Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/648

 JUSTICE

572

JUSTICE

i'ustice teaches us to give to another what belongs to lim.

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 ani- mal 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 ac- complishment 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 per- sons 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 connexion is not a mere vague and indefinite claim against others, which others are bound to re- spect, 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 con- ceded 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 circum- stances, 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 em- ployment 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 ad- vantage. The owner of a house may dispose of it as he will. He may live in it, or let it, or leave it un- occupied, 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 be- longs 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 render- ing to the owner what belongs to him.

The right of ownersliip may be absohite 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 any- thing 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 deter- minate, 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 re- lations of man with man. It sharplj^ 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 char- acter. Justice between man and man is callctl in- dividual, particular, or commutative justice, because it is chiefly concerned with contracts and exchange. Individu;d justice is distinguished from social, for not only individuals have claims in justice against other individuals, but a subject has claims against the so- ciety 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 sub- ject 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 sulijects. If it does this it commits injustice as individuals would do if they acted in like maiiiior. 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 wlicii it is in ]i('ril, and to part with a portion of their ]irop(>rty when this is required for a public road, l)ut as far as possil>le it must make suit- alile compensation. When it imposes taxes, military service, or other liurdens; when it distributes rewards, offices, and honours; when it metes out condign pun- ishment for offences, it is bound to do so according to the various merits and resources of the persons con- cerned; otherwise the State will sin against that special kind of justice which is called distributive.

There is a controversy among autliorilics 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 lie said for the latter view. For justice is sdinething which is due to another; it consists, ,as Aristotle .said, in a cer- tain equality liy which the just and definite claim of another, neither more niir less, is satisfied. If I have borroweil a horse ;uid cart from my neighbours, jihstice requires that I should return that ]iartieiilar horse and cart. The debt in its precise aiudunt 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 boimd in justice towards himself; justice essentially regards others. However, between the State and the individuals who