Justice

is here taken in its ordinary and proper sense to signify the most 
important of the cardinal virtues. It is a moral quality or habit 
which perfects the will and inclines it to render to each and to 
all what belongs to them. Of the other cardinal virtues, prudence 
perfects the intellect and inclines the prudent man to act in all 
things according to right reason. Fortitude controls the irascible 
passions; and temperance moderates the appetites according as 
reason dictates. While fortitude and temperance are self-regarding 
virtues, justice has reference to others. Together with charity it 
regulates man's intercourse with his fellow men. But charity leads 
us to help our neighbour in his need out of our own stores, while 
justice teaches us to give to another what belongs to him. 

Because man is a person, a free and intelligent being, created in 
the image of God, he has a dignity and a worth vastly superior to 
the material and animal world by which he is surrounded. Man can 
know, love, and worship his Creator; he was made for that end, 
which he can only attain perfectly in the future, immortal, and 
never-ending life to which he is destined. God gave him his 
faculties and his liberty in order that he might freely work for 
the accomplishment of his destiny. He is in duty bound to strive 
to fulfil the designs of his Creator, he must exercise his 
faculties and conduct his life according to the intentions of his 
Lord and Master. Because he is under these obligations he is 
consequently invested with rights, God-given and primordial, 
antecedent to the State and independent of it. Such are man's 
natural rights, granted to him by nature herself, sacred, as is 
their origin, and inviolable. Beside these he may have other 
rights given him by Church or State, or acquired by his own 
industry and exertion. All these rights, whatever be their source, 
are the object of the virtue of justice. Justice requires that all 
persons should be left in the free enjoyment of all their rights. 

A right in the strict sense in which the term is used in this 
connection is not a mere vague and indefinite claim against 
others, which others are bound to respect, on any grounds 
whatever. We sometimes say that the unemployed have a right to 
work, that the needy have a right to assistance, and it may be 
conceded that those phrases are quite correct, provided that such 
a right is understood as a claim in charity not as a claim in 
justice. For, at least if we confine our attention to natural law 
and ordinary circumstances, the assistance to which a man in need 
has a claim does not belong to him in justice before it is handed 
over to him, when it becomes his. His claim to it rests on the 
fact that he is a brother in distress, and his brotherhood 
constitutes his title to our pity, sympathy, and help. It may, of 
course, happen that positive law does something more than this for 
the poor and needy; it may be that the law of the land has given a 
legal right to the unemployed to have employment provided for 
them, or to the poor a legal right to relief; then, of course, the 
claim will be one of justice. 

A claim in justice, or a right in the strict sense, is a moral and 
lawful faculty of doing, possessing, or exacting something. If it 
be a moral and lawful faculty of doing something for the benefit 
of others, it belongs to the class of rights of jurisdiction. Thus 
a father has the natural right to bring up and educate his son, 
not for his own, but for the son's benefit. A lawful sovereign has 
the right to rule his subjects for the common good. The largest 
class of rights which justice requires that we should render to 
others are rights of ownership. Ownership is the moral faculty of 
using something subordinate to us for our own advantage. The owner 
of a house may dispose of it as he will. He may live in it, or let 
it, or leave it unoccupied, or pull it down, or sell it; he may 
make changes in it, and in general he may deal with it as he 
likes, because it is his. Because it is his, he has a right to all 
the uses and advantages which it possesses. It is his property, 
and as such its whole being should subserve his need and 
convenience. Because it belongs to him he must be preferred to all 
others as to the enjoyment of the uses to which it can be put. He 
has the right to exclude others from the enjoyment of its uses, it 
belongs with all the advantages which it can confer to him alone. 
Were anyone else to make use of the house against the reasonable 
wish of the owner, he would offend against justice, he would not 
be rendering to the owner what belongs to him. 

The right of ownership may be absolute or qualified. Absolute 
ownership extends to the substance of the property and to all its 
uses. Qualified ownership may, in the language of divines, be 
direct or indirect. The former is ownership of the substance of a 
thing without its uses, such as the landlord has over a house 
which he has let. Indirect ownership is the faculty of using, but 
not of disposing of, a thing. When anything definite and 
determinate is owned by anyone so that he can say--"This is my 
property"--he is said by divines to have a right in re. On the 
other hand if the thing has not yet come into existence though it 
will come, or it is not separate and determinate, so that he 
cannot say that it is actually his, but he nevertheless has a 
strict claim in justice that it should become his, he is said to 
have a right ad rem. Thus a farmer has a right ad rem to the 
harvest of the coming year from his land; when he has harvested 
his crop he will have a right in re. 

