The Nicomachean Ethics translation I’ve been using
as my base camp (Ross) is very difficult
going here, so I’m going to consult some
others (particularly Stock, whose
paraphrases are less-shackled by devotion to Aristotle’s Greek) and see if I
can make things a little more clear. (Complicating matters, in this chapter
in particular different translators
divide it up into sections very differently.)
First off, Aristotle says that he’s going to treat Justice as a
virtue, which is to say that he’s going to try to fit it into the
same framework that he’s used to evaluate the various other virtues he’s
dealt with so far:
Determine the subject matter of the virtue and its associated vices.
Show how the virtue demonstrates the mean between the extreme vices.
Look also at the nature of these extremes.
Paragraph two defines justice and injustice with what at first glance looks
to be a puerile and wordy pair of tautologies: Justice is that state of
character that makes people act justly and desire what is just; injustice is
that state of character that makes people act unjustly and desire what is
unjust. (And you’re thinking: it’s stuff like this that got
Aristotle in the philosophy hall of fame?)
But the important thing to notice here is not the superficial tautological
foolishness of the definition, but that Aristotle is planning to define
justice as a state of character (that is, a virtue) that is
possessed by people who engage in just acts from just
desires. These aren’t the same things, and so the definition isn’t
as tautological as it first seems. Ignore the adjectives and pay attention
to the nouns: justice is a character-state demonstrated by acts and the
desires that prompt them.
From here, Aristotle goes into a set of arguments that I found it very
difficult to get my head around. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at them
from the perspective of a number of
translators and commentators, I’ll try to summarize them here in a
less-confusing way.
First off he distinguishes states-of-character from “faculties” or “sciences.”
A faculty or science concerns a subject matter in which your knowledge and
skill can help you aim for opposite extremes: for instance, a doctor knows
the science of health, and this knowledge would be equally useful to her in
healing someone and in harming them. A state-of-character, on the other hand,
goes in only one direction — having a courageous state-of-character doesn’t
make it easier for you to be cowardly, nor vice versa. Get it?
Aristotle asserts that Justice is a state-of-character rather than a faculty
or science. So Justice isn’t about learning the rules of what makes one thing
just and another thing unjust (which, presumably, could help you do either one
were you so inclined, and which, incidentally, is most of what ethical
philosophy concerns itself with these days), but is about having the right
desires and doing the right acts because you have the right state-of-character
(Justice) that impels them.
Next, Aristotle notes that the words “justice” and “injustice” each have
fuzzy and ambiguous meanings in common usage, and that these ambiguities and
fuzzinesses are complimentary so we can’t expect help from using the more
precise of the two terms to sharpen the meaning of the other one.
For instance, lawbreakers are sometimes called “unjust” because they break
the rules of justice. But shifty operators are also called “unjust” for
gaining unfair advantage through craft and wile and unfairness, whether or
not what they do is illegal. So justice, in one case, is following the rules,
and in the other case it’s playing fair.
Aristotle isn’t troubled by this ambiguity, but just wants to warn us that
Justice is a complex virtue that seems to have at least these two different
dimensions at play: A grasping person who tries to get more goods (or avoid
more evils) than he or she deserves is unjust, whether or not it is illegal;
and someone who violates the just laws of the state may also be unjust,
whether or not the motive is to get away with unfairly coming out ahead.
As a note expanding the first prong of Justice (that of being happy with
getting what one deserves, no more, no less), Aristotle says that people
who try for more than their fair share are acting under the misapprehension
that it is the goods themselves that are important, rather than the whole
package of being a virtuous person who has come by goods virtuously. This,
I guess, would be like someone stealing a trophy rather than winning it, and
expecting it to give as much satisfaction as if it had been won.
In support of the second prong of Justice — that being just means being
law-abiding — here is the curious idea of the law that Aristotle has
in mind:
Since the lawless man was seen to be unjust and the law-abiding man just,
evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts; for the acts laid down
by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these, we say, is just. Now
the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage
either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of the
sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and
preserve happiness and its components for the political society.
So Justice, as Aristotle is using the term, is radically relative to the
particular legal system in effect — from particulars like individual laws to
the core issue of who in general the laws were designed to benefit. It
would be a mistake to think that Aristotle is saying that all legislators
have wisely made their laws coincide with a preexisting model of justice;
I think he is just saying that to the extent that justice is defined as
law-abiding, lawful acts can be considered just acts.
Aristotle was a serious student of political science — he collected
constitutions, and managed to study more than a hundred — so any time he says
something about political arrangements, it’s worth paying attention.
He does not address, yet anyway, what happens when the two parallel
definitions of justice go perpendicular — when being law-abiding means
being unfairly grasping, or when being just in the sense of fairness means
breaking the law. (I’m a little worried he’s going to put this off until
another of his works, the Politics.)
Aristotle notes that there seem to be some parallels between what legal
systems encourage and prohibit and what his system of virtues and vices
encourages and condemns: there are laws against cowardly actions by soldiers,
laws encouraging temperance (e.g. by prohibiting adultery), and good-temper
(e.g. laws against assault and defamation), and so forth. “[T]he
rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less
well.”
Most of these laws concern those aspects of virtue that show themselves in
public acts. And, to the extent that the law really does properly prohibit
or punish the vices and reward the virtues, justice (in the form of
law-abiding) “is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our
neighbor.” If you internalize the law, and practice its dictates as a virtue — that is as a character-state or habit — then you will behave virtuously
towards your neighbors, which is sometimes more difficult for people to do
than to behave virtuously in their own private affairs.
Furthermore, Aristotle asserts that this sort of virtue (practiced towards
other people) is a better variety. He doesn’t develop this much,
not here anyway, so I don’t know what line of thinking gets him from here
to there. But he concludes from this that justice “in this sense, then, is
not a part of virtue but virtue entire, nor is the contrary injustice a part
of vice but vice entire.” Virtue is a superset that includes all of justice
and some additional private virtues.
In the previous section, he noted
that to the extent that justice is defined as conformity to the law, and to
the extent that the law encourages virtue and prohibits vice, Justice and
Virtue overlap. In this view, Justice isn’t a virtue but is
equivalent to Virtue (or at least to a public subset of it).
But in this section he says that in a second sense of “Justice,” it is a particular virtue of its own.
This variety of justice concerns fairness, as in “one’s fair share,” and you are just if you only attempt to obtain what’s coming to you, and you’re satisfied only with what is your due.
Whenever, through force or fraud or unfair advantage, you try to get more than your share of goods, you are acting unjustly, in this sense.
This particular form of justice (fairness) is one of the virtues among many
that make up the more general form of justice (legality) because, Aristotle
asserts, “all that is unfair is unlawful, but not all that is unlawful is
unfair… the law bids us practise every virtue and forbids us to practise any
vice.”
Is he talking about an actual or an ideal legal system here?
