Accountability as a Sub-Type of Justice: Reflections on ‘Obedience’ and ‘Religion’ in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae

Introduction

On 13 January 2021, Donald Trump achieved the ignominious distinction of becoming the first American President to be impeached twice, most recently for inciting a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol building in a desperate bid to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the recent presidential election. As the dust settled, tech executives banded together to hold Trump accountable, by banning him and tens of thousands of his most paranoid supporters from social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. However, these actions themselves raise serious questions about the degree of unaccountable authority over public life which has become concentrated in the hands of these private citizens.

Understandably, accountability is much on the public’s mind these days, but most often in the negative, backwards-looking sense of increasingly fragile and sclerotic structures for holding wrongdoers accountable. We would perhaps do well, however, to pay greater attention to accountability, not only in these backwards-looking practices, but also as a forward-looking virtue, ¹ a disposition to live accountably in relation to those to whom one is rightly answerable. ² Phil Tetlock and Jennifer Lerner, social psychologists who study accountability as a personal trait, define it in closely related terms, as the ‘explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, or actions towards others’, and the recognition that rewards or punishments will rightly follow from those attempted justifications. ³ Someone who possesses the virtue of accountability would welcome the direction of rightly constituted authority and respond promptly and proactively to it, or, failing that, would submit to appropriate correction, whether instruction, remonstration, or even punishment.

Moreover, we could perhaps sub-divide this virtue into ‘particular’ and ‘ultimate accountability’. The former would be exercised within specific and limited relationships (e.g., between parents and children, employers and employees, or even among friends). The latter, on the other hand, would be a sense of one’s accountability for his life as a whole, which is an attitude commended in different ways by, for example, the Upaniṣads’ doctrine of karma, ⁴ or the Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) notion of a final judgment by God.

While this disposition does indeed seem intuitively to be virtuous (at least to this parent of small children!), a natural objection to so regarding it is that ‘accountability’ does not seem to be represented among classical discussions of the virtues. Given the minute attention paid to the varieties of human excellence by the ancients and medievals, shouldn’t all the genuine virtues have been tabulated by now? In this article, I suggest that the virtue of accountability was in fact theorized in at least some corners of ancient and medieval moral philosophy, though not under that name.

Rather, it had a natural home in one classical approach to the virtue of justice, understood as ‘rendering to each his right (suum ius cuique tribuendo)’. (In what follows, I will refer to this proposal and its exposition as ‘justice-as-rights-rendering’, or JRR.) I focus here in particular on the interpretation of JRR given by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in his Summa Theologiae (hereafter, ST) 2-2.57-122, ⁵ which includes a detailed discussion of the virtues of ‘obedience’ (ST 2-2.104) and of ‘religion’ (ST 2-2.81-100). ⁶ Aquinas argued that both of these are connected with or annexed to justice; I propose that they are close analogues of ‘particular’ and ‘ultimate accountability’, respectively. ⁷

After providing some initial motivation for seeking accountability’s resting place within the virtue of justice, I trace its implicit presence within Aquinas’s treatments of ‘obedience’ and ‘religion’, particularly if these are rightly interpreted as requiring sensitivity in their bearers to subjective rights. Then, in response to the objection that Aquinas’s ‘obedience’ is not genuinely comparable to ‘accountability’ in the sense sketched above, since he applies it only to servile relations, I argue that, for Aquinas, the ‘obedience’ even within the most asymmetrical social relations still involves mutual accountability. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the value of distinguishing accountability (or obedience and religion) as distinct sub-types of justice.

Accountability and Rights in Normative Social Relations

Connecting accountability and justice has a certain immediate and intuitive appeal, given the ordinary associations of both ideas with institutions such as law-courts or the time-out corner. But even in ordinary usage, the two ideas are conceptually linked as well. As Jean Porter nicely puts it, a first-brush conception of ‘a just individual’ is as someone ‘committed to fairness, equity, and respect for the legitimate claims of others. She is committed to ideals of impartiality and mutual accountability.’ ⁸

Consider the case, posed by Stephen Darwall, of Jane’s standing painfully on John’s foot, and of his requesting that she move it. ⁹ Now, Jane might have objective, ‘agent-neutral’ reasons for heeding John’s request: as a good utilitarian, she might be committed to reducing the amount of pain in the world, or, as a good Kantian, she might be committed to undertaking only those actions which can be formulated in terms of the categorical imperative. But most would grant that, at least once John has issued the request, and perhaps even before, she has an important subjective, ‘agent-relative’ reason for acceding to it, namely that he has a well-founded authority to claim immunity from being stood-on painfully.

