Aquinas on Justice

Undergraduate / Graduate

Aquinas regards justice as the preeminent moral virtue, and in the Summa theologiae he devotes more Questions to it than to any other virtue (II-II, qq. 57-79). With occasional help from other passages of his, and with an eye to his sources (especially Aristotle) and to later thinkers, we will first work through his general accounts of the object of justice (ius-the just or the right), justice as a virtue, the nature of injustice, and the distinction between distributive and commutative justice. Then, as time permits, we will discuss selected texts on more specific topics such as judicature, restitution, partiality, murder, theft, verbal injuries, fraud, and usury. (A