Jean Porter
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Justice As A Virtue
$43.99Add to cart“Aquinas,” says Jean Porter, “gets justice right.” In this book she shows that Aquinas offers us a cogent and illuminating account of justice as a personal virtue rather than a virtue of social institutions, as John Rawls and his interlocutors have described it – and as most people think of it today.
Porter presents a thoughtful interpretation of Aquinas’s account of the complex virtue of justice as set forth in the Summa theologiae, focusing on his key claim that justice is a perfection of the will. Building on her interpretation of Aquinas on justice, Porter also develops a constructive expansion of his work, illuminating major aspects of Aquinas’s views and resolving tensions in his thought so as to draw out contemporary implications of his account of justice that he could not have anticipated.
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Ministers Of The Law
$34.99Add to cartIn Ministers of the Law Jean Porter articulates a theory of legal authority derived from the natural law tradition. As she points out, the legal authority of most traditions rests on their own internal structures, independent of extralegal considerations – legal houses built on sand, as it were. Natural law tradition, on the other hand, offers a basis for legal authority that goes beyond mere arbitrary commands or social conventions, offering some extralegal authority without compromising the independence and integrity of the law.
Yet Porter does more in this volume than simply discuss historical and theoretical realms of natural law. She carries the theory into application to contemporary legal issues, bringing objective normative structures to contemporary Western societies suspicious of such concepts.
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Natural And Divine Law
$31.50Add to cartThough the concept of natural law took center stage during the Middle Ages, the theological aspects of this august intellectual tradition have been largely forgotten by the modern church. In this book ethicist Jean Porter shows the continuing significance of the natural law tradition for Christian ethics. Based on a careful analysis of natural law as it emerged in the medieval period, Porter’s work explores several important scholastic theologians and canonists whose writings are not only worthy of study in their own right but also make important contributions to moral reflection today.
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Moral Action And Christian Ethics
$51.00Add to cartHow do we decide whether an action is right or wrong? Recently, moral philosophers have moved away from the claim that we can find one definite solution to every moral problem by means of clearly established moral rules. While sympathetic to their critiques of modern moral theories, Porter questions whether these critiques go far enough in offering a positive alternative to a modern view of the moral act. Instead, she returns to Aquinas, and seeks to reclaim his understanding of the moral act as a product of interdependent moral virtues.
