11:00 am – 1:00 pm
TBD
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Title: “Justice and the Passions: Integrity and Rectitude from Plato to Augustine”
Abstract: Justice seems to be a bloodless matter. In our courts, we want judges who are impartial, unmoved by emotional appeals. In our political life, we want policy that solves problems rather than simply making people feel good, especially when these goals are at odds. Because modern moral and political philosophy tends to construe justice and injustice as properties of social institutions and their arrangements, it can make sense of these claims by representing justice as an objective matter.
Ancient Greek theories of justice proceed from a different starting point. For Plato and Aristotle, justice is, in the first instance, a virtue of the human soul. A just society, in turn, is one that educates people into justice and one whose prevailing conditions are those a just person would choose and be proud of. Justice for the ancients is a psychological matter, associated, intrinsically, with a particular subjective outlook. Yet we also find the ancients emphasizing the value of impartiality. Indeed, these ideas are part of Greek popular morality. Moreover, Plato and Aristotle are both sensitive to the ways that strong feelings can distort impartial judgment.
My question, then, is this: how in the ancient tradition can impartiality be squared with the psychological character of justice as a virtue: that is, a view on which justice is characterized in terms of a particular outlook – a set of values and desires – and not merely a correspondence with externally specifiable principles? I will argue that the tradition of thought about justice that runs from Plato to Aristotle down to Augustine – in which the later authors refine the view initially presented in the Republic – shows both the difficulty and the promise of such a position.
Respondents: Christiana Olfert (Tufts University) and Natalie Hannan (University of Rochester).
