In what sense is justice a mean for Aristotle?

Essay

For Aristotle, justice is a mean in that it is intermediate between two extremes, and is therefore a suitable object for virtue to aim at. The different kinds of justice he identifies are associated with their own kind of extremes, but each is intermediate in some way. However, Aristotle’s presentation of justice in Book V is rather unsatisfying as an application of the Nicomachean Ethics’s “Doctrine of the Mean”, as he himself acknowledges. The account of justice fails to convincingly locate the virtue of being just between two corresponding vices, and is also unsuccessful at distinguishing between justice and other virtues. Aristotle’s treatment of justice would be more convincing freed from the straitjacket of his Doctrine of the Mean, and as a result, Book V is a helpful illustration of the fundamental flaws in that framework. In this essay, I first consider why Aristotle is interested in demonstrating that justice is a mean at all, and explain what he understands a mean to be. Then, I outline his typology of justice and account of how justice is a mean, before critically appraising the convincingness of this approach. Finally, I conclude that Aristotle’s application of the Doctrine of the Mean to justice is unconvincing, though understandable given his broader worldview, and exposes some of the shortcomings of the doctrine as a whole.

Aristotle’s main project in the Nicomachean Ethics is to investigate the nature of the highest good for humans and explain how this highest good can be achieved: Books I, II, and III.1-5 set out a conceptual framework about linking together function (ergon), virtue (arete), and flourishing (eudaimonia), before the remainder of the work details specific virtues and practical considerations around how to attain them. The Doctrine of the Mean is introduced in II.2, and is of central importance to Aristotle’s subsequent discussion of virtue:

Virtue then, is a state that decides, consisting in a mean, the mean relative to us, which is defined by reference to reason… It is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. (NE II.6, 1107a15-16)

It is clear that Aristotle conceives of virtue as fundamentally about the mean (meson), and that this view – which as Hursthouse (2006, p99) notes, was held in the context of a general principle in contemporary Greek philosophy that the meson was the best state across various disciplines and crafts – motivates his emphasis of the Doctrine of the Mean. In addition to demonstrating why Aristotle is interested in the mean, the definition above also helps us to pick out two of its crucial features. For each character trait, the mean:

(1) is the virtuous state located between two vicious tendencies of excess and deficiency along that same dimension of character, and

(2) generates a particular situation-specific response in terms of actions and feelings that are intermediate between the extremes which would be generated by its virtue’s corresponding vices.

Young (2006, p184) refers to these features of the mean as the (1) location and (2) intermediacy theses, and I shall refer back to this decomposition in the evaluation which follows.

Before that, however, we must explore Aristotle’s account of justice. He presents a nuanced typology, first distinguishing general justice from special justice, and further specifying the distributive and the corrective as subcategories of special justice (NE V.2, 1130b16-19 & 1130b30-b6). Each of these species of justice is claimed to be connected to the mean, but in a slightly different way to the others. Aristotle identifies general justice with “the exercise of the whole of virtue… in relation to each other” (NE V.2, 1130b21-22), and quickly sets it aside, because, as a state which encompasses all interpersonal virtue, it is a different sort of object to the virtues of character (like bravery and temperance) he is running through at this point in the Nicomachean Ethics.

• Superficially, there are similarities between how Aristotle talks about justice and the other virtues in Books III and IV.

  • For general justice, Aristotle may think it’s just evident that it’s a mean, because it simply constitutes lots of means (the individual virtues of character). In any case, we will (like Aristotle) set it aside for the remainder of this essay.

  • For specific justice, he makes two sets of arguments (organised in Natali)

    • Corrective justice seeks the mean between profit and loss – the original state before the transaction is to be restored, and any deviations from that are the suboptimal extremes.

    • Distributive justice seeks a mean between the distributor taking too much and giving too much, in equal shares to the worth and desert of each individual

  • There is a strong connection to motivation and voluntariness, like with the other constituents of virtue. Aristotle notes that acts of injustice can be done by individuals who are not unjust, whether because of ignorance, misfortune, or the principle being spirit & passion rather than rational thought.

• However, on closer inspection the explanation is not very convincing at all

  • Aristotle himself concedes (somewhat grudgingly) that justice is a different kind of mean to the other character traits. It is interesting that he is so keen to have it be classified as a mean at all, and this lends weight to Hursthouse and Young’s explanation that his preoccupation should be understood in the context of broader metaphysical views at the time.

  • Initially Aristotle appears to contrast doing injustice with suffering injustice as the extremes around the mean, but later clarifies that it is not a vice to suffer injustice. This means that justice seems to fail condition (1), in that there is only one corresponding vice, not two. (e.g. Young 2006, p184)

  • There is a dilemma for Aristotle around the scope of special justice. Either it overlaps with the other virtues and his theory of habituation appears to be contradicted, or there is no space left for it as a distinctive virtue.

