Christian Economic Ethics: History and Implications

9 The Medieval Period

9 The Medieval Period Thomas Aquinas on Four Economic Issues Thomas Aquinas applies the natural law analysis to four major economic issues: personal ownership of property, the just price to charge for anything bought or sold, slavery, and the charging of interest when lending money (usury). We will examine these issues in this chapter and then in the next will investigate how Christian teaching about two of these (slavery and usury) changed in later centuries. These provide a model for the development of moral doctrine that will be helpful in considering, at the end of this volume, whether and how any other economic teachings should change in the twenty-first century. Property ownership Whether it is lawf Whether it is lawful f ul for a man to possess a thing as his own? or a man to possess a thing as his own? Two things are competent to man in respect of exterior things. One is the power to procure and dispense them, and in this regard it is lawful for man to possess property. Moreover this is necessary to human life for three reasons. First because every man is more careful to procure what is for himself alone than that which is common to many or to all: since each one would shirk the labor and leave to another that which concerns the community, as happens where there is a great number of servants. Secondly, because human affairs are conducted in more orderly fashion if each man is charged with taking care of some particular thing himself, whereas there would be confusion if everyone had to look after any one thing indeterminately. Thirdly, because a more peaceful state is ensured to man if each one is contented with his own. Hence it is to be observed 139 that quarrels arise more frequently where there is no division of the things possessed. Thomas Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 66, a. 2 Thomas approaches the question of the ownership of property (i.e., “external” things, like tools, clothing, animals, houses, or land) in a very practical manner. He endorses the notion that individuals can and should own property, though we should recall that in Thomas’s day those “individuals” were almost always males, who owned all the property of their family, a much more hierarchical and much less widely distributed kind of property than we take for granted today. Nonetheless, the reasons Thomas gives for why personal ownership is moral are what we today might call “economic efficiency” reasons. He says, first, that people are more likely to put in the effort to create or purchase things (“procuring” them) if they are themselves going to own them than if ownership were going to be in common among all. Second, owners are far more likely to take care of their own property than are people who use common property. Third, there is a great advantage to knowing who will decide on the use of each thing (“dispensing” it), and with personal property ownership, it is the owner who makes that decision. This avoids any disputes about who should decide on who gets to use what. To take a contemporary example, we might ask what life would be like if all the students in a college residence hall who own a car transferred ownership to the group of all students who live there, a kind of common ownership, so no one had more claim on any one car than anyone else. In Thomas’s account, far fewer students would be inclined to buy a car. Second, when it was time for the oil to be changed in that blue Toyota, no one may step forward to see that it is done. And third, on Saturday evening, when many students might want to use one of the cars to go to a movie, without individual ownership there could be both confusion and even quarrels about who gets to use the final car left in the parking lot when two or three different groups arrive at the same time to use it. Thus Thomas endorses the ownership of property by individuals, and he sounds, at least in the paragraph just quoted, as if he supports the individualistic view of personal ownership that typifies our culture today, the sort that says “it’s mine and I can do whatever I want with it.” However, this is not the full story, as he continues: 140 | Christian Economic Ethics [18.117.196.184] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...