ABSTRACT
The distinction between advantage and justice is not quite parallel to the distinction between disadvantage or misfortune and injustice. Anselm treats justice both as an object of first-order willing – the action that ought to be done, the state of affairs that ought to obtain – and as a quality of the will that wills such objects for the sake of justice itself; but he speaks of injustice only as belonging to a will. Such injustice is purely a privation, the lack of the justice that ought to be present in the will, whereas not all misfortunes are privations. Rather than saying that injustice or evil entered the angel, we should instead say that justice departed from the angel. It is better to use a verb that locates the agency where it really belongs the angel abandoned justice. One component of Augustine's privation theory of evil is his occasional recourse to what scholars have called deficient causality.
