A prominent political historian has recently identified unwarranted optimism and unwarranted pessimism as democracy's “dual dangers.” While this historical analysis highlights the difficulties that accompany democratic hope, our prevailing conceptual vocabulary obscures the resources needed to address them. This essay attempts to recover these resources by excavating insights from Thomas Aquinas, who supplies one of the most systematic accounts of hope in the history of religious and political thought. By appropriating the conceptual structure of Thomas's theological virtue of hope, this (...) essay reconstructs a democratic virtue that perfects acts of hoping in fellow citizens to achieve democratic goods and thereby enables citizens to respond properly to difficulties that tempt presumption and despair. (shrink)

Shared Decision-Making is a widely accepted model of the physician–patient relationship providing an ethical environment in which physician beneficence and patient autonomy are respected. It acknowledges the moral responsibility of physician and patient by promoting a deliberative collaboration in which their individual expertise—complementary in nature, equal in importance—is emphasized, and personal values and preferences respected. Its goal coincides with Pellegrino and Thomasma’s proximate end of medicine, that is, a technically correct and morally good healing decision for and with a particular (...) patient. We argue that by perfecting the intellectual ability to apprehend the complexity of clinical situations, and through a perfection of the application of the first principles of practical reason, prudence is able to point toward the right and good shared medical decision. A prudent shared medical decision is therefore always in keeping with the kind of person the physician and the patient have chosen to be. (shrink)

Cultural diversity is an inescapable reality and a concern in many businesses where it can often raise ethical questions and dilemmas. This paper aims to offer suggestions to certain problems facing managers in dealing with cultural diversity through the inspiration of Thomas Aquinas. Although he may be perceived as a voice from the distant past, we can still find in his writings helpful and original ideas and criteria. He welcomes cultural differences as a part of the perfection of the universe. (...) His systemic approach leads one to place the problem in its proper context, and to reflect on it from the perspective of virtue ethics, with a central role for practical wisdom and giving primacy to neighborly love and natural moral law. Rather than a set of rigid standards with no consideration of diversity Aquinas focuses on the common human ground, which allows for the indispensable dialogue between different positions. When dealing with practical questions, the problem is one of finding the right balance between general principle and cultural specifics, tolerance, and dialogue, always guided by practical wisdom. In this way, Aquinas’ approach is neither rigid ethical universalism with no consideration for diversity nor moral relativism with no place for any transcultural and absolute morals. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to give an account of hope as it was understood by Józef Tischner a public intellectual and a prominent chaplain of the Polish Solidarity movement, which led to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The idea of hope was one of the basic ideas of the Solidarity movement, around which the daily experiences of its members were organized. The author thus offers insight into the intellectual history of the Eastern European dissidence (...) movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Referring to Tischner’s biography she describes some of the ways in which Western ideas crossed the Iron Courtain. Using the example of Tischner’s dialogue with, and critique of, Thomism, she explains how dissidents’ interest in phenomenology interacted with the heritage of European thought. The author shows that despite Tischner’s distancing himself from Aquinas’ thought, he remained under Aquinas’ influence, and his own ideas were not as different and incompatible with Thomism as is often believed. Given the rising interest in the question of the relation between hope and democracy today, the question of the meaning of hope is pending. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article assesses whether the contemporary consensus of just war thinking to allow only for defence as just cause for war between states should also be applied to the practice of target...