Carlos Santiago Nino

Carlos Santiago Nino (1943–1993) was an Argentine moral, legal and political philosopher.

Nino studied law at the University of Buenos Aires and at Oxford, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977 with a thesis directed by John Finnis and Tony Honoré.

Nino began his academic activity in the early 1970s, concentrating on some traditional issues in jurisprudence, such as the concept of a legal system, the interpretation of the law, the debate between legal positivism and natural law, and the concept of validity. After realizing the need to clarify the normative problems involved in some of those issues, he was led to embrace a model based on the explicit adoption of principles of justice and social morality, rejecting the predominant German-inspired "dogmatic" approach. This signaled the beginning of his philosophical investigations, which were always oriented to practical issues, and marked by a distinctively analytical approach. His need to provide a liberal justification for criminal law practice thus lead him to moral philosophy, and to the development of an original "consensual" theory of punishment which combined the merits of the retributive and utilitarian (see deterrence) varieties while avoiding their respective difficulties. Similarly, the problems presented by the characterization of criminal conduct stimulated his work in the field of philosophy of action.

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