Reading Finnis and Aquinas on Justice as the Evaluative Standard for Positive Law

Abstract

Justice is known to be an emblematic legal-philosophical criterion that forms part of the evaluative point of law for several prominent authors (such as Robert Alexy and Gustav Radbruch) who advocate that the nature of law is dual, namely, that law has at the same time an evaluative and descriptive nature. John Finnis, a proponent of a contemporary natural-law theory of law who supports a maximalist or full-range approach regarding the aspects of human good, acknowledges the legal importance of the requirement for justice. However, Finnis seems to conceptualize justice as a subset of what he deems the main evaluative standard within the nature of law—practical reasonableness. In this article, I argue that Finnis’s account of law and justice may be fruitfully upgraded by an emphasis on Thomas Aquinas’s texts that highlight the virtue of justice and its object, the juridical phenomenon (ius), as the central evaluative standard and the ideal end of positive law. I also show how a greater emphasis on justice is ultimately compatible with the role of practical reasonableness in explaining the nature of law.