Politics 3.6-18: Aristotle’s (Long Lost?) Dialogue on Justice

• In Event: On Law and Constitutionalism in Ancient Greek Thought

Abstract

Going back at least to Aristotle scholars such as David Keyt and Fred Miller, scholars have ascribed a theory of distributive justice to Aristotle based on the purported agreement about theories of justice in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (EN) 5.3 and Politics 3.6-18. But I argue that the account of that which is just in distribution in EN 5.3 concerns the civic excellence of a citizen exercising his virtues in a deliberative body (like a 4th C. assembly) and such assemblies historically were primarily concerned with the distribution of honors to individuals by decree rather than debates about the principles of justice. The sort of debate about principles of distributive justice (in our sense of the term) that play out in Politics 3 most certainly are NOT the debates that one would have heard in such a 4th C. assembly. Rather, the debates in the second half of Politics 3 concern idealized philosophical positions, put in dialogue not unlike a Platonic dialogue. My paper argues that from a contextualist framework of political theory the “theory of distributive justice” that plays out in Politics 3 has only surface resemblance to justice in distribution as it is described in EN 5.3. Instead, I claim that Politics 3.6–18 presents an extended analysis—really a debate or philosophical dialogue—of the different claims made by different segments within a political community (for instance, the wealthy, the poor, and the virtuous, all of whom need to co-exist in most political communities). Such a dialogue is a far more nuanced and complicated account of distributive justice than one could imagine based solely on Nicomachean Ethics 5.3—and indeed is more sophisticated than other 4th C. dialogues on justice that we find in Aristotle’s contemporaries, such as Xenophon, Plato, and Isocrates.

Author

• Thornton Lockwood, Quinnipiac University