现代世界对多元价值的尊重，业已成为道德生活不言自明的前提。道德困境的产生源于人们对基础道德原则的理解不同。自然法理论是认识道德原则、解决道德困境的重要凭借之一。重拾这一理论传统，为道德判断寻求概念工具，不无裨益。
自然法理论代表着一个庞大的思想传统，其中包含种种相互竞争的思想流派。本书作者简•波特继《自然法与神圣法：重回基督教伦理学传统》之后，再次调用中世纪经院哲学的理论资源，着力提供完整的托马斯主义自然法理论图景。
作者在本书中重新考察了经院哲学的自然观、幸福论、德性论、恩典论，并与当今英语学界颇具代表性的伦理学家积极对话，从而证明，托马斯主义自然法理论在现代个体与公共生活当中依然意义非凡。

First published in 1980, Natural Law and Natural Rights is widely heralded as a seminal contribution to the philosophy of law, and an authoritative restatement of natural law doctrine. It has offered generations of students and other readers a thorough grounding in the central issues of legal, moral, and political philosophy from Finnis's distinctive perspective. This new edition includes a substantial postscript by the author, in which he responds to thirty years of discussion, criticism and further work in the field to develop and refine the original theory. The book closely integrates the philosophy of law with ethics, social theory and political philosophy. The author develops a sustained and substantive argument; it is not a review of other people's arguments but makes frequent illustrative and critical reference to classical, modern, and contemporary writers in ethics, social and political theory, and jurisprudence. The preliminary First Part reviews a century of analytical jurisprudence to illustrate the dependence of every descriptive social science upon evaluations by the theorist. A fully critical basis for such evaluations is a theory of natural law. Standard contemporary objections to natural law theory are reviewed and shown to rest on serious misunderstandings. The Second Part develops in ten carefully structured chapters an account of: basic human goods and basic requirements of practical reasonableness, community and 'the common good'; justice; the logical structure of rights-talk; the bases of human rights, their specification and their limits; authority, and the formation of authoritative rules by non-authoritative persons and procedures; law, the Rule of Law, and the derivation of laws from the principles of practical reasonableness; the complex relation between legal and moral obligation; and the practical and theoretical problems created by unjust laws. A final Part develops a vigorous argument about the relation between 'natural law', 'natural theology' and 'revelation' - between moral concern and other ultimate questions.

“自然法”的观念，在西方已有两千年的历史了。在这漫长的过程中，这个观念历经演变，时隐时彰，但始终是西方思想的一支主流，对政治、法律、哲学、宗教、伦理各个领域，有历久弥新的影响。本书是英语世界中讨论“自然法”的经典著作。凡对西方思想之本源及政治理论、法律理论有兴趣的人，都不可错过此书。