>>>>Dr. Harper: Throughout this course we'll be using the ideas and the vocabulary of the
classical Greeks and above all, the philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle lived in the 4th century
BC. He's one of the most influential political thinkers, political philosophers of all time.
And throughout the course we'll be using his vocabulary, the Greek vocabulary. And in fact
it's inescapable. Our language and our concepts of justice are so deeply suffused with the
Greek influence that you can't escape it, it's everywhere around us in our politics.
In fact our very word "politics" comes from the Greek. Greek, "polis" which means "the
city-state" like Athens or Sparta, those are city-states. And those are the, the unit of
Greek community, of Greek political life and politics means "the things of the polis",
it means the things that any community living together has to settle. And so our vocabulary,
words like democracy, words like tyranny, words like philosophy are Greek. They come
from Greek roots, and that's indicative of the influence of Greek philosophy. And nobody's
been so influential as Aristotle. And so to launch us on our discussion about justice
it would be helpful if we have some shared vocabulary. And so we'll learn from Aristotle
the basic categories of justice. Aristotle's political philosophy is preserved principally
in two of his most influential works. A work that's called the "Politics" and a work that's
called the "Nicomachean Ethics", both ethics and politics are Greek words. And in fact
Aristotle's most extended discussion of the nature and purpose of justice is preserved
in the "Nicomachean Ethics". And there Aristotle says something that's actually very profound
and very useful as we, as we have a conversation about justice. He says that there are essentially
three domains, three areas, three types of justice: corrective, distributive, and transactional.
And it'd be helpful if we define those categories of justice. First, corrective justice. Well
this is what we mean when we say the, the correctional system or when we even say the
justice system: the system of police and courts and judges and prosecutors and jails that
deal with crime. Aristotle says when a human injures another human, involuntary victim
that is a matter for corrective justice. And every society must grapple with how it will
administer, how it will deal with the problem of corrective justice because humans are flawed
creatures and they will injure one another, and so societies must set up some system effectively
to correct wrongs that have been done. And so every day in our society and every county
across this country there is a justice system at work deciding hard questions of corrective
justice, and we'll talk about the kinds of principles, the kinds of problems that arise
when a society must decide how to correct wrongs that have been done. What is, what
is the proper role of punishment? What's the proper level of punishment? And Aristotle
begins to help us think about a proper amount of punishment, a corrective punishment being
a punishment that fits the crime. And we'll talk about what that means. Aristotle says
distributive justice is a second fundamental domain of justice. And in fact, in some ways
it's the most fundamental problem of justice. Whether we realize it or not, almost all of
our major political debates whether it's the taxation system or the health care reform
or education funding, all are fundamentally questions of distributive justice. Distributive
justice Aristotle says is-- comes from the fact that there are certain things, especially
two things, honor and property, which are finite. They exist only to a certain extent
and any society has to decide how will these finite good be distributed? Let me give you
an example. Honor. It's not necessarily intuitive that's its finite, but in fact it is. Take
for instance the OU Women's Softball team, recently won the national championship. With
that national championship comes a trophy, which is a a symbol of honor, comes parades
and celebrations and the lifelong honor of being a national champion. That's a finite
good. Imagine the alternative scenario that after the game is over and one team wins,
the officials announce that nevertheless both teams are champions. Now this would totally
fundamentally undermine the very point of being a champion. In other words it would
remove the honor if both of the teams were given the honor, then it really ceases to
be an honor at all. By it's very nature it's a finite good. Now in the case of sporting
events it's actually quite obvious how you distribute honors because there are very clearly
established rules and the victor gets the honors. But in a society and with other kinds
of goods it actually becomes more complicated quite quickly. And property is the perennial,
the persistent problem of human justice. In all societies the distribution of property
always finite, something that people always want more of, raises fundamental questions
and so throughout this class we'll be asking - what is the proper way to distribute property
in a society? There are fundamentally different ways, different principles, different reasons
and we'll explore those across this class. Finally, Aristotle's third category: what
we will call transactional justice. Aristotle says that human societies have various kinds
of exchanges and in fact exchanges are fundamental to our way of life. We don't even think about
them they are so fundamentally, they're ubiquitous, around us everywhere. People make exchanges
and Aristotle says that for an exchange to be just the value of the goods exchanged must
be equal. That if you're going to give everyone what they are due, then in any transaction
the value of the things that are transacted have to be equal for it to be a just exchange.
Aristotle says that this is true even where it's a voluntary transaction. And in fact
we can already begin to see that this will raise fundamental and perennial questions
about the very nature of transactional justice. Let me illustrate it with an example. Imagine
that there are two little boys, brothers, one's four years old and one's ten years old.
And for their birthdays their parents get them, Mickey Mantle rookie cards, very valuable
baseball card. It's worth thousands of dollars. One day the boy, boys are having ice cream
and the older brother says to the younger brother, I will give you this delicious chocolate
ice cream cone if you will just give me that little piece of paper, that Mickey Mantle
rookie card. And the four year-old looking at the delicious ice cream starting to melt
agrees to the transaction and makes the trade. He gives his brother the rookie card and eats
the ice cream. Well, now imagine you are the mother. Inevitably about an hour later the
ice cream has worn off and the younger son begins to regret trading away that little
rookie card, and so he comes to his mother and says, "This is a grave injustice that
has to be rectified. I did not exchange something of equal value for that rookie card." And
the mother is then faced-- and imagine you're in this situation. You have two different
principles at stake. Two different claims about what the nature of transactional justice
is. What is the older brother say? It was a fair transaction, fair and square. He voluntarily
agreed to it, now he has to live with the consequences. The younger brother says, "But
this was clearly an exchange of goods of unequal value. It's unfair, he got my rookie card
and all I got was ice cream." The mother has to decide this question and it raises fundamental
questions about what justice is, and as we'll see when we turn away from examples like baseball
cards and ice cream it raises profoundly difficult questions that we in fact face in our society
all around us. So throughout this class we'll be exploring these three domains of justice:
corrective, distributive and transactional that go back to Aristotle's systematic thinking
about the nature of justice.