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The Virtue of Justice and the Justice of Institutions: Aquinas on

Money and Just Exchange

Ryan Darr

ABSTRACT: Justice, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a personal virtue. Modern the­ orists, by contrast, generally treat justice as a virtue of social institutions. Jean Porter rightly argues that both perspectives are necessary. But how should we conceive the relationship between the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions? I address this question by drawing from Aquinas’s account of the role of the convention of money in mediating relations of just exchange. Developing Aquinas’s account, I defend two conclusions and raise one problem. The conclusions are: (1) Aquinas does presuppose the need for just institutions in just relations; (2) Aquinas highlights the importance of an underappreciated consideration: the way institutions mediate just or unjust re­ lationships. The problem, which naturally arises from bringing together the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions, is whether and how individuals can act justly in a context of structural injustice.

INTRODUCTION

J USTICE, LIKE NEARLY EVERY MORAL TOPIC, is the subject of protracted disagreements. Yet disagreements about justice, unlike disagreements about most other moral topics, are not only about its nature and justification or its

concrete application. Disagreements about justice are often also disagreements about the subject to which it is to be attributed. Though ethicists disagree, for example, about the nature, justification, and application of courage, they agree that courage is a quality of human beings. No such consensus can be found when it comes to justice. According to the dominant modern view, which is found most importantly in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, justice is, in Rawls’s famous

Ryan Darr is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Philosophy of Religion at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, 304 Louis Marx Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544; ryanmdarrtibgmail. com

©Journal ofthe Society of Christian Ethics 40, no. 1 (2020) doi: 10.5840/jsce202051925

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phrase, “the first virtue of social institutions.”1 For Rawls and many who have written in his wake, justice and injustice are primarily qualities of institutions. One also commonly encounters the idea that justice and injustice are qualities of states of affairs. The extreme economic inequality of contemporary society, for example, is often called unjust. In this sort of usage, justice and injustice are attributed not first to institutions but to the outcomes that institutions and policies create. According to a third alternative, which has a long historical pedigree, justice and injustice are attributes of individual agents. Justice, on this view, is a personal virtue.

Among those who treat justice as a personal virtue is Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, synthesizing a number of philosophical and theological sources, the virtue of justice is “the perpetual and constant will to render to each one his right.”2 In her recent book, Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective, Jean Porter begins by distinguishing Aquinas’s theory of justice as a personal virtue from the dominant contemporary view of justice as a virtue of social institutions. She goes on to defend the superiority of the Thomistic view. “Aquinas,” she writes, “gets justice right.”3 Yet in her conclusion, Porter is more irenic than we might have expected. We need the Thomistic approach, she maintains, but we need the modern approach as well:

The personal virtue ofjustice cannot simply be equated with justice as embodied in social arrangements, and yet the term “justice” is not simply used equivocally in these contexts, either. . . . [E]ach of these ways of thinking about justice captures some aspects of this comprehensive ideal in a way that the other does not. . . . Aquinas’ account ofjustice and contemporary theories ofjustice thus represent two distinct, yet potentially complementary, ways of thinking about this complex moral and social ideal. We have good reasons to try to bring these perspectives together.4

Porter, I think, is right that those who defend a Thomistic view of justice ought not to abandon the insights of modern theories of justice. Yet Porter says very

'The earliest version of this paper was written many years ago as a seminar paper for Jean Porter. I am grateful to her for her guidance and encouragement to pursue the project, even if has gone in directions unforeseeable at the time. I would also like to thank Jennifer Herdt, John Bowlin, Andrew Forsyth, Graedon Zorzi, Mark Ryan, and the reviewers and editors of JSCE for their insightful comments and suggestions.

John Rawls, A TJjeory ofjustice, Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 3.

2Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benziger Bros., 1947), II-II.58.1).

3Jean Porter, Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 5.

Tbid., 270, 272.

THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS 5

little about the relationship between the justice of persons and the justice of institutions. The two uses of “justice” are not equivocal. How, then, do they relate? And does taking both seriously require us to think differently about either?

In this essay, I aim to make some progress toward answering these questions from Aquinas’s own writings. Aquinas, of course, lacks the category of an institu­ tion in the modern sense. He does, however, employ a related category, namely, that of a convention. For Aquinas, convention plays a key role in specifying the largely indeterminate principles of the natural law—including, as Porter notes, the mutual obligations of justice. For this reason, Aquinas’s treatment of convention is directly relevant to a consideration of institutions and institutional justice.

