By Jonathan Culbreath
“It is all too easy for anyone interested in social sciences or ethics to adopt an over-simplilfied and univocal idea of justice, and its concomitant rights, duties, merits, and deserts. As Aristotle notes in the Nicomachean Ethics, ideas of merit are largely dependent upon the types of social structures that people inhabit, or roles which they occupy: “Democrats say it is freedom; oligarchs, wealth; others, good birth; aristocrats, virtue.” (5.3) Aristotle does not appear to be ruling out any one of these conceptions of merit; rather, he is cautioning against reducing justice to any one of them — or exalting any one of them to fill the whole notion of justice.”…
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