Dr. Samuel Gregg

Dr. Samuel Gregg is a moral philosopher who has written and spoken extensively on questions of ethics in public policy, jurisprudence, bioethics, and ethics in business. He has an MA in political philosophy from the University of Melbourne, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in moral philosophy from the University of Oxford, which he attended as a Commonwealth Scholar. Dr. Gregg is the author of several books, including Morality, Law, and Public Policy (2000), Economic Thinking for the Theologically Minded (2001), Challenging the Modern World: Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II and the Development of Catholic Social Teaching (2003) and On Ordered Liberty (2003). He also publishes regularly in journals such as Markets & Morality, Crisis, and Policy. He is the American editorial consultant for the Italian journal, La Societa, as well as American correspondent for the German newspaper Die Tagespost. Dr. Gregg is Director of Research at the Acton Institute, an Adjunct Professor at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Marriage and the Family within the Pontifical Lateran University, and a consultant for Oxford Analytica Ltd. In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and in 2003 he was elected a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society.

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Relevant Writings

On Ordered Liberty: A Treatise on the Free Society (2003)

On Ordered Liberty goes beyond the liberal and conservative divide, asking its readers to think about the proper ends of human choice and actions in a free society. Beginning with the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville and some natural law sources, author Samuel Gregg suggests that integral law must be distinguished from most contemporary visions of freedom. This requires, he believes, a complete repudiation of utilitarian ideas as incompatable with human nature and further analysis of the basic but often neglected-question: what is man?

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Challenging the Modern World: Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II and the Development of Catholic Social Teaching

Samuel Gregg provides an insightful, cogent, and thorough analysis of the issues surrounding developments in Catholic social teaching during the pontificate of John Paul II. He compares the treatment in John Paul's social encyclicals of three topics-industrial relations, capitalism, and the relations between developed and developing countries-with the handling of these matters in the social teachings of the Second Vatican Council and Paul VI. Through the application of a comparative exegetical approach to the relevant texts, it becomes apparent that John Paul's development of the teaching derives from several sources. Within this analysis, Gregg considers a more specific and less widely examined issue: the extent to which the development in Catholic social thought has been influenced by the writings of Karol Wojtyla before he became pope in 1978. In addition to revealing an openness to certain modern philosophical insights and expressing a range of views about the modern world, these writings elaborate a distinctive anthropology of man as the conscious subject of moral acts. -- Publisher

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