PHIL 834 Aquinas on Justice
The seminar will consider Aquinas's thinking about justice beginning with his commentary on the fifth book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and continuing inti his sprawling Treatise on Justice in the Summa theologiae. There we will concentrate on the initial questions on right (ius) and justice and its subjective parts. We will then spend some time on the questions concerning killing, property, and religion. A subtheme of the seminar will concern the similarities and differences between Aquinas's account and those of some characteristically modern theories of justice, e.g., utilitarianism and social contract theories.