Religious freedom is included among the basic liberties to which persons are entitled in John Rawls’s account of Justice as Fairness. Rawls’s revised presentation of this as a political conception of justice in Political Liberalism aims to show how it can be (along with the other parts of Justice as Fairness) the focus of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. As an example, Rawls contends that his understanding of religious freedom is consistent with that of the Roman Catholic Church, at least since the Second Vatican Council. I argue that he was mistaken in this in so far as other aspects of his political conception, especially its characterization of citizens as normatively having the power to form their own conceptions of the good, puts it at odds with the teaching of the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis humanae. This suggests more generally that the limits of consensus in modern pluralist societies are greater than Rawls’s theory holds.

In my essay, I examine Plato’s understanding of justice and injustice within the home and the city. For Plato, the home, as private, must be suppressed to bring about a common polis. I critique Plato’s conclusions regarding the home and the city, especially his privative definition of justice, which loses the complexity of justice in-between persons, families, and communities. To critique Plato, I rely on his own doubts about his project, especially in his portrayal of the city of sows. The city of sows and the city of guardians both show that we need a politics guided by justice with prudence. The space of justice exists in the needs and obligations that lie between us, our homes, and our cities; it is in this space alone that political prudence can grow in the weaving together of oikos with oikos in the rich tapestry of the polis.

This paper examines the relationship between justice and nature in key figures in early Greek philosophy in order to understand the idea of nature that grounds Plato’s account of justice. Tracing the idea of justice through Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, I show that each figure uses justice in unique and innovative ways to explain different concepts of nature. Among the Presocratics then, justice is a heuristic for grasping the newly emerging and evolving concept of nature. It is in turn this evolving concept of nature that ushers in the transformation of justice from the conventional Hesiodic notion of “legal settlement” or “paying one’s debts” to Plato’s philosophical account of justice based on nature. The transformation is marked by the development of several key epistemological criteria and teleological facets in the earliest concepts of nature. As such, Plato’s account of justice in the Republic is deeply indebted to Presocratic conceptions of justice and nature.

In his discussions of justice and of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle appeals frequently—without much explanation—to temporal considerations. I take these indications as a key for sorting out the systematic significance of Aristotle’s claim that “when people are friends, there is no need for justice” (NE VIII.1.1155a26). Anaximander’s fragmentary claim that coming-to-be is itself an injustice serves as a touchstone for the analysis; I ask whether and how Aristotle might agree with such a claim. I first isolate some problems, especially those involving time, that underlie Aristotle’s various dialectical articulations of justice in NE V and show that friendship addresses them more beautifully than does justice. Then I try to establish that the ultimate work of friendship is to alter human temporality, interweaving multiple particular lives into a whole that both imitates and fits into the cosmic whole.

Several commentators have noted that “justice has not fared well in the revival of virtue ethics”; it “has become damagingly marginalized” and “no longer has a starring role.” Given its traditional place among the four cardinal virtues this is a remarkable state of affairs and yet exactly this has occurred has not been adequately explored or explained. In this paper, I argue that the particular moral virtue of justice has been largely disregarded by the contemporary virtue theorists primarily because their conception of justice is so different from Aristotle’s. Accordingly, they do not need the virtue of justice to do the kind of explanatory work in their systems that it does in Aristotle’s.

Augustine asserted that demons (and angels) have material bodies, while Aquinas denied demonic corporeality, upholding that demons are separated, incorporeal, intelligible substances. Augustine’s conception of demons as composite substances possessing an immaterial soul and an aerial body is insufficient, in Thomas’s view, to account for certain empirical phenomena observed in demoniacs. However, Thomas, while providing more detailed accounts of demonic possession according to his development of Aristotelian psychology, does not avail of this demonic incorporeal eminence when analysing demonic attacks: demonic agency is still confined to the material body. Aquinas’s account of demonic possession need not, on the face of it, require an immaterial cause. In his renouncement of the strong Christian tradition affirming demonic corporeality, Aquinas either conflates the need for a demonic agent with a requirement for a super corporeal one, or subordinates his demonology and angelology to a deeper, more fundamental Dionysian metaphysical principle of creative diffusion to which these adhere in a secondary way.

Thomas and Suarez understand God’s creation and conservation in a similar way: as God’s continually giving being to all creatures. The two philosophers also try to explain the way in which creaturely, secondary causality is guaranteed, but they do so in radically different ways. Suarez’s doctrine of concurrence is not a progressive development of Thomas’s doctrine of secondary, instrumental causality, with which this Suarezian innovation is incompatible. I try to show how different concurrentism is from Thomas’s doctrine of secondary causality and to offer some criticism of the former by the latter.

According to the New Natural Law theory, marriage is a basic good. This means that marital society is an end in itself, and that marital intercourse instantiates that end by making the married couple to be “one-flesh.” This one-flesh union finds its intrinsic fulfillment in the procreation of children, but should not be seen as a mere means to the begetting and rearing of offspring. This view of marriage represents a departure from the traditional understanding of marriage as having its ultimate raison d’être in the begetting and rearing of offspring, and has significant implications for judgments concerning the liceity of embryo adoption/rescue. This paper offers a critical appraisal of the thesis that marriage is a basic good.

The paper seeks to identify some of the first principles necessary for an adequate account of gender justice. In the first section of the paper, a recent account of gender justice is analyzed in order to determine its ultimate principles. These principles include a distinction between sex and gender, absolute equality and individual freedom of choice as valuable, the just as the chosen, and gender as a restriction upon freedom. In the second section of the paper, these principles are critiqued, and alternate first principles are proposed. It is argued that an adequate account of gender justice should view sex and gender as a unity, justice as rendering what is due to the other, and gender as a teleological structure. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of what these revised first principles might mean for the question of a gendered division of societal roles.