In one sense, John’s request that Jane desist from her foot-stomping is an exercise of accountability; she is answerable to him for mistreating or overlooking him, and he calls her to account for this. But that request might equally be thought of as John’s assertion of a right against Jane, in this case, a negative right against interference. That he possesses such a right implies that Jane possesses a duty not to step on him; ¹⁰ the two are subject to what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls the ‘principle of correlatives’, such that every right possessed by one implies a correlative duty possessed by some or all others to respect or render that right. ¹¹

This correlativity of right and duty generates the relation of accountability within which John issues his appeal to Jane. Notice that the right in this case is subjective, but not individualistic, voluntaristic, or asocial, among other fighting words thrown at rights-talk by its contemporary detractors. ¹² Rights, in Wolterstorff’s helpful formulation, are ‘normative social relations’, and ‘natural rights’, such as the right not to be painfully stepped on, if it exists, ‘are not the rights of asocial beings but the rights of social beings that have not been socially conferred on them’. ¹³

Obedience, Religion, and ‘the Necessity of Justice’

The virtue of accountability as we have been treating it is concerned at least (if not only) with a disposition to respond positively to authoritatively issued commands (e.g., John’s ‘move your foot’). This is a strong first-blush indication of accountability’s intimacy with ‘obedience’ as Aquinas conceives it. In his terms, obedience is a virtue whose ‘special object is a tacit or express precept. For the will of a superior, however it is known, is a kind of tacit precept, and obedience seems all the prompter inasmuch as it runs ahead of an express precept in obeying, once the superior’s will is understood’. ¹⁴ To possess the virtue of obedience is to have a disposition to respond favorably to a rightly-constituted authority’s commands, but still more, to be active in anticipating those commands, so as to comply with them ahead of time. This virtue is annexed to the virtue of justice, because the obedient person has a finely tuned sense of what ‘the necessity of justice’ requires in his relations with a superior, ¹⁵ and is disposed to conform his actions to those requirements, although their relationship lacks that full equality which Aquinas (following Aristotle) sees as ingredient in justice in the strict sense. ¹⁶

Another of the virtues annexed to justice which Aquinas treats is ‘religion’, which disposes rational creatures to offer the worship they owe God by virtue of their creation. ¹⁷ (Whereas Aquinas’s discussion of obedience occupies only a single question in the Summa, that of ‘religion’ takes up a full nineteen, which means that my treatment of it here will necessarily be somewhat more superficial and summary than the treatment of obedience which continues below.) This virtue is ‘deficient’ in comparison with the virtue of justice, according to Aquinas, because it is

unable to render the equal due . . . Whatever man renders to God is due, yet it cannot be equal, as though man rendered to God as much as he owes Him, according to Psalm 115:12, ‘What shall I render to the Lord for all the things that He hath rendered to me?’ ¹⁸

Aquinas’s point is simply that everything we have, down to our very existence, is a divine gift granted ex nihilo (cf. 1 Cor. 4:7).

As the gift is total, encompassing both the ‘unfailing principle’ and ‘ultimate end’ of our existence, ¹⁹ so too is the honor and service it requires unlimited and absolute, taking in every aspect of our lives. The virtue of religion manifests itself paradigmatically, as we might expect, in interior devotion and prayer and in exterior worship and sacrifice, ²⁰ but also surfaces prominently in oaths, which are guaranteed by the prospect of divine judgment. ²¹ In the broadest sense, however, every act of obedience to the moral law as divinely-commanded is an exercise that involves the virtue of religion. ²² And so, unsurprisingly, findings from experimental psychology suggest that a sense of ‘ultimate accountability’ to God or the gods strongly reinforces the exercise of ‘particular accountability’ to one’s neighbors. ²³

‘Religious’ and ‘obedient’ persons are sensitive to what the ‘necessity of justice’ requires in their relations with God and neighbor. But to what does the ‘necessity of justice’ direct the possessors of these virtues? Justice, for Aquinas, is arguably centered on the very sort of agent-relative deontic properties, such as rights and duties, which we followed Darwall above in seeing as grounded in mutual accountability. A great deal depends in this case on the meaning of a single term, ‘ius’, in Aquinas’s definition of justice, which he borrows from the opening of Justinian’s Institutes: ‘justice is a constant perpetual will rendering to everyone his own ius’. ²⁴

