According to Aristotle, justice is restoring or maintaining a
proper balance. He hardly distinguishes the justice that deals with crime and
those that deal with commerce. The only difference is that he calls the former
involuntary and the later voluntary. For some, it might be hard to see what the
two have in common, but for Aristotle, they both involve exchanges. Aristotle
believes that anything that could result in an unfair advantage or disadvantage
is a concern of justice. It makes the connection that inflated prices and
physical assault are both, essentially, grouped into the same category.
We talked briefly in class about “zero sum” goods – things like
money, honor, and safety. Particular justice encompasses these things. A gain for one person results in a loss to
another. Aristotle associates particular injustice with greed or desire. Distributive
justice, on the other hand, is where the people who make the most contributions
to society receive the greatest rewards. Aristotle’s version of distributive
justice seems slightly biased. In his time, women and slaves did not have the
freedom to do as they pleased, so they would receive a lesser share of the
wealth. Those who have the greatest privilege have the greatest access to
wealth.
Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean says that justice is a state
where people are given things based on their merit and usefulness, and
injustice is where people have either too much or too little. However,
usefulness and merit can be judged differently at different times and by
different people. A bus driver would be very useful to someone that doesn’t
have a car, but they would be completely useless for someone who can drive
themselves. Numerous other jobs seem worthless to one group but are necessary
to the functionality of other people’s lives.
So how would we determine who deserved what? Who would be the
one to decide? It would be near impossible for whom ever to decide what would
be fair for everyone. I don’t think there would be a reliable way for any
person or group to decide the merit of others.
So, what do some of you guys think about it? Do you think
that there could be a fair, proper, and just way to adequately decide what the
worth of someone would be? Is there a way to disregard any bias that someone
would have when they were deciding?
When discussing Aristotle’s understands of Justice and the mean, it is important to understand that for Aristotle, there is no “real” or idealized mean. Unlike Plato, who saw everything as being an imperfect version of an idea, Aristotle’s reality was defined by reality. So when the usefulness of a bus driver is argued over, although the actual usefulness can be disputed, the logic behind the value of his service isn’t. There may be a disagreement over how much his service is valued, but the argument is in fact occurring over the principle of his usefulness.
ReplyDeleteI spoke with Prof. Johnson after class about this problem in Aristotle’s logic, and although she explained that his system is based in reality, and value is a relative term, I have to agree that there seems to be some dispute over the actual ability for injustice to be declared when two individuals come into conflict over the value of an object, service, or relationship. One of the reasons we use idealized versions of reality, like Plato’s Republic, is so we can understand how best to model our own reality. With Aristotle’s understanding of Justice as based not only in number, but also motivation ( i.e. accidental versus planned harm to others, stealing for survival versus to do another harm, etc.), then we reach the grey area of relative understandings. If I am the only one capable of determining value objects have to me, and if I am the only one capable of determining my motivations, then we cannot use this system as a functional measure of Justice. Aristotle’s understanding of justice, although far more grounded than Plato’s, is ultimately too distant to provide a solid measure of justice in society.
Like Tommy said, Aristotle focuses on relative, 'realistic' justice, whereas Plato constructed the ideal justice for us in The Republic.
ReplyDeleteWhile you're right about there being a grey area in justice, Tommy, I don't think that that would necessarily make Aristotle's system a broken one. While you are indeed the only one capable of determining an object's value to yourself and are (at times) the only one capable of determining your own motivations, Aristotelian justice isn't centralized solely around the individual. If I were to voluntarily steal a jar of peanut butter from my local grocery, knowing that I won't eat it because I'm allergic to peanut butter (and therefore the peanut butter has no real value to me), an injustice has still occurred. The rectificatory justice that would occur if I were caught would not take into account my own valuation of the peanut butter, but its monetary worth and my intent in the act.
In a society where the value of objects is not based in money, you might have a case. In ours, money provides a type of balance against which we may measure an item's value as a society. That's the idea anyways.
I agree with you that there is not a realistic, reliable way for one person to determine the merit of others, which is probably why our political system is composed of representatives and delegates that speak for the majority. It would require one person to be able to put themselves in every American's shoes and being able to consider every single possible set of circumstances that would effect their merit. While that would be ideal, it's next to impossible. I do agree with a lot of what Aristotle says in his Doctrine of the Mean about the injustice of some people having too much or too little of what they deserve. That shows itself a lot in today's society especially with the Occupy movement and the economic inequality in the United States. Aristotle offers an ideal solution to this problem, but something like that, a long with most other things in this country, would end up being corrupted and create more injustice than before.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I don't consider that it is biased that in Aristotle's time woman and slaves didn’t receive as much, under distributive justice, as other members of Aristotle’s society. At least to them it didn’t seem biased. While a society works within certain parameters, this would have made it perfectly acceptable to give the lesser in society, less, than what others where appropriated. For modern times, distributive justice applied to a country with strict immigration laws/policy would mean that not all of that country’s resources would be appropriated to none residents of that said country. This obviously is not the United States, because we all non-residents many benefits that other countries, like Mexico for instance, do not allow to non-residents citizens, or illegal immigrants to that country.
DeleteAristotle’s “doctrine of the mean”, as you stated, would put everyone one equal footing with everything considered within a society. We are obviously talking about a “perfect world” again, because people will always make decisions off of some sort of biased. As Professor J said in one of our classes, “We discriminate everyday” or something similar. By this, what is being said is that to make decisions, one must weigh the options and decide based off of what is the better outcome or recipient.