It’s odd that he doesn’t qualify this phrase in any way, by prefacing his comments with something like “in the best of the legal systems I have studied…” or “when the laws have been made wisely…” Logically, if all that is unfair is unlawful, then nothing that is lawful is unfair (assume, pedants, that nothing is both lawful and unlawful and that everything is either one or the other).
Put that in a context where Athens had, only a generation before, lawfully put Socrates to death for philosophizing too vigorously (Aristotle himself would flee Athens, anticipating another legal lynching of an inconvenient philosopher).
It’s almost as though he is speaking of “the law written in their hearts” that Paul wrote about in Romans.
But I don’t think he is.
I think he’s describing a real-world, explicit, man-made legal system of some sort.
Maybe he means a combination of explicit law and implicit custom & tradition.
Or maybe he is referring to what the ideal law ought to look like.
It’s really hard to tell at this stage.
Aristotle does note that “perhaps it is not the same to be a good man and a good citizen of any state taken at random,” and says he’ll deal with this subject later (again, I worry that “later” may mean in the Politics rather than later in this book).
For now, he wants to begin subdividing this virtue of particular justice so
he can investigate its components.
The two main categories Ross translates as distributive and rectificatory (distributive and corrective in Rickaby’s diagram above).
The first of these has to do with those goods (not just physical goods, but
privileges and the like) that are the common property or the creation of the
polis as a whole. How should these be divvied up? How do you know what your
fair share is? This is the domain of distributive justice.
Rectificatory or corrective justice concerns individual transactions between people.
How do you know when each person in the transaction has been treated fairly and ends up with their fair share, or when one person has unfairly gained the upper hand?
And what do you do to rectify/correct the situation once an injustice has occurred?
Of these transactions, there are two sorts: voluntary and involuntary. A
voluntary transaction is typified by an act of trade in a free market:
selling or buying some good, taking out a loan, pledging a security,
making a bank deposit, paying rent, hiring a laborer, working for a paycheck,
bartering. Involuntary transactions are things like theft, fraud, all manner
of violent crime, slander, even “adultery [and] enticement of slaves.”
The following sections will look into these varieties of particular justice in detail.
This has to do with those goods (not just physical goods, but privileges and the like) that are the common property or the creation of the polis as a whole.
How should these be divvied up?
How do you know what your fair share is?
The crux of the matter seems to be this: when two people are contending for the same sort of good, they ought to be granted a proportion of this good that is equivalent to their proportion of just claim to it.
Of course, this is easily said, but it is less easy to determine what this just claim is (or to determine the quantitative numerical values of qualitatively different goods, or to proportionally dole out things that are unique and indivisible, and so forth).
Different political systems have different ideas of what a fair share of the privileges of the state means.
Democrats think that all citizens should have an equal share, and everyone else no share or a limited share.
Others (believers in oligarchy, aristocracy, etc.) think that privilege ought to be in some way proportionate to wealth, fortune of birth, or nobility earned by virtue.
“From each according to his ability; to each according to his need” would be another possible formulation of this rule of proportionality.
Whichever rule you choose, you then enact justice by divvying up goods according to that rule, so that if persons A and B stand in a ratio A∶B by whatever standard you have chosen (need, nobility of birth, wealth, citizenship, etc.) then the good should be divvied out in a ratio C∶D so that (A+C)∶(B+D) = A∶B; in other words, so that divvying up the goods respects and maintains the original ratio of the people vis a vis each other.
Aristotle discusses this variety of justice with regard to coercive political institutions, but it could also be applied to voluntary ones.
For instance, people who pool their funds to buy a shared vacation home may decide that they want to divvy up the time each individual can reserve the use of the home in proportion to the amount of money each person initially added to the shared pool.
Or a group of people who decide to found a private library may decide that anyone who pays a fee or donates a certain number of books in order to join the library has an equal right to check out books from the library.
A company that “goes public” and sells shares of itself may hand out dividends to people in proportion to the number of shares they hold.
These would all fall under the same “distributive justice” heading.
In any case, Aristotle does not yet take sides as to which scheme of justice (democratic, aristocratic, oligarchical, or whatever) is best, he merely is saying that whichever system is in place, distributive justice mandates distributing public goods according to the demands of that system, so that the political distribution of goods perfectly respects the political status of people vis-a-vis each other.
It assumes that political systems are rational and have certain distributive ideals built into them, and simply requires that they live up to those ideals, whatever they are.
In previous section we learned that distributive justice is all about maintaining the balance of publicly-allocated goods so that people get what’s coming to them according to their status in the political system they live under.
This second variety of justice, rectificatory justice, gives a remedy for what to do when the balance between people is disrupted in the course of their individual interactions.
Say person X and person Y engage in some transaction (either voluntary or involuntary) and this transaction puts them out of equilibrium.
Beforehand, the goods X had (Gx) were the goods X deserved to have (Dx) and the goods Y had (Gy) were the goods Y deserved to have (Dy).
Afterwards X has somewhat more and/or Y somewhat less, so that Gx>Dx and/or Gy<Dy.
This doesn’t necessarily have to do with physical property.
If you slander someone, you take away their rightful goods (in the form of their reputation); if you batter someone, you take away their rightful goods (in the form of their health and well-being); and so forth.
The solution to situations like these is for rectificatory justice to restore the balance.
Aristotle uses a geometric metaphor.
The judge is like someone called upon to restore equality to a line that has been “divided into two unequal parts” and in order to do so “were to cut off from the greater that by which it exceeds the half, and to add this to the less.”
In practice it is difficult to achieve this balance — is there really some penalty you can inflict on malefactor Y and award to victim X that is worth the same amount to Y as to X and also the same amount as the original injury?
But ideally, two people walk away from the judge with one of them smiling and saying, “huzzah, I have been restored to where I was before I was mistreated” and the other one muttering, “curses, I am reduced to where I was before I tried my sneaky trick.”
Most people expect more from a justice system than this.
Rectifying the injustice is only one possible purpose of judgment and punishment; retribution and deterrence are two other important ones.
I’ll be curious to see how (or if) Aristotle incorporates these.
Also, remember that this analysis applies to both involuntary and voluntary transactions.
It seems as though Aristotle is making the argument that in any voluntary transaction, the parties to the transaction ought to leave it as well-off vis-a-vis each other as they were when they entered it.
Anything else implies funny-business and demands rectificatory justice to restore the balance.
This has all sorts of ethical and legal implications.
For example, in an agorist economy of unhindered free exchange, it can be assumed that in any voluntary transaction both parties to the transaction end up subjectively better off in its aftermath (otherwise, presumably, they would not have entered in to it).
But this, I think, would not have been enough to satisfy Aristotle.
I think he would either demand that both parties to the transaction be equally better-off or perhaps that they be better-off in some proportion to one-another that respects some pre-existing proportion.
Most transactions in a free economy should be expected to approximate this, but many probably would not (indeed, you would expect people to be constantly looking for opportunities to be on the side of the transaction that gets the bigger-slice of the pie, and for inventive and clever people to be coming up with new opportunities of this sort all the time).
