Is it Thursday already?
A few weeks of Mondays ago, we were asked to prepare a briefing sheet on
areas of potential differences with a potential new member of CESJ’s advisory
board, the Board of Counselors, with whom we met shortly after. (Happy ending: the potential new member
became a member, so any differences were straightened out.)
The bottom line was that there were no differences, just
some areas that needed clarification and tightening up — such as “distributive
justice.” The position taken by the new
member of the advisory board explained the virtue of distributive justice as it
pertained to politics . . . but not to economics.
Fortunately, this was very easy to address. The Compendium
of the Social Doctrine of the Church (the new member is a Catholic priest,
so it’s appropriate to cite Catholic sources) mentions distributive justice
only once, but that’s all that’s needed.
It states, “The Church’s social Magisterium constantly calls for the
most classical forms of justice to be respected: commutative, distributive and
legal justice [Cf. Catechism of the
Catholic Church, 2411.].”
The fact that the Compendium
cites the Catechism of the Catholic
Church and specifically states that it is “the classical forms of justice” that are to be respected is
significant. The Catechism is unclear on this point, bringing in need as relating to
distributive justice, which is only the case (and then very loosely) in extreme
cases under the principle of double effect (Rerum
Novarum, § 22).
The “classical form” of distributive justice, as Aquinas
made clear in his commentary on the Nicomachean
Ethics of Aristotle, has nothing to do with distribution on the basis of
need. That was an invention of Msgr.
John A. Ryan in A Living Wage (1906)
and Distributive Justice (1916), both
of which reinterpreted traditional Catholic social teaching and Aristotelian
philosophy in a way that, to all intents and purposes, constituted the
invention of a new religion under the name of Christianity. As G.K. Chesterton explained in Saint Francis of Assisi (1923):
“St.
Francis was so great and original a man that he had something in him of what
makes the founder of a religion. Many of his followers were more or less ready,
in their hearts, to treat him as the founder of a religion. They were willing
to let the Franciscan spirit escape from Christendom as the Christian spirit
had escaped from Israel. They were willing to let it eclipse Christendom as the
Christian spirit had eclipsed Israel. Francis, the fire that ran through the
roads of Italy, was to be the beginning of a conflagration in which the old
Christian civilization was to be consumed.” (G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi. New York: Image
Books, 1957, 175.)
And what is the “classical form” of distributive
justice? It’s a very simple concept:
distributive justice operates when a participant in a common endeavor receives
the results (outputs) of that endeavor in strict proportion to the relative
objective value of his or her contribution to the endeavor (inputs). This
conforms to the principles of Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy.