What is Justice?

Human Nature, Ius, and the Foundations of Rights

Our public discourse is replete with appeals to, arguments about, and declarations of injustice—but rarely do we stop to ask the more basic question: what is justice?

Unsurprisingly, the classical tradition provides robust answers. Classical thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas defined justice as “to render to each what is due.” But what exactly are humans due? At a practical level, it can take many forms. The injured is due compensation. The criminal is due punishment. The contracting party is due what they bargained for.

But what are humans due at a more basic level—prior to any interpersonal transaction or wrongdoing? The answer lies in man’s nature and the end of the human person. What, then, is due to rational, social, theomorphic beings? As discussed in the previous post, human beings are ordered towards flourishing, which is composed of participation in basic, intrinsic goods, including life, virtue, justice, excellence, friendship, and ultimately God. And flourishing requires rational self-direction. Accordingly, humans are due the freedom to exercise reason and act according to their will, free from coercion.

This echoes the natural rights principles articulated by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and American statesmen like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but it is rooted in the classical tradition of ius (sometimes spelled jus). “The true, strict and proper meaning” of ius, according to the classical jurist Francisco Suarez in De Legibus, is “a kind of moral power which every man has, either over his own property or with respect to what is due to him.” Hugo Grotius, a Protestant natural law thinker and contemporary of Suarez, defined ius as “a moral quality of a person, making it possible to have or to do something correctly.”

So in the classical tradition, ius is the moral entitlement to a zone of freedom that individuals have over their person, acts, and property. It provides human beings with the necessary space to engage in human action and pursue flourishing. Not only is this a practical necessity for flourishing, but this freedom reflects the imago dei. Our very nature entitles us to be treated as rational actors, not objects at the mercy of the whims and wills of others. But justice bounds that zone of freedom, requiring that we respect the equal ius of others.

Justice, then, requires that each individual be afforded ius, a protected sphere of freedom over their person, acts, and property, to act according to reason and pursue the Good. Thus, to participate in the good of justice and flourish, we must not only enjoy ius ourselves, but also respect and protect the ius of others.

Unlike modern liberal, progressive, and Marxist conceptions of justice that center on redistribution, material equality, and celebration of disordered lifestyles, ius grounds justice and by extension freedom in our moral nature and orders it toward the transcendent.

Libertas et lux