ness and bashfulness, temperance between insensibility and
intemperance.
Justice hardly comes into the scheme; it is rather a virtue
of the State than of the individual, and it has been thought
by some that the book devoted to it in the “Ethics” has
been misplaced. Justice is of two kinds, distributive and
corrective. Its fundamental idea {320} is the assignment
of advantages and disadvantages according to merit. Dis-
tributive justice assigns honours and rewards according to
the worth of the individuals involved. Corrective justice
has to do with punishment. If a man improperly obtains
an advantage, things must be equalized by the imposition
on him of a corresponding disadvantage. Justice, however,
is a general principle, and no general principle is equal to
the complexity of life. Special cases cannot be foreseen,
The necessary adjustment of human relations arising from
this cause is equity.
Aristotle is a pronounced supporter of the freedom of the
will. He censures Socrates because the latter’s theory of
virtue practically amounts to a denial of freedom. Accord-
ing to Socrates, whoever thinks right must necessarily do
right. But this is equivalent to denying a man’s power to
choose evil. And if he cannot choose evil, he cannot choose
good. For the right-thinking man does not do right volun-
tarily, but necessarily. Aristotle believed, on the contrary,
that man has the choice of good and evil. The doctrine of
Socrates makes all actions involuntary. But in Aristotle’s
opinion only actions performed under forcible compulsion
are involuntary. Aristotle did not, however, consider the
special difficulties in the theory of free will which in modern
times have made it one of the most thorny of all philosoph-
ical problems. Hence his treatment of the subject is not of
great value to us.(b) The State.Politics is not a separate subject from Ethics. It is merely
another division of the same subject. And {321} this, not
merely because politics is the ethics of the State as against
the individual, but because the morality of the individual
really finds its end in the State, and is impossible without
it. Aristotle agrees with Plato that the object of the State
is the virtue and happiness of the citizens, which are im-
possible except in the State. For man is a political animal
by nature, as is proved by his possession of speech, which
would be useless to any save a social being. And the phrase
“by nature” means the same here as elsewhere in Aristotle.
It means that the State is the end of the individual, and
that activity in the State is part of man’s essential function.
The State, in fact, is the form, the individual, the matter.
The State provides both an education in virtue and the
necessary opportunities for its exercise. Without it man
would not be man at all. He would be a savage animal.The historical origin of the State Aristotle finds in the fam-
ily. At first there is the individual. The individual gets
himself a mate, and the family arises. The family, in Aris-
totle’s opinion, includes the slaves: for, like Plato, he sees
no wrong in the institution of slavery. A number of families,
joining together, develop into a village community, and a
number of village communities into apolis(city), or State.
Beyond the city, of course, the Greek idea of the State did