In his monumental On Justice and Rights, the Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535-1600) discussed the legal and ethical aspects of the Portuguese trade in African and Asian enslaved persons. Molina surveys, develops, and problematizes the criteria necessary for the legitimate possession, sale, and purchase of human freedom. He insists that, even under legally valid slavery, persons who have sold or lost their freedom have inalienable rights as human beings, such as the freedom to make contracts, to marry, and even, under certain circumstances, to sue their owners in court. Molina also devotes attention to the ways in which slavery could be ended and whether and under what circumstances slaves had the right to escape from their owners. Well informed about the political structures and customs of many peoples in Africa, as well as Japan, China, and India, Molina paints a vivid and detailed picture of Portuguese trade. He gives specific accounts of the origins and development of the slave trade, region by region, and of the nature of the relationship between local rulers and the Portuguese kingdom. In doing so, he carefully describes the deception, coercion, and general indifference that pervades this trade regarding the rights to freedom of these people. It also attempts to identify the political, ecclesiastical, and market agents involved in this great injustice and their varying degrees of culpability. While Molina does not condemn slavery as a legal institution, the deeply flawed and even immoral behavior of sellers, buyers, regulators, and political rulers both in Portugal and in the slave-supplying regions that Molina denounces casts a heavy shadow on the morality of the trade.

Suárez was probably the first theologian to propose a political understanding of the order of subordination among the demons. According to Aquinas, this subordination immediately reflects the natural differences in perfection between the demons. Suárez charged that a natural-based order of demonic subordination could not ground the capacity of the demons’ ruler—Lucifer—to use his power to impose civic obligations on fellow demons so as to pursue their joint evil goals. But can there be obligations ad malum? This paper explores a number of possible paths seemingly available to Suárez to defend his controversial view. I argue that the most promising interpretation of Suárez is one according to which the obligations created by Lucifer’s commands are not obligations in conscience but rather what we may call “non-moral obligations.”

Suárez was probably the first theologian to propose a political understanding of the order of subordination among the demons. According to Aquinas, this subordination immediately reflects the natural differences in perfection between the demons. Suárez charged that a natural-based order of demonic subordination could not ground the capacity of the demons’ ruler—Lucifer—to use his power to impose civic obligations on fellow demons so as to pursue their joint evil goals. But can there be obligations ad malum? This paper explores a number of possible paths seemingly available to Suárez to defend his controversial view. I argue that the most promising interpretation of Suárez is one according to which the obligations created by Lucifer’s commands are not obligations in conscience but rather what we may call “non-moral obligations.”

On 7 July 1550 a council of fourteen leading theologians and jurists convened by the King of Spain met in Valladolid ostensibly to discuss ‘by what manner and under what laws our Holy Catholic Faith should be preached and promulgated’. In effect, however, they met to discuss the justice of the conquest of the New World and the subjection of its inhabitants. This was the apex of a debate that had started much earlier, stirred by reports of massacres, enslavement, cruelty and pillage by Spanish soldiers and settlers in the Americas. The proximate trigger of the Valladolid meeting was, however, the controversy surrounding Sepúlveda’s provocative book, Democrates secundus, which now sees its first complete translation into English. This impressive scholarly edition includes translations of three additional texts: Sepúlveda’s Apologia, in which he defends the publication of his controversial dialogue, a text published without license by Sepúlveda’s nemesis, Bartolomé de las Casas, containing a summary of the proceedings at Valladolid; Sepúlveda’s and Las Casas’ responses to each other’s arguments; and a text titled Outrageous, Scandalous, Heretical Notions, Sepúlveda’s final counterattack, in which he tried unsuccessfully to provoke inquisitorial action against Las Casas.

One of Solon's laws punished citizens who fail to take sides in the event of a civil war. Among the very few sixteenth-century political writers who defended Solon's law we find Jean Bodin, Justus Lipsius and Michel de Montaigne (the latter two possibly reacting to Pierre Grégoire's criticism of Bodin). This article retrieves the justifications offered by these writers for taking sides in a civil war in the context of what should be seen as an exercise in humanist casuistry. According to Bodin, citizens may strategically join a party in order to restrain fellow partisans. Lipsius and Montaigne seem to agree with Grégoire that Bodin is too optimistic about the strategic partisan's capacity to restrain his fellows. In response, Lipsius de-emphasizes restraint of others as a justification for partisanship. Montaigne, by contrast, rejects Bodin's assumption of partisan unreasonability and emphasizes the partisan's capacity of selfmoderation.

