Ambrose on Justice

A great discovery for me has been the writing of Ambrose of Milan. It is striking how contemporary he is in charting a course between submission to the state and subversion of it. Here he is writing about justice in The Duties of Clergy (which I think he grasps in a beautifully biblical way):

The foundation, then, of justice is faith, for the hearts of the juts are precoccupied with faith; and the person who justly accuses himself constructs his justice upon good faith, for his justice is apparent when he confesses the truth. So the Lord says through Isaiah, "Behold I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone." This refers to Christ as the foundation of the church. For the faith of all believers is simply Christ; and the Church is, as it were, the form that justice takes, the common right of all. Her prayer is the prayer of the community' her works are the works of the community; her trials are the trials of the community. A just man, in sum, worthy of Christ, is someone who accepts that he is not his own. And that is why Paul insisted that Christ must be the foundation; because faith is the foundation of our works of justice, it is on him that they should be constructed.

O'Donovan on Equality

I am re-reading Ways of Judgment in preparation for a Symposium on the book next week. As is his common practice, Oliver O'Donovan will respond to three papers on his own work. This is one of the great things he does, actually: he has responded several times in print to reviews of Desire of the Nations which actually provides a terrific resource for his readers.


Anyways, he says some great things about equality:


The value of human life is equal, because equally infinite, not susceptible of any exchange value. p. 44



There is a hideous bureaucratic element in contemporary thinking about equality which calculates everything, even human life, in dollar terms. The Ford car company notoriously factored in the cost of compensation law suits for wrongful death in their manufacturing of the Pinto (nicknamed 'the barbecue that seats four'...). Equality is not an aspect of justice, but in fact an element of the doctrine of creation. Thinking about equality as justice leads us to this terrible calculation of exchange rates. We never stop counting things...

The hero of his book is Hugo Grotius, whose suggestion for 'attributive justice' O'Donovan is enthusiastic about. Attributive justice is not a theory of justice as such... it is a determination to play each case on its merits. It

elaborates differences. It strengthens relations of affinity and bonds of loyalty, it promites talkent and makes wise appointments to office, it gives opportunities to those who can use them.

Attributive justices recognises the fitness of acting in a certain way on certain occassions. If that sounds vague, that is because it cannot be prescribed ahead of time! Equality plays a different role, a remedial one (we might say).