Bøger af Donald Boland

The social encyclicals of the Catholic Church provide an opportunity to treat human behavior from a practical moral philosophical point of view grounded in Aristotle as interpreted by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Because any attempt to remedy the social disorder by the efforts of reason alone will not only fail but will also result in a worse condition even for the oppressed, the author acknowledges that Christ and his Church have the true and only answer. The social encyclicals are intended, after all, to shift our focus from the philosophical (natural) to the theological (supernatural) level of human life and association, restoring the relationship between the two orders of Faith and Reason. This book was written to explain the philosophical foundation of that relationship, which modernity has threatened, in the hope that it will help heal the widening breach.

This is a book on what is perhaps the most burning and urgent of social issues of our times, namely, the relationship between the science of Economics and Ethics. It demonstrates that the modern view has reversed the true relationship and that it is a mistake of enormous practical significance, not unrelated to the vicissitudes that the modern economy has experienced in the past and, now worldwide, is undergoing at the present time. To regain the proper perspective on the relationship, we need to recover the practical wisdom of two of the geniuses of Ethics in the history of that study: Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.