The Ethics of Aristotle - Penn State Hazleton

The Ethics of Aristotlethe division is made out of common property, the shares willbear the same proportion to one another as the original contributionsdid: and the Unjust which is opposite to this Justis that which violates the proportionate.But the Just which arises in transactions between men isan equal in a certain sense, and the Unjust an unequal, onlynot in the way of that proportion but of arithmetical.[Sidenote: 1132a ] Because it makes no difference whether arobbery, for instance, is committed by a good man on a bador by a bad man on a good, nor whether a good or a badman has committed adultery: the law looks only to the differencecreated by the injury and treats the men as previouslyequal, where the one does and the other suffers injury,or the one has done and the other suffered harm. And so thisUnjust, being unequal, the judge endeavours to reduce toequality again, because really when the one party has beenwounded and the other has struck him, or the one kills andthe other dies, the suffering and the doing are divided intounequal shares; well, the judge tries to restore equality bypenalty, thereby taking from the gain.For these terms gain and loss are applied to these cases,though perhaps the term in some particular instance maynot be strictly proper, as gain, for instance, to the man whohas given a blow, and loss to him who has received it: still,when the suffering has been estimated, the one is called lossand the other gain.And so the equal is a mean between the more and the less,which represent gain and loss in contrary ways (I mean, thatthe more of good and the less of evil is gain, the less of goodand the more of evil is loss): between which the equal wasstated to be a mean, which equal we say is Just: and so theCorrective Just must be the mean between loss and gain.And this is the reason why, upon a dispute arising, men haverecourse to the judge: going to the judge is in fact going tothe Just, for the judge is meant to be the personification ofthe Just. And men seek a judge as one in the mean, which isexpressed in a name given by some to judges ([Greek:mesidioi], or middle-men) under the notion that if they canhit on the mean they shall hit on the Just. The Just is thensurely a mean since the judge is also.So it is the office of a judge to make things equal, and theline, as it were, having been unequally divided, he takes from113