Thomas De Quincey (x785-1859) is best known as the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and one of the most important British writers of the Romantic period. De Quincey had a vast range of interests, which included, in addition to literature and poetry, philology, history, theology, political economy, and philosophy. In 1839 and 1840, De Quincey published a long essay entitled "Casuistry" in two installments in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.' In this essay, De Quincey sought to rehabilitate the science of casuistry, which had been vilified, particularly in Blaise Pascal's (1623-62) Lettres provinciales (Provincial Letters), thus becoming an almost irredeemably pejorative term, the designation of a form of deviant inquiry closely associated with the Jesuits.

Can a war can be just on both sides? Within the Western just war tradition, Catholic theologians traditionally held wars on both sides to be logically impossible. This view went unchallenged until questioned by two seventeenth-century Irish Franciscan Scotists. These were Aodh Mac Cathmhaoil (Hugo Cavellus) and John Punch. In this paper I lay out the Scotist theological grounds that led them to admit to the possibility of wars just on both sides. I also conjecture on possible reasons why Punch refrained from revising traditional just war theory in light of his own far-reaching theological conclusions.

This article examines how Catholic moral theologians analysed the constraints imposed by the rights of the dead to their good name on historical writing and research. The concern of Catholic moral theologians for persons’ rights to their good name coupled with their concern for the rights of dead persons placed serious moral constraints on the work of historians. At the same time, from very early on, these moral theologians showed appreciation of the benefits of historical writing, including writing on the less public aspects of historical figures. The general tendency was to allow historians some moral elbow room. There was, however, a clear red line: what was and had always been secret could not be revealed, regardless of the benefits. By the end of the nineteenth century, the authors of the casuist manualists revised the traditional doctrine and removed the moral red line that had been accepted until then. Historians could now reveal what had always been secret. This doctrinal development was the result of two historical events: the opening of the Vatican Archives and allowing propagandists and journalists within politically organized Catholic conservatism to fight as equals in the printed media.

This paper examines the use of the theological doctrine of probabilism by the Valencian political writer Juan de Madariaga in his Del senado y su príncipe of 1617. Madariaga’s work is but one example of the phenomenal diffusion of probabilism in political and legal writings in seventeenth century Spain. Such popularity must be understood in the institutional context of the Habsburg monarchy, effectively managed by an expanding number of powerful councils (consejos), constituting what Spanish historians call a ‘polysynodial regime’. Probabilists argued that council members could, within limits, defer to the majority opinion within the council without shirking their conscientious duties. As explained by Madariaga, by morally allowing such deferrals, probabilism strengthened the cohesiveness of the councils and preserved their authority in the eyes of the king and the people. It is suggested that by relying on probabilism in order to foster unanimity within the council, Madariaga was in fact attempting to remove occasions for one of the favoured criticisms against the polysynodial regime: that the multiplicity of contradictory advice confused the monarch and prevented the sort of expedite action necessary for solving the urgent problems of the monarchy.

The early modern scholastics’ detailed discussion of the justice of war also addressed the rights of victors. This chapter examines their views on the permissibility of killing and plundering — both of innocents and of culpable combatants — in the aftermath of victory. The focus is on Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina as well as Pedro de Lorca, Giles de Conink, Gaspar Hurtado and Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza. The chapter pays special attention to their account of individual liability to loss of life and property and the extent to which this liability derived from a person’s contribution to the war effort, their status as a citizen of the enemy state, and from whether or in how far they could contribute to a future threat. Authors such as Vitoria and Suárez, the chapter concludes, deployed a statist approach to combatant and civilian liability. The chapter also explores the late scholastic defence and critique of the permissibility of reprisals against citizens of enemy states. It closes by examining the scholastic resort to the ius gentium as a means to justify the duty of the citizens of a defeated state to surrender their property to the victors.