This venerable definition had a rocky beginning in the history of philosophy, as the second definition of justice considered and quickly rejected in Plato’s Republic. ²⁵ After Plato’s criticism, its fortunes revived, however, as it was taken up and endorsed by Romans writing in Latin, notably Marcus Tullius Cicero, who often cited it, without qualification or commentary, as a summary of the virtue of justice. ²⁶ Following Cicero, this definition of justice was picked up by ancient Christians as well, perhaps even St. Paul, ²⁷ but certainly Augustine, who defines both divine justice in relation to humanity, ²⁸ and human justice in relation to God in terms of giving each his due. ²⁹

The most significant step in securing an enduring place for JRR within the West’s philosophical and especially legal culture, however, was its adoption by the third-century Roman jurist Ulpian, whose Institutes subsequently supplied the opening paragraphs (and much of the body) of the sixth-century Digest of Roman law compiled at the behest of the Emperor Justinian. Ulpian wrote, ‘Justice is a constant and perpetual will to render to each his own right (ius suum). The precepts of right (iuris) are these: to live honestly, not to harm another, to render to each his own (suum cuique tribuere)’. ³⁰

The key innovation in this formulation over JRR’s appearance in Plato or Cicero is the specification of ‘one’s own (suum)’ in terms of ‘ius’, a ticklish term whose sense covers roughly the semantic range occupied in ordinary English by the words ‘right’ and ‘desert’, including both goods (specified by primary justice) and punishments (specified by retributive justice), with the added complication that ‘ius’ could also mean the law (written or unwritten) which specified these rights and duties, or the court in which it was administered. ³¹ My ius is what is due to me, whether by virtue of a positive legal grant or immunity, or (as Ulpian’s three ‘precepts of ius’ suggest) by virtue of some natural, or at least pre-political, property or properties.

Perhaps already in Ulpian, ³² but certainly by the thirteenth century, ius was used to indicate, not merely an objectively right state of affairs, but ‘a moral power of the individual through which she can authoritatively claim something from another at her discretion, or claim immunity from some kind of coercion or harm’. ³³ This is true even in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, although this fact has gone largely unrecognized even by those, such as Brian Tierney, who have amply documented the presence of appeals to subjective rights among the twelfth- and thirteenth-century canonists. ³⁴ After all, Aquinas does not, like the canonist Huguccio of Pisa (d. 1210), define ‘ius’ as a (subjective) ‘potestas’, ³⁵ but rather as an (objectively) just state of affairs, ³⁶ or ‘what is owed to a person according to an equality of proportion’. ³⁷

Aquinas does, however, clearly understand ‘ius’ as a property of social relations which are characterized by (some sort of) equality:

the peculiar property of justice among the other virtues is that it orders man in those things which relate to another. For it suggests a certain equality, as the name itself demonstrates, for things which are made equal to each other are colloquially said ‘to be justed’ (iustari). ³⁸

The virtues of prudence, courage, or temperance regulate a person’s dispositions and behavior as such, though of course with reference to relevant information about the outside world. But only justice, among the cardinal virtues, is an essentially social virtue, in the sense that it principally concerns a man’s relations to his fellows, ensuring that they are characterized by equality of an appropriate sort: in exchanges, for instance, justice ensures equality of information, of terms, of the subjective worth of the goods exchanged; in the distribution of goods and honors, justice ensures that each person’s share is proportional to his contribution, and so on.

Moreover, as Porter emphasizes, Tierney himself grants that the objective and subjective senses of rights-talk are complementary rather than contradictory. ³⁹ So, while the ‘objective’ sense of ius certainly stands to the fore in his treatment of justice, Aquinas does also on occasion modify ius with ‘his own (suum)’, which at least suggests that it can be a particular person’s property. The central case here is of course his quotation of Ulpian’s definition at ST 2-2.58.1, ⁴⁰ but another significant instance, which we will consider further below, is his describing a slave’s intellectual liberty in terms of his ‘mind’ being ‘sui iuris’, ‘in his power’. ⁴¹ And, as Porter emphasizes, subjective rights are sometimes implicit in Aquinas’s description of a state of affairs as just. For instance, he maintains that a starving person who takes food from another does not steal; in fact, his dire condition entitles him to that other’s food, so that the other would act unjustly in withholding it. ⁴² ‘The critical point’, as Porter rightly emphasizes, ‘is that in these circumstances, the primary purpose of material things, which is a matter of natural right, is put into effect through someone else’s free choice and action.’ ⁴³ Taking the food is not simply right as a matter of fact; it is also the starving man’s right, as a matter of what he may claim from another.