So Aristotle at first glance, I think, is better adapted to support a Marxist view of trade in which class privilege warps the playing field so that “free” exchange works for the sole or lopsided benefit of the owning-class, and that this needs to be rectified by acts of justice (or by radically unwarping the playing field by eliminating the exploiting class).
We’ll see whether this first impression holds up as Aristotle’s discussion of Justice continues.
First, he notes that just exchanges are not based on equality but
on proportionality. This is for two reasons. One is that people
do not necessarily begin from a point of equality vis-a-vis each other, and
so a just exchange between them is not one that brings them into equality,
but one that preserves their preexisting inequality. The rather ugly example
he uses to illustrate this is that of an official wounding some schmoe as
opposed to some schmoe wounding an official. In the first case, it would
be wrong to suggest wounding the official as a way of restoring justice; but
in the second case it would be insufficient to wound the schmoe,
but the schmoe should be additionally punished. The value of the wounds is
proportional to the value of the people being wounded, and so the rectifying
act must take this into account.
(It is both the ability to revenge evil with proportional evil on the evildoer, and the ability to bestow good proportionally on someone who has done one a favor, that holds a society together.
The Graces, or Charities, were the Greek anthromorphizations of the mutual exchanges of good-for-good that held this society-cementing purpose, and Aristotle notes the important place of temples to the Graces in Greek society.)
The second reason is that in voluntary transactions, there is no way of
determining an equality. People do not exchange actually equal goods, because
there would be no point. People exchange different goods because each one
wants what the other one has more than they want what they have.
For instance if a house-builder and a shoemaker want to exchange their products, and they want to do this justly, they must find some way of making their exchange correctly proportional.
Clearly, trading a pair of shoes for a house isn’t going to do the trick.
We need some way of coming up with a common quantitative measurement of otherwise incommensurable products and services so that a just rate of exchange can be determined.
Aristotle says that money exists to provide this common quantitative measurement.
But how is this measurement made in the first place?
Aristotle says that it is “demand” that initially creates the measurement and that money is only the units we use to denominate it.
Actually, he says “chreia,” not “demand,” which may be misleading, but I’m following the lead of the majority of the translators I’ve been consulting.
Scott Meikle in
Aristotle’s Economic Thought
() argues that this translation is too
facile and was motivated by a desire to mold Aristotle into a presager of
classical economics. He says that “chreia” might also be
translated in terms of such things as “ ‘use’, ‘advantage’, [and] ‘service’,”
which would leave a much different impression.
But, for the purposes of this discussion, just plug in your favorite determiner of value: cost-of-production, supply-and-demand, subjective-want, whatever.
Aristotle says that a just exchange is one that preserves the correct proportionality of goods, in terms of this determiner, but denominated with the medium of exchange, that is, money.
It is this way in which unequal goods can be compared as though they were qualitatively equivalent, if only for the purposes of just economic exchange.
Imagine, for instance, an exchange of shoes-for-food between a shoemaker and
a farmer. If they come to a mutually-satisfactory ratio of shoes-to-food,
you can determine from this the value ratio of the two products, and can use
this information to solve, mathematically, other ratios. In other words, if
you know the value ratio of shoes to food, and you know the value ratio of
food to houses, then you can determine how many shoes you’d need to exchange
for a house.
Well… in theory, anyway.
In practice, nobody is willing to take a warehouse full of shoes in exchange for a house.
That’s where money comes in.
It’s a semi-stable value measuring stick that permits the quantitative comparison of a huge variety of goods and services for the purposes of facilitating exchange.
It simplifies this process of triangulating on the appropriate ratio between two qualitatively-different goods (say food and houses) from previous exchanges of qualitatively-different goods by replacing these barter ratios with single quantities.
Money makes just exchanges practical and easier; but it is the existence of a
dimension on which they can be quantitatively compared for the purposes of
exchange (chreia) that makes these exchanges possible in
the first place.
Aristotle wraps this up by reminding us that Justice, being a virtue, needs to be seen as a mean between two opposing vices.
One vice is in committing injustice so as to get more than you deserve; the opposing vice is in being unjustly treated so as to get less than you deserve.
Remember that Justice is a character-trait, so it’s not necessarily true
that an unjust act means that the actor is unjust. For the actor to be
unjust, he or she must be committing that unjust act because of a habitual
unjust character. Some unjust acts are spontaneous or are motivated by
character flaws other than injustice. For instance, someone who commits
adultery might not be motivated by an unjust disregard of the institution
of marriage, but by an intemperate inability to regulate the passions.
Political justice is a subset of justice as a whole, and concerns the
interactions of individuals who have a formal political standing vis-a-vis
each other, whether that be the equality of citizens in a democracy, or
the tiered status of citizens in an oligarchy, or what have you.
Between people who do not have this sort of formalized relationship (for
instance, between people in an unstable or contested regime, or between
people each of whom is in a different regime, or between a citizen and
a non-citizen or slave), there is no justice in this sense, though a type
of justice can be cobbled together by analogy.
“Justice [political justice?] exists only between men whose mutual
relations are governed by law; and law exists for men between whom there
is injustice; for legal justice is the discrimination of the just and the
unjust.” This one is going to take some unraveling. How can Justice, a
character trait, exist “between men”? Or is he using justice, not in its
meaning as one of the virtues, but in the limited sense of “political
justice” or as a synonym for a legal system? The next phrase seems
paradoxical, but maybe it is meant to be interpreted as a progression
through time: the law emerges when there is injustice between men and its
existence allows justice to replace this injustice. But does the “for”
phrase do anything to explain this? It almost seems as though it should
come first, defining “justice” as Aristotle is using it here, so that
this section would mean something like this:
Legal justice is the discrimination of the just and the unjust. It
is a human convention, and must be shared by people in a community for
it to work. It serves people in such a community when they come into
an unjust imbalance by identifying the imbalance (so that it can be
rectified).
Some other translations of this bit interpret the middle section as only
making the point that if there is legally-defined justice, there must
also be legally-defined injustice, else what is there to compare it to?:
“Justice cannot exist unless there be a law between man and man;
and the very existence of law implies the possibility of
wrong, inasmuch as an adjudication is nothing more than a
distinction between that which is right and that which is wrong.”
(Williams; Stock, Browne, Stewart, Chase, and Peters go along with this too)
Perhaps, but that seems a much more obvious and less interesting point
for Aristotle to be making here. Vincent
tries to return to the idea of
Justice as a character trait, and renders this section like this:
“[J]ustice exists in the case of those who have laws to which they
are amenable; and law in the case of those who have the habit of
injustice, (for judgment is the decision of justice and
injustice).”
Hatch gives a somewhat different reading of the middle-phrase:
“Rights can only exist among those who are ruled by a common law;
and law can only exist among those who can injure one another
(a legal sentence being a distinguishing of what is right from what
is wrong).”
