Justice

Justice, iustitia, is defined in the tradition by the Roman jurist Ulpian's formula, preserved in Justinian's Digest and quoted by Aquinas: the constant and perpetual will to render to each his right. It is the only cardinal virtue that concerns the will rather than the appetites or the intellect, and the only one whose object is other people, which is why Aquinas ranks it highest of the four. The tradition divides it into commutative justice, governing exchanges between individuals, distributive justice, governing what a community owes its members, and legal or general justice, governing what members owe the community; a fourth category, social justice, was articulated in Catholic teaching from the nineteenth century onward. Related virtues include religion, understood as what is owed to God, piety, what is owed to parents and country, and gratitude.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, first drew the distinction Aquinas later systematized, between general or legal justice, ordering the individual to the common good, and particular justice, itself divided into distributive justice, apportioning goods according to merit or need, and corrective justice, restoring an unjust imbalance created by one party's wrongdoing against another. Historians of Catholic social thought generally credit the Italian Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio with coining the specific term social justice in the 1840s, decades before it entered official Catholic teaching through Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which used the underlying concept, though not always that exact phrase, to address the conditions of industrial labor.

Justice is identified by scales and a sword, and the two are a complete statement of the classical definition on their own. The scales weigh the competing claims, which is the discernment half of rendering to each what is due. The sword enforces the finding, which is the half without which the weighing is only an opinion. Both are much older than Christian iconography: they belong to the Egyptian judgement of the dead, to Themis and Dike in Greek use, and to Roman Iustitia on the coinage.

The blindfold is not. It arrives late, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it arrives as an insult. The earliest well known appearance is a woodcut in Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools of 1494, where a fool ties the cloth over Justice's eyes so that she cannot see what is being done in her court. Only afterwards, over roughly a century, did the blindfold turn into a compliment and come to mean impartiality rather than blindness to corruption. The reversal is complete enough that most people now assume it was always the point.

That history is worth knowing because it is a rare case where an emblem's meaning can be watched inverting in the documentary record.

The atlas draws the scales with the sword, which is the attested classical pairing and the one that carries the definition the tradition actually gives. The blindfold is recorded here rather than drawn.