The Thomistic convention I consider in this essay is money. I am choosing money for two reasons. First, money is particularly relevant to commutative justice, the species of justice that Aquinas treats at greatest length and considers most relevant to those who are not rulers. Indeed, Porter argues that commutative justice, for Aquinas, is “paradigmatically identified with buying and selling” and extended “to include every kind of interaction between individuals through an expansive interpretation of exchange.”5 Second, Aquinas says quite a bit about the purpose and proper uses of money, providing important insight into how he thinks about the role of convention in mediating just relationships.6

By analyzing Aquinas’s treatment of money as a convention that plays a cru­ cial role in relations of just exchange, I seek to draw out implicit insights about the relationship between the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions. I first provide an interpretation of Aquinas’s understanding of money. While my interpretation is indebted at many points to other scholars, I put a greater em­ phasis on the fact that money is a convention, an emphasis that has important implications for the logic of the argument. I then turn to a constructive devel­ opment of Aquinas’s position in which I argue for two conclusions and raise one problem. The first conclusion is that Aquinas does grant what we would call social institutions an important role in his account of justice. The question of institutional justice may be modern, but it is not entirely foreign to Aquinas. By pressing this question, we are developing what is already implicit. The second conclusion is that Aquinas offers valuable insight into the question of institutional justice by calling attention to the key role of institutions in mediating just or

5Ibid., 47. 6One might wonder why I am not instead choosing civil law. Aquinas says, after all,

that civil laws can be just and unjust. Is this not an explicit attribution of justice to an institution? On my understanding, it is not. A law, on Aquinas’s famous definition, is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated” (Summa Theologiae, I-II.90.4). A civil law, then, is not an institution but an act by the civil authority. Of course, the act is only possible given the existence of civil institutions. Nonetheless, money is a more direct route to addressing the question of this paper.

6 RYAN DARR

unjust relationships—what I will call the commutative function of institutions. Finally, I consider a problem that arises when we take seriously both the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions, namely, the problem of whether and how one can act justly in a context of institutional or structural injustice. This problem, I argue, is especially acute when justice is conceived as a virtue of both individuals and institutions.

Before turning to the argument, let me say a word about my use of Aqui­ nas. I find Aquinas’s account of justice, especially as it has been developed by Porter, both compelling and insufficient. This essay grows out of an effort to put modern questions to the Thomistic account. How are we to understand institutional justice? How are we to address the problem of structural injustice? I am convinced that the viability of the Thomistic account of justice depends upon its ability to answer these questions. This essay uses Aquinas’s treatment of money as a way to open up the possibility of broadly Thomistic answers. It is, in this sense, experimental. I am drawing from Aquinas to say what he did not and perhaps could not say.

I. AQUINAS ON MONEY, USURY, AND JUST EXCHANGE

Aquinas’s most extensive discussion of money and exchange occurs in the treatise on justice in the Summa Theologiae. Let me briefly situate the relevant questions. The treatise begins with a general account of justice, the virtue that concerns relationships with others. The object of justice is the right (jus), which is “a work that is adjusted to another person according to some kind of equality.”7 Aquinas distinguishes between two ways in which something can be adjusted to another equally. In some cases, equality is established by nature; in others, it is established either by the private agreement of two parties or by the common consent of all.8 The former are cases of natural right; the latter, of positive right.

The virtue ofjustice is the habit by which one renders to others the right and thus preserves equality and right relation. In contrast to other virtues, Aquinas says, the virtue of justice concerns external relations and thus is essentially to­ ward another.9 It can be divided between general justice and particular justice. The former directs the agent immediately to the common good, and the latter directs the agent in relation to other individuals.10 Particular justice, in turn, can be divided into two species: distributive justice, which concerns the distribution of public goods and is proper to the one who has care of the community; and commutative justice, which concerns relations between private individuals.11 A large portion of the treatise on justice treats sins against commutative justice. In

7Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II.57.2. 8Ibid. 9Ibid., II-II.58.2. “Ibid., II-II.58.7. “Ibid., II-II.61.1.

THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS 7

this context, Aquinas addresses sins that occur in buying, selling, and lending. His treatment of lending provides the greatest insight into his understanding of the role of money in commutative justice.

Aquinas considers usury, which includes all lending at interest, unjust. His central argument is that usury is equivalent to charging for nothing. The argument begins with a distinction between two types of goods. The first type is goods “the use of which consists in their consumption.”12 Goods of this type, such as wheat and wine, cannot be used without being consumed. For this reason, the use of these goods cannot be granted without their ownership being transferred. To charge for both ownership and use would be to demand “double payment.” The second type is goods “the use of which does not consist in their consumption.”13 His example here is a house; one can charge a tenant for the use of a house with­ out transferring ownership because use can be meaningfully differentiated from consumption. Money, according to Aquinas, falls in the former category: “the proper and principal use of money is its consumption or alienation whereby it is sunk in exchange.”14 In exchange, money is consumed. Thus, to charge for the use of money would be an injustice comparable to charging for the use of food.