This either makes this phrase just repeat the previous one in a sideways
fashion for emphasis, or it says that the reason why there is no universal
standard of justice is that geographically distant people have no
injustice between them because they don’t have the opportunity.
Gilles gives a looser paraphrase:
“Justice takes place among those who being capable of injuring each
other, are restrained by law from mutual encroachments; and those
encroachments must be made, before injustice can be committed.”
Aristotle follows this up by saying that “between men between whom there
is injustice there is also unjust action (though there is not injustice
between all between whom there is unjust action).” This seems to just be
restating his first point and returning to speaking of injustice as a
character trait. But then what does he mean by describing this character
trait as existing “between” men? Could he really be saying “between men
in which there is injustice there will inevitably be
unjust action”? (Here again I looked to
the other translators, but they
translated this section in a variety of ways, none of which were any less
confusing or more clear.) Aristotle is talking about injustice in the
“grasping” sense (taking more than your share) rather than in the
law-breaking sense.
Aristotle says that for these reasons we prefer the rule of codified law
or abstract principle to the rule of individual people, because when a
person rules, they no longer stand in an equal or proportional
relationship to other citizens, and their actions cannot be judged in this
fashion. Combine this with the power associated with rulership, and you
have a recipe for injustice (in the grasping sense) unchecked by justice
(in the legal sense). This strikes me as the perpetual error of political
science: the belief that laws can rule autonomously. Ultimately it’s
always people who call the shots, using their discretion, and
this discretion is limited not by codified law but by other people, and
that these people, using their discretion as they see fit, are in this
same sort of unequal political status and subject to this same temptation
to self-indulging injustice that Aristotle says is the reason we shun
tyranny.
Aristotle suggests that in order to motivate a magistrate not to deviate from justice for the sake of self-interest that we bestow honor and privilege on him to compensate for the opportunities we ask him to give up or to reward him for the character of Justice he exhibits in not pursuing such things.
Those for whom honor and privilege are not enough become tyrants.
Finally, Aristotle reiterates that it only makes sense to talk about legal justice between similarly-situated people under a single legal order.
When we use “justice” to talk about how a father treats his children or how a master treats his slaves, we’re not being precise but are using an analogy.
It seems like up to now, Aristotle has been speaking of justice as a set of
conventions. Either it is explicitly a matter of being law-abiding, or it’s
a matter of being “fair” where fairness is defined according to the
prevailing community standards.
But in the seventh section of the fifth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that political justice is only partially conventional.
There is also a “natural” component: “that which everywhere has the same force and does not exist by people’s thinking this or that.”
(If you’re following along in another edition, this section and the ones around it are divided up differently in various translations.
This is true for all of the books, but seems especially varied here.)
All along, there has been this tension about whether justice is to be
invented or discovered — that is, whether it is solely
the product of human invention or whether it preexists and its human-created
approximations are more-or-less faithful to it. Aristotle has been walking
along the boundary between these two positions: trying to discover
the virtues (like justice), but trying to discover it via anthropology,
that is by examining how people conventionally discuss and enact the
virtues. Now he attempts to face the issue head-on.
Aristotle entertains the idea (promoted by the Sophists) that all justice is
conventional, and that the only natural laws are things like the laws of
physics (“as fire burns both here and in Persia”) while laws of justice are
absolutely mutable and might as well be arbitrary.
He says that there’s a grain of truth to this: certainly it would be possible
for any particular proposed “natural” law of justice, to imagine a nation
in which that law is inverted so that what we think is just, they outlaw as
unjust, and vice versa, and to imagine the people of that nation internalizing
that law in that way.
But Aristotle doesn’t think this is the end of the question. He says that
there may still be such thing as “natural” law, even though people may be
able to override or contradict it with conventional law. He compares this
to being right- or left-handed. You can probably train a right- or
left-handed child to switch hands or to become ambidextrous. This doesn’t
mean that handedness is completely conventional, only that although it is
natural it is moldable by human effort.
To Aristotle there is a natural standard by which conventional justice can
itself be judged. Although what is just by human enactment is subject to
change and is to some extent arbitrary, there are better and worse examples
of these things, and “but one [constitution] which is everywhere by nature
the best” (it’s unclear whether he means that for each polis, there is a best
constitution for it, or whether he means that there is a single best
constitution that all political groups would be best off adopting; the
translators tend to keep this ambiguous but seem to me to lean toward the
latter).
From here, things get confusing. This sounds like it’s saying something
important, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what:
Of things just and lawful each is related as the universal to its particulars;
for the things that are done are many, but of them each is one, since it is
universal.
Now of Justs and Lawfuls each bears to the acts which embody and exemplify it
the relation of an universal to a particular; the acts being many, but each
of the principles only singular, because each is an universal.
Okay; that’s not so important after all… it’s just a preamble for what
follows (back to Ross again):
There is a difference between the act of injustice and what is unjust, and
between the act of justice and what is just; for a thing is unjust by nature
or by enactment; and this very thing, when it has been done, is an act of
injustice, but before it is done is not yet that but is unjust. [Ditto for
just actions.]
What does all that mean? Just that an act is an act of injustice when it
is acted out, but when an act is only contemplated it is not yet an act of
injustice but may be in the category of things that would be unjust if they
were acted out? Is he just defining terms, or is there more to it than that?
I hope things become more clear in the following sections.
For a person to act justly or unjustly, that person must do a just or unjust
act voluntarily: that is, under his or her own power and with
awareness of what he or she is doing. Unforeseen acts are not voluntary: for
instance, stepping on a cat’s tail that you didn’t realize was in your path
is not a voluntary act, even though all of your contributions to that act
(placing your feet where you did) were voluntary. Compelled acts are also not
voluntary: if you grab your little brother’s hand and slap his face with it
and say “stop hitting yourself” you’re not fooling anybody. Also not
voluntary are those acts that aren’t in your power to begin with (for
instance, growing old).
But even doing a just or unjust act voluntarily is not sufficient to make the
act one that is done justly or unjustly. A person may voluntarily do a just
act incidentally — for instance doing a just thing, but doing it from motives
other than justice (for instance, fear of retribution). For an act to be done
justly, it must be done voluntarily and be motivated by a just character.
There is also the distinction between chosen and unchosen acts to account
for. This results in the following chart of unjust acts between individuals:
Table of Unjust Acts
description of unjust acts
nature of unjust acts
done from ignorance of the nature of the act (therefore involuntary) and that cause an unforeseeable injury
“misadventures” or “accidents”
done from ignorance of the nature of the act (therefore involuntary), that cause a foreseeable injury, but that do not imply vice
“mistakes”
done with knowledge of the nature of the act (therefore voluntary), but not chosen, that is: not done with premeditation (but perhaps from passion or anger)
“injustices”
both voluntary and chosen
“acting unjustly and viciously”
So, for instance, if you’re cleaning your rifle and it goes off unexpectedly,
wounding someone, this is an accident. If you’re firing your rifle, thinking
you’re aiming at the enemy, but you’re actually shooting at an ally, then you
have made a mistake. If you get carried away by rumors of an armistice and
fire your rifle into the air in celebration before thinking through the wisdom
of such an act, and a stray bullet strikes someone, you have committed an
injustice. But if you stake someone out and deliberately assassinate them,
you are acting unjustly and viciously.
