difficulties are irrelevant.

The treatment of Justice in Book V has always been a source of great
difficulty to students of the _Ethics_. Almost more than any other part
of the work it has exercised influence upon mediaeval and modern thought
upon the subject. The distinctions and divisions have become part of the
stock-in-trade of would be philosophic jurists. And yet, oddly enough,
most of these distinctions have been misunderstood and the whole purport
of the discussion misconceived. Aristotle is here dealing with justice
in a restricted sense viz as that special goodness of character which
is required of every adult citizen and which can be produced by early
discipline or habituation. It is the temper or habitual attitude
demanded of the citizen for the due exercise of his functions as taking
part in the administration of the civic community--as a member of the
judicature and executive. The Greek citizen was only exceptionally, and
at rare intervals if ever, a law-maker while at any moment he might
be called upon to act as a judge (juryman or arbitrator) or as an
administrator. For the work of a legislator far more than the moral
virtue of justice or fairmindedness was necessary, these were requisite
to the rarer and higher "intellectual virtue" of practical wisdom. Then
here, too, the discussion moves on a low level, and the raising of
fundamental problems is excluded. Hence "distributive justice" is
concerned not with the large question of the distribution of political
power and privileges among the constituent members or classes of the
state but with the smaller questions of the distribution among those of
casual gains and even with the division among private claimants of a
common fund or inheritance, while "corrective justice" is concerned
solely with the management of legal redress. The whole treatment is
confused by the unhappy attempt to give a precise mathematical form to
the principles of justice in the various fields distinguished. Still it