The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century

Dr David Thunder is a Research Fellow at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society (Religion and Civil Society Project). Prior to this appointment, he held several research and teaching positions in the United States, including visiting assistant professor at Bucknell and Villanova and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program. Dr Thunder earned his BA and MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, and his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame. His research, which primarily engages the work of twentieth and twenty-first century political and moral philosophers, seeks to recover a more holistic and person-centered vision of human action and life in community with others, in the face of attempts by modern thinkers to isolate legal, economic, and political activity from broader concerns and values that affect the human person as such. Specific issues he has taken up in his writings include integrity and corruption in public life, our responsibilities toward the distant needy, the philosophical justification of human rights, and the challenge of building sustainable communities in individualistic cultures. In Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), he makes the case that the modern separation between ethics and political morality is a dangerous error, and that democratic societies would be much better served by a more ethically integrated form of citizenship. Dr Thunder’s work has appeared in venues such as the American Journal of Political Science,