Ownership in the sense explained is the principal object of the 
virtue of justice as it regulates the relations of man with man. 
It sharply distinguishes justice from charity, gratitude, 
patriotism, and other virtues whose object is a claim against 
others indeed, but a claim of a less strict and more indefinite 
character. Justice between man and man is called individual, 
particular, or commutative justice, because it is chiefly 
concerned with contracts and exchange. Individual justice is 
distinguished from social, for not only individuals have claims in 
justice against other individuals but a subject has claims against 
the society to which he belongs, as society has claims against 
him. Justice requires that all should have what belongs to them, 
and so the just man will render to the society, or State, of which 
he is a member, what is due to it. The justice which prescribes 
this is called legal justice. On the other hand, the individual 
subject has claims against the State. It is the function of the 
State to protect its subjects in their rights and to govern the 
whole body for the common good. Authority for this purpose is 
given to the State by nature and by God, the Author of man's 
social nature. 

The power of the State is limited by the end for which it was 
instituted, and it has no authority to violate the natural rights 
of its subjects. If it does this it commits injustice as 
individuals would do if they acted in like manner. It may indeed 
levy taxes, and impose other burdens on its subjects, as far as is 
required by the common necessity and advantage, but no further. 
For the common good it has authority to compel individual citizens 
to risk life for the defence of their country when it is in peril, 
and to part with a portion of their property when this is required 
for a public road, but as far as possible it must make suitable 
compensation. When it imposes taxes, military service, or other 
burdens; when it distributes rewards, offices, and honours; when 
it metes out condign punishment for offenses, it is bound to do so 
according to the various merits and resources of the persons 
concerned; otherwise the State will sin against that special kind 
of justice which is called distributive. 

There is a controversy among authorities as to whether 
commutative, legal, and distributive justice are so many species 
of one common genus, or whether commutative justice is in reality 
the only species of justice in the strict sense. There is much to 
be said for the latter view. For justice is something which is due 
to another; it consists, as Aristotle said, in a certain equality 
by which the just and definite claim of another, neither more nor 
less, is satisfied. If I have borrowed a horse and cart from my 
neighbours, justice requires that I should return that particular 
horse and cart. The debt in its precise amount must be paid. 
Consequently, justice in the full and proper sense of the term 
requires a perfect distinction between debtor and creditor. No one 
can be bound in justice towards himself; justice essentially 
regards others. However, between the State and the individuals who 
compose it there is not this perfect distinction, and so there is 
something wanting to the proper and complete notion of the virtue 
in both legal and distributive justice. 

The rights which belong to every human being inasmuch as he is a 
person are absolute and inalienable. The right to life and limb, 
the essential freedom which is necessary that a man may attain the 
end for which he is destined by God, the right to marry or remain 
single, such rights as these may not be infringed by any human 
authority whatever. A man himself even has no right to dispose of 
his own life and limbs; God alone is the Lord of life and death. 
But a man has the duty and the right to use and develop his 
faculties of soul and body, and if he chooses he may dispose of 
his right to use these faculties and whatever advantage they can 
procure him in favour of another. No person then can become the 
property of another human being, slavery in that sense is 
repugnant to the dignity of human nature. But a man may by various 
titles have the right to the labour of another. 

All things inferior to man were created for his use and benefit; 
they fulfil the end of their being by ministering to his wants and 
necessities. Whatever, therefore, pertains to the animal, 
vegetable, or inorganic world may be brought under the ownership 
and made the property of man. The right thus to acquire property 
which is useful and necessary for an orderly human life, is one of 
man's natural rights, and it can not be taken away by the State. 
She State may indeed make reasonable laws regulating and defining 
the property rights of its subjects for the common good, but it 
cannot abrogate them altogether. Such rights are antecedent to the 
State, and in their substance independent of it; the State was 
instituted to protect and defend them, not to take them away. 

