Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

1. Money is both a necessary and useful instrument for justice in society because it establishes a proportional form of exchange, it acts as a medium to mediate exchange and enable supply and demand between people of different avocations thus promoting justice in society as well prompting injustice in society.

2. Money being necessary and a useful instrument for justice in society is relevant to the individual person because money allows and “guarantees” the individual to purchase and sell amongst dissimilar persons establishing a relationship through a universal mean of exchange. Without money as a form of measure an individual would be unable to trade what he has with what he needs if the other person assigned no value to what he had to trade, thus making the individual unequal to another individual. Inequality is unjust and unjust is unlawful. Money being necessary and a useful instrument for justice in society is relevant to society because money is needed for exchange amongst people that make up society. If the citizens of the society are communal in exchange through the means of money then the society flourishes through equality. As Aristotle states, ”For in that way there will always be exchange, and if there is exchange there is a community. Thus, money acts like a measure: it makes goods commensurable and equalizes them. For just as there is no community without exchange, there is no exchange without equality and no equality without commensurability. (NE 1133b15-17)”

3. Money is a necessity but it has been made clear in recent years that it is no longer an instrument for justice in society but an instrument of injustice in today’s society as money has been unevenly distributed in excess. The US economy is demonstrating...

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...exchange. Money makes exchange among dissimilar people commensurable. Aristotle argues that exchange occur out of two conditions: mutual need, “That it is a need which holds the parties together as if they were one single unit is shown by the fact that there is no exchange when one or both parties do not stand in need of the other” (NE 1133b6-10) and diversity of individuals, “For a community is not formed by two physicians, but by physician and a farmer, and, in general, by people who are different and unequal. But they must be equalized; and hence everything that enters into an exchange must somehow be comparable. (NE 1133a16-20). Money as a means of measurement between unequal people and their products makes it an important part of justice. It presents an artificial equality that can allow political justice to advance.

Works Cited

aristotle nicomachