This was the hardest book so far, and I was lost most of the time. I kept expecting him to try to fit justice into his framework of virtues as a mean between two vices, but if he did this at any point, I completely missed it.
It’s definitely not as clear as the previous book, but I think he touches on it as a “middle term” starting in Chapter 3, 11131a15. He says that the just is a middle term as well as equal, and “In the respect in which it is a middle term, it is between certain things (these are the more and the less.”
Aristotle then goes on to say that the just involves at least 4 terms, two people involved and two matters of concern.
Thus, he says, the just is actually a proportion by nature, and the unjust is what is contrary to proportion. “The unjust, therefore, is both what is more [than the proportion], on the one side, and what is less than it, on the other.”
“…he who acts unjustly has more of the good, and he who suffers injustice, less…”
And just to clarify my comment further, it’s clear throughout that Aristotle understands justice to be a horse of a different color when compared to the other moral virtues, in large part because of the degree to which the just involves the good of others.
The idea is that the vice on each extreme, i.e. both of the vices, is injustice. In the one case you do injustice towards another. In the other case you do injustice to yourself.
But doesn’t Aristotle ultimately argue that one cannot do injustice to oneself, except perhaps metaphorically, between the parts of the soul, as Plato would argue?
I think since justice itself involves striking a balance in the treatment of 2 more parties, it's hard to define a specific excess and deficiency like the other virtues. If you fail to act justly, then you given 1 party an excess and left another party with a deficiency. So you don't really have either an excess or a deficiency to point to - you have both, pertaining to different parties. It makes more sense then to simply speak about striking or not striking the proper balance (being just or unjust). It seems like justice as a characteristic of a person would involve both the instinct/experience to know what is just in a given situation and then the conviction to act accordingly even in the face of undesired consequences (to the person acting) or one's own bias.
In situations where gain/loss aren't really at play, then Aristotle says we would ordinarily point to a more specific "corruption" rather than the person's being unjust (his anger, if striking someone, for example).
I wanted to point out that I found 1137b Line 24 interesting: "Hence equity is just and better than what is just in a certain sense - not what is just unqualifiedly but the error that arises through its being stated unqualifiedly. This is in fact the nature of the equitable: a correction of law in the respect in which it is deficient because of its being general."
This describes the same problem we have with modern law which is that it's often hard to make a "bright line rule" that leads to equitable results in all cases. This leads to things like "legal fictions" where we do some mental and sometimes linguistic gymnastics to cram one set of facts into a categorization that doesn't really fit so that we can get an equitable result.
I felt like book IV spent most of its energy trying to grasp at tons of different concepts in an effort to prove his mean theory. This book was definitely different as justice seems to resist the absolutes and requires a case by case consideration. This, he has to introduce a proportional mathematical concept to manage this. At times you can feel his struggle trying to define justice.
As others have mentioned, this was certainly a tough one for me. Defining justice as the whole of all virtues as well as a part of itself really started to trip me up. I know in theory they are different but the self referential terminology had me missing the mark on what exactly was being talked about. However, I was definitely interested in his ideas of lawfulness as it relates to justice. Maybe I was thinking to linearly but I would be curious to hear what others think on how Aristotle's definition of justice relates to laws that may conflict with other virtues entirely. If a system or law is set up in a way that results in inequality, can that system still be considered just?
This was the hardest book so far, and I was lost most of the time. I kept expecting him to try to fit justice into his framework of virtues as a mean between two vices, but if he did this at any point, I completely missed it.
It’s definitely not as clear as the previous book, but I think he touches on it as a “middle term” starting in Chapter 3, 11131a15. He says that the just is a middle term as well as equal, and “In the respect in which it is a middle term, it is between certain things (these are the more and the less.”
Aristotle then goes on to say that the just involves at least 4 terms, two people involved and two matters of concern.
Thus, he says, the just is actually a proportion by nature, and the unjust is what is contrary to proportion. “The unjust, therefore, is both what is more [than the proportion], on the one side, and what is less than it, on the other.”
“…he who acts unjustly has more of the good, and he who suffers injustice, less…”
And just to clarify my comment further, it’s clear throughout that Aristotle understands justice to be a horse of a different color when compared to the other moral virtues, in large part because of the degree to which the just involves the good of others.
The idea is that the vice on each extreme, i.e. both of the vices, is injustice. In the one case you do injustice towards another. In the other case you do injustice to yourself.
But doesn’t Aristotle ultimately argue that one cannot do injustice to oneself, except perhaps metaphorically, between the parts of the soul, as Plato would argue?
I think since justice itself involves striking a balance in the treatment of 2 more parties, it's hard to define a specific excess and deficiency like the other virtues. If you fail to act justly, then you given 1 party an excess and left another party with a deficiency. So you don't really have either an excess or a deficiency to point to - you have both, pertaining to different parties. It makes more sense then to simply speak about striking or not striking the proper balance (being just or unjust). It seems like justice as a characteristic of a person would involve both the instinct/experience to know what is just in a given situation and then the conviction to act accordingly even in the face of undesired consequences (to the person acting) or one's own bias.
In situations where gain/loss aren't really at play, then Aristotle says we would ordinarily point to a more specific "corruption" rather than the person's being unjust (his anger, if striking someone, for example).
I wanted to point out that I found 1137b Line 24 interesting: "Hence equity is just and better than what is just in a certain sense - not what is just unqualifiedly but the error that arises through its being stated unqualifiedly. This is in fact the nature of the equitable: a correction of law in the respect in which it is deficient because of its being general."
This describes the same problem we have with modern law which is that it's often hard to make a "bright line rule" that leads to equitable results in all cases. This leads to things like "legal fictions" where we do some mental and sometimes linguistic gymnastics to cram one set of facts into a categorization that doesn't really fit so that we can get an equitable result.
I felt like book IV spent most of its energy trying to grasp at tons of different concepts in an effort to prove his mean theory. This book was definitely different as justice seems to resist the absolutes and requires a case by case consideration. This, he has to introduce a proportional mathematical concept to manage this. At times you can feel his struggle trying to define justice.
As others have mentioned, this was certainly a tough one for me. Defining justice as the whole of all virtues as well as a part of itself really started to trip me up. I know in theory they are different but the self referential terminology had me missing the mark on what exactly was being talked about. However, I was definitely interested in his ideas of lawfulness as it relates to justice. Maybe I was thinking to linearly but I would be curious to hear what others think on how Aristotle's definition of justice relates to laws that may conflict with other virtues entirely. If a system or law is set up in a way that results in inequality, can that system still be considered just?
This was definitely the most challenging one to get through yet.
Felt a bit more like rambling than previous books and especially the parts with, if α is this and β is that etc.
I would probably need to read through this one a couple more times to grasp it better.
So having these summaries really is super helpful.