This argument may appear to presuppose a particular picture of the nature of money.15 Aquinas, along with the scholastics more generally, has often been criticized for misunderstanding the nature of money. This common reading of Aquinas is mistaken. He repeatedly reminds his reader that money is a convention. Justice in exchanges involving money is positive justice, not natural justice. The importance of this point is not that positive justice is any less significant than natural justice but that the grounds of equality are different. Usury, as a misuse of money, is a misuse of a convention.

According to Aquinas, money was created for a very specific purpose, a purpose he draws in part from Aristotle.16 Money was “invented by the art of man, for the convenience of exchange, and as a measure of things salable.”17 Aquinas repeatedly cites the reasons behind the convention. In this sense, he

12Ibid., II-II.78.1. 13Ibid. 14Ibid. 15While I have learned a great deal from the classic works of John Noonan and Odd

Langholm, I am partially departing from them by insisting that the fact that money is conventional is crucial to the structure of the argument. See Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury according to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200—1350 {New York: Brill, 1992).

16Aristotle’s writings on money gave rise to more than one possible interpretation. For Aquinas’s place among the options, see Andre Lapidus, “Metal, Money, and the Prince: John Buriden and Nicolas Oresme after Thomas Aquinas,” History of Political Economy 29, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 21-53.

llSumma Theologiae, I-II.2.1.

RYAN DARR

treats money the same way he treats private property Private property is not a natural institution.18 It is a convention that “arose from human agreement.” It is not established by nature but is “an addition thereto devised by human reason” in order to facilitate the distribution and care of goods.19 Money, too, functions in Aquinas’s thought as a rational addition to nature founded by human agree­ ment. It is established “by reason, not by nature.”20 Moreover, just as private property cannot be made absolute without contradicting its rational purpose, so too money cannot be lent at interest without contradicting its rational purpose.

We see the importance of the conventionality of money when Aquinas recog­ nizes that other goods can serve the monetary function as well. He acknowledges, for example, that a silver vase, though meant for use, can be sunk in exchange. In such a case, he simply treats the vase as money and prohibits lending at interest.21 Likewise, he accepts the practice of lending at interest a b pomparn in which money is borrowed for the purpose of display. In this practice, money does not serve the monetary function and thus can licitly be rented.22 We see, then, that Aquinas is not concerned with the nature of money itself but with the preservation of a particular social practice of commensuration. The primary rational function of money is its role in the practice of commensuration. A silver vase may at times hold this function; money may at times be used for other purposes. What matters is that the monetary function is preserved, which, for Aquinas, is only possible when nothing serving this function is rented.

Insisting on the conventional status of money may seem to raise a puzzle. How can usury be a violation of positive right in cases in which the usurious lending is voluntarily agreed upon by both parties? After all, positive right can be established by private agreement. The answer is that the convention of money is established not by private agreement but by common consent. The agreement of two parties alone is not the standard of equality in this case. Still, one might ask: can the consent of an entire community render usury unjust? This question must be taken seriously, and I return to it below. For the moment, however, it is important to see that conventions, for Aquinas, are not arbitrary or the product of mere whim. Conventions are necessary to specify many things left indeter­ minate by nature.23 Specification occurs through human law but also through agreement and custom. The latter are indispensable. Indeed, custom, Aquinas says, “has the force of a law, abolishes law, and is the interpreter of law.”24 And

18Ibid., II-II.66.1-2. 19Ibid., II-II.66.2adl. 20Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Richard Regan (Indianapolis:

Hackett, 2007), 1.7. llSumma Theologiae, II-II.78.Iad6. 22Ibid. 23Ibid., I-II.91.3. 24Ibid., I-II.97.3.

THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS 9

custom, like law, must be measured by the standard of reason. The common consent that determines the purpose of money, then, is not arbitrary consent but consent to a rational function that money plays in human relationships. As Aquinas says, there would be no

equality of passion in voluntary commutations, were one always to exchange one’s chattel for another man’s, because it might happen that the other man’s chattel is much greater than our own: so that it becomes necessary to equalize passion and action in commutations according to a certain proportionate commensuration, for which purpose money was invented.25

Money is not an arbitrary convention but one established by reason to facilitate the exchanges necessary to meet human need.

One might still object that usury does not prevent money from facilitating exchange. This is true in principle, though, as Christopher Franks has persuasively argued, we must recognize that Aquinas understands economic activity to be situated within a larger natural order. According to Franks, the key to under­ standing Aquinas’s economic work lies in recognizing humanity’s “dependence on a purposive order in which they participate but whose full contours exceed their grasp.”26 The usury prohibition, he argues, is unintelligible apart from an understanding of nature as divinely ordered to human provision. Franks writes:

justice in economic exchange requires keeping nominal wealth (money val­ ues) tied relatively closely to real wealth (actual goods and productive human activities), and doing so requires that exchanges fit within the cycle of nature’s provisions through which God cares for creatures in general and humans in particular.27

Franks helps us see that Aquinas’s understanding of the rational function of money is part of a much broader understanding of the natural order of creation: “human purposes do not form the first condition for economic reflection, but rather exist within a comprehensive divine order that exceeds and circumscribes them.”28 Justice in exchange, then, requires not only that both parties benefit but also that monetary practices are properly situated within the created order. Aquinas’s understanding of this larger purposive order accounts for his belief

25Ibid., II-II.61.4. 26Christopher Franks, “The Usury Prohibition and the Natural Law: A Reappraisal,”

The Thomist72 (2008): 627. 27Ibid. This argument is developed at greater length in Christopher Franks, He Became

Poor: The Poverty of Christ and Aquinas’ Economic Teachings (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009).

