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Cardinal Bertone and Metropolitan Kirill on Social Doctrine

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone

Paola Fantini has expanded her blog post on Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone's new work on Catholic social doctrine into a book review for the forthcoming Religion & Liberty quarterly published by the Acton Institute. She has also translated the prologue to the book by Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Kirill. These articles are the first to translate anything from Cardinal Bertone's “The Ethics of the Common Good in Catholic Social Doctrine” (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2008) into English. The Italian title is "L'etica del Bene Comune nella Dottrina Sociale della Chiesa."

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Cardinal Bertone and Metropolitan Kirill on Social Doctrine
October 13, 2008

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From the Journal of Markets & Morality

Ronald Dworkin's Group Fetishism by Amir Horowitz

The main purpose of this paper is to point out how questions of group responsibility should not be answered. This is done by criticizing Ronald Dworkin’s discussion of the moral justification of imputing responsibility in tort law to a corporation’s shareholders. Dworkin suggests to treat corporations as moral agents and to apply principles about individual fault and responsibility to them, and then to ask how the corporations’ members should be seen to share in that fault or responsibility. It is argued that Dworkin thus commits the fallacy of “group fetishism”: He presupposes that the group may have moral characteristics that are neither identical with nor derived from the moral characteristics of its members. In addition to criticizing Dworkin’s approach, the paper briefly points out the direction from which such questions should be approached.