. In Aristotle's account, corrective and distributive justice are not particular substantive ideals, but are rather the formal patterns that inhere in interactions and in the legal arrangements that regulate them. Corrective and distributive justice are the structures of ordering internal to transactions and distributions, respectively. The Aristotelian. forms of justice thus constitute the rationality immanent to the relation ships of mutually external beings. This article stresses Aristotle's formalism, contrasting it to modem instrumental conceptions of legal rationality, and defending it (...) against Kelsen's allegations of emptiness. The article concludes with the suggestion that corrective justice, as the conceptual pattern that makes private law what it is, can be considered the formal and final cause of private law. (shrink)

Aristotle’s treatment of brutishness in the Nicomachean Ethics is very brief: a couple of paragraphs in the first chapter of Book VII, and most of Chapter 5 of the same book, together with some glancing references in Chapter 6. Commentators standardly give these passages short shrift indeed, if they do not ignore them altogether. In antiquity Aspasius commented on the Ethics, but, by great ill luck, his commentary on the first half of Book 7 is lost. A twelfth- or thirteenth-century (...) commentary known as “Anonymous” exists, but, in the words of Friedrich Schleiermacher, it “exceeds everything in poverty.” Aquinas comments helpfully on some items in the passage, but its doctrine does not find its way into his own moral theory, and indeed in his language the Latin word bestialitas, which standardly renders the Greek thêriotês, is taken over to denote sexual relations between members of different species. Dante makes a brief though striking reference to Aristotle’s discussion, but he gets it wrong. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the translators furnish occasional notes of interest; the line-by-line commentators go through the passage with small points of explanation but the overall theory does not seem to capture their attention; the more thematic commentators largely ignore it; and, to my knowledge, no article or monograph exists upon it. The beguiling issues of the Ethics, it appears, lie elsewhere: the function argument and the nature of happiness, the nature of virtue, the voluntary and involuntary, the distinction between vice and weakness, the place of contemplation in the happy life. On these subjects the literature is numbingly massive. (shrink)

This paper argues against the view favored by many contemporary scholars that corrective justice in the Nicomachean Ethics is essentially compensatory and in favor of a bifunctional account according to which corrective justice aims at equalizing inequalities of both goods and evils resulting from various interactions between persons. Not only does the account defended in this paper better explain the broad array of examples Aristotle provides than does the standard interpretation, it also better fits Aristotle’s general definition of what is (...) just. In the last section, the paper argues, again against the standard interpretation, that proportional reciprocity, the kind of justice discussed in Nicomachean Ethics V.5, has two forms and is closely linked to corrective justice. Although corrective justice and proportional reciprocity are conceptually distinct and do different work in Aristotle’s political philosophy, instances of proportional reciprocity are instantiated by instances of corrective justice. This linkage, the paper concludes, helps to explain why Aristotle would assign corrective justice such a prominent place in his theory of justice. (shrink)