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To ask for payment for the sale of a thing which not only did not exist, but which was quite incapable of existence, was clearly to ask for something for nothing which obviously offended against the first principles of commutative justice. 'He that is not bound to lend, says Aquinas in another part of the same article, 'may accept repayment for what he has done, but he must not exact more.
Every error in commutative justice is an immolation of the laborer, a transfusion of the blood of one man into the body of another. . . . . Let no one be frightened; I have no intention of fulminating against property an irritating philippic; especially as I think that, according to my principles, humanity is never mistaken; that, in establishing itself at first upon the right of property, it only laid down one of the principles of its future organization; and that, the preponderance of property once destroyed, it remains only to reduce this famous antithesis to unity.
To speak properly, Commutative Justice, is the Justice of a Contractor; that is, a Performance of Covenant, in Buying, and Selling; Hiring, and Letting to Hire; Lending, and Borrowing; Exchanging, Bartering, and other acts of Contract. And Distributive Justice, the Justice of an Arbitrator; that is to say, the act of defining what is Just. The Fourth Law Of Nature, Gratitude
What fool so confident to say, That he shall live one other day? Of commutative justice, in buying dear, I say, upon trust, and selling goods cheap, that is, for ready money. The father of a family, says he, must be a perpetual seller; by which means it is impossible but that at last he shall become rich, if he have of vendible ware enough still ready for sale.
After making the common observation that single inconsistent acts do not destroy a character for justice or injustice, he has this: 'That which gives to human actions the relish of justice, is a certain nobleness or gallantness of courage rarely found, by which a man scorns to be beholden for the contentment of his life to fraud, or breach of promise. Then he shows the difference between injustice, injury, and damage; asserts that nothing done to a mail with his consent can be injury; and, rejecting the common mode of distinguishing between commutative and distributive justice, calls the first the justice of a contractor, and the other an improper name for just distribution, or the justice of an arbitrator, i.e., the act of defining what is just equivalent to equity, which is itself a law of nature.
And if he have; then his Will to have it done being signified, is a release of that Covenant; and so again there is no Injury done him. Justice Commutative, And Distributive Justice of Actions, is by Writers divided into Commutative, and Distributive; and the former they say consisteth in proportion Arithmeticall; the later in proportion Geometricall.
This, he says, is an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics; and he asks whether there is not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion. But I would ask in my turn whether the certainty that any arithmetician or geometrician has of the arithmetical or geometrical truth will lead him to discover this coincidence.
It will be noticed, however, that the principles of commutative justice all treat of the commutations of external goods in other words, they assume the existence of property of external goods in individuals. Commutations are but a result of private property; in a state of communism there could be no commutation. This is well pointed out by Gerson and by Nider.
In order that such exchange might be justifiable, it must be conducted on a. basis of commutative justice, which, as we have seen, consisted in the observance of equality according to the arithmetical mean. We further drew attention to the fact that exchanges might be divided into sales of goods and sales of the use of money.
It is in consequence of monopoly that in society, net product being figured over and above gross product, the collective laborer must repurchase his own product at a price higher than that which this product costs him, which is contradictory and impossible; that the natural balance between production and consumption is destroyed; that the laborer is deceived not only in his settlements, but also as to the amount of his wages; that in his case progress in comfort is changed into an incessant progress in misery: it is by monopoly, in short, that all notions of commutative justice are perverted, and that social economy, instead of the positive science that it is, becomes a veritable utopia.
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