Justice as Fairness and Balance — Nicomachean Ethics

Book 5 is Aristotle’s full treatment of justice. He begins by distinguishing justice as a whole virtue,being lawful and fair toward others,from particular justice, which concerns gain and loss in exchanges among neighbors. The unjust person is grasping: he takes too much of what is good in itself, especially honor, money, and safety.

Particular justice has two main forms. Distributive justice divides honors, money, and common goods among citizens according to desert, using geometric proportion: equal shares for equals, unequal for unequals, not mere arithmetic sameness. Rectificatory justice corrects transactions between individuals. In voluntary exchanges,buying, selling, lending,the just price restores equality between what is given and received. In involuntary harms,theft, assault, fraud,the judge takes away the offender’s gain and restores the victim, as if the scales were evened.

Reciprocity in commercial life is not the same as either form, yet it holds society together: builder and shoemaker must exchange in proportion to their work, which is why money exists as a conventional measure of demand. Political justice applies among free and law-governed equals; master,slave and father,child relations involve analogies but not full civic justice. Some justice is natural, the same everywhere in force; some is legal and varies by constitution, like measures that differ between wholesale and retail markets.

Justice is a mean between having too much and too little of what can be shared; injustice is excess and defect. Not every harmful act is fully unjust in character: mistakes done in ignorance differ from deliberate wrongs done by choice, though angry acts may be unjust without making the agent wicked overall. Aristotle also asks hard questions: can someone be willingly wronged, or wrong himself? Suicide harms the city; strict “harm yourself” puzzles aside, complete self-injustice in the political sense is impossible because justice always involves more than one party.

Equity corrects law when universal rules misfire in particular cases,like a flexible ruler used in Lesbian stonework that bends to the surface rather than forcing a curved wall into a straight line. The equitable person chooses what the legislator would have intended, pardoning human failings where the letter of the law would be too crude. Acting unjustly is worse than suffering injustice, because it springs from vice; yet justice remains essentially human, since gods need no share of goods and the incurably vicious cannot benefit from them. With justice mapped, Aristotle closes this stretch of the Ethics and prepares to move on.