For Aquinas, then, the ius which an obedient subordinate or religious devotee renders to his superior in submitting to his licit commands is, not merely an agent-neutral, objectively good state of affairs (the rightness of his submission), but an agent-relative reason for acting (the superior’s right to exercise authority within a given domain). The obedient or religious person is guided by the ‘necessity of justice’ in identifying and rendering these rights as embodied in the form of commands.

From Obedience to Accountability

The centrality of another’s perspective—and what’s more, that other’s wishes and will—for the virtue of obedience in particular prompts a question: is this really a virtue, in the sense of a property of an excellent human being? After all, Aquinas himself muses in the very first article devoted to obedience in ST 2-2.104, ‘services are more acceptable insofar as they are more gratuitous. But what a man does as a matter of debt (ex debito) is not gratuitous.’ ⁴⁴ ‘Obedience’ seems at best to name a second-rate quality, possessed by someone (such as a child), not yet able to understand or will the good in an independent and reliable way.

An initial response to this worry about obedience as childish heteronomy is evident in Aquinas’s own account of the fundamental disanalogy between human obedience to a command and a body’s ‘obedience’ to natural law: the latter is a matter of efficient causes acting through the transfer of force, in which the patient has no real agency of its own, whereas, in the case of human relations of authority, ‘to command is to move by reason and will’. ⁴⁵ As he says later, reflecting on the limits of obedience, ‘He who obeys is moved at the bidding of the person who commands him, by a certain necessity of justice, even as a natural thing is moved through the power of its mover by a natural necessity’. ⁴⁶ The one who issues a command on the basis of his authority thereby offers a reason for his subject to obey, rooted in his own sense of obligation to what is right. While this reason can in principle override his own private judgments about the proper course of action, it does not in fact bypass the subject’s faculties of reason and free will. ⁴⁷ By contrast, a subject who has to be physically forced to comply with a command isn’t said to obey it at all; willing acquiescence, however ambivalent, is ingredient in obedience.

But this connection between reason and obedience raises the question of whether subjects ought to obey their superiors in all things. ⁴⁸ Aquinas grants that

a subject is bound to obey his superior within the sphere of his authority; for instance a soldier must obey his general in matters relating to war, a servant his master in matters touching the execution of the duties of his service, a son his father in matters relating to the conduct of his life and the care of the household; and so forth. ⁴⁹

In all of these cases, the superior has the right—the proper standing—to issue the command, which derives its authority, not from the person issuing it, but from the justice with which he issues it. Nonetheless, he insists that any human authority is liable to being overruled by a higher authority, or to issuing a command which lies outside its proper competence. ⁵⁰

Aquinas offers an illuminating illustration of the limits to obedience which serve to demonstrate the application of his theory well beyond the hierarchical social relations on which he focuses. He takes the case of the freedom of slaves or children from interference by their masters or parents in the decision of whether to marry or not marry. He begins with an initial premise, that ‘by nature all men are equal’, ⁵¹ and that this equality consists, first, in their shared possession of a soul endowed with reason and free will, about which Aquinas quotes Seneca approvingly: ‘If someone thinks that servitude extends to the whole man, he errs. His better part is excepted. Bodies are liable to and conscripted by the lord, but the mind is under his control (mens quidem est sui iuri)’. ⁵² Notice that here, ‘ius’ takes on an unmistakably subjective coloring for Aquinas, naming the slave’s sphere of liberty, which his master cannot control.

But human equality extends further, for Aquinas, also taking in men’s equal share in the natural imperative for self-preservation, both for themselves and for their kind. ⁵³ This shared predicament entails, Aquinas argues, that a man ‘is not bound to obey another man in matters touching the nature of the body, for instance in those relating to the support of his body or the begetting of his children’. ⁵⁴ The natural right to ‘support of the body’ is perhaps the more intuitive of the two: in his Sentences commentary, for instance, Aquinas argues that a slave does not require permission from his master to eat, drink, or sleep sufficiently to preserve his health, since self-preservation is a condition for surviving, and so for being a slave in the first place. ⁵⁵

