Taxation and Sustainable Development: From Thomas Aquinas to Today: The Universal Destination of Goods and the Future of Taxation

Description

This seminar offered an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing from some of the earlier, medieval sources of economic thought and their development in contemporary theology at Tilburg University.
Solidarity is often perceived as the voluntary relinquishing of something one might prefer to retain; however, the seminar emphasizes its deeper grounding in justice, whereby certain forms of reallocation are not acts of generosity but expressions of fairness.
This builds on the medieval idea, in Thomas Aquinas, that balances the right to private property with the notion of the universal destination of goods. In this way, the seminar offers new concepts to discuss questions of human development, responsibility and solidarity.
How can countries with divergent economic and fiscal interests work together, and what shared concepts might we use to better express how we indeed are “all in this together”?
The seminar engaged participants to consider familiar questions through a variety of perspectives, at the crossroads of ethics, taxation and economics.

Period	21 Oct 2025
Event type	Seminar
Degree of Recognition	International