    • As Williams (p192) observes, it is entirely possible for somebody to commit an act of injustice without having any motivation regarding the promotion of injustice itself. But this is a problem, because (following his discussion of habituation earlier) Aristotle has the view that it is actions with a certain goal that lead to the development of character traits (hexeis) – so how can it be that these putative acts of injustice are really such, if done without injustice in mind? To take his example of adultery done for profit, surely the relevant motivation is greed as opposed to a desire to seek injustice for its own sake.

    • Maybe he does mean to restrict (in)justice to those occasions where actions are taken specifically with justice in mind. But then there does not really seem to be any space for justice as a distinctive virtue, at least in the sense it is ordinarily thought of. Williams (p197) illustrates this well – there are many people who do not actively seek out injustice but nonetheless have a disposition which reliably generates injustice – for instance, because of indifference or cowardice.

  • The implication that equity is a higher form of justice also fits poorly with earlier discussion of virtue and the mean. Aristotle emphasises the mean is “relative to us” and dependent on practical judgement in the specific situation. So the notion that a rigid, rule-following approach to justice is still virtuous (albeit less excellent than being equitable) appears inconsistent with his other views.

    • Also, it is rather peculiar that Aristotle says the decent person will tend to take for herself less than she deserves (V.10), if doing so is out of line with the mean. His discussion of this puzzle (V.9) concludes she’s not doing an injustice against herself, but that’s not entirely satisfying.

• The weaknesses of the account helps to bring out deeper flaws in the Doctrine of the Mean

  • It is especially clear in the discussion about distributive justice how Aristotle is smuggling in evaluative content when pinning down the mean. He talks about “too much” and “too little” with respect to what is deserved – but obviously this trivialises his claim that the mean is what is best, since he is simply defining it relative to two evaluatively suboptimal outcomes!

  • The mean’s lack of practical guidance also comes through clearly here. Winthrop (1978) notes that, for all the mathematical analogies about geometric and arithmetic ratios [which, incidentally, are rather inconsistent with Aristotle’s exhortations in Book I that the political science is by its nature imprecise, and in Book II emphasis on the mean “relative to us”], Aristotle does not provide any details on how to determine what the just distribution is (nor does he account for the role of punishment in corrective justice).

• Conclusion

  • It is certainly the case that justice fails to meet the location criterion (1) to be a mean – Aristotle is explicit that injustice does not have a dual vice. Arguably it does meet condition (2), in that it generates an intermediate response to situations, though the kind of intermediacy varies between the species of justice.

  • This shows (a) the ad-hoc-ness of Aristotle’s doctrine, and (b) how it smuggles in evaluative content in the other cases but is really quite trivial.

  • As Hursthouse and Young (1988) describe, it is quite understandable why Aristotle would arrive at this view of the mean, and try to contort his conception of justice to fit it. But the account is more interesting and insightful when viewed apart from this.

References

Hursthouse, Rosalind. 2006. ‘The Central Doctrine of the Mean,’ in Kraut (ed.) Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Blackwell.

Natali, Carlo. 2015. ‘The Search for Definitions of Justice in Nicomachean Ethics 5,’ in Henry & Nielsen (eds.), Bridging the Gap Between Aristotle's Science and Ethics, Cambridge Uniersity Press, 148-168.

Williams, Bernard. 1980. ‘Justice as a Virtue,’ in Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, University of California Press,189-200.

Young, Charles M. 1988. 'Aristotle on Justice,' in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXVII, Supplement.

Young, Christopher. 2006. ‘Aristotle’s Justice’, in Kraut (ed.) The Blackwell Guide to the Nicomachean Ethics.

Tutor’s feedback

This is an exceptionally well-structured essay that displays the virtues necessary both for for a good tutorial essay and for what I believe makes a good answer in the exam. I think that the introduction and contextualisation of the discussion of justice within the wider Aristotelian work is particularly well done. Moreover, I think you take the essay question as a prompt to develop the discussion in interesting ways (e.g., claiming that the justice discussion actually reveals weaknesses of the doctrine of the mean and saying that the discourse on justice would be more successful and interesting without trying to make it conform to that theoretical device), but I would have liked to see that part in more extended form. You make good points about how the doctrine of the mean applies or might fail to apply to the discussion of justice; one point you did not mention, to my surprise, is that the intermediate state with regard to the other character virtues is always attached to, at least partly, human beings’ internal emotional responses that need to be negotiated (just think of courage, for example), whereas in the case of justice, the mean seems to apply to something external first and foremost, not to human beings’ emotional dispositions (which, as we saw earlier in the Ethics, is what virtue of character is importantly concerned with). Two small further points of improvement: Make sure that, when you introduce new terms or aspects of Aristotle’s theory, they are sufficiently explained given the particular aims that you have in bringing them up. This means you do not need to give a whole recap of Aristotle’s theory of habituation, but you should briefly mention what it is and why it matters here. Second, make sure always to clearly indicate which aspects of your critical discussion are originally yours and which ones are adapted from existing secondary scholarship (such as, for instance, the two-part definition of the mean you introduce above).