Summary
The term justice can apply both to a
general disposition in a person as well as to questions concerning
exchanges and illegal infractions. Justice is a distinct kind of
virtue because it encompasses all the other virtues and because
it treats the interactions between people rather than just the dispositions
of an individual person. Aristotle distinguishes between distributive
justice, which deals with the distribution of goods among members
of a community, and rectificatory justice, which deals with unjust
gains or losses between two people, through trade, theft, or assault.
Distributive justice accords goods and honor proportionately, giving
most to those who deserve most, whereas rectificatory justice aims
to restore imbalances. No one willingly suffers an injustice, and
it is not possible to treat oneself unjustly. While the laws are
a good guideline, they do not cover every particular case. On occasion,
agreed-upon equity must settle cases that the laws do not.
Acting morally requires not only that we have all the
moral virtues but also that we have the intellectual virtue of prudence,
or practical reason. Prudence is one of five intellectual virtues,
the other four of which are scientific knowledge, intuition, wisdom,
and art or technical skill. Prudence is the kind of intelligence
that helps us reason properly about practical matters. Having the
right motives is a matter of having all of the moral virtues, but
choosing the right course of action is a matter of prudence.
As well as plain, unthinking brutishness and vice, which
are the opposite of virtue, people may also do wrong through incontinence, or
a lack of self-control. Incontinence is not as bad as vice, since
it is partially involuntary, but it is also harder to remedy, since
it is unreasoned. Though we are led into incontinence from an excessive desire
for pleasure, pleasure is generally a good thing. Our pursuit of the
good life is itself the pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure only leads us
astray when we have a defective character.
Friendship is an essential component of the good life.
The best kind of friendship is one in which two people are attracted
to each other because they admire each other’s virtue and where
each friend takes more interest in giving love than in receiving.
Inferior kinds of friendship are based on utility or pleasure. Our
attitude toward ourselves reflects our attitude toward our friends:
people who love and respect themselves are likely to treat their
friends well. Self-love is more important than friendship, and people
only look down on it because people who love themselves imperfectly
seek honor or pleasure for themselves rather than goodness. Since
friendship is essential to the good life, not even wholly self-sufficient
people can be truly happy without friends.
Friendship is closely tied to justice, since both have
to do with how we treat others, and Aristotle’s discussion of friendship
reaches outward to encompass other forms of human interaction such
as family relationships and government. The three good kinds of
government are monarchy, aristocracy, and timocracy, which is a
kind of democracy with a basic property requirement for voting rights. They
are analogous, respectively, to a father–son relationship, a husband–wife
relationship, and a brother–brother relationship. Corrupted monarchy
becomes tyranny, corrupted aristocracy becomes oligarchy, and corrupted
timocracy becomes democracy, by which Aristotle means a kind of
mob rule.
The highest goal of all is rational contemplation, and
the good life consists in pursuing this activity above all others.
No one can live a life of pure contemplation, but we should aim
to approximate this ideal as best as possible. Pleasure accompanies
and perfects our activities, and a good person will feel the highest
pleasure in this activity of rational contemplation. The practical
sciences of ethics and politics are guides for dealing with our
everyday lives and arranging things so that we can find the surest
path to the good life.
