons, will result. But in order to see whether Finnis’s project succeeds, we will have to examine closely his assumptions and the philosophical moves he makes.

It has often been remarked that in the 1920s and 1930s some British Catholics sympathized with Fascism; but the collocation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascism’ is alarming, the more so when it is realized that the Catholics in question were the writers, the intellectuals: civilized, educated, sophisticated and otherwise likable and mostly well- intentioned people, who expressed varying measures of attraction to what we now know to be the politics of megalomania, elitism, frustration, prejudice, deceit and brutality. How could cultured Catholics be even partially attracted to Fascism: what did they see to admire in it, and what were the conditions which permitted and provoked them to find good in it?

The present subject of ‘Catholic pro-Fascism’ is a minefield, with some of the mines laid by rightist Catholics, who, believing it to be damaging to the Catholic Church, do not wish the subject to be discussed by other than apologeticists. One such mine is to say that the word ‘Fascist’ cannot be used, either because it is a mere term of abuse, or because its meaning is so variable as to be worthless, or because it is generally confused with Nazism; so to speak the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascist’ in the same breath is to risk unjustifiably tainting the memory of good people. But the memory of such people can be clarified only by considering exactly what they were saying, and why.