Aristotle’s account of the virtue of justice has been regarded as one of the least successful aspects of his ethics. Among the most serious criticisms lodged against his views are (i) that he fails to identify the proper subject matter of justice (LeBar 2020), (ii) that he wrongly identifies the characteristic motives relevant for justice and injustice (Williams 1980), and (iii) that his account is parochial, i.e., that it fails to correctly recognize or characterize our obligations of justice to those (...) outside our community (Annas 1995; Curzer 2012, ch. 13). Indeed, Mark LeBar has recently argued that, although Aristotle’s eudaimonist framework remains the most promising metaethical strategy to ground justice as a virtue of individual human beings, the normative content of his theory is so flawed that neo-Aristotelians ought to adopt a Kantian theory of justice that centers on according respect to persons (LeBar 2020). My aim in this paper is to defend Aristotle’s views from these criticisms in order to show that it holds promise as an account of justice as a virtue. Notably, neo-Aristotelians have generally neglected the topic of justice, despite its centrality to Aristotle’s ethics and to our own social lives. I argue that they ought to take Aristotle’s account seriously as a starting point for their own theorizing, while recognizing that it needs modification on some points. (shrink)

I argue that Aristotle’s unmodern conception of politics can only be understood by first understanding his distinctive picture of human agency and the excellence of political wisdom. I therefore undertake to consider three related puzzles: why at the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics [NE] is the human good said to be the same for a city and for an individual, such that the NE’s inquiry is political? why later on in the NE is political wisdom said to be the same (...) state of soul as practical wisdom? why in the Politics does Aristotle identify practical wisdom as the peculiar excellence of rulers when deliberation was said to be the common work of all citizens insofar as they are genuinely citizens? While these puzzles have individually received treatment in the literature, they have seldom been treated together. Taken independently, the passages in question can seem to express a more familiar conception of politics. In particular, each of the sameness claims made in and has too easily been assimilated to a more modern conception of the relation of ethics to politics and thereby domesticated. As I hope to show, in Aristotle is not simply asserting that the human good in a city supervenes on the good as achieved by its inhabitants ; and in he is not claiming only that political wisdom is a species of practical wisdom, but is rather asserting a more thoroughgoing identity between various types of deliberative excellence that are conventionally distinguished and assigned different names. Working through these passages will provide a sufficient basis for tackling, the question about the respective excellences of rulers and citizens. I will show that, despite his restriction of the exercise of practical wisdom to rulers, Aristotle imagines that non-ruling citizens will also exercise their political agency and thereby require a distinct rational excellence. More precisely, for Aristotle, there are two forms of political agency, deliberation on behalf of one’s community, which is perfected by practical-political wisdom, and the comprehension exercised by citizens on the basis of the view of life preserved by their character-virtues. Understood this way, the division of labor between rulers and citizens does not generate two spheres of activity, political and private, which could have unrelated excellences or concern distinct goods. (shrink)

The profusion of senses of justice in NE V.1–7 has left many readers with a general impression of chaos, but also gives rise to pressing questions about Aristotle’s conception of justice. Specifically, why does Aristotle claim that there are two parts to justice as equality, but go on to discuss three types of equality in the subsequent chapters? What is the relationship between political justice and the distinction between general justice and particular justice? I argue in this essay that the (...) notion of reciprocity, central to the first question, can also help us address the second. Specifically, I show that reciprocity is not a third species of particular justice, but rather a prior condition for political community and for political justice. Political justice is best understood as a redescription of particular justice that highlights how distributive and corrective justice maintain equality among citizens in an existing political community. In addition to explaining the unity of Aristotle’s thought in these chapters of NE V, I demonstrate a number of philosophical consequences for understanding Aristotle’s conception of justice. (shrink)

Life can be awful. For this to be the stuff of tragedy and not farce, we require a capacity to be more than we presently are. Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, poses a challenge to this commitment of ethics in his commentary on the instability of memory. But Barnes leads us past this difficulty by showing us that Tony’s real problem is his inability to make sense of himself—a failure of self-knowledge. Tony’s past (...) is tangled up with others he can scarcely see as people. Let us hope we can do better. (shrink)