Natural Right and Aristotle's Understanding of Justice

Abstract

DOES ARISTOTLE CLAIM that the nature of things provides us with an absolutely correct standard of justice? In this article, I argue that, despite his reputation as a founder of natural right and natural law theory, he does not. Aristotle certainly insists that right or justice exists nature (phusei) as well as by agreement (Nicomachean Ethics [NE] 1134b30).' That he does so is one of the few points in his discussion of natural and conventional right about which there can be no doubt or disagreement. In what follows, however, I shall try to show that Aristotle's claim about the naturalness of right does not commit him to what we have come to call natural right -that is, the idea that for every particular situation there exists one inherently just state of affairs against which we can measure the justice of our actions and opinions. Aristotelian natural right, I argue, does not refer to a set of higher standards of justice. It refers, instead, to a kind of judgment about justice that develops naturally in political communities. Citizens derive the justice and injustice of their actions, according to Aristotle, either from agreements to designate otherwise indifferent actions as just and unjust or from their judgments about the intrinsic merits of particular actions. The former class of judgments, I suggest, makes up conventional right, the latter, natural right. Aristotelian natural right, according to my interpretation, includes all the judgments made by citizens about the intrinsic justice or injustice of their actions, not merely those judgments that are correct and correspond somehow to the nature of things. In insisting upon the naturalness of justice, Aristotle thus is not, I argue, defending the existence of natural, inherently correct standards of justice. He is, instead, arguing that the need for citizens to make and argue about judgments of the intrinsic justice of their actions is something that develops naturally within political communities.