Which is all well-and-good for the clear-cut cases, but what about the ones
in the gray areas?
The other morning, while my sweetie was in the shower, I absent-mindedly
turned on the kitchen faucet. Now, I know that turning on the kitchen
faucet while someone is in the shower causes the shower temperature to
take a sudden and unpleasant lurch in one direction or the other. I wasn’t
intending to give my sweetie such a shock, but my action in turning the knob
was voluntary, the negative consequences were absolutely foreseeable, and
I wasn’t acting out of some sort of sudden flood of passion. It was simple,
absent-minded thoughtlessness. I was thinking about something else and acting
as though on auto-pilot; I chose, but I did not really deliberate, at least
not as I should have. Was I acting viciously, did I commit an injustice, or
did I just make a mistake?
When we originally covered the voluntary/involuntary distinction, I asked
where taxpaying would fit into that scheme. I thought it would probably be
categorized as voluntary, but with Aristotle’s caveat that it might be called
involuntary in the sense that it isn’t the sort of thing a person would do
spontaneously (that is, absent the law that requires it and the punishments
that induce it).
Is it also chosen and deliberate? Taxpaying doesn’t spring from spontaneous
passions, so, if that’s the criteria, then yes it’s a chosen act. But some
people don’t really deliberate about taxpaying at all — to them it’s either
accepted almost as a feature of the natural world (in the rainy season we
open umbrellas; in tax season we file tax returns), or it’s actually disguised
(paycheck withholding, taxes added to the prices of goods or hidden in the
fine print on your phone bill). They pay taxes like I turn faucet knobs
before my morning coffee kicks in. To what extent such ignorance or
disengagement changes the nature of the act is something that Aristotle has
not yet addressed head-on. I think that habitual ignorance or
disengagement probably constitutes a state-of-character, that is, in this
case: a vice.
Perhaps we need a new virtue for this. Using Aristotle’s template, I might
call this virtue “mindful responsibility” and define it as an ownership of
your actions and a wise anticipation of their effects on the world. The
opposing vices would be, on the one hand, irresponsibility (carelessness of
the effects of your actions) or denial of agency (unwillingness to hold
yourself responsible for the decisions you make), and on the other hand,
something like delusions-of-reference (in which you morbidly feel yourself to
be responsible for things wholly outside of your control) or exaggeration (in
which you overestimate the effects of acts you were responsible for in
comparison to acts in general).
But back to Aristotle:
He says that one of the reasons why acts proceeding spontaneously from anger
are not considered vicious in the same way that premeditated acts may be is
that in the case of anger there is some dispute over whether the act is one
of righteous retribution or of injustice. The person who is angered doesn’t
dispute that he or she is striking out with intention to harm, but feels
justified in doing so to rectify an earlier wrong.
In contrast, if you choosedeliberately to cause harm and
then follow this up by actually committing an act of injustice, you are an
unjust person. And this is also true of justice: by choosing deliberately to
behave justly, you exhibit the qualities of a just person; if you just happen
to behave justly, you are not necessarily just.
Aristotle next briefly addresses the issue of excusability. Mistakes
made in ignorance and from ignorance, he says, are excusable. But those
done in ignorance but not from ignorance (“owing to a passion which is
neither natural nor such as man is liable to”) are not excusable. Well, what
does that mean?
Back in book three, Aristotle
discussed the difference between acting in ignorance and acting
by reason of ignorance. Someone who is drunk or in a rage, for
instance, may be acting in ignorance. Someone who is unaware or
misinformed about some crucial aspect of the action he or she is performing
(is the gun loaded? is there a cat on the path?) is acting from
ignorance. It looks at first like he’s isolating two cases:
Table of Acts
from ignorance
not from ignorance
in ignorance
excusable
not excusable
not in ignorance
?
?
So it seems like he’s really just saying that doing something “in ignorance”
is no excuse; it’s only doing something “from ignorance” that makes it
excusable. But what about this “owing to a passion which is neither natural
nor such as man is liable to” phrase? That seems to change the picture, as
he’s already said that anger is among the “passions necessary or natural to
man.” So it looks more like the situation is like this:
Table of Acts
from ignorance
not from ignorance
in ignorance thanks to a passion necessary or natural to man, like anger
excusable
excusable
in ignorance thanks to a passion neither natural nor such as man is liable to
excusable
not excusable
not in ignorance
?
?
This raises the question of which passions are necessary and natural and of
the sort that man is liable to, but Aristotle doesn’t answer that question
here. Among the translators:
Hatch suggests that Aristotle is distinguishing between the passions
resulting from core human needs, such as fear, pain, or hunger, and those
that are “some merely luxurious craving, as, for instance, to drink wine
of fine bouquet or to eat partridge.”
Browne categorically says that the human passions are grief, fear, and
pity, and the natural appetites are hunger and thirst, which is
comfortingly definitive but has the disadvantage of not including anger,
which Aristotle mentions in this very chapter as a necessary or natural
human passion.
Gillies believes that Aristotle is distinguishing between “complete and
habitual ignorance” (pardonable) and “temporary ignorance, occasioned
by the blind impetuosity of passion, either extravagantly excessive in
its degree, or highly improper in its object” (not pardonable).
Grant says that Aristotle may be alluding to “brutality” as an example
of something that isn’t necessary and natural to man but that can
lead people to behave unjustly as if compelled by a passion. (Aristotle
will discuss brutality as a motivation in book seven.) Stock also seems
to follow this line, discussing someone “who commits an atrocious deed
under the mastery of some abnormal and unnatural passion,” and having his
Aristotle conclude that “you would seek to rid society of him, as you
would of a dangerous wild beast.” Jackson also calls these acts “more
detestable than ordinary vicious acts.”
Paley says that the passions neither natural nor such as man is liable to
are “bestial or degrading, such as drunkenness”.
Vincent adds two commas that change the phrase substantially: “all that
[people] do ignorantly, but not through the instrumentality of ignorance,
but through passion, that is, not
natural nor human, are unpardonable,” which makes it sound as though
doing acts ignorantly through passion is itself something that is not
natural nor human, and therefore not excusable.
So clearly there’s not a lot of consensus on how to interpret this.
Multiple translators and commentators
note the tension between this section,
in which Aristotle matter-of-factly calls acts done in and
from ignorance as two varieties of involuntary acts, and
what he said in book three, which was that such acts were not involuntary,
except for those acts that both were done from ignorance and were
then regretted.
(I’m covering section ten before section nine because sections nine and eleven seem to go together.
The way The Nicomachean Ethics was stitched together has left some odd seams, and this is one of them.)
