JUSTICE OR SOCIAL JUSTICE? BUILDING ON THE THOMISTIC PARADIGM

Abstract

Scholarly debate on the question of justice remains unabated, especially since medieval period when Thomas Aquinas devoted a great deal of space to the virtue of justice. Aquinas, despite his enormous effort, could not exhaust all the aspects of justice. On another note, the concept of social justice which is more or less, a recent effort by scholars to augment on Aquinas’ concept of justice, is equally subject to controversy. In fact, scholars are not in harmony as regards the nature, scope and function of social justice. For some, it is nothing else but merely another expression for legal justice. Others even equated the two. Still, others say that it comprises and/or signifies all that legal and distributive justice mean. And others again distinguish social justice from legal, distributive and commutative justice. Both distributive and contributive/legal justice, for some, are implied in the modern term: social justice, which some writers consider a separate type of justice. The above controversy compels this paper to adopt historical and comparative analysis, especially as regards the comparison between different aspects or species of justice; so as to contribute to the ongoing debate. In the end, this research agrees with Pope John Paul II that the world should overcome the rigid limitations of commutative justice, i.e., justice in its strict sense and embrace social justice which seeks to subordinate things to man, individual goods to the common good, and right to property to the right to life. This paper finally submits that the question of justice should be holistic, contextual, realistic, reasonable and above all, humanistic, fair and social.