1. Introduction A great deal of morality is concerned with the public arena: examining what is required for a just and fair society, and trying to map out the nature and extent of our obligations to our fellow citizens and to the wider world. The concepts of conscience, guilt and shame, by contrast, seem primarily […]

A consistent message and direction often expressed in the actions and teaching of Pope Benedict XVI is the need for an ongoing dialogue between religious faith and the secular mind, based on the role of reason. Indeed, this was central to the appeal he made during the Visit to the UK in September 2010. And […]

Two events tend to occur more or less regularly throughout history: wars and epidemics. Sometimes they occur separately and sometimes together. Both have caused and indeed continue to cause, devastating damage in terms of loss of life, physical and psychological suffering, famine, mass emigration and overall impoverishment of the affected populations. Although numbers do not […]

Prof. William Wagner is professor of law and director of the Program of Studies in Jurisprudence at the Columbus School of Law, The Catholic University of America, where he is also Faculty Editor of the Journal of Law, Philosophy and Culture. He has a J.D. from Yale University Law School, and a Ph.D. in Moral […]

That there is a relationship between morality and aesthetics is an idea which, at various times, writers and artists have been keen for one reason or another to assert. On the face of it there would seem to be a pleasing relationship between the two if we could say that the person most capable of […]

I think we shall all agree that in recent years we have been through a number of crises. There has been, first of all, the financial crisis when we discovered that the people we trusted with our money were not, after all, to be trusted, and that those who were going to make us and […]

Any discussion of ‘new aspects of sovereignty’ makes it appropriate to start speaking of what the ‘old aspects of sovereignty’ imply and of what sovereignty traditionally means. We are dealing with a word derived from Latin, superus, which means what is above or higher; and ‘sovereignty’ thus points to ‘the top authority’. Before the rise of […]

Parents and religious leaders who want to express an opinion in favour of what is often called the ‘traditional’ family – a man, a woman and their children – tend to support their position either on religious grounds, or on the basis of empirical evidence, and there is indeed a wealth of evidence to support […]