Justice: the Most Terrible of the Virtues Be the Normal Accomplishments of Human Moral Growth Acquired for Their Own Sakes

Journal of Markets & Morality Volume 7, Number 2 (Fall 2004): 409–421 Copyright © 2004 Justice: The Most Terrible of the James V. Schall, S.J. Professor of Government Virtues Georgetown University The place of justice among the virtues, both moral and theological, has always been a delicate issue. Machiavellians tend to underestimate or deny its central significance. Contemporary religious rhetoric often tends to exaggerate it. Classi- cal philosophy was ever aware of the ambiguity of justice—its impersonality and rigidity. Unless placed within a higher order of “good,” as Plato saw, or of “charity,” as Aquinas understood, justice introduces an unsettling utopianism into any existing polity. “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven.” —Psalm 85:10–11 “Summum jus, summa injustitia.” —Cicero, De officiis “Deus misericorditer agit, non quidem contra justitiam suam faciendo, sed aliquid supra justitiam operando.…” —Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 21, 3, ad 2 In ethical and political affairs, no more frequent or more agonizing word is found than that of justice or its related words fair, equitable, right, or rights. In its own way, of course, justice is also a noble word standing at the height of the practical, not theoretical or theological, virtues. It is also one of the attrib- utes applied to the divinity—God is just. Justice, following Plato, can have a 409 James V. Schall, S.J. very broad scope. It means that everything is voluntarily doing what it ought to do so that the whole may do what it is ordered (that is, designed) to do. Such is the fifth definition of justice in the fourth book of Plato’s Republic. The standard subtitle of this famous dialogue is precisely “On Justice.” Justice is classically treated in the fifth book of Aristotle’s Ethics, wherein he distinguishes between legal or general justice and special justice. In earlier books, he offered an overall description or analysis of virtue and responsibil- ity, together with the vices opposite to each of the virtues.1 Aristotle explained how virtues applied to human action and passion in which they exist as habit- ual guides or moderators. Justice is a virtue, which, unlike courage or temperance, does not look inward. Rather, it looks ad alium, to how we stand to another or others besides ourselves when we chance to come into various relationships with them. It implies that our perfection is not something totally dependent on or related to ourselves alone. If we speak of “justice to ourselves,” we mean that we compare or relate what we ought to be with what we in fact are and do. Justice is usually the first virtue that children and youth become aware of, the one that causes most of the loudest controversies existing within families or society. “He took my toy” or “she won’t give me my cake” are protestations frequently heard by parents throughout the world and in all times. Whether the toy is his or the cake hers is itself a controversy about justice. Justice has something strangely incomplete about it, even when it is complete. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice was addressed to the potential conflict between justice and charity, to the reasons why the famous “pound of flesh,” even though due in “justice,” was not just in its carrying out.2 Justice seems to overlook exceptions, something Aristotle discussed under the heading of epichia or equity in the same fifth book of his Ethics. This problem with exceptions also explains, in part, the length and nature of Plato’s dialogue on the Laws, why each law needed a preamble to explain what it was intended to accomplish whatever the words used to describe it. Actually, Aristotle tells us, every virtue or vice, not merely justice and injus- tice, can have an effect on others so that it thereby acquires a justice compo- nent. Thus, it can fall under the law. Our excessive anger or intemperance, for example, can require legal standards and restrictive coercion or penalty. This need is what drunken driving laws, after all, are all about, the combination of temperance and justice. When a virtue is looked upon under the aspect of how it relates to others, it is what Aristotle meant by general or legal justice, an action that could or should be subject to legislation but only under the aspect of justice, not of itself. Actually acquiring and practicing the virtues ought to 410 Justice: The Most Terrible of the Virtues be the normal accomplishments of human moral growth acquired for their own sakes. That is, we should control our eating or drinking even if it had no effect on others. Justice was also its own particular virtue not just an element in the other virtues. It had its own specific realm or object, something that was not merely subjective. It concerned itself with how we stand to others either voluntarily or involuntarily in relationships that, broadly speaking, had to do with exchanges in which something could be measured or at least reasonably estimated. Liberality or generosity was treated in book four of the Ethics. This particular virtue also dealt with something outside of ourselves—with how we handle our wealth or property. This is one of the origins of the term liberal, which meant, in such writers as Locke, that the state was designed to protect our wealth so that we can freely use it. In Aristotle, it meant our being free of our wealth so that we could use it in a reasonable manner when occasion arose. Clearly, property or wealth is something related to justice, at least indi- rectly. In fact, though, liberality is related to wealth as a means to meet the bodily and human needs of finite, corporeal beings, particularly the family. Indeed, liberality, strictly speaking, means that we show in our actions that we sue our wealth for proper or beneficent ends. Chesterton, in a famous essay explaining why he was not a socialist, remarked that he did not want to live in a world in which everything was shared because sharing had attached to it the notion of justice rather than of something beyond justice. He wanted to live in a world in which he could actually give what was really his freely to someone else.3 He also wanted to be able to receive something that was really given to him, not just shared, as if it were a matter of justice. Strictly speaking, justice does not require thanks. Without this economic foundation of freedom, without some basic abundance or superfluity, it is impossible to have the virtue of generosity, of liberality. This notion does not mean, however, that the poor cannot be generous or liberal. Often they are more generous proportionately than the rich, a reminder of the story of the widow’s mite in the New Testament (Luke 21:1–4). Liberality, nevertheless, was, like fear and pleasure, still concerned with something more directly related to ourselves, even to our bodies. It noted, too, that there is nothing pejorative or wrong about things naturally related to ourselves. It is good that we exist, as Genesis teaches. Nature also looks to ourselves and to the things needed to be what we are in our flourishing. “No ethi- cally unfavorable connotation attaches to the notion of a need centered about the self…,” Yves Simon has written: “Needs relative to such goods as food and shelter are self-centered by nature.…”4 We have a proper good that needs 411 James V. Schall, S.J. reasonable attention. The common good in principle is not opposed to our private good. Indeed, one of the purposes of the common good is that private goods, in their proper manner, be achieved by us. One of the basic purposes of authority, as Yves Simon also wrote in his great book, is that it fosters and pro- tects the autonomy of families and smaller institutions.5 Aristotle considered justice itself under two headings. The first was distributive justice; namely, how the general or common goods and burdens were to be equitably divided among the various people within a polity or organization. In this sense, justice, like all virtues, always involved an element of prudence, namely, the discovery of a proper judgment about what this proportion was, more or less. We should not expect, as Aristotle warned us, more certitude of a science than its subject matter will allow (1094b13-15; 1103b28; 1104a3-5). Thus, it was recognized that it was impossible, usually, to have an exact mathematical relationship, even though Aristotle spoke of distributive justice in terms of geometric proportion and commutative justice, the second form of justice, in terms of mathematical proportion. Aristotle thought that these goods and burdens should be decided in accordance with their relative contributions to a common good. Thus, those who contributed or suffered more deserved more rewards, either spiritual or temporal. Burdens, be it noted, were likewise to be distributed according to some standard of equitable bearing of what commonly needed to be done, in wars, for instance, or in taxation, or in honors. The second form of justice, that is the one with which we are most instinc- tively familiar, the one we learn, or fail to learn, as children, is generally called commutative or rectificatory or rectifying justice. Its classical definition, itself a kind of self-evident principle, is “reddere cuique quod suum est,” to “render to another what is due.” Thus, if I borrow a hundred dollars from you and promise to repay it in a month, then I make right what is unbalanced in our relationship when I pay back the hundred dollars.

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