Ep 1. Justice and Truth - The Economic Thought in Caritas in Veritate

The economical thought at Caritas in veritate Stefano Zamagni JUSTICE AND TRUTH There are three concepts of justice that are used both in economy and more generally in the social sciences: the commutative justice, the distributive justice, and the contributive justice. The commutative justice is related to the market. Each time you make a market transaction, it needs that the value of what you give equals the value of what you obtain, and this is the concept of justice which everybody understands. The distributive justice, instead regards exactly the interventions of any kind of governmental and non-governmental authority, which intervenes in the economic sphere to redistribute a part of the generated revenue, in order to make it possible for everyone, who detains a low social level, to restart an economic activity. So the distributive justice is related to the concept of solidarity. But there is a third dimension of justice, which almost never is mentioned, which is, like I said the contributive justice. It means that we are all part of a kind of group, it could be the family, it could be the political community, it could be an association, it doesn't matter, since being part of a group, all of us must contribute to the good of this group, and so the contributive justice is related to the concept of fraternity. While, through the distributive justice, we try to render our societies fair to allow the last ones to emerge, through the contributive justice, we tend to translate into practice the principle of fraternity. The teaching of the social doctrine of the Church reminds us exactly these three dimensions, even if in the economic literature and in the mass culture, this almost never happens, because we just stop at the commutative justice and the distributive justice. The Pope says in this encyclical “it’s not enough”. If we don’t introduce in some operatively efficient way the principle of fraternity, our societies will be able to progress in the direction of material well-being, but will not see improvement of their own spiritual well-being. It is what we technically call the human happiness.