Aristotelian Ethics & Distributive Justice
Concern with material equality as the central form of distributive justice is a very modern idea. Distributive justice for Aristotle and many other writers for millennia after him was a matter of distributing what each ought to get from merit or desert in some sense. The idea of equality was arguably anathema to Aristotle and most other theorists, including Catholic philosophers, until modern times, indeed until the nineteenth century. A common view was that social hierarchy and its attendant inequality was natural. This inference was likely little more than a naturalistic fallacy of deriving ought from is, but it seemed compelling to most writers. In the seventeenth century, the Levellers in England pushed for equality as essentially a Christian requirement. But theirs was an odd voice in the history of concern with justice before the recent era.
David Hume, writing about 1751, saw distributive justice in the modern sense as......
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