28Franks, “The Usury Prohibition and the Natural Law,” 645.

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in the natural commensurability between goods directed to the satisfaction of human need.

There are, of course, many reasons one might disagree with Aquinas’s un­ derstanding of the natural order. Yet the idea that economic exchange ought, in some fundamental sense, to be situated in the larger natural order continues to be persuasive, especially in light of the destruction caused by the ways in which the current human economy refuses to operate within the natural ecological order. The ecological crisis belies the rationality of contemporary economic practices, and many are calling for a reintegration of the human economy into the natural order.29

What, then, is the problem with usury? It is not the multiplication of money, nor even increase of wealth without labor, but the lack of correspondence between usurious gain and natural wealth. As his discussion of societas demonstrates, Aquinas sees no problem with an investor lending money to a business person and sharing profits and losses.30 He does not object to borrowing for business purposes as long as the returns to the lender are tied directly to the success or failure of the enterprise. The problem with usury is that the borrower is forced to pay back interest on top of the principle even if no real wealth is gained. The usurer’s profits in such cases come not from the provision of nature but from the resources of the borrower. Usury is presumptive insofar as it assumes that natural wealth will be generated and thus dislodges monetary wealth from natural wealth.

We have followed Franks in order to see the larger natural order within which the convention of money must operate in order to be rationally justifiable. But let us not forget my basic point, which is the importance of remembering that money is conventional. The logic of Aquinas’s argument is not from the nature of money—say, its sterility—to a logical conclusion that usury is unequal. It is closer to the reverse. As a convention, money is nothing other than its use. The nature of money, like the meaning of language, is determined by its use. For Aquinas, money can serve a rational function only when used in particular ways and not in others. The usury prohibition, then, is not derived from the nature of money. Rather, the usury prohibition is constitutive of money itself.

Recognizing this fact helps us see a further point, which will be important below. As a convention, the function of money is not determined by individual money users or in the context of individual exchanges. The function of money depends upon the practices of the community. Extending the logic of Aquinas’s

29Franks mentions Wendell Berry. See also Larry Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997); Herman Daly and John Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Of course the natural order is conceived differently by these contemporary authors, but the relationship imagined between human economy and natural order is analogous.

xSumma Theologiae, II-II.78.2ad5.

THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS 11

argument, we can say that in a community that embraces usury as a common practice, the function of money will change. Money will no longer mediate ex­ changes in which equality is defined by human need and money is subordinated to natural wealth. And importantly, this will be true even for individual money users who avoid usurious practices. Money will simply be a different convention serving a different social function.

II. THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS: TWO CONCLUSIONS

Let us return now to the central question of the relationship between the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions. What lessons or insights can we draw from Aquinas’s account of the role of the convention of money in just exchange? I will defend two conclusions. The first is that Aquinas’s understanding of just exchange does indeed presuppose a wider social practice that fits the modern notion of an institution. Rawls, who is representative on this point, defines an institution as “a public system of rules which defines offices and positions with their rights and duties, powers and immunities, and the like.”31 Many things, he says, can count as institutions: “games and rituals, trials and parliaments, mar­ kets and systems of property.”32 Justice, he notes, might apply to all institutions, though he limits his concern to the major institutions of society.33

It is no surprise to find Aquinas presupposing what Rawls calls social institu­ tions given the importance, which Aquinas fully recognizes, of human agreement and convention in specifying mutual obligations. Any virtue that concerns relationships will be inseparably bound to the conventions and institutions that structure those relationships. The importance of this first conclusion is twofold: (1) there are Thomistic grounds for thinking about institutional justice, even if we are pressing the point further than he did; (2) the exercise of the virtue of justice is closely bound with the existence of just institutions.

The second conclusion is that Aquinas offers a new lens through which to view the notion of institutional justice. Aquinas’s account of money, as I have interpreted it, ties the rationality of the convention to the common good through the communal practices by which nature’s provisions reach their destination in the satisfaction of human need. Thus money serves the common good by allow­ ing new forms of exchange between individuals. While the full account of the rationality of money must refer to the common good, the actual function of the convention is found in the relationships it makes possible. Money, in this sense, is no different from any other institutions. All institutions mediate relationships

31Rawls, Theory of Justice, 47. 32Ibid., 48. "Ibid., 6.

