Law and Ethics: Twelfth-Century Jurists on the Virtue of Justice

Abstract

This article examines the reflections of twelfth-century canon and civil lawyers on justice as a moral virtue and demonstrates their influence on moral theology. The canonists were among the first to recognize natural virtues and contributed to moral thought in this respect. However, their increasing insistence on the divine aspects of natural justice and law deprived these concepts of their religiously neutral character. Civil lawyers generally devoted more attention to virtue ethics than the canonists; some of them even cherished ideas which interfered with the foundations of contemporary moral thought. Many of them recognized the divine origin of justice, but tended to confine this virtue within the boundaries of human law, ruling out the possibility of testing the law against moral standards. Only Martin Gosia and his school maximized the difference between divinely inspired justice and human law, thus making it possible for laws to be measured against objective standards of morality.