After today's reading we will be halfway through Book V. Today's reading is on a Greek version of 'An Eye for an Eye.'
Some think that reciprocity is without qualification just, as the Pythagoreans said; for they defined justice without qualification as reciprocity. Now 'reciprocity' fits neither distributive nor rectificatory justice-yet people want even the justice of Rhadamanthus to mean this:
Should a man suffer what he did, right justice would be done -for in many cases reciprocity and rectificatory justice are not in accord; e.g. (1) if an official has inflicted a wound, he should not be wounded in return, and if some one has wounded an official, he ought not to be wounded only but punished in addition. Further (2) there is a great difference between a voluntary and an involuntary act.
It does matter to justice, as Aristotle says here, whether you put out the eye on purpose or involuntarily, as perhaps by accident. Even by accident, we might distinguish between an act from negligence when you should have taken more care, over against a pure accident that no one could have seen coming. Even if it were right to put out the eye of the man who intentionally put out another's in a fight, it might not be right to put out the eye of one who did so in a car accident; and especially not if the car accident was caused not by negligence but by circumstance.
But in associations for exchange this sort of justice does hold men together-reciprocity in accordance with a proportion and not on the basis of precisely equal return. For it is by proportionate requital that the city holds together. Men seek to return either evil for evil-and if they cannot do so, think their position mere slavery-or good for good-and if they cannot do so there is no exchange, but it is by exchange that they hold together. This is why they give a prominent place to the temple of the Graces-to promote the requital of services; for this is characteristic of grace-we should serve in return one who has shown grace to us, and should another time take the initiative in showing it.
Confer with the Christian position on this matter of forgiveness and showing each other grace, as the basis for a just society.
This is a longer chapter, and we've had several long readings lately, so I am going to put the rest beyond a jump break. However, many of you will find this chapter very interesting because it is about proto-capitalism and justice in market exchange.
Now proportionate return is secured by cross-conjunction. Let A be a builder, B a shoemaker, C a house, D a shoe.
This will be of interest to some of you: justice now in fair exchanges of goods and services, which will eventually form the basis of capitalism.
The builder, then, must get from the shoemaker the latter's work, and must himself give him in return his own. If, then, first there is proportionate equality of goods, and then reciprocal action takes place, the result we mention will be effected. If not, the bargain is not equal, and does not hold; for there is nothing to prevent the work of the one being better than that of the other; they must therefore be equated. (And this is true of the other arts also; for they would have been destroyed if what the patient suffered had not been just what the agent did, and of the same amount and kind.) For it is not two doctors that associate for exchange, but a doctor and a farmer, or in general people who are different and unequal; but these must be equated.
The doctor's work is usually thought to be more valuable than a farmer's, so that perhaps a foot doctor and an ear doctor could just exchange services without pay and consider it fair to do so. Yet the farmer's work provides them all with the sustenance without which life is impossible. It is also much more physically difficult labor, and entails more dangers. Is it really less valuable? That has long been the objection.
This is why all things that are exchanged must be somehow comparable. It is for this end that money has been introduced, and it becomes in a sense an intermediate; for it measures all things...
It doesn't, actually; some things aren't for sale at any price. Kant will later make a distinction between things with a price and things that instead have 'a dignity,' such that it would be wrong to buy or to sell them. Human beings are the obvious example to us; neither Kant nor Aristotle was completely on board with that idea, however.
There are other things that aren't easily compared by money, such as the outcome of future endeavors. Is it more valuable to charge the enemy lines and try to break them, or to withdraw to higher ground? We aren't going to get paid either way, nor must we pay anything in cash to make either attempt. If you could know the outcomes of both with sufficient certainty, the cost could be used to compare the actions; but probably not the financial cost.
Yet we do need a method of comparing all things, and money isn't it. Aristotle is aware of the need to compare completely unlike things that can't be reduced to money, as well as things that can, so that we can even compare across categories -- is it better to have a million dollars, or the life or freedom of your child?
The thing that actually turns out to be the comparable measure of all things for Aristotle is honor. He has this discussion in Rhetoric I.7 Just as the magnanimous can find the most worthy course of action by considering the action that is most worthy of honor, so too can a group compare things and actions in terms of what would be most worthy of honor. This allows you to compare apples to oranges to cash to acts of great worth, and decide which is really the most valuable.
Here, however, we are talking about money.
...and therefore the excess and the defect-how many shoes are equal to a house or to a given amount of food. The number of shoes exchanged for a house (or for a given amount of food) must therefore correspond to the ratio of builder to shoemaker. For if this be not so, there will be no exchange and no intercourse.
Here then is a reply to the objection about the farmer from above: the doctor won't exchange his services for produce, but the farmer will gladly give produce for doctor's services. The builder won't build you a house for a pair of shoes, nor probably even for the promise of a lifetime's shoeing provided on a reasonably regular basis. Thus, we really do know that the farmer's produce is less valuable than the doctor's skill, etc., because no exchange will take place if that is all that is on offer.
And this proportion will not be effected unless the goods are somehow equal. All goods must therefore be measured by some one thing, as we said before. Now this unit is in truth demand...
Who was taught that Adam Smith invented the concept of supply and demand?
...which holds all things together (for if men did not need one another's goods at all, or did not need them equally, there would be either no exchange or not the same exchange); but money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name 'money' (nomisma)-because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless.
Who was taught that until the Renaissance people thought that gold was innately valuable, thus explaining the pre-capitalist Mercantilism of the empires of the day? Also not true.