Justice, Aristotle has said, concerns following the accepted legal principles of the community, on the one hand, and being fair in interpersonal transactions (that is, not seeking to come out ahead at the expense of the person you’re transacting with) on the other.
But what about those cases in which a strict adherence to law or to transactional proportionality seems wrong — when mercy or charity or just the peculiar circumstances of some particular case would seem to require us to make an exception to the law or to authorize an unproportional transaction?
Cases like this require “equity.”
In some sense, equity is outside of justice — something that corrects for the inevitable lack of foresight of any oversimplified systematization of justice.
In another sense, it’s not apart from justice, but an important part of justice: the particular fine-tuning of justice that treats the explicit rules as guidelines and applies the spirit of the law to the circumstances of a particular case.
Aristotle says that equity isn’t a virtue all its own, but that people with the virtue of justice ought also to have the virtue of equity.
There really is no thing as equity without justice, but equity with justice is better than justice without equity (which may not be just at all).
This section of the Nicomachean Ethics doesn’t actually define equity, but several in my panel of translators suggested that readers refer to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and one of them (Grant) was nice enough to include the following passage, in which Aristotle defines equity in an almost psalmic way:
It is equity to pardon human failings, and to look to the [intentions of the] lawgiver and not to the law; to the spirit and not to the letter; to the intention and not to the action; to the whole and not to the part; to the character of the actor in the long run and not in the present moment; to remember the good rather than evil, and good that one has received, rather than good that one has done; to bear being injured; to wish to settle a matter by words rather than by deeds; lastly, to prefer arbitration to judgment, for the arbitrator sees what is equitable, but the judge only the law, and for this an arbitrator was first appointed, in order that equity might flourish.
I was reminded a bit of the labyrinthine codes of conduct associated with Wikipedia editing.
There is a set of rules (“Wikipedia policy”) which have the force of laws, in the Aristotelian sense of a set of codified dicta that govern the community.
But there are also several parts of the Wikipedia code of conduct that have the same superficial format as these laws but that counsel equity rather than codify laws, for instance:
Ignore all rules (“If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.”)
The word Aristotle uses for equity is “ἐπιείκεια” (epieikeia); Grant says that in Aristotle this word “has a close connexion with what is called γνώμη [gnome] (consideration)” — for what that’s worth.
See The Picket Line, , for a discussion of the eleventh section of the sixth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle discusses γνώμη.
In 2 Corinthians 10 the term shows up and gets translated “gentleness,” “softness,” and the like; in Acts 24 the term becomes “clemency,” “kindness,” “courtesy,” and such; “επιεικες” also shows up in Philippians 4:5 and gets “gentleness,” “moderation,” “forbearance,” and so forth.
These won’t work for us here, I don’t think, as they all imply a merciful lessening of legal sanction, whereas I think Aristotle’s use of the term could go in either a more-merciful or a more-severe direction depending on circumstances.
Matthew Arnold thought “sweet reasonableness” was a good English rendering of the term, as it was used to describe Jesus in Corinthians, and thought that it was characteristic of “true Christianity” and the secret to its persuasive power.
In Greek, Welldon notes, “επιεικής [epieikis] means ‘virtuous’ as well as ‘equitable’ ” which causes its own problems for Aristotle (though not as much for us).
He takes pains to distinguish the particular sub-virtue of equity from its parent virtue of Justice and from Virtue in general, in part because of this confusion in Greek.
But, stepping back from the translation tangle, one last look at the argument: Aristotle is saying that while codified and explicit laws are important, they are only rough approximations of justice that suggest but shouldn’t constrain the application of real justice in real-life circumstances.
Explicit law should be flexible and should state guiding principles rather than trying to anticipate and micromanage future events.
It seems to me that today’s law, at least in the United States, has become absurdly rigid by this standard, leaving little discretion to judges or juries (“mandatory minimums,” “zero tolerance,” and so forth), though I also understand the pressures that moved us in this direction.
It’s probably largely due to us being a quasi-nation rather than a polis, and there being little hope of us having some shared vision of justice, making the discretion of individual judges and juries seem frighteningly arbitrary and giving us little guidance on how to behave.
For this and for more base reasons we reward legislators who write laws that micromanage yesterday’s tragedies tomorrow with a comforting precision and certainty.
But it is not as though there were no discretion or opportunities for “equity” built in to the system, it’s just that these things are less in the hands of judges and juries and more in the hands of police and prosecutors, who, in my opinion, have even more frightening and pernicious biases in this regard.
This, anyway, seems to be the case with criminal cases; in civil cases we have arbitration (which I don’t know much about) and plaintiff discretion/deterrence-through-cost.
Can someone willingly be treated unjustly, or is being treated unjustly always involuntary, in the same way that you can only be unjust by acting voluntarily?
If someone suffers something unjust, does this necessarily mean that they have been treated unjustly?
If an arbiter unfairly divides disputed property so as to give one party more than they deserve, who has acted unjustly — the arbiter or the party who ends up with more than his or her share?
Is it possible to treat yourself unjustly?
Then he finishes off by telling us that justice is harder than it seems, and is something human rather than something divine.
But first, the questions:
Can you voluntarily be treated unjustly? Aristotle notes that when it comes to being treated justly, you may be so treated with or without your consent.
Is the same true of being treated unjustly, or is it logically impossible to consent to be treated unjustly?
There’s some confusion here right from the get-go since the question of voluntariness is being applied to a passive verb: “to be treated unjustly.”
Someone is doing the treating, and it seems to me that it is this person who is or is not acting voluntarily.
You can be treated justly or unjustly without even being aware of it, much less consenting or not.
It seems like the real issue is: are you really treating someone unjustly if they don’t have any complaints about how they’re being treated or indeed if you’re treating them just as they’ve asked to be treated?
This might come into play if you do something to someone that is objectively harmful or unjust, but subjectively desired.
For instance, if you sell someone a state lottery ticket, you’re selling them something that’s objectively worth significantly less than what they’re paying for it, but you’re not using any deception or trickery and you’re not forcing them to buy it — are you nonetheless behaving unjustly?
If you suffer injustice does that necessarily mean you have been treated unjustly? Here, Aristotle says that in the same way that you may commit an injustice without necessarily acting unjustly (the former just concerns the nature of the act; the latter also includes questions of motive); you may suffer an injustice without necessarily having been treated unjustly.
(The same is true of just acts.)
Who is unjust: the person who divides goods unfairly, or the person who gets the larger share of this division? Aristotle says the unfair divider is clearly acting unjustly, but the person who gets the benefit of this unfair division is not always acting unjustly.
“[T]he person in whom lies the origin of the action” is the unjust one, and in this case, that is the person who does the dividing.
This has the same caveats as other unjust actions: the divider must be acting deliberately and not from ignorance and so forth.
Injustice, as Aristotle has defined it, has to do with seeking to get more than your fair share, but in this case it seems like the divider isn’t the one seeking this, so what gives?
