Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

1. When the legal partners encounter one another on an equal plane, justitia commutativa
(commutative, balancing justice in commerce, contracts, and trade) exercises its office. Its
violation through theft, injury, or an attempt on the body and life of one’s neighbor creates a
situation of injustice that must not only be repented inwardly, but also repaired outwardly. In
the industrial society, commutative justice makes its appearance in four realms above all:
a) The industrial society is a commercialized society in which almost everything that households
require in terms of goods and services is bought, so that the justice of prices has attained
an importance unsuspected in earlier economic periods in which self-provision was widespread.
b) Since in the developed industrial society approximately eighty per cent of the gainfully
employed practice their professions as wage-earning laborers, office workers, and civil servants,
commercial justice must take effect in a special way in employer-employee relations
(fair pay, fulfillment of duties at the work place).
c) More than four fifths of the population in industrial states are inserted into the system of
‘social security’, which yields a further important realm of commutative justice. Insurance
fraud is a violation of commercial justice, not only in private insurance, but also in the forms
of social insurance established by law (health insurance, accident insurance, and so on). This
fact must be especially emphasized since lax opinions prevail here to a large extent.
d) Commutative justice is gaining increasing importance in the modern traffic system; here it
is to be noted that the duty to make restitution in the case of traffic accidents where one party
is at fault also holds with respect to the family of the one injured or killed.
2.) Even if commercial justice is extremely important for human coexistence, an even greater
importance , nevertheless, attaches, especially today, to those fundamental forms of justice
that regulate the strained relations between individuals and society.
Here is to be named first that fundamental form of justice, which orders the relation of the
social body to its members from above, as it were: justitia distributiva (distributive, apportioning
justice). Its goal is to allow individual people to participate in the common good through a
just distribution, so that spiritual and moral development becomes possible for all. Since the
same position does not attach in every respect to each individual and to each group within the
social whole, it is not the arithmetic equality holding for commutative justice, bur rather a
geometrical equality that corresponds to apportioning justice, as for instance, that which
forms the basis of the tax laws. Every kind of corruption, favoritism, and oppression of particular
people or groups is a travesty of distributive justice. Distributive justice therefore obligates
above all those who exercise power in the social body (of the community and the state),
whereas the members act in the spirit of distributive justice when they are satisfied with just
measures. Incidentally, if a state were to violate not only the position of the citizens within the
national whole, but also human rights, it would offend against distributive as well as against
commutative justice.
3. Social bodies are also bearer of rights. This brings us to the third form of justice: justitia
legalis (legal or legislative justice), whose formal object is the orientation to the common
good. It is to be distinguished from apportioning justice, for, whereas legal justice is oriented
to the creation of the common good, apportioning justice aims at the individual or, more precisely,
at the distribution of the common good appropriate to the respective position of the
individual. Legal justice is found, principally and, so to speak, ‘architectonically’ in the legis-
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