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
From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version copyright � 1996 by
New Advent, Inc.
Taken from the New Advent Web Page (www.knight.org/advent).
This article is part of the Catholic Encyclopedia Project, an
effort aimed at placing the entire Catholic Encyclopedia 1913
edition on the World Wide Web. The coordinator is Kevin Knight,
editor of the New Advent Catholic Website. If you would like to
contribute to this worthwhile project, you can contact him by e-
mail at (knight.org/advent). For more information please download
the file cathen.txt/.zip.
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