Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective by Jean Porter (review)

Porter describes her book as "a study of the virtue of justice as Aquinas presents it in the Summa theologiae, developed in such a way as to bring out the contemporary significance of his account" (x). Porter does not attempt to summarize in any way what Aquinas says about justice in his other extensive writings. She thinks "that Aquinas's overall account of justice and the virtues is the true theory of morality" but will not attempt to prove this statement conclusively in her book (ibid.). She does make clear that she "will offer a constructive expansion of Aquinas's views on justice . . . developing Aquinas's theory in some way, rather than simply interpreting what he says" (6). In other words, readers should be aware that she may depart from Aquinas's account of justice or add new things to it.

The remaining parts of chapter 1 focus on the basics of the Thomistic presentation of justice. Justice is a personal virtue of individuals rather than a characteristic of society's basic institutions. It is a perfection of the will, the most excellent of the moral virtues, but inferior to the supernatural virtue of charity. For Aquinas, "the will is perfected through right relations to others" (27). In order to understand justice as a virtue, we need to understand the fundamentals of Aquinas's understanding of virtue. Porter notes that Aquinas begins his analysis with Peter Lombard's definition of virtue, which was, in turn, drawn from Augustine's writings: "Virtue is a good quality of the mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God brings about in us, without us" (18, quoting STh I-II, q. 55, a. 4, which is quoting II Sent., d. 27, q. 5). The last part of the definition only applies to the infused virtues. The word "quality" in the definition refers to a habit or stable disposition inclining a person to do the right thing. Porter also makes her readers aware of the complexity of justice by distinguishing different kinds of justice: general, or legal, justice and particular justice, which is subdivided into distributive and commutative justice. To put justice into practice, a person will always need prudence, she adds with emphasis. More examples of these three kinds of justice and a more discernible order of the book's five chapters in relation to each other would have helped Porter's readers.

Already in the second paragraph of chapter 1, Porter notes correctly that Aquinas's treatment of justice as a virtue and a perfection of the will is totally foreign to the theories of justice expounded by John Rawls and his interlocutors. Porter rightly sees that Rawls's "theory of justice . . . proposes an account of the ways in which institutions ought to operate, which kinds of structural arrangements are acceptable, and which kinds of outcomes are acceptable, given basic criteria of fairness and respect" (2). Although Porter says that "Aquinas gets justice right," she immediately adds that "he does not raise, much less address, questions pertaining to social and institutional structures that are central to most contemporary theories of justice" (5). Despite her great appreciation of Aquinas's thought on the virtue of justice, she never says that Rawls and his interlocutors should draw upon Aquinas in order to raise questions pertaining to the practice of the virtues by individuals responsible for the reform of institutions and structures.

The constraints of a short review will not allow me to deal thoroughly with the main points of chapters 2 through 5. In the remainder of this review, after briefly mentioning a few insightful points made in these four chapters, I will focus on Porter's nonacceptance of Aquinas's way of evaluating the morality of the human act. In sum, she thinks that his analysis leads to more prohibitions than are acceptable today.

In chapter 2, Porter directs...