The Guardian is worshipping at the shrine to its own piety with even more self-satisfaction than usual because it is paying millions in reparations to African-Americans based in Georgia and Jamaica, whose slave labour 200 years ago underpinned the wealth of the newspaper’s founders. But where is the justice in that?
Aristotle argued that justice, which was good, depended on a form of equality. So for him, injustice was a matter of a man doing something wrong for his own advantage, thereby gaining an unequal share of something good. This could arise from (for example) buying and selling, ‘when quarrels arise when equals get unequal shares’. That was why money was invented, thought Aristotle, to solve problems that arose from such situations (e.g. in trying to work out ‘the number of shoes that are worth a house’) ‘since it makes goods commensurate and equalises them’.
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