Rights and the good: What is just for individuals

Stepanians, Markus (2016). Rights and the good: What is just for individuals. Philosophical News, 13, pp. 156-164. MIMESIS EDIZIONI

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I argue that the Bolognese Glossators developed the primitive notion of a right ex-pressed in the Latin phrase “ius suum”, as they found it in the classical definition of jus-tice in Justinian’s Institutes, into the richer conception of a claim-right correlative to someone else’s duty. They did so by taking the breach of a contract as a paradigmatic model for an injustice and by regarding pacta sunt servanda as a contextual definition of a right [ius suum]. Making this contextual definition explicit reveals the relevant sense of ius suum to be that of a claim-right correlative to a duty. – My argument for this interpre-tative thesis makes up the main part of the paper. In its last section, I suggest that the conception of justice in terms of claim-right/duty-relations developed by the Glossators was adopted by Thomas Aquinas and informed his understanding of justice in general and of the Decalogue in particular. I conclude that the fact that Aquinas explicitly re-garded the Ten Commandments as requirements of justice commits him to the view that it must be possible to reformulate them in terms of claim-rights, and I defend this inter-pretation against an important objection by HLA Hart.

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