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visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org. What is justice? You'll find justice described in the

tradition in various ways. A lot of authors that I read will cite the definition of Olpian,

a Roman jurist, and then they'll elaborate on the basis

of that definition.

So what you get from St. Thomas Aquinas is this.

They'll call justice, he'll call justice, a habit whereby one renders to another his due, with

a constant and perpetual will.

So let's just identify the salient features of that definition and give each of them a word of explanation.

So justice is a habit. For those of you who think in terms of Aristotelian categories, a habit is an accident.

All right, so you've got substances, which are, for lack of a better description, the things, and then you've

got the accidents, which are those further elements or further features which fill out the things.

Okay, so a habit is what fills out the thing.

The thing is a human being, and the habit is a kind of quality.

So various kinds of qualities on offer. Knowledge is a quality. You can be more

or less knowing. You can be qualified in that way. But habit is also a quality. You can be more or

less effectively disposed towards this type of activity or that type of activity. So a habit is a kind of

quality of our spirit, a quality of our humanity, whereby we act in a particular way with a kind of firmness or stability, freedom, liberty, however you want to describe it.

But basically, you can think about this concretely in terms of like temperance, for instance.

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