By the way, the philosophical position of nominalism (a cognate of the word for money and law) -- very popular in the late Middle Ages among Scholastic Christian philosophers -- holds something similar about all things. Just as money has no real value without the law/custom that backs it, so too they claim that many different kinds of things don't really exist but are only customs or ideas of our own. Some nominalists hold this fairly lightly, denying only certain ideas like universals or abstract entities (sometimes including, dangerously for Scholastic thinkers, God). Others commit to fairly extreme nominalism; I know of some who deny the reality of any kind of entity aside from organisms, and a few who deny even that.
However, again, here we are talking about money. No one denies the existence of money, only that its value arises from the thing itself rather than our ideas or laws about it.
There will, then, be reciprocity when the terms have been equated so that as farmer is to shoemaker, the amount of the shoemaker's work is to that of the farmer's work for which it exchanges. But we must not bring them into a figure of proportion when they have already exchanged (otherwise one extreme will have both excesses), but when they still have their own goods.
So, if you agreed to the exchange you're bound by it whether it was fair or not. We aren't going to go back and re-litigate whether the deal was fair once you've completed the exchange. That's still an ordinary principle of contract law as I understand it.
Thus they are equals and associates just because this equality can be effected in their case. Let A be a farmer, C food, B a shoemaker, D his product equated to C. If it had not been possible for reciprocity to be thus effected, there would have been no association of the parties. That demand holds things together as a single unit is shown by the fact that when men do not need one another, i.e. when neither needs the other or one does not need the other, they do not exchange, as we do when some one wants what one has oneself, e.g. when people permit the exportation of corn in exchange for wine. This equation therefore must be established.
Corn for wine is a perfectly ordinary example of a capitalist exchange, but you can see Aristotle's point: you don't need the wine, but you do need the corn (which, since this is a British text and pre-Columbus, means grain of many sorts). Trading what you do really need for something you just want seems foolish, perhaps. Yet if you have ground that readily produces grain but not grapes, it might increase everyone's happiness to let the people who live on good grape land make wine, so that everyone can have wine and they can also eat grain.
And for the future exchange-that if we do not need a thing now we shall have it if ever we do need it-money is as it were our surety; for it must be possible for us to get what we want by bringing the money. Now the same thing happens to money itself as to goods-it is not always worth the same; yet it tends to be steadier. This is why all goods must have a price set on them; for then there will always be exchange, and if so, association of man with man.
Associations of man with man is how we get society, after all, with all of its sophistications and pleasures -- as well as the leisure that allows for important work like the study of philosophy. It is Aristotle's goal, as I have noted several times now, to enable a society that itself enables the good life, a complete life that includes friendship and reflection. Thus, it is important to have prices because it enables exchange, and exchange requires associations, and associations set the conditions for such a society of friendship. They are, in a bare sense, a kind of friendship: you are generally at least sort-of at peace with your trading partners.
In this way, the market is a very moral thing: it is here seen to perform a role that is fundamental to peace and friendship, and the sort of society that enables a good life for its participants.
Money, then, acting as a measure, makes goods commensurate and equates them; for neither would there have been association if there were not exchange, nor exchange if there were not equality, nor equality if there were not commensurability. Now in truth it is impossible that things differing so much should become commensurate, but with reference to demand they may become so sufficiently. There must, then, be a unit, and that fixed by agreement (for which reason it is called money); for it is this that makes all things commensurate, since all things are measured by money.
Now for a bad example.
Let A be a house, B ten minae, C a bed. A is half of B, if the house is worth five minae or equal to them; the bed, C, is a tenth of B; it is plain, then, how many beds are equal to a house, viz. five. That exchange took place thus before there was money is plain; for it makes no difference whether it is five beds that exchange for a house, or the money value of five beds.
Aristotle's examples are usually better than this, but you can obviously see the problem. I won't take any number of beds in return for a house. I am not in the bed business; I don't need more than one, have no market for excess beds, and would have no place to store them if I exchanged my house. A builder might make an exchange like this -- I'll build you a house in return for five beds, deliverable to the five next people to buy a house from me. Even if you offered me very unfair terms, say twenty beds for a house, I couldn't use them and it would be a bad deal for me. If you pay me the money, however, our trade can operate very smoothly.
Thus, I submit this is a bad example by the same logic he employed above proving that builders' products are more valuable than farmers'. The exchange just won't happen, even at extortionate rates, if you only have beds. If you have money, it can happen at much lower rates quite easily.
Therefore the market makes a crucial difference, a great deal of difference -- not "no difference whether it is five beds... or the money value." The market is what makes exchange practical and possible for most people most of the time, rather than a thing that can sometimes be achieved once in a while in special cases. This is another reason to believe that markets are moral entities, entities that make life better for most people most of the time.
We have now defined the unjust and the just. These having been marked off from each other, it is plain that just action is intermediate between acting unjustly and being unjustly treated; for the one is to have too much and the other to have too little. Justice is a kind of mean, but not in the same way as the other virtues, but because it relates to an intermediate amount, while injustice relates to the extremes. And justice is that in virtue of which the just man is said to be a doer, by choice, of that which is just, and one who will distribute either between himself and another or between two others not so as to give more of what is desirable to himself and less to his neighbour (and conversely with what is harmful), but so as to give what is equal in accordance with proportion; and similarly in distributing between two other persons. Injustice on the other hand is similarly related to the unjust, which is excess and defect, contrary to proportion, of the useful or hurtful. For which reason injustice is excess and defect, viz. because it is productive of excess and defect-in one's own case excess of what is in its own nature useful and defect of what is hurtful, while in the case of others it is as a whole like what it is in one's own case, but proportion may be violated in either direction. In the unjust act to have too little is to be unjustly treated; to have too much is to act unjustly.
Let this be taken as our account of the nature of justice and injustice, and similarly of the just and the unjust in general.
We are still only halfway through this Book, so don't think that this last line indicates that we are done with justice and injustice.
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