Justice in Greek Thought: Plato and Aristotle

In one line

The Western argument about justice begins with two Greeks: one who held that justice is each part of a whole doing its own work, and one who divided it into the kinds that lawyers still use.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Plato (c. 427 to 347 BC), in the Republic, treats justice as a structural virtue: justice in the city consists in each class performing the function proper to it, and justice in the individual consists in each part of the soul performing its own. Aristotle (384 to 322 BC), in the Nicomachean Ethics, treats justice as a matter of proportion and divides it into distributive justice, the allocation of goods according to merit, and corrective justice, the restoration of a balance disturbed by a wrong. Aristotle also introduces epieikeia, equity, as the correction of law where its generality fails.

Plato

The setting. The Republic opens with the question what justice is, and rejects the answers offered: that justice is telling the truth and paying debts; that it is helping friends and harming enemies; and, from Thrasymachus, that justice is nothing but the interest of the stronger. That third answer is the ancestor of the equivalence theories in Module IV, and it is worth naming here for that reason.

The method. Plato proposes to look for justice in the city first, because it is written larger there, and then in the individual.

Justice in the city. The city has three classes: the rulers, whose virtue is wisdom; the guardians or auxiliaries, whose virtue is courage; and the producers, whose virtue is temperance. Justice is each doing its own work and not meddling in another's. It is not a fourth activity alongside the other three but the condition in which each is properly performed.

Justice in the individual. The soul likewise has three parts: reason, spirit and appetite. Justice in a person is the condition in which reason rules, spirit supports it, and appetite is governed.

What is valuable in it. Justice as a structural condition rather than a transaction. Plato's justice is a property of an arrangement, which anticipates what is now called social justice.

What is objectionable. The scheme is anti-democratic and its class structure is fixed. Each doing his own work can be read as everybody staying in an allotted place, which is the second sense of harmony criticised in [The Purpose of Dharma]. The parallel with varnashrama dharma is close and is worth drawing, including the objection.

Aristotle

Universal and particular justice. Aristotle first distinguishes justice in the wide sense, which is complete virtue in relation to others and is coextensive with lawfulness, from justice in the narrow sense, which concerns fairness in distribution and exchange. The narrow sense is the lawyer's.