This paper has two goals: 1) to understand justice as a cardinal virtue, according to Aquinas; and 2) to use his conception of justice as a cardinal virtue to understand how one engages in acts of “general” justice. The argument proceeds in four stages: 1) how Aquinas understands the virtues by looking to their “objects”; 2) the two distinct “modes” of the four cardinal virtues, as “general” and “specific” virtues; 3) the triangle of three kinds of justice, seen in terms of their “objects”; 4) Aquinas’s doctrine of justice as a “general” virtue (ST 2-2.58.5–6) shows that we can perform operations of “general” justice in two ways, as do the ruler and his minsters, and as ordinary folk do. Surprisingly, it is the latter mode of acting for “general” justice that is primary, not the former.

This paper discusses the theme of “personal justice” in the Summa theologiae, a concept inherited from the Nicomachean Ethics wherein Aristotle says that a man is just toward himself only metaphorically, insofar as the parts of man are appropriately ordered with the higher ruling the lower and the body subjugated to the soul. This paper demonstrates how Aquinas extensively utilizes this concept of metaphorical justice across the tripartite division of the Summa in his accounts of original justice in the prima pars, the humanity of Christ in the tertia pars, and justification of the sinner in the secunda pars. As a response to critiques that Thomistic moral theology is not properly centered in the person of Christ, I will show that, for Aquinas, Christ’s personal justice both fulfills the right ordering of humanity lost through sin and restores that integrity to mankind in the grace of justification—the root of the Christian’s entire moral life.

Over the past decade, U.S. officials have taken steps to institutionalize the practice of targeted killing of persons outside an identifiable war zone. In the past, such a policy would have been described as extra-judicial killings. Advocates of this policy claim that the practice is permissible because the executive reviews and authorizes every targeted strike. I examine the tenability of this claim in light of Aquinas’s understanding of the natural principles of justice and their implication for our definition of murder and the duties of a sovereign judge to those subject to his judgment. I conclude that Aquinas’s understanding of murder is expansive enough to include the use of lethal force by public authorities when it proceeds from an act of judgment that disregards a presumption of innocence for the accused and her right to a fair trial.

Aquinas held that lying is always a sin, an evil action (ST II-II, Q110, A3). In later terminology it falls under what would be called an intrinsically evil action. Under no circumstances can it be a good action. Following Augustine, Aquinas held that even if others must die, one must still never tell a lie (ST II-II, Q110, A3, ad 4, DM Q15, A1, ad 5). Yet when it comes to self-defense and capital punishment Aquinas’s reasoning seems at odds with itself. One may kill a man in self-defense (ST II-II, Q64, A7). Similarly, just as a diseased limb may be cut off for the sake of the good of the whole, so too may an evildoer who is dangerous to the community be killed for the sake of the good of the whole community (ST II-II, Q64, A2). Herein lies the tension: why does Aquinas hold that it is licit to kill in self-defense or in capital punishment on account of the common good, but that one may never tell a lie on account of the common good? I argue that Aquinas does indeed have a consistent account. Killing and lying are not analogous, despite the prima facie temptation to lump them together.

Thomists do not have a standard account of history as a discipline or of historical knowledge in general. Since Thomism is a tradition of thought derived in part from historical figures and their works, it is necessary for Thomists to be able to say how we know what we know about those figures and their works. In this paper, I analyze the notion of history both in its key contemporary senses and in how it was used by Aristotle and Aquinas. I show briefly how intellectual knowledge of the past is possible. Then, I argue that the Thomistic tradition implies a far wider notion of history than is generally recognized, history as study of the past in general, not a science in itself, but an aspect of other sciences. Finally, I indicate how this wider notion of history relates to the ordinary sense of history as an inquiry into the specifically human past and then how such an account fits within contemporary Thomism.

This paper examines Thomas Aquinas’s condemnation of usury. In the first section, the details of Thomas’s teaching are examined with special attention to the so-called “extrinsic titles” discussed in the Middle Ages as qualifications of the moral and legal strictures concerning moneylending. The reminder of the paper examines the particular extrinsic title of Lucrum Cessans (compensation for lost profit), which Thomas rejects, and attempts to square that rejection with other texts implying that compensation for lost profit is a requirement of justice when taken outside the context of moneylending. The paper concludes with some possible modern applications of Thomas’s position.

Anscombe argues in “Modern Moral Philosophy” that obligation and moral terms only have meaning in the context of a divine Lawgiver, whereas terms like ‘unjust’ have clear meaning without any such context and, in at least some cases, are incontrovertibly accurate descriptions. Because the context needed for moral-terms to have meaning does not generally obtain in modern moral philosophy, she argues that we should abandon the language of obligation, adopting instead the yet clear and meaningful language of injustice. She argues further that we should develop an account of human flourishing to answer the question why we need to be just. The essay contends that Aquinas has an account of obligation that requires neither a god nor an account of human flourishing, and that proceeds immediately from the common apprehension of justice Anscombe noted.

Hans Bernhard Schmid has argued that contemporary theories of collective action and social metaphysics unnecessarily reject the concept of a “shared intentional state.” I will argue that three neo-Thomist philosophers, Jacques Maritain, Charles de Koninck, and Yves Simon, all seem to agree that the goals of certain kinds of collective agency cannot be analyzed merely in terms of intentional states of individuals. This was prompted by a controversy over the nature of the “common good,” in response to a perceived threat from “personalist” theories of political life. Common goods, as these three authors analyze them, ground our collective action in pursuit of certain kinds of goals which are immanent to social activity itself. Their analysis can support an alternate position to “intentional individualism,” providing an account of collective practical reasoning and social metaphysics based on shared intentional states, but without involving implausible “group minds.”