Justice as a virtue.

So it's a habitus, which is to say it's also a perfection of the human person.

Virtues, Aquinas says over and over again, if you read through his disputed questions on the virtues

or anywhere else where he treats the virtues, he says that they make their possessors good and their work done well.

Right? So virtues enable you to do your work well and what is the work proper to a human being?

So that's what question you should bear in mind as I continue to reflect.

What does one mean by the work of a human being?

And they make you good, right? Now,

that's something that's familiar to you already, of course. Virtues make you good. So if we don't

think of justice typically these days as a virtue, what do we think of it as? And what do you think of justice as? What comes to mind when you think of it as and what do you think of justice as what comes to

mind when you think of justice I would suggest that for many of you you think

about law courts or you think about the federal government or the state

government or you think about other institutions and you might also think about

certain kinds of advocacy right as in the term social justice right but we

often don't think about justice as in the virtue of an individual right and

there's nothing wrong, of course,

with thinking about justice as attached to institutions.

And there's a philosophical account that I could give

for how we came to think of justice,

principally as attached to virtue.

Some of you, no doubt, have heard of John Rawls, a great American philosopher who argues that justice

is the principal virtue of institutions, right?

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