Judge and Justice: St. Thomas Aquinas’ Considerations on the Relation between Virtue and Man

Abstract

The article aims at presenting some crucial Thomas’ ideas, espoused in his Summa theologiae, explaining how the judge should realize and preserve his justice. Justice, on the one hand, is one of the four cardinal virtues that together build up the moral skeleton of human beings and is understood as an individual person obliged to achieve moral perfection, and ultimately salvation. On the other hand, it is the virtue that governs the relations of that individual to the others, especially in the social life. The principal act performed by justice is a judgment, the sphere where it is realized is the court, and the main actor is the judge professionally nominated to form sentences – the judgments aiming at re-establishing social harmony violated by crimes committed by individual humans.

Therefore, to fulfill his task the judge must be above all a virtuous man. But the judge’s moral rightness can be endangered when justice realized in the court is in conflict with the judge’s own private opinion. The crucial example is the situation in which the judge is convinced that documents delivered by one side in the process are false, but at the same time they must be treated in court as true because the law says so. Thomas Aquinas was perfectly aware of the complexity and fragility of the question of the judge’s justice in such a case. Finally, he points out that the public character of the professional activity of the judge must prevail over his private opinions, and thus, Aquinas releases the judge from total moral responsibility for his sentences and shows the way in which his professional mistakes can be justified and cannot affect his moral perfection and consequent salvation.