Reddit reviews The Four Cardinal Virtues

To begin with, I suspect I would ultimately agree with you about a reasonable approach to accepting refugees in today's conditions. However! Your assertion is stronger than that: you asserted that "it cannot be regarded in any way Christian . . . ", so all I will do is give an example where I believe a government guided by Christian principles would exclude refugees.


A government is unique in that it is responsible for distributive justice, the distribution of goods within society according to what it owed to each individual. This is balanced by other aspects of justice, but it covers things like law enforcement, building roads, and welfare. I take this as a Christian principle because St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about it; my main source is The Four Cardinal Virtues by Catholic philosophy Joseph Pieper. So the notion that the government must defend its citizens is not just a matter of self-interest, but of natural law, and therefore God's law.


The Christian conception of love influences justice to expand it in important ways, so of course a government must have some concern for foreigners. How much concern? That's a difficult question, and I don't think it can be fully answered outside of a real situation. In many areas of the law, a full understanding of the commands of Christ would likely compel the government to treat foreigners as if they were citizens, but ultimately the government can't completely fail its natural obligations to its own citizens. It can demand that its citizens take on hardships and stretch their means for the sake of helping refugees, but it can't endanger their lives (and there's a balance to strike somewhere between those two points).


Thus, if an entire nation was fanatically enraged at another, and there was a credible suggestion the angry nation was willing to resort to terrorism, the target nation would be entirely justified in blocking all refugees from the angry nation for fear of terrorism. In a situation like that, if they weren't at war already, I'm sure they would be soon.


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I say this, although I am convinced it does not describe the situation that the U.S. is currently in. The real ability to screen refugees is also enormously important.

No. Essentially it is the same idea, the Greeks were barking up the same tree we are climbing up. We of course add to it with divine revelation; Jesus and the Church Fathers are a shortcut to where the Greeks were trying to go.

Following after Socrates, Aristotle tries to codify virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics. It's a great and easy to read book and it's strikingly similar to Catholic moral theology. For instance, evil is always a lack of (or an excess of) of a good. It's good to be brave or strong; it's bad to be cowardly; and it's also bad to be reckless.

The last of the classical philosophers was probably Boethius, who was most likely Catholic. His Consolation of Philosophy is another excellent book and easy to read.

For more recent reading on this, I suggest Josef Pieper's short little The Four Cardinal Virtues.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0268001030/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_eT9Kyb18C377R

Best book on the topic I have ever read.