Review of Diana Wood, 'Medieval Economic Thought' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. xii, 259.)

Abstract

Questions concerning the morality of particular forms of commerce have been mainstays of applied ethics over the past twenty years. To see this one need only examine the considerable attention paid by applied ethicists to such topics as commercial surrogacy, prostitution and the sale of human organs for transplantation. One striking feature of these debates is that they are conducted with little or no reference to the writings of any pre-Modern moral philosophers (and often, excluding Kant, any pre-twentieth century philosophers whatsoever). Contrast this with debates, for instance, on such topics as just war theory where the Medieval doctrines have a central role to play in the normative deliberations of contemporary philosophers.