Justice as a Virtue | Nicomachean Ethics, Book V

From The Met

Today, we continue our read-along of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. If you’re just now joining and want to catch up, here is the schedule we are following (with links to previous posts):

• July 1: Introducing the work, Aristotle’s life, etc.

• July 8: Book I

• July 15: Book II

• July 22: Book III

• July 29: Book IV

• August 5: Book V

• August 12: Book VI

• August 19: Book VII

• August 26: Book VIII

• September 2: Book IX

• September 9: Book X

• September 16:

  Retrospective

This read-along of Nicomachean Ethics is free. But if you want to support my work – which really means helping me support my family – and you want access to the monthly Zoom calls, become a paying subscribe

In The Monthly Digest, released yesterday, I announced that the next Zoom call will be on August 18 at 8 PM Easter. That’s right before the post for Book VII will go live, but we might discuss a little bit about VII in the call. (VII happens to be my favorite book in this work.) It should be a very fun call.

That means we’ll have one more call during the read-along — maybe just after the September 16 retrospective post. Then we’ll take a break for about a month and start on another book together.

Book IV, you will recall, was about a motley of virtues. Book V is significantly more focused, and the text is truly devoted to a theory of justice. We’ll talk about some of the big, key insights a little later, but let’s think through one significant thing about this as a feature of the text.

We are a justice-obsessed culture. If you run in academic, usually progressive circles, you will hear ‘justice’ bandied about all the time. There is something called ‘x justice’ for nearly all values of x: climate justice, social justice, food justice, sex justice, etc. But I don’t think many of us spend time thinking about what justice is.

The default assumption is that justice is a kind of outcome. If this is true, then justice isn’t a virtue. It isn’t a vice either, of course — what I am saying is that justice becomes a property of certain states of affairs, not a characteristic of human beings. I think this assumption is implicit in many of our discussions of justice, both conservative and progressive.

The idea that justice is not a property (or characteristic) of persons is also common in more sophisticated discussions of justice. Robert Nozick and John Rawls, two of the great political philosophers of the 20th century, were both concerned with giving a theory of justice. Nozick offers a helpful characterization of the difference in their views in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia. For Nozick, justice is a matter of history. Was property justly acquired and transferred? If not, was the matter justly rectified? If so, the state of affairs is just. For Rawls, justice is a matter of distribution; it is ahistorical. Would the distribution of wealth, rights, privileges, etc. be acceptable behind the veil of ignorance? If so, the state of affairs is just. This is a crucial difference in giving a theory of justice — but it isn’t what Aristotle is really concerned with here.

For Aristotle, justice is a virtue. If it is a virtue, then it is a characteristic of persons. Thus, we are determining if a person is just or unjust, not if a state of affairs is just or unjust. That requires some recalibration of our usual way of thinking.

Clearly, Aristotle also thinks this is a very important virtue; he discusses it at length in Nicomachean Ethics, more than any other virtue so far. He in fact ends Book V by saying that he has said all he needs to say of the moral virtues, and Book VI turns to virtues of the soul (like wisdom). Justice is the capstone of his discussion of moral virtues.

We can investigate justice through injustice

Aristotle begins with a methodological point: sometimes, we can learn about something by learning about its opposite. One example – which I like because of the vivid imagery it conjures – is that we can learn that a bad bodily condition involves flabby flesh because we know that a good bodily condition involves firm flesh (V.1, 1129a). Some characteristics are such that by knowing their opposites, we know them. Justice is like this, and so we can investigate justice through investigating justice.

Thus when we learn that the unjust person ‘grasps for more’, we know that the just person will not grasp for more. When we learn that the just person is concerned with the good of others (Aristotle says justice is special among the virtues because it is for the good of others rather than the just person), we thereby know that the unjust person will not be concerned with the good of others.

Two senses of ‘justice’ (and more)

At the end of chapter 1, Aristotle goes on an odd tangent about justice as a ‘complete’ virtue. He also mentions that justice is the whole of virtue; necessarily, it seems, a just person will in fact be fully virtuous. This is because (I think!) justice is concerned with lawfulness and equality, where equality is mediated through the goodness and badness of the things under consideration, and so to be just one must also be brave, moderate, etc.

But Aristotle also says he is concerned with justice as a part of virtue. This, I think, means that there are two senses of ‘justice’ in the text. There is justice which is the completion of virtue, and there is justice which is a component. It would be nice if we disambiguated these more clearly in the text, but at least in chapter 1 Aristotle does not do this.

Once we have focused in on the sense of justice which is a part of virtue, we have another distinction. Aristotle writes of partial justice as something found in the distribution of goods (including honor) and another sort of partial justice concerned with what is lawful — Aristotle also writes of the corrective aspect of justice at the end of chapter 3. We can call this distributive justice in the first sense and lawful justice in the second.

I looked through some notes based on Richard Kraut’s book on Aristotle, and there were some helpful points here. The author of the notes, Jacques Bailley, points out a few things that I think are good for us to keep in mind. First, while Aristotle writes of lawfulness, and thus we might read him as saying that we must as a matter of justice obey all laws (thus making it impossible for there to be unjust laws), Aristotle distinguishes between laws and decrees in the politics — and tyrants are said to rule by decree. So ‘law’ must mean something special here. Instead, ‘nomos’ here refers to a larger set of customs and the act of interpreting the text of the law. It is more of a well-regulated society as opposed to a simple matter of justice being whatever the lawgiver decrees.

Justice and equality

Justice is a matter of equality for Aristotle, but really here is a matter of proportionality. Distributive justice involves the allocation of goods and honors in a way that is proportional — essentially, people should get what they deserve. Corrective justice, often being handed down by a judge, aims to restore this proportionality.

Thus, Aristotle also rejects the idea that justice is reciprocity, as he briefly argues in chapter 4. Ever the inegalitarian, Aristotle thinks that a ruler who strikes someone (wrongly) should not be struck in return. One who strikes a ruler might receive a much harsher punishment. The discussion can get rather complex – look at the discussion of reciprocal giving – but Aristotle concludes that what ‘holds all things together’ and thus allows for a common measure is need. Money serves us well as a conventional representation of need. This allows us to compare things which are quite different. This principle still carries over to this day in our own legal system.

Methodological strangeness

There is much more to be said in this chapter — I am glossing over the discussion of equity, the possibility of doing injustice to oneself, etc. But let’s end with a little methodological reflection.

Something is weird about this chapter, and I want to know if you noticed it. Aristotle speaks of the opposite of justice, and that is injustice. He also speaks of justice as concerned with a middle term, which is why he emphasizes proportionality so much. Fair enough, we might think. But does this seem different from earlier discussions of virtue? After all, all the other virtues are conceived of as means between two distinct vices. We aren’t concerned with strict opposites. The discussion of justice seems to be very different, then. And that might even call into question whether is properly speaking a moral virtue. It is strange to consider, but I wonder what you all think of that.