Summary / Resumé
Christian Spieß: Liberty, Effi ciency, Justice. Financial Transactions as viewed from Papal Social Teaching
Among the great achievements of catholic social teaching is the development of a differentiated theory of property. Long before the church caught up with the standards of modern political philosophy it combines in its ethics of property the modern rationale of liberal political philosphy with the classical Aristotelian-Thomicstic statement of effi cieny. Many aspects of Roman theory of property can be used fairly unproblematically for an ethical assessment of transactions on international fi nancial markets. This more so as the global situation, the global social issue, is similar in structure to individual national economies at the time when Rerum novarum (1891) was written: Precarious and miserable living conditions in the marginalized majority of world population on the one, and extreme wealth and affl uence of a rich minority in the Western industrialized countries on the other side.