Francisco Suárez and Hugo Grotius on distributive justice and imperfect rights

This paper argues that Francesco Suárez (1548-1617) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) grappled with the same conundrum: how to incorporate a conception of ‘subjective’ rights as moral powers into the received Aristotelian typology of justice? And, this having been achieved, how should we understand the difference between various types of justice? Both thinkers maintained innovatively that distributive justice essentially differs from other forms of justice in exclusively governing ‘imperfect’ rights — while disagreeing over the meaning of the latter notion. My analysis suggests that the widespread early modern association and even identification of distributive justice with imperfect duties like charity and liberality is best regarded as inspired by Grotius’s conceptual innovations.