Aristotle says that in such a case, the divider typically deviates from a just division because “he is himself aiming at an excessive share either of gratitude or of revenge… the fact that what he gets is different from what he distributes makes no difference, for even if he awards land with a view to sharing in the plunder he gets not land but money.”
So this preserves his original definition of injustice.
In the course of this discussion, Aristotle lets loose with an aside that is tantalizing in its suggestions about individual responsibility:
[T]he word “do” is ambiguous, and there is a sense in which lifeless things, or a hand, or a servant who obeys an order, may be said to slay, [but, like them,] he who gets an excessive share does not act unjustly, though he “does” what is unjust.
Isn’t that something: Aristotle comparing a servant who obeys
an order to “lifeless things” or to a hand (as opposed to the person who guides the hand)?
I wonder how he would have commented on the Nuremberg defense.
It sounds like he believes that a servant who obeys an order to harm someone is doing an unjust act, but is not acting unjustly, while only the servant’s master is acting unjustly.
It’s remarkable that Aristotle thinks that someone can, by virtue of their social status, be on the same level as a person’s hand or of “lifeless things” when it comes to their agency.
Is it possible to treat yourself unjustly? If to act unjustly means to deliberately cause someone to suffer an injustice, and you deliberately cause yourself harm in some way, it seems as though you have treated yourself unjustly.
This opens up a can of worms that Aristotle would rather not open.
To some extent his other vices are defined as things that harm the doer, and so they might all get subsumed under Justice, for instance.
And some of his virtues (liberality and magnanimity for instance) involve deliberately ignoring strict justice in favor of generosity (though Aristotle considers that the virtuous person might receive enough “good” in terms of virtuousness to compensate for a lesser share of some public good, and so it might even out or even redound to the virtuous person’s advantage).
So he suggests restricting his definition of unjust acts to include only acts “contrary to the wish of the person acted on.”
This would fix this problem and also solve question #1 as well.
With this definitional change, you cannot treat yourself unjustly.
Furthermore, you cannot voluntarily be treated unjustly, though you can voluntarily be harmed or suffer injustice.
Nobody can sensibly want to be treated unjustly, though they may be mistaken about what is just or unjust to them in any particular case.
(But remember that Aristotle made justice the mean virtue between the opposing vices of treating someone unjustly and allowing oneself to be treated unjustly.
Since vices and virtues are only such because of their voluntary nature, wouldn’t this imply that being treated unjustly has to be voluntary in some circumstances?
Or does Aristotle need to go back and revise his definition of the vice on the opposite end of the spectrum from unjustly treating others?)
The last two paragraphs of this section do not address any of these questions directly, but are interesting on their own.
First, Aristotle says that being just is hard.
It isn’t simply a matter of knowing what is just and what is unjust and choosing right, but must be rooted in a certain state of character.
Even understanding intellectually how to treat people justly is no less of a skill than learning how to treat people medically as a physician.
It isn’t wielding a scalpel that makes you a surgeon, but knowing when, where, and how to cut.
(He notes in the course of this that “the laws… are not the things that are just, except incidentally” which blunts some of the things he has said in earlier sections that seemed to assume that the law and the just were always or usually in parallel.)
The final paragraph is particularly perplexing:
Just acts occur between people who participate in things good in themselves and can have too much or too little of them; for some beings (e.g. presumably the gods) cannot have too much of them, and to others, those who are incurably bad, not even the smallest share in them is beneficial but all such goods are harmful, while to others they are beneficial up to a point; therefore justice is essentially something human.
What is Aristotle trying to say by asserting that Justice is a human thing, not a divine thing?
Here’s what my panel of translators and commentators have to say about this paragraph:
Chase says that Aristotle is restricting just acts to zero-sum games; where someone getting more than their share necessarily means someone else getting less than their share.
(The Gods, presumably, aren’t limited in this way.)
Gillies gives a pretty straightforward reading: Some things are good in and of themselves (health, wealth, power, freedom, honor) but only in the right quantity and only to the right people.
A wicked person will only put such goods to vicious ends, to nobody’s benefit (including that person’s).
Perhaps to Zeus, no amount of honor is too much, but to an ordinary virtuous person, being honored undeservedly is an embarrassment and a curse.
To me this seems like the right reading of the paragraph, but doesn’t explain why it ends by emphatically saying that (“therefore”) justice is a human (not divine) thing.
Grant writes that “[t]he passage is a curious one, and may remind us of the position assigned by Aristotle [in the Politics] to man in his social condition, as something between the beast and the god.”
Hatch provides his own interpretive paraphrase of this paragraph in which he says that Aristotle is explaining why the gods have no need for justice the way humans do.
Similarly, a polis composed of only vicious people would also have no need for justice, as there would be no just distribution of goods to strive for (might makes right, I suppose, would be the rule).
“Right can only exist among such as wish for things that are just and do what is just according to human strength, and, again, fail only in such ways as are natural for man.”
Stock’s paraphrase also works along these lines.
Welldon finishes the paragraph by writing “justice is essentially human, i.e. it affects the natural relations of men as men.”
In the ninth section of of the fifth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle addressed, among other questions, whether it is possible for people to treat themselves unjustly, and it looked as though he had settled the question to his satisfaction (no: you cannot be unjust to yourself).
But in the final section of the fifth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle takes the question up again.
This, I think, is just a consequence of how the book came to be stitched together from surviving fragments, and not a deliberate decision on Aristotle’s part.
Grant says this chapter “might be called superfluous and out of place” and “is merely an instance of Eudemian mal-arrangement” with “feeble reasonings and… repetitions.”
Jackson took great pains to disassemble the ninth and eleventh sections and then stitch them back together in a more logical and coherent way.
But, in any case, Aristotle comes to much the same conclusion this time around (no: you cannot be unjust to yourself), but he points out some different landmarks along the path and takes on the particular case of suicide.
He lets loose this stinker right off the bat: “The law does not expressly permit suicide, and what it does not expressly permit it forbids.”
This just plain sounds too stupid to attribute to Aristotle, who was a serious student of legal codes and must have known better than this.
What gives?
Grant asks, incredulously, “Did the Athenian law command its citizens to breathe, to eat, to sleep, &c?”
Chase responds to Grant’s objection by saying “the obligation of State service, to which every man was liable, may well have been taken by Aristotle to include things necessary for health.”
This isn’t much of an answer, since Grant’s examples could easily extend beyond things necessary for health: “Did the Athenian law command its citizens to laugh, to stumble, to salt their food, &c?”
Jackson says that the Greek being translated here is idiomatic and doesn’t deserve the literal reading that prompted Grant’s disdain.
Alas, you have to know Greek to follow Jackson’s note on this, and I don’t, so I can’t explain his argument with any certainty, but he seems to be saying that the phrase being translated as “does not allow” was just an idiomatic way of saying “disallows” which would turn the phrase into a tautology: “what the law disallows it forbids.”
Stewart thinks it’s unlikely that Aristotle would resort to tautology like this.
