Fairness and justice in the economy

58. To respond to this opposition between the market and justice, the Church's social teaching works on the basis of the notion of just price, derived from Scholasticism. This refers not only to the criterion of commutative justice, but more broadly to the criterion of social justice, namely, all the rights and duties of the human person. This realisation of social justice, thanks to a just price, is based on a twofold conformity: the conformity of the legal environment of the market to the moral law and the conformity of multiple individual economic acts which set market prices to the moral law.

It is insufficient to consider personal responsibility as being restricted solely to civil law, because in many cases this involves "renouncing personal conscience(⁸⁵)." Just as the market price is based on a variety of customary values agreed upon by consumers, so it is our moral conduct, as the arbiter of agreed customary values, that will cause the market price to converge or not to converge with the just price. When market agents fail to incorporate their duty to ensure social justice into their economic decisions, the market mechanism itself will dissociate the competitive price from the just price.

As we prepare for the Jubilee of the Year 2000, we are all invited to embody the moral law in our daily economic activities(⁸⁶). From this stems the concept that the just or unjust character of the price is to a certain extent "in our own hands", the hands of the producer and the investor, the hands of the consumer and of the public policy-makers.

All this does not dispense the State, nor the community of States, from the duty to exercise protection that is capable, among other things, of imperfectly making up for the lack of the individual duty to ensure social justice. This lack is the absence of conformity to the moral law, a duty incumbent on eachone of us. The common good is a political object which has primacy over the mere commutative justice in trade.