According to the Just War tradition a war can only be just if two sets of principles are satisfied. First there is the jus ad bellum. These principles tell us when it is just to start a war. There has to be a good reason or a just cause in order for a war to be morally permissible (self-defense, defense of others, putting a stop to human rights violations). The decision to go to war has to be t...

An obvious, if somewhat perverse, attraction of criminal law for those who study it is that it involves the regulation of some of the darkest and most disturbing aspects of human behavior. If one is interested in observing the most wrongful, harmful, and anti-social kinds of conduct in which people are capable of engaging, the criminal law offers as promising a place as any to start. Moral phil...

In his 1795 essay ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ the East-Prussian university metaphysician Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) named ‘Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel’ as the ‘miserable comforters’ of the law of nations. This was a bon mot that became celebrated retrospectively, with the late-twentieth-century reception of Kant’s cosmopolitanism in political philosophy and international relations theory. In fo...

This essay briefly contextualizes Martin Rhonheimer’s work in Thomistic action theory in light of the contemporary renewal of Thomistic ethics, while further noting some of interpreters who influenced the development of his thought. The primary goal, however, is to offer an exposition of his approach to the object and evaluation of human acts, and note how its key aspects draw upon Aquinas’s te...

In this paper, I propose a new response to a particular instance of the problem of evil: the problem of animal suffering. My solution, in brief, is that the rational theist may argue, justifiably, that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God would not allow gratuitous animal suffering to occur, and, therefore, all instances of animal suffering that are encountered are not instanc...

John Hick, lecturer in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, has written one of the most serious and important studies of the problem of evil to appear in English for a long time. I t is a work both of historical interpretation and of systematic construction. While it is, under both aspects, not wholly invulnerable (what effort at reconciling evil and God ever is?), it is argued w...

This paper undertakes a disability studies reading of blindness in selected early Grimms Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM). I argue for the use religious model as methodology this and develop new known moral model: demonstrate, locates individual. In contrast, — which is often conflated with should be symbiotic methodological approach that fabric tales rather than My analysis shows equals damnation...

Mahatma Gandhi was a freedom fighter as well social reformer. He man of action and intuition. held no political office. Yet he could arouse the consciousness an entire subcontinent! A lean, frail, ‘half-naked fakir’—armed with wooden staff dignity human being, fought against greatest empire world has ever known. It just moral grandeur his soul which enabled him to fight brute power, in any form...