He thinks Aristotle is saying that in “not merely statute law, but custom and fashion” every action is either allowed or forbidden.
Suicide is not customarily permitted, so it must be forbidden.
He thinks that if Grant is to be faulted, it is for interpreting “law” too narrowly, so as to apply only to the explicit legal code of the polis, when Aristotle meant it more broadly to apply to both law and custom.
The Greeks recognized the principle that it was the duty of their state to support the sanctions of virtue by legislative enactments; the moral education of the people formed part of the legislative system.
Hence the rule which Aristotle states, “Quæ lex non jubet vetat” [what the law does not permit it forbids].
The principles of our law, on the contrary, are derived from the Roman law, which confines itself in all cases to forbidding wrongs done to society.
Hence the rule with us is exactly the contrary, “Quæ lex non vetat permittit” [what the law does not forbid, it permits].
If Browne is right, this solves the problem.
But I have to wonder why none of the other commentators and translators mention this possibility.
I think it’s probably too simple an explanation, the sort of thing that would be very helpful in explaining Aristotle were it actually true.
Burnet tries to explain the phrase away by suggesting that Aristotle really meant something like “the law does not expressly provide an exception to its prohibition against murder for killing yourself, and so suicide must fall under its general prohibition.”
(Hatch also inserts an “in matters of this kind” into Aristotle’s phrase, to the same purpose.)
Paley swings in the other direction, making the phrase even more ridiculous by translating it so that instead of “permit” it says “order,” like this: “the law does not order a man to kill himself; and what it does not order, it virtually forbids.”
(Peters, too, translates it this way; Taylor says “[the law] forbids what it does not command” and Vincent also uses “command” here.
Some of the other translators come pretty close to this either-command-or-forbid reading.
Stock veers in this direction as well, but then changes course at the last minute by adding “if you take law in the ideal sense of all that reason would enjoin” which gelds the phrase into a sort of “an action is reasonable or it ain’t, in which case it’s not, and then you oughtn’t.”)
Well, that gets us through the second sentence of this section, and we’re only just getting started.
Aristotle notes a possible contradiction: you’re forbidden from killing because harming people voluntarily (except perhaps in retaliation) is unjust; but he’s just said that it’s not possible to be unjust to yourself; so where is the injustice in killing yourself?
Aristotle resolves this, sad to say, by saying that a person who commits suicide is being unjust to the state.
He follows this with a series of further arguments for why it is impossible to be unjust to yourself that strike me as not particularly good, and, after the arguments he gave in section nine, superfluous.
He then adds a parenthetical remark:
It is evident too that both are bad: being unjustly treated and acting unjustly.… But still, acting unjustly is the worse, for it involves vice and is blameworthy — involves vice which is either of the complete and unqualified kind or almost so (we must admit the latter alternative, because not all voluntary unjust action implies injustice as a state of character), while being unjustly treated does not involve vice and injustice in oneself.
In itself, then, being unjustly treated is less bad, but there is nothing to prevent its being incidentally a greater evil.
As a general rule, it is better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice (Socrates/Plato also taught this, and Hannah Arendt frequently alluded to it in her writings about ethics).
People who believe the opposite are fooling themselves: they may get better goods and better advantages, but only at the cost of becoming worse people, and that’s typically a poor trade.
Finally, Aristotle drops an intriguing aside about a sort of metaphorical justice that exists within individuals.
A person’s rational and irrational sides are sometimes at odds, have different goals, and so forth.
“There is therefore thought to be a mutual justice between them as between ruler and ruled.”
He doesn’t develop this further here, but it could be an interesting thread to pick up elsewhere.
Aristotle covered a lot of ground in book five. Here’s a review of what we
learned about Justice:
Justice is a virtue — that is, it springs from core character and it occupies
the golden mean between the extreme vices of committing injustice and suffering
injustice (of which committing injustice is the worse of the two). It is not
a precise science, nor is it reducible to abstract laws, but is more of an art
that manifests itself in concrete actions from virtuous motives. It isn’t
just a matter of obedience or of learning some simple rules, but is a
difficult matter of molding your character.
There are just and unjust acts, but for an act to be done justly or unjustly,
it must both be the right sort of act and it must be done voluntarily
and deliberately, based on the character of the actor, and with knowledge of
the nature of the action. An unjust act is not necessarily a case of acting
unjustly, but may be merely an accident, a mistake, an unpremeditated
injustice, or a justified act of retribution; or it may be only incidentally
just or unjust, while done from some motive having nothing to do with justice.
If you commit an injustice from actual ignorance of the nature of the action
(you didn’t know there was a gas leak when you lit the match) or from the
sort of weaknesses we’re all susceptible to (fury, hunger,
etc.), you can
be excused; otherwise, not so much.
There are two sorts of justice: the justice of following the rules that govern
your society, and the justice of fair transactions between people. In a good
state, these things will be in parallel, and being law-abiding and being fair
will amount to the same thing.
A group of people exhibit justice by divvying up the goods and privileges that
they acquire or create as a group in a way that respects the status of the
people who make up the group with respect to the group. One example of this is
states, where goods should be distributed with respect to the different
political statuses of people in the state. This is distributive justice.
Individual people exhibit justice by being law abiding, but also by not trying
to get more than their share in interpersonal transactions. Determining what a
fair share is and what to do, when injustice results from a voluntary or
involuntary transaction, in order to restore the balance, is the realm of
rectificatory justice.
Something akin to the law of supply-and-demand allows people to come up with a
just quantitative exchange rate for qualitatively different goods, and money
was invented to serve as a measuring stick for this and a way of facilitating
such transactions.
To clarify: you can only be just or unjust to somebody else (or perhaps to the
polis as a whole), not to yourself. And it is the person who initiates the
unjust action who may be acting unjustly — not necessarily the person who
directly benefits from the injustice.
Political justice, whether distributive or rectificatory, only makes sense
between people who stand in some formal political relation to one another.
People from different states, or people in a situation where conflicting states
or standards are battling for supremacy, or people without political status
(slaves, children) don’t have access to political justice, although in such
cases we may speak of justice in a metaphorical sense.
Explicit, codified law is preferable to rule by people, because if certain
people rule outside of a framework of laws, they no longer have a common
political status with the people they govern, but stand above and outside.
That said, codified law can only be a schematic guide — individual cases
require us to look at the spirit that informed the law and apply this spirit
rather than the letter-of-the-law. This is “equity” and it is both a correction
of and the culmination of justice.
To some extent, justice is entirely conventional, and depends on the agreements
groups of people come to about how to organize their societies and what sorts
of interactions are fair. But behind the scenes there is a natural law to
which human laws are more-or-less faithful.
![Husbandman (Α); Shoemaker (Β); Food (Γ); Shoes [Δ + (Γ−Δ)] equalized to Γ. That is, Α∕Γ = Α∕[Δ + (Γ−Δ)]. That is, Α is in the same proportion after his exchange as before.](Brewer_V_7.png)