A similar logic is at work in Aquinas’s insistence that marriage, too, belongs within this sphere of natural freedom: since the preservation of the species is as much a requirement of nature as is self-preservation, the individual’s liberty with regard to it cannot be circumscribed by any positive law. And so, ‘servants are not bound to obey their masters, nor children their parents, in the question of contracting marriage or of remaining in the state of virginity or the like’. ⁵⁶ While he does not here use the expression ‘ius suum’ in the case of the right to marry, it should be obvious that Aquinas does in fact recognize a subjective right possessed by the slave against his master’s interference in his decision to marry or not to marry, and a correlative duty possessed by the master not to interfere in this matter. ⁵⁷

That the issue for Aquinas is one of subjective rights is evident as well from what he does not say. He might have framed the issue in agent-neutral terms, by appeal to marriage’s place within a general theory of right social order. (Nothing about this argument, of course, requires that Aquinas did not also hold to such a theory—as we noted above, these judgments can be overdetermined.) He could have so appealed, but he didn’t. Instead, he framed the master’s obligation in agent-relative terms, regarding the slave’s own liberty to preserve himself and his kind. In the analogous case of intellectual freedom, Aquinas expressly describes that liberty as a subjective right—there is every reason to extend that analysis to the freedom to marry as well.

That subordinates possess rights which circumscribe the authority of their superiors has important implications for the scope of the virtue of obedience, although Aquinas does not call attention to them himself. Recall that obedience is owed, for Aquinas, to a command issued in accord with ‘the necessity of justice’, viz., on the basis of some ius. But now consider the slave who says to his master, ‘Let me marry’. The slave has the right to issue this command, and the master is duty-bound to accede to it. With respect to his liberty to marry, the slave is in fact the superior, and the master the inferior. And this is a general feature of human social relations, for Aquinas: the intrinsically limited character of all human authority means that every such relation, even those between ruler and ruled, will be characterized by a mutuality of rights and duties. ⁵⁸

But if ‘obedience’ names the virtue by which the slave is able to recognize and respond appropriately to authoritative commands justly given, then an analogous virtue would seem to be required in the master with respect to the slave’s just demands for liberty in this or that protected sphere. And, in general, we can say that anyone who holds just authority over another person will himself be duty-bound to respect the limits of that authority: for instance, teachers have a right to request honest work from their students, but students have the right to request fair grades from their teachers. Each is entitled to hold the other accountable for respecting his right, and each must recognize his own duty to respect the other’s right.

Conclusion: From Accountability to Obedience, and Back Again

But this conclusion raises a final question: might not the putative virtue of accountability (or the virtues of obedience and religion) simply be different ways of talking about the virtue of justice? Why not simply refer to the virtue of justice as applied to God and to human superiors? In principle, I actually have no objection to this, since the intimacy of ‘accountability’, or ‘religion’ or ‘obedience’ with the virtue of justice has been a key theme of this article. However, it is worth observing that a similar complaint might be lodged against such well-established virtues as honesty and gratitude—after all, what are these but the virtues of rendering to each the truth or the thanks which he is due? ⁵⁹ Perhaps they too are merely aspects of the virtue of justice.

Nonetheless, since words are the spotlights we aim at our concepts, it seems plausible to think that there is at least heuristic value, particularly for the work of moral formation, in having some way of bringing each of these dispositions into clear view. If talk of gratitude and honesty is meaningful and important, even if they are ultimately only sub-types of justice, then so too, I would argue, is talk of the virtue of accountability.

I began this article with an objection to regarding ‘accountability’ as a virtue, namely that it does not seem to figure in classical tables of the virtues. I hope that the foregoing has shown that close analogues to accountability as a forward-looking virtue can be found in ancient and medieval philosophy, in the virtues of ‘obedience’ and ‘religion’, which Aquinas and others argued were annexed to the virtue of justice, which ‘renders to each his due’. For the authors who worked within this tradition of reflection on justice, a sensitivity to the just claims of another is a crucial moral virtue, particularly but not only for subordinates within hierarchical relations.

In the course of demonstrating accountability’s pre-modern pedigree, however, we have also seen how Aquinas’s understanding of ‘obedience’ is implicitly required, not only of subordinates, but equally of superiors. Anywhere two or more persons are related via correlative rights and duties, the duty-bound will require a virtue disposing him to recognize the authority of the rights-holder to assert a claim against him, whether of immunity, action, or redress. To possess this trait would certainly be virtuous in a person, and fostering it should be a key interest of anyone who hopes to encourage communities and societies in which everyone is given the respect they are owed. ⁶⁰