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between persons. Aquinas helps us to see the importance of this point for the question of institutional justice.

Contemporary approaches to justice have most often focused on the dis­ tributive function of institutions. Aquinas has little to say about this because he thinks of distributive justice as a virtue of those with care of the community. Yet when it comes to the commutative function of institutions—the way in which relationships between people are structured by social institutions—Aquinas has something important to contribute. Contemporary theorists focus much more on distribution, but why does distribution matter? Rawls defends his distributive principles on the grounds that individuals would choose them in the original position. But he also argues that the difference principle, by expressing particular concern for those with the fewest resources, is an expression of the democratic value of fraternity.34

Rawls is right to recognize that distribution matters in part because of the way it expresses relational commitment. It matters also, as Aquinas helps us see more clearly, because of the way it shapes relationships. Why is the growing in­ equality of wealth so troubling? Obviously it matters if it increases real poverty. Beyond this, the most important reason, in my view, is not that some get to consume much more than others. The most important reason is the way it creates relationships structured by unjust power in which the lower and middle classes are increasingly subject to the power of the owners of wealth and capital through employment and debt relations as well as through the latter’s grip on the powers of the state. Distributive justice is no doubt an essential aspect of institutional justice, but a fuller picture requires greater attention to the role of institutions in mediating just and unjust relations. Aquinas helps us develop a fuller picture.35

To make this more concrete, let us consider money and exchange in contem­ porary capitalist society. In our society, lending at interest is not only acceptable but integral to the functioning of the economy. If we judge contemporary mon­ etary practices by Aquinas’s account of the proper function of money, we cannot but conclude that the function of money is being systematically distorted. The conclusion is not that many individuals are guilty of usury but that money itself is no longer functioning to mediate exchanges of equality ordered to human need. And this seems exactly right in light of the history of capitalist finance. The

^Ibid., 90-91. 35A related point about the insufficiency of distribution has been raised by those advo­

cating for recognitional justice. While I agree about the importance of recognition, I do not think these theorists yet adequately expressed what I am calling the commutative function of institutions. Recognition, on the most common models, is still conceived as something to be justly distributed by society rather than realized in concrete relations. See, for example, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso Books, 2004).

THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS 13

cycle of booms and crashes repeats over and over again.36 The operations of the financial sector, to use only the most recent example, rapidly inflate the cost of real estate, only to cause a sudden drop. Homeowners are left with a portion of the value they paid for their homes, while the value of the mortgage loan remains unchanged. Money itself, the medium of exchange, can and does frequently redistribute natural wealth. Rather than preserving equality of exchange, money systematically distorts it.

What, then, are we to say about contemporary monetary practices? One conclusion would be to insist that money must be what Aquinas says that it ought to be and accuse contemporary capitalist society of institutional injustice. I think this conclusion is too quick. It fails to take seriously the conventional character of money. We must follow Aquinas in refusing to reify money, to treat it, as economists too often do, as if it has a timeless nature. Aquinas had good reasons to defend his view of money, some of which continue to be compelling. Yet the fact remains that contemporary money is not what Aquinas says money ought to be. Following Aquinas’s insight that money is conventional, we must accept that money in capitalist society is a different convention that serves a different, though not unrelated, set of purposes.

If we learn from Aquinas to treat contemporary money as a convention, what do we learn about justice in contemporary capitalism? The Thomistic analysis directs our attention to the relationships mediated by contemporary capitalist institutions. Capitalist institutions certainly do not mediate exchanges based on the value of goods as Aquinas understands it. Capitalism, however, is not without its own account of equality. On the dominant account, capitalist exchange does preserve equality because the value of goods is their price in open markets. As long as each party freely enters the transaction and could freely walk away if it were not to her benefit, equality is preserved. What should we say to this?

A just relation, as we have seen, is one in which parties render unto each other the right. Moreover, the right can be divided into natural and positive right. Monetary exchange, I have argued, is a matter of positive right, that is, equality determined by common consent. In this sense, contemporary capitalist exchange does seem to permit exchange in which each party renders to the other positive right. But it is important to see that a Thomistic approach cannot stop here. Just as Aquinas refuses to limit his assessment of individual exchanges to the interests of the parties alone, so we too must expand our vision and situate our assessment individual exchanges within the larger set of practices of capitalist production, exchange, and consumption. The question of whether individuals relate rightly in particular exchanges is inseparable from the question of how relationships are created and sustained by the wider set of capitalist institutions and practices.

36See Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth RogofF, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

14 RYAN DARR

When considering individual monetary exchanges, those of us formed by capitalist societies tend to react differently to different types of exchanges. On the one hand, we think that current monetary practices are often unjust and harmful. Predatory lending, for example, is rampant. Banks and other financial institutions are constantly coming under scrutiny for manipulative monetary schemes. When these practices are uncovered, many of us feel indignant and demand reform. On the other hand, when we consider ordinary loans or exchanges in which all important information is available and neither party is acting under duress, we tend to approve. What, after all, can be wrong with exchanges in which both parties benefit?

The argument implicit in this question is important, both due to its per­ suasiveness to our contemporaries and the historical role of a version of it in the works of John Calvin.37 Yet Aquinas helps us to see the flaw. Treating exchange as an isolated event fails to take account of the larger monetary and economic practices that structure the relationship of exchange. Aquinas teaches us to look not only to the good of the parties in the exchange but also to the relationship between the use of money and its broader social function. The fact that both parties benefit in lending for profit-seeking enterprises is not enough, from Aqui­ nas’s perspective, to justify the exchange. The question is what sort of practices must be sustained if money and its associated institutions are to mediate just relationships.

How can we bring this perspective to capitalist financial exchange? When it comes to this question, Karl Marx remains exemplary. Whatever the flaws in his analysis, he refuses to accept the picture of free and equal market exchange as the entire story of capitalism. Looking only at the marketplace, Marx observes, theorists tend to see “a very Eden of the innate right of man . . . , the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.”38 We see one person freely agree to exchange money for another’s labor-power. Each accepts the deal as advantageous and enters it freely. Yet, Marx insists, this is not the whole story. He invites us to follow the parties to the exchange away from the market and watch the change as “he who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as the capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker.”39 The market relation, for Marx, occurs only on the surface; the true nature of capitalist relations is found in production.

The point here is not the actual analysis but the refusal to limit the analy­ sis to the apparent freedom and equality of the marketplace. This move, I am

37On Calvin’s treatment of usury, see David W. Jones, Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of Differences that Separated the Protestant Reformers (Dallas, TX: University Press of America, 2004); Guenther Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvins Ethics (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997).

38Capital, Volume I (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 280. 39Ibid.

THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS 15

arguing, is necessary if we are to answer the question of how capitalist practices mediate just or unjust relations. Marx, with his unfortunate attempt to reduce all social phenomena to the economic, fails to see that the relationship between the capitalist and the worker depends not only on ownership and need but also laws and regulations as well as less formal cultural norms. Marx points us in the right direction, but he can only take us so far.

Let us pause and raise a potential puzzle about the argument so far. I have claimed that in evaluating the justice or injustice of conventions and institutions, one of the key questions we must ask is what kind of relationships they mediate. But there may appear to be a problem. Justice, for Aquinas, is the virtue by which one acts rightly in relation to others. Yet the criteria for right relationship depends upon the kind of relationship, and the kind of relationships depends upon the respective social roles of the parties to the relationship. In other words, the judg­ ment about what constitutes right relationship depends upon the institutions and their corresponding roles—spouse, senator, citizen, consumer. How then can we judge institutions to be unjust based on the relationships they mediate?

The puzzle is not as problematic as it first appears. It is true that judgments about right relationship depend upon the kind of relationship, which in turn depends upon institutions and their corresponding social roles. Yet, as we have seen, Aquinas judges roles and institutions as rational specifications added to nature. Conventions are not simply given by nature, but they are also not arbitrary. The rational justification for the institution defines the standards of judgment for right relationships. We can criticize an institution whose functioning fails to conform to its rational justification. We can also continually improve our grasp on the many social functions and relational implications of major social institutions, such as marriage, the university, or money.

The failure to realize its rational function is not the only reason to criticize an institution for the relationships it mediates. Consider again employment relations. There are reasons that workplaces are often hierarchically ordered, reasons that I think can be rationally defended by reference to their larger social function. Among those reasons is not to give superiors the power to sexually harass, co­ erce, or abuse subordinates. When the hierarchical employment relations permit such acts, we have to critically assess the relationships and the institutions that sustain them. If these issues occurred infrequently, the problem might be a few unjust superiors. But when we see widespread practices of sexual harassment, coercion, and abuse in hierarchical workplace relationships, we ought to suspect institutional injustice. Importantly, the existence of institutional injustice does not necessarily mean that the codified institutional rules are themselves formally unjust. The injustice may arise from the way in which the codified institutional rules interact with the informal norms, habits, and biases of those who inhabit the institutions. Even still, institutional injustice is occurring. As we have learned from Aquinas, a convention is not something other than its practice. Custom

16 RYAN DARR

is the interpreter of law.40 Informal norms, habits, and biases are not external to institutions. Cathleen Kaveny, drawing from Aquinas, has taught us to take into account the habits of a people in considering just laws.41 We can say the same about just institutions more generally.

III. THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND STRUCTURAL INJUSTICE: A PROBLEM

I have thus far defended two conclusions: (1) Aquinas’s account of justice as a virtue does presuppose the need for just social institutions; (2) Aquinas’s approach to evaluating social institutions helps us to see the importance of what I have called their commutative function. We come now to the problem, which arises from a more difficult question about the relationship between the virtue of jus­ tice and the justice of institutions, namely, the question of how to understand the exercise of the virtue of justice in a context of institutional injustice. When institutions are just, the exercise of the virtue of justice is rather straightforward: one ought to perform one’s obligations as they are specified by one’s role within the relevant social institution. When institutions are unjust, however, the exercise of the virtue of justice is much more complicated.

Though we can learn from Aquinas, he does not give us a straightforward answer to this question.42 Aquinas accepts that the social institutions of his day provided adequate norms and conventions for just relationships. Moreover, be­ cause he does not raise the question of institutional justice, he never explicitly considers the possibility that social institutions, with their corresponding roles and obligations, might be unjust. Yet if my argument thus far is correct, his position is at least in principle open to this possibility. When the possibility is realized, we have what can be called structural injustice, that is, injustice that occurs not by violation of the institutions of society but in and through their functioning.43 The question I now want to consider is whether and how we can act justly in a context of structural injustice.

We must first recognize that this question does not arise in the same form when we limit ourselves either to justice as a personal virtue or to justice as a virtue of institutions. If justice is treated only as a personal virtue, then the notion of

i0Summa Theologiae, I-II.92.3. 41 Cathleen Kaveny, Law’s Virtues: Fostering Autonomy and Solidarity in American Society

(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2012). 42Aquinas does discuss just response to unjust law and tyranny. As I noted above,

however, unjust law is not the right place to consider Aquinas on unjust institutions. See Aquinas, On Kingship, trans. Gerald B. Phelan, revised by I. Th. Eschmann, O.P. (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949).

43I am using the language of structural injustice rather than institutional injustice to align my language with the more common contemporary term for the phenomenon I am discussing. There are many ways to conceive of structural injustice, some of which differ from my own. I discuss this further below in relation to the work of Iris Marion Young.

THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS 17

structural injustice cannot explicitly arise. If, by contrast, justice is treated only as a virtue of social institutions, then the question of the justice or injustice of individual acts and agents does not occur. In the latter case, there are still questions of individual morality, but they are not posed in terms of justice. The individual moral questions are usually these: Who is responsible for the harms caused by structural injustice? Who is responsible for correcting the unjust institutions?

When we consider the virtue of justice in relation to structural injustice, we encounter the problem of how individuals are to act justly in a context of structural injustice.44 Part of the answer will surely be that individuals are to take responsibility for the harms afflicted by structural injustice and work to transform unjust institutions. In this sense, the answer will echo common mod­ ern conclusions. Yet I want to argue that taking seriously a broadly Thomistic approach to justice as a virtue in a context of structural injustice requires more than echoing modern conclusions. We can see this by comparing the perspec­ tive I am developing with that of one of the most important modern theorists individual morality and structural injustice, Iris Marion Young.

In her highly influential book, Responsibility for Justice, Young both defends and modifies the Rawlsian claim that justice is a virtue of institutions. Justice, she contends, concerns social structure, not individual action.45 At the same time, she argues that Rawls’s approach limits the subject of justice too much. The structures that are the subject of justice are not a part of society, as Rawls claims. Rather, they “involve, or become visible in, a certain way of looking at the whole society.”46 The structures that are the subject of justice appear when we look not at individual acts but at larger social patterns among people and the positions they occupy relative to one another. On this point, I am in full agreement with Young. The structures that matter are not formal institutions abstracted from society but social institutions as they function materially in their complex relationships with

44This problem is closely related to the problem of whether bearers of particular offices (usually political offices) are ever bound to act in ways that would ordinarily be considered wrong or unjust—often called “problem of dirty hands.” See, for example, Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy & Public Affairs (Winter 1973): 160-80. The problem of dirty hands is generally treated as a problem faced by bearers of particularly weighty offices. It arises when the duties that come with an office conflict with other duties. My argument here is meant to generalize the problem by noting that we all inhabit many different roles (which I use as a more widely applicable equivalent of “office”) as part of our participation in many different social institutions. When these institutions are unjust, problems that are analogous to the problems faced by political office holders can confront all of us. Thanks to a questioner and a reviewer for pushing me to clarify the relationship between my argument and the history of reflection on the responsibilities of office holders.

45Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 46Ibid., 70. Emphasis in original.

18 RYAN DARR

one another and with the informal norms, habits, and biases of those that inhabit them.47 But the agreement ends here.

Young’s sharp distinction between morality, which concerns individual action, and justice, which concerns social structure, results in two separate normative domains. Individual actions fall within both domains but in different ways. Con­ tributing to structural injustice does not make an action morally wrong because structure does not figure into individual morality. Consider, in Young’s example, a woman without access to adequate and affordable housing. Many people act in ways that contribute to her unjust situation, but none of them necessarily wrong her. Conversely, she may have been mistreated by a landlord. In the latter case, the landlord has committed a moral wrong but not an injustice. Judgments about justice and injustice are judgments about structures, which are the product of individual acts but not simply reducible to them. Judgments about morality are judgments about individual acts apart from their role in larger structural patterns. Young does think that contributing to structural injustice gives rise to an individual moral responsibility to correct the injustice, but the responsibility is not a result of any wrongdoing.

There is some obvious appeal to Young’s position. Yet if we take the Thom- istic virtue of justice seriously, we cannot reach her conclusions. There may be two independent objects of assessment—individual acts and institutions or structures—but there are not two independent normative perspectives. Both personal and structural justice concern relationships. If my actions are part of a larger pattern of social relations that systematically devalue, exclude, or harm others, then I am a participant in an unjust set of social relations. As Young rightly insists, social structures are not something independent of the agents and actions that constitute them.48 The structurally unjust relationships in which I stand are my relationships. By relating to others unjustly, I act unjustly. If we think of justice solely in terms of the distribution of benefits, harms, and opportunities, then Young’s account makes good sense. But if we take seriously that justice is the virtue by which individuals relate rightly to one another, then we must also see that individuals acting in structurally unjust contexts are, insofar as they perpetuate the structural injustice, acting in wrong relation with others—and therefore unjustly.

The problem of whether and how an individual can live justly in a context of structural injustice should now be clear. We can see this problem manifest in the discussion of money. If money systematically distorts equality of exchange,

47My way of conceiving structural injustice is similar to but not the same as Young’s. Young reserves the term for cases in which no responsible agent can be found. I use it for any case in which the material operation of institutions is unjust, including in cases in which the fault lies, for example, in the racialized habits and perceptions of a community. In such cases, many agents act wrongly but I still think the term structural injustice is appropriate.

48Young, Responsibility for Justice, 59-62.

THE VIRTUE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INSTITUTIONS 19

can any individual money user exchange justly? Likewise, we can ask, even apart from concerns about money, how individual consumers are to relate rightly to all of those involved in the production, transportation, and sale of their food, clothing, and other consumer goods. Similarly, I have elsewhere raised a related problem regarding justice in the context of climate change.49 The conventions that structure relations in many economically developed societies were built on the existence of cheap fossil fuels. As it becomes painfully clear that our heavy reliance on fossil fuels is unjust, we find ourselves struggling to imagine how we can act justly in relation to our neighbors, near and far. In each of these cases, the question occurs: when we inhabit structural injustice, is it possible to act rightly toward all of those to whom we are, in one way or another, related?

It is relatively clear that the answer, if we are to retain all of Aquinas’s rational and theological commitments, must be yes. Yet taking seriously the reality of structural injustice forces us to ask whether that answer is too quick, whether it too easily abstracts us from the thick and complex social world in which our actual relationships are found. The number of considerations that must inform an answer to this question go far beyond what can be addressed here. I will not try to offer a solution, though I have made a proposal elsewhere.50 All I want to achieve in this context is to show that the problem of individual participation in structural injustice takes a particular form when we take the Thomistic virtue of justice seriously. We can continue to ask the more common contemporary questions about who is responsible for the existence of structural injustice and its attendant harms. When the question is put in these terms, it may be, as Young argues, that individuals who did not create social institutions have done no wrongs. Yet we must also include the additional consideration of how we are relating to others in and through our participation in social institutions, a consideration that highlights how deeply enmeshed we are in the structural realities of our social world.

IV. CONCLUSION

Following Jean Porters suggestion, this essay has explored the relationship between a Thomistic account of the virtue of justice and the modern notion of justice as a virtue of institutions. Beginning from Aquinas’s treatment of money and just exchange, I have sought to highlight the internal connection between the Thomistic virtue of justice and social institutions. Drawing from but not strictly following Aquinas, I have defended two conclusions and raised one problem. The two conclusions are: (1) the Thomistic virtue of justice does indeed presuppose

49Ryan Darr, “Climate Change, Individual Obligations and the Virtue of Justice,” Studies in Christian Ethics 32, no. 3 (2019): 326-340.

50Ryan Darr, “Social Sin and Social Wrongs: Individual Responsibility in a Structur­ ally-Disordered World "Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 37, no. 2 (2017): 21-37.

20 RYAN DARR

the existence of social institutions; (2) the Thomistic approach provides valuable insight into institutional justice by highlighting the importance of what I have called the commutative function of institutions. The problem is that combining a virtue approach to justice with an account of institutional justice makes it difficult to see how individuals can act justly in contexts of structural injustice.

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