Justice: Virtue or Principles?

Abstract

The paper deals with the collision of two approaches to discovering and expressing the normative content of justice. The first one takes as a starting point the character of a just person or rather a person who has the virtue of justice. It is classically represented by Aristotle’s conception of particular justice. For Aristotle, a just person is a person who successfully overcomes the desire to have more (pleonexia). The second approach considers the virtue of justice a secondary phenomenon which is dependent on the principles of justice. The latter are formed due to a projection of the equal moral respect to every person onto relationships between cooperating and concurring individuals. To evaluate the relevance of the approaches, the author draws on the experience of the polemics on the meaning and theoretical value of the Aristotelian conception of particular justice. Its critics claim that: particular justice appears to be a highly contradictory virtue and doesn’t fit into the frameworks of the individual quest for the perfect and flourishing life; Aristotle distorts the structure of the value of justice because he prioritizes personal qualities of a distributor over methods and results of distribution. The advocates of the Aristotelian conception suppose that these criticisms don’t take into account the relation of the virtue of justice and communities with shared conceptions of the flourishing and perfect life (conceptions of good). The virtue of justice is a capacity to support a community and to identify the right order of the components in the shared conception of good. The author believes that the priority of virtue over principles in the sphere of justice marginalize the universal fairness and ignores the common usage of the moral vocabulary. So he concludes that the reverse order of priorities is more justified.