Rights are the appanage of intelligent beings as such, beings who 
can reflect on themselves, know their own wants, and who can will 
to supply them by permanently appropriating to themselves objects 
which are subordinate and which will satisfy those wants. Every 
human being, therefore, is the subject of rights, even before he 
has been brought into the world. The unborn child has a right to 
its life; it may even have property rights as well. Justice then 
is violated if such rights are interfered with unwarrantably. 
Minors and married women have their rights like others, but 
positive law frequently modifies their property rights for the 
common good. In past ages the property rights of women especially 
were largely modified by positive law on their being married, the 
husband acquiring more or less extensive rights over the property 
of his wife. In modern times, and especially in English-speaking 
countries, the tendency has been to do away with such positive 
enactments, and to restore to married women all the property 
rights which unmarried women possess. 

Not only individuals, but societies of men as such are the 
subjects of rights. For men cannot singly and by their own unaided 
exertions do everything that is necessary for the security and 
dignity of human existence. For this end man needs the co-
operation of his fellows. He has then a natural right to associate 
himself with others for the attainment of some lawful end, and 
when such societies have been formed, they are moral persons which 
have their rights similar to those of natural persons. Such 
societies then may own property, and although the State may make 
laws which modify those rights for the common good, it is beyond 
its power altogether to abrogate them. Men have this power to form 
themselves into societies especially for the purpose of offering 
to God the public and social worship which is due to Him. The 
Catholic Church, founded by God Himself, is a perfect society and 
independent of the State. She has her rights, God-given, and 
necessary for the attainment of her end, and justice is violated 
if these are unwarrantably interfered with. 

As we have seen, human nature, its wants and aims, are the source 
of the fundamental and natural rights of man. By his industry man 
may occupy and annex to his person material things which are of 
use to him and which belong to nobody else. He thus acquires 
property by the title of occupation. Property once acquired 
remains in the possession of its owner; all that it is or is 
capable of is ordained to his use and benefit. If it increases by 
natural growth or by giving birth to offspring, the increase 
belongs to the original owner. By the same law of accession 
increase in value, even unearned increment as it is called, 
belongs to the owner of that which thus increases--"Res 
fructificat domino". Positive law may, as we have seen, modify 
property rights for the common good. It may also further determine 
those that are indeterminate by the law of nature; it may even 
create rights which would not exist without it. Thus a father may 
by law acquire certain rights over the property of his children, 
and a husband may in the same way have certain rights over the 
property of his wife. When such rights exist it is, of course, a 
matter of justice to respect them. Finally, rights may be 
transferred from one to another or modified by a great variety of 
contracts, which are treated of under a special heading. See 
CONTRACT. 

The foregoing is in very brief outline the doctrine on justice 
which has been gradually elaborated by Catholic philosophers and 
divines. The foundations of the doctrine are found in Aristotle, 
but the noble, beautiful, and altogether rational edifice has been 
raised by the labours of such men as Aquinas, Molina, Lessius, 
Lugo, and a host of others. The doctrine as it appears at large in 
their stately folios is one of the chief and most important 
results of Catholic thought. It fully accounts for the peremptory, 
sacred, and absolutely binding character with which justice is 
invested in the minds of men. It was never of greater importance 
than it is nowadays to insist on these characteristics of justice. 
They disappear almost if not altogether in the modern theories of 
the virtue. Most of these theories derive rights and justice from 
positive law, and when socialists and anarchists threaten to 
abrogate those laws and make new ones which will regulate men's 
rights more equitably, no rational defense of the old order is 
possible. It becomes a mere question of might and brute force. 
Even if some with Herbert Spencer endeavour to find a deeper 
foundation for justice in the conditions of human existence, it is 
easy to answer that their interpretation of those conditions is 
essentially individualist and selfish, and that human existence 
thus conditioned is not worth having; that the new social order 
peremptorily demands their abolition. The Catholic doctrine of 
justice will be found one of the main safeguards of order, peace, 
and progress. With even balance it equally favours all and presses 
unduly on none. It gives the State ample authority for the 
attainment of its legitimate end, while it effectually bars the 
road to tyranny and violence. 

T. SLATER 
Transcribed by Rick McCarty