Edward Barrett - Böcker

Fundamentally, Persons and Liberal Democracy is an explication and defense of classical liberalism. It explains the relatively recent shift in the Church's political theory and, in the process, defends what could be deemed a non-statist form of welfare liberalism. After an introduction, the first chapter contextualizes modern Catholic social thought, explaining how the shift to a nuanced endorsement of liberal economic and political thought was initiated by the pragmatic economic and cultural analyses of nineteenth-century social and liberal Catholics. The next two chapters investigate one fruit of the subsequent re-examination of the relationship of Catholicism to modernity: John Paul's qualified acceptance of liberalism for non-circumstantial, ethical reasons appropriated from within the tradition. While the second chapter details the phenomenological, Thomistic, and theological bases of his ethical premises, the third chapter examines the relationship of these premises to the various aspects of his political theory, particularly his theories of human rights and the complementary roles of the state and civil society in securing these rights. Chapters four and five initiate a dialogue between this analysis of John Paul's social thought and influential political theorists. In the fourth chapter, the dialogue is between John Paul and four Catholic interlocutors: theoconservatives, liberation theologians, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and British distributists. The fifth chapter brings John Paul and Catholic social thought into conversation with communitarian critics of liberalism and evaluates the relationship of recent thought on civil society and federalism to the principle of subsidiarity. Finally, the conclusion highlights his most significant accomplishments and suggests areas for further development.

Justice at the Margins of War fills two important gaps in the literature on the ethics of national security affairs. First, while thinking about the justice of warfare is highly developed, justifications of intelligence activities—which can involve lying, manipulation, coercion, stealing and even killing to obtain and defend information—are relatively limited and often conflicting. The authors explore relevant ethical principles and then apply them to specific activities—including agent recruitment, human and technical methods of espionage and counterintelligence, interrogational torture, analysis, covert action, sabotage, and assassination.Second, ethical work on interstate conflict occurring in a “gray zone” between war and peace has only just begun. Gray zone operations—the use of low-level lethal and sublethal means to weaken others—are not new. But technological developments have increased the forms, intensity, and significance of this realm of competition. This volume defines the gray zone and discusses moral challenges associated with various operations—including lethal, economic, information, election, legal, and cyber.