Justice may be the most important of the virtues.
It certainly seemed so to Aristotle whose time spent discussing it was disproportionate to the other virtues.
Justice is also one of the hardest virtues to pin down.
Abstract to the point of madness, and yet we all understand what I means to be just due to the fact that we’ve all experienced the lack of justice in our lives.
“That’s not fair!” is something we have all said more than once.
And more than any other vice, feeling as though we have been treated unjustly hurts the most.
More than being lied to.
More than someone being rude to us.
Humans are acutely tuned in to what is just and unjust.
We’re aware when an injustice is committed against us, yet that rarely stops many from committing injustices against others if it’s in their better interest, due to prejudice, or as a result of so many different social nuances.
We see that all men mean by justice that kind of state of character which makes people disposed to do what is just and makes them act justly and wish for what is just; and similarly by injustice that state which makes them act unjustly and wish for what is unjust.
You can see here that even Aristotle has a difficult time creating a compressed definition of justice without resorting to using the words “just” and “unjust” and appealing to common human instinct.
Both the lawless man and the grasping and unfair man are thought to be unjust, so that evidently both the law-abiding and the fair man will be just. The just, then, is the lawful and the fair, the unjust the unlawful and the unfair.
This could be a difficult definition for a lot of people because Aristotle is using the law to define whether you are just or not.
The first issue being that of the laws of Aristotle’s time and place would have differed from those of the ones of your time and place.
Do you agree with the laws currently set in place?
Surely, the majority of laws are built on a bedrock of principles that almost everyone would agree are sound and just.
Drop down in a state anywhere in the world and you’ll see commonalities that have been set in stone (think Moses with the Ten Commandments) ever since law was conceived.
Murder is outlawed, stealing is outlawed, and so on.
But what about those laws that differ from state to state?
Because it is unlawful to smoke marijuana where the state has deemed it illegal does that mean breaking that law is unjust?
We could argue with the decisions that went into that law-making decision. But also what is meant by law?
Are we talking about state-mandated laws here? Or something else?
This is something you will have to grapple with in your battle to become a fair and justice person.
Since the unjust man is grasping, he must be concerned with goods—not all goods, but those with which prosperity and adversity have to do, which taken absolutely are always good, but for a particular person are not always good. Now men pray for and pursue these things; but they should not, but should pray that the things that are good absolutely may also be good for them, and should choose the things that are good for them.
Simply put:
Prosperity and fortune in isolation is good, but it may not be good for you right now.
What is good for one is not necessarily good for another.
You want the things that are absolutely good and good for you simultaneously and then you must actively choose the good things.
The unjust man does not always choose the greater, but also the less—in the case of things bad absolutely; but because the lesser evil is itself thought to be in a sense good, and graspingness is directed at the good, therefore he is thought to be grasping. And he is unfair; for this contains and is common to both.
The passage on justice in The Nicomachean Ethics is one of the hardest to understand even with Aristotle’s masterly breakdown (we should really applaud him for being able to do so) and I believe that’s because justice as an idea is so abstract.
We really must try to make things more concrete with examples and so on in order to fully understand.
But here Aristotle is highlighting a very important point:
Choosing the lesser evil is still a form of evil.
Not going for the highest good, not going for what is truly and absolutely just and right, is still wrong.
Let’s take an extreme example.
Nazi Germany.
The highest possible good in that situation would be either to speak out against the evil or, with the evil having set in already and swept the country, harbour jewish people and keep them safe from persecution, enslavement, torture, and death.
The greatest evil?
To actively oppress and harm the jews.
Think Gestapo.
Think concentration camp guards.
Now many at the time never actively harmed the jews, nor did they wish them any harm.
Many thought the events in their country were deplorable.
These people decided to take the lesser evil. They did not add to the hatred and violence. But this lesser evil is still a form of evil.
In this situation, the people sitting back and saying nothing were just as complicit in the evil as those actively perpetrating it.
Sitting back and saying nothing in this situation is still evil.
It’s still unjust.
And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one’s lust), and those of a good-tempered man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness, commanding some acts and forbidding others; and the rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well.
Not only are the large majority of laws about preserving the happiness of the common lot and the good for everyone, but instilled in the laws are the virtuous habits we wish to adopt.
This doesn’t mean we blindly follow the laws either, because that’s not justice if the laws aren’t aiming at the highest possible justice for the common good.
Aristotle mentions than some laws are hastily conceived and preserve justice less well than the rightly-framed laws.
So there is a distinction here and once again this is an art not a science to discerning justice.
We’re working to develop our inner compass.
This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, although not without qualification, but in relation to another. And therefore justice is often thought to be the greatest of virtues, and ‘neither evening nor morning star’ is so wonderful; and proverbially ‘in justice is every virtue comprehended’. And it is complete virtue in its fullest sense because it is the actual exercise of complete virtue. It is complete because he who possesses it can exercise his virtue not only in himself but towards another also; for many men can exercise virtue in their own affairs, but not in their relations to others.
We really need to pay attention to justice because it contains all virtues together.
Justice is like a super virtue.
And while most of the other virtues are focused primarily on the individual, going deep within yourself to become a better person, justice is about your relation to the community.
Being just is about you and your relation with society.
Now the worst man is he who exercises his wickedness both towards himself and towards his friends, and the best man is not he who exercises his virtue towards himself but he who exercises it towards another; for this is a difficult task.
It is fitting that the virtue of justice is the penultimate one in this cycle.
You’ve been training all of this time and you should have gotten a decent handle on the other virtues, the virtues that you exercise with yourself.
Those were hard enough.
But now here’s the chance for you to take it to the next level and exercise virtue towards other people.
Here are some nuances of definition when it comes to justice:
if one man commits adultery for the sake of gain and makes money by it, while another does so at the bidding of appetite though he loses money and is penalized for it, the latter would be held to be self-indulgent rather than grasping, but the former is unjust, but not self-indulgent; evidently, therefore, he is unjust by reason of his making gain by his act. Again, all other unjust acts are ascribed invariably to some particular kind of wickedness, e.g. adultery to self-indulgence, the desertion of a comrade in battle to cowardice, physical violence to anger; but if a man makes gain, his action is ascribed to no form of wickedness but injustice.
What makes someone unjust rather than one of the other vices?
It all comes down to whether one gained by their wickedness or not.
If a man becomes physically violent due to anger then he has temperament issue.
If he becomes physically violent because he has something to gain from it (like money), he is unjust.
Injustice = “is concerned with honour or money or safety—or that which includes all these, if we had a single name for it—and its motive is the pleasure that arises from gain”.
Aristotle divides the unjust into the unlawful and the unfair, whilst the just are divided into the lawful and the fair.
the law bids us practise every virtue and forbids us to practise any vice. And the things that tend to produce virtue taken as a whole are those of the acts prescribed by the law which have been prescribed with a view to education for the common good.
Justice often comes down to equality.
Injustice arises…
when either equals have and are awarded unequal shares, or un-equals equal shares.
Here examples help make abstract ideas easier to understand.
Just say you did all the work for a school presentation while the other group members sat back and played video games.
But you all get awarded the same points and grades.
That is injustice because you are un-equals but have been awarded equal shares.
But let’s say you all did your part and everyone contributed the exact amount, each bringing their unique skills and effort to the table to make a great presentation.
In this case, the teacher thinks only one of the people (the person doing the speaking, for example) did most of the work and decides to award that person the higher grade.
That’s equals being awarded unequal shares.
awards should be ‘according to merit’.
Aristotle is coming out against affirmative action two thousand years early.
Affirmative action is unjust.
Hiring someone based on identity politics rather than merit is unjust.
Also remember this when it comes to evaluating justice:
the man who acts unjustly has too much, and the man who is unjustly treated too little, of what is good.
Justice comes down to balancing the books and being fair:
This, then, is what the just is—the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion.
Another thing to note is that justice is constant.
You cannot change what is just by circumstances.
Just is just.
the justice in transactions between man and man is a sort of equality indeed, and the injustice a sort of inequality; not according to that kind of proportion, however, but according to arithmetical proportion. For it makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man a good one, nor whether it is a good or a bad man that has committed adultery; the law looks only to the distinctive character of the injury, and treats the parties as equal, if one is in the wrong and the other is being wronged, and if one inflicted injury and the other has received it.
“He deserved it” is not an argument.
Bad is bad, full stop.
You can’t cheat someone out of money and expect to have the virtue of justice on the defence that the man you cheated was an adulterer.
It doesn’t work like that.
Whether you cheated a gangbanger or a nun, you still committed a vice. You still committed an injustice.
This is why we have judges in our judicial system.
Judges restore equality.
this kind of injustice being an inequality, the judge tries to equalize it; for in the case also in which one has received and the other has inflicted a wound, or one has slain and the other been slain, the suffering and the action have been unequally distributed; but the judge tries to equalize things by means of the penalty, taking away from the gain of the assailant.
How do you know when you are just?
According to Aristotle, like always, it comes down to action and doing just actions by choice:
And justice is that in virtue of which the just man is said to be a doer, by choice, of that which is just, and one who will distribute either between himself and another or between two others not so as to give more of what is desirable to himself and less to the other (and conversely with what is harmful), but so as to give what is equal in accordance with proportion; and similarly in distributing between two other persons. Injustice on the other hand is similarly related to the unjust, which is excess and defect, contrary to proportion, of the useful or hurtful. For which reason injustice is excess and defect, namely, because it is productive of excess and defect—in one’s own case excess of what is in its own nature useful and defect of what is hurtful, while in the case of others it is as a whole like what it is in one’s own case, but proportion may be violated in either direction. In the unjust act to have too little is to be unjustly treated; to have too much is to act unjustly.
Remember also that if you do something wrong, even though the outcome may look like an injustice or it might be unfair, the vice you are having trouble with may not be justice.
This is important to know because this is an iterative process of self-correction.
You want to know what vices you struggle with so you can correct them.
Since acting unjustly does not necessarily imply being unjust, we must ask what sort of unjust acts imply that the doer is unjust with respect to each type of injustice, e.g. a thief, an adulterer, or a brigand […] For a man might even lie with a woman knowing who she was, but the origin of his act might be not deliberate choice but passion. He acts unjustly, then, but is not unjust; e.g. a man is not a thief, yet he stole, nor an adulterer, yet he committed adultery; and similarly in all other cases.
Cheating on your wife is an unjust act.
But if you did it in a moment of passion, lacking self-control, the vice you’re struggling with is self-indulgence and the virtue you need to concentrate on acquiring is temperance.
Acts just and unjust being as we have described them, a man acts unjustly or justly whenever he does such acts voluntarily; when involuntarily, he acts neither unjustly nor justly except in an incidental way; for he does things which happen to be just or unjust.* Whether an act is or is not one of injustice (or of justice) is determined by its voluntariness or involuntariness.
It comes down to conscious choice.
Doing things within your power with knowledge.
It means you did not act in ignorance.
It also means you weren’t acted on or forced.
Aristotle gives the example of one person taking your hand and using it to strike another.
In this situation, you did not act voluntarily because the act wasn’t in your power.
But in the case of unjust and just acts alike the injustice or justice may be only incidental; for a man might return a deposit unwillingly and from fear, and then he must not be said either to do what is just or to act justly, except in an incidental way. Similarly the man who under compulsion and unwillingly fails to return the deposit must be said to act unjustly, and to do what is unjust, only incidentally.
You are just when you act justly by choice.
Some involuntary acts are excusable, such as those done in ignorance, but not those done in ignorance but due to some other driving passion (e.g. anger, lust).
Ultimately, a guiding principle to be an equitable or fair person is, according to Aristotle, to choose and do just acts and not be a stickler for your rights in a bad sense, tending to take less than your share even though you have the law on your side.
Virtue Assignment for Justice:
THIS WEEK:
– Monitor your actions with your wristband.
Are you acting justly or unjustly?
Are you doing things for gain that you shouldn’t be?
Are you taking more than your fair share?
Switch wrists whenever you catch yourself straying away from justice.
– What greater injustices are you witnessing in the world?
If there is an issue that has been on your mind for some time, this week is the time to do something about it.
Speak up. Alert others to what is going on. Sign and circulate petitions. Come up with practical solutions. Protest.
What the issue is will dictate what you need to do. But if you know about an injustice and continue to sit by and do nothing this week you are choosing the lesser evil. Get involved on some level.
I remember my eighth grade English teacher Mr. Jones had to teach us about Amnesty International. But instead of just teaching us, he got us involved. As a class, we wrote letters imploring the freedom of wrongly imprisoned men in Guantanamo Bay.
What can you do this week?
– Make a list and brainstorm injustices that you see in your everyday life.
These aren’t global issues. These are injustices close to home. Start close to yourself and you’ll move outwards in concentrate circles.
Perhaps you’ve seen your local council has spent thousands on a monstrosity of a statue to clear their year-end budget while there are still pot-holes in the road. Is this an injustice? If you believe so, it’s time to take issue.
Most other people let injustices slide by. Don’t be like most other people this week.
– As usual, spend time journaling this week and contemplating the nature of justice.
READING HOMEWORK:
I hope you’ve been finding this program valuable.
Next week, the final week in this cycle, we’ll focus on the virtue of wisdom.