In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that friendship and justice are the same, apparently flouting the not uncommon contrast between friendship and justice. I start by assessing Aristotle’s principle of equality: friends of equal standing engage in exact reciprocity in goods and friends of unequal standing engage in proportional reciprocity. In a number of ways that have gone unnoticed, the equalization principle is a requirement for understanding the sameness of friendship and justice. Just relations and friendship share the same domain, (...) that is, the same relationship of a corresponding community. Moreover, asking how to be just to someone is the same as asking how to be a friend to that person, indicating that the virtue of justice and the virtue of friendship are also the same. (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)

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)

In numerous places in his Ethics and Politics, Aristotle associates political justice (or ruling in turns) and the regime of polity. I argue that there is a necessary connection between political justice and polity due to their origins in political mixing. Aristotle is the first to discover political justice and polity because his predecessors had thought that the elements which they combine -- excellence and equality in the case of political justice, and oligarchy and democracy in the case of polity (...) -- were antithetical. The novelty of Aristotle's 'discoveries' points to their connection, namely that both originate in the political mixing of elements. This article examines such political mixing in detail and shows how an institutional arrangement such as ruling in turns can be adapted to different regime-types. (shrink)