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Notes
For discussion, see (inter alia) LeBar 2017.
Nicomachean Ethics I.7, 1097a36.
NE I.7, 1097b15.
For Plato and the Stoics, it was also sufficient. But in Aristotle’s view, it was merely necessary, not sufficient; some supply of “external goods” was also necessary for happiness.
NE VI.5, 1140b5.
De Anima II.2.
NE VI.12, 1144a8.
NE VI.13, 1144b30-1145a2.
NE V.1, 1129b26.
NE VI. 2, 1130b2.
I develop these critiques at greater length in Just People (ms.), and LeBar forthcoming.
Republic I 331-2.
I owe this point to John Hacker-Wright.
Williams 1981.
NEII.6, 1107a1-3.
Eudemian Ethics7.10, 1242a20-23, Inwood and Woolf translation.
Curzer2012, 287.
Although Kant sometimes does say the object is our wills that give that law (see for example Groundwork Ak. 440). As I read Kant, he can be understood to maintain that persons are the appropriate objects of respect only insofar as our wills are identified as our “true selves” (Kant 1785/1997, Ak, pp. 451-2, 457).
A complication here is that we ourselves are persons worthy of — and rightful objects of — respect as well, so there is a reflexive component to this virtue, again in contravention of Aristotle’s own view. But for sake of simplicity I will not take up this complication here. See Russell and LeBar, forthcoming.
For discussion of the relevant emotional components, see LeBar, Just People (ms.).
See for example Kant 1785/1997, Ak. pp. 389, 452.
See for example De Anima II.2, NE I.7.
I thank Tristan Rogers for discussion of this point.
This is a key part of Kant’s conception of justice as well: what he calls the principle of “innate equality”, which he understands as “independence from being bound by others to more than one can in turn bind them” (Kant 1797/1991, Ak. 237).
NEII.9, 1109a28.
I am grateful to Lisa Tessman for pressing this point.
Smith, Adam. 1759/1982, 224 (III.iv).
I take perfect virtue here to be something like a regulative ideal. If there are perfectly virtuous people, they certainly do not exist in sufficient abundance to underwrite the process I describe here, which is one of continued marginal improvement on imperfect understandings of what recognition of equal authority — and thus the virtue of justice — requires. Moreover, the interactions of these non-ideally virtuous agents take place in concrete particular form, and those interactions provide the object of joint scrutiny and negotiation. I thank Tristan Rogers for pressing this point.
NE I.4, 1095b5.
I have in mind here precisely the kind of contrast Rawls uses in presenting his concept of an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls 2005, xxxii). In the present case, however, the right kinds of reasons are those that flow from the virtue of justice and the recognition of equal authority.
Here I have in mind a specific version of the sort of picture of moral improvement envisioned in Walker 2008, ch. 10. I thank Karen Stohr for pointing out this connection.
Darwall 2012, 337. Darwall does not cast the obligations in question as obligations of justice either, but the subject-matter is effectively the same.
Tomasello 2016, 40, 80.
Tomasello 2016, ch. 3.
Tomasello, ch. 4.
Hayek’s account of group selection faded into the twilight as group selection itself was thought suspect amongst evolutionary biologists, but in recent years that mechanism has returned to credibility as a form of explanation of the evolution of culture and determinant of cultural effects on human biological evolution. See David Sloan Wilson 2002, ch. 1; 2005. Jonathan Haidt builds on Darwin’s Descent of Man, Wilson and others in making an extended case for group selection (as part of a multilevel selection process — a process going on both between groups and within groups) in Haidt 2012, ch. 9; see also Haidt and Kesebir 2010, pp. 817-18, Tomasello 2014, p. 121.
Hayek 1973, vol II, 13.
Hayek 1973, vol. II, 3.
Hayek 1973, vol. 16, 21.
Haidt cites private correspondence by evolutionary psychologist Lesley Newson that makes precisely this point:
I think it is important not to give readers the impression that groups competing necessarily meant groups being at war or fighting with one another. They were competing to be the most efficient at turning resources into offspring. (Haidt2012, 253)
Tomasello 2014, p. 84.
Of course, other social virtues are called into play as well in interactions across groups. My claim here is that the virtue of justice plays a distinctive and necessary role in constraining the kind of conduct that is inimical to cooperation and coordination.
This is due to the fact, known since Adam Smith, that the productive advantages of the division of labor increase with the size of the market. The more extensive the network of trade, the more efficient the use of resources (Smith 1776/1981, I.I.III).
Hayek 1973, vol. I, 74-5.
Hayek 1973, vol. I, 43. In earlier work, Hayek says of the “moral rules of conduct”:
Next to language, they are perhaps the most important instance of an undesigned growth, of a set of rules which govern our lives but of which we can say neither way they are what they are nor what they do to us: we do not know what the consequences of observing them are for us as individuals and as a group. (Hayek1960, 64).
Hayek 1973, vol. I, pp. 74-5.
NE VIII.9, 1160a13; Pol. III.12, 1282b16;
Pol. III.6, 1278b22;
Pol. III.7, 1279a27.
Pol. III.13, 1283b43.
Pol. VII.8, 1328a28.
Cooper 2010. 229.
Cooper 2010, 243.
Cooper 2010, 244.
Cooper 2010, 245.
Riesbeck 2016a, 45, 80.
Riesbeck 2016a, 52-3.
Riesbeck 2016a, 55-6; 2016b, 72-3. I think as a matter of fact Riesbeck is mistaken about the nature of exchange: there needs be no mutual benefit motivating the activities of the parties. We can imagine a Glaucon-inspired contractarian, thinking that just exchange is but a poor second-best to doing injustice, but afraid of the consequences, exchanging on just terms with absolutely no interest in mutual benefit. This is precisely Adam Smith’s point with the metaphor of the invisible hand (Smith 1776/1981, §IV.ii.9).
Compare the forms of community Aristotle surveys in Pol I.2. These, in my view, are just the tips of the iceberg, and include all sorts of community of different forms within the political community, and across the boundaries of political communities.
Owens 2012.
Hayek makes a point of this similarity in Hayek 1960, 153.
NE I.1.
Pol. I.2, 1252b30.
NEV.1, 1129b14-19.
The contrast between law and legislation as forms of rule was an important theme of Hayek’s also; see Hayek 1973, ch. 4.
Pol. VII.14, 1332b27; see alsoEEVII.10, 1242b28;Pol. III.4, 1277a26;Pol.III.6, 1279a8;Pol.VI.2, 1317b1.
My thanks to Michael Bukoski, John Hacker-Wright, Matt Jernberg, Marc Kaufman, Daehyun Kim, Matthew LeBar, Paul Martin, Tristan Rogers, Karen Stohr, Matt Taylor, and Lisa Tessman for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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LeBar, M. Equality of Authority as the Aristotelian Common Good. J Value Inquiry 55, 399–416 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09758-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09758-x