I summarize the key points of the scholastic theory of usury following The Scholastic Analysis of Usury by John T. Noonan. Usury is the sin of taking interest on a loan without a just title. According to Scholastic moral theology, interest on loans may be justified by the extrinsic titles to...

This paper develops a conception of reflexive economic agents as an alternative to the standard utility conception, and explains individual identity in terms of how agents adjust to change in a self-organizing way, an idea developed from Herbert Simon. The paper distinguishes closed equilibrium...

The thought of Hayek has been a topic of considerable interest for a while now and the studies of Laozi's philosophy have also been drawing increasing attention worldwide. In particular, increasingly people seek answers to current political, economic and social questions within Laozi's wisdom...

Research on the economic context of Jesus* teaching on wealth and exchange points to the need to take into account the nature and extent of market arrangements in first-century Roman Palestine. This context involves changing relations among reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange....

Nothing is more common in moral debates than to invoke the names of great thinkers from the past. Business ethics is no exception. Yet insofar as business ethicists have tended to simply mine abstract formulas from the past, they have missed out on the potential intellectual gains in...

This paper examines the marginal utility as a theory of value in comparison with the theories which preceded it. It compares in detail the utility theory with the predominant theory of value of classical economics, a cost theory which saw labor as the ultimate source of value. By introducing a...

Spanish Abstract: Francisco Suárez es el teólogo más relevante de la escuela española de derecho natural o Escuela de Salamanca en sentido amplio. Según piensa, el derecho de imponer tributos justos reside en exclusiva en la autoridad suprema, sin necesitar el consentimiento de las Cortes....

Warfare is an important and common subject in discussions on mercantilism. However, the idea of a mercantilist (type of) warfare rarely appears in the specialized literature. This article begins with a historiographical review of the uses of mercantilist warfare. It identifies mercantilist...

John Rae has recently been rediscovered as a precursor of the endogenous growth theory. This study argues that Rae needs to be rediscovered a second time for his original contribution to clarify the role of the innovation and technical change within the economic systems. The aim of this paper is...

This paper looks into the scholastic definitions of the “just price” in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Bl. John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) and investigates whether they are conceptually different from the current “market price”. A specific focus is on whether government...