Aquinas on Justice
Must the just man be pleased by the performance thereof?
Thomas Aquinas argues, mirroring Aristotle's definition in Ethics V, that "justice is the habit according to which someone has a constant and perpetual will to render to each his right" (170). Clearly, Aquinas is enamored and in large agreement with The Philosopher. Summa Theologiae IIaIIae 58: “On Justice” is almost entirely an apologetic exercise in defense of Aristotle's conception of justice in which Aquinas reconciles his views with those of other Catholic theologians, such as Augustine.
Accordingly, Aquinas must bring aboard Aristotle's tripartite conception of the virtues: right reason, action, and emotion. That is, if justice is a virtue, then the just man must delight in acting justly. In fact, Aquinas says as much: "since 'a man is not just unless he takes pleasure in just actions'" (186).
This seems to me a stretch.
Would we really regard as unjust that man who acts justly?
After all, by Aquinas's lights, "the directing of our actions insofar as they tend towards external things belongs to justice" (186). Continuing, "other moral virtues [are] concerns with the passions" (186). If it is the passions that give rise to pain and pleasure—emotion—and that the passions are not the proper domain of justice but the other virtues, and justice's object is external actions, then it seems to me that the just-acting man should be afforded the title of the just man. (Though such a man is not rightly called the virtuous man—who is also just—and is delighted by behaving justly.)
Aquinas takes up the relationship between justice and the passions in articulus 9. He concludes that "just has to do with actions [as distinct from passions]." He says forthrightly that "justice is not concerned with the passions, which are in the irascible and concupiscible appetites'' (185). So, if "the subject [i.e. the 'seat'] of justice... is the will," how can justice be properly understood as a virtue, which are concerned with the passions?
It seems to me that Aquinas is in a sticky situation in maintaining that Justice must be understood as an Aristotelian virtue and, at the same time, it does not pertain to the passions or appetites.