Reason and Character by Lorraine Smith Pangle

Author:Lorraine Smith Pangle [Pangle, Lorraine Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000 Political Science / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

NATURAL JUSTICE (5.7)

Aristotle’s famous but cryptic statement on natural justice or natural right in 5.7 holds out hope that nature can always and everywhere provide clear standards for reason to look to in directing a community or a life justly. Yet to our disappointment, we find that this chapter, like most of book 5, is in fact silent on reason. Less surprising is that Aristotle never says, as his commentator Saint Thomas will, that natural justice is based on divine justice. To the contrary, Aristotle suggests that whatever it is that naturally pertains to the gods—leaving open for now whether that includes justice, which he will ultimately rule out (1178b8–12)—it bears little resemblance to the natural justice that pertains to us. Indeed, Aristotle cites provisions regarding sacrifices, in one case to a human being, among his chief examples of what is just by convention. He gives no examples of natural justice, however, from which a rational standard might be deduced. Nor, finally, does he present nature here as a universal, uniform standard that transcends the invariably narrow and partisan judgments of the political sphere: natural justice, he says explicitly at the outset, is part of political justice (1134b18–19).16 For our highest standard of justice we can look neither to the divine nor to pure reason nor to the simply uniform laws of nature, but only to our own experience as beings for whom it is natural, as Aristotle paradoxically but helpfully put it at the end of the previous chapter, to create and live by legal conventions (1134b13–15), arbitrary and changeable as those conventions may be.

Indeed, so much of what goes by the name of justice is so clearly arbitrary, Aristotle says, that

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