Self-Interest, Love, and Economic Justice: A Dialogue Between Classical Economic Liberalism and Catholic Social Teaching

This essay seeks to start a dialogue between two traditions that historically have interpreted the economy in opposing ways: the individualism of classic economic liberalism (CEL), represented by Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, and the communitarianism of Catholic social teaching (CST), interpreted primarily through the teachings of popes and secondarily the U.S. Catholic bishops. The present authors, an economist and a moral theologian who identify with one or the other of the two traditions, strive to clarify objectively their similarities and differences with the opposing perspective. Section one focuses on each position\u27s perspective of love of self and love of others. We find both CEL and CST saying that self-love, rightly understood, constitutes a moral good and that the love of others serves as an important principle in the political economy. We find less agreement in section two regarding justice and rights, but even here, we discover a few surprises. Both traditions uphold justice (giving to each party what is due) as essential to the political economy, and recognize some similarity in that type of justice called commutative. We note, however, substantial differences regarding a second type of justice that we call public justice. First, they differ over the extent to which government should be involved. Here the meaning of rights, especially that of individual freedom, arises. Secondly, the traditions diverge over whether benevolence as a motivator ought to serve as a partner for public justice. Thirdly, CEL in general opposes CST\u27s emphasis on social justice that calls upon institutions to be proactive in helping citizens and groups to become active participants in the economy. We conclude our essay by summarizing our discoveries and by suggesting areas for further dialogue

Recent Decisions

Recent Decisions Act of State Doctrine--Act of State Doctrine precludes Judicial Inquiry into the Motivation underlying the Acts of a Foreign State in a Private Antitrust Suit Ronald P. Cima Preemption--State Statute Prohibiting Nonresidents or Aliens from Fishing in its Waters is Preempted by Federal Law Douglas Berry Warsaw Convention--Provision for Limiting Liability--Recoveries in Personal Injury Actions against Air Carrier Employees, as Well as Against the Air Carrier itself, are to be Limited by the Warsaw Convention Jon L. Goodma

The Backward Shift on the Space of Chauchy Transforms

This note examines the subspaces of the space of Cauchy transforms of measures on the unit circle that are invariant under the backward shift operator f --\u3e z-1 (f—f (0)). We examine this question when the space of Cauchy transforms is endowed with both the norm and weak* topologies

[Introduction to] The Cauchy Transform

The Cauchy transform of a measure on the circle is a subject of both classical and current interest with a sizable literature. This book is a thorough, well-documented, and readable survey of this literature and includes full proofs of the main results of the subject. This book also covers more recent perturbation theory as covered by Clark, Poltoratski, and Aleksandrov and contains an in-depth treatment of Clark measures.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1094/thumbnail.jp

On zero sets in the Dirichlet space

We study the zeros sets of functions in the Dirichlet space. Using Carleson formula for Dirichlet integral, we obtain some new families of zero sets. We also show that any closed subset of E \subset \TT with logarithmic capacity zero is the accumulation points of the zeros of a function in the Dirichlet space. The zeros satisfy a growth restriction which depends on $E$.Comment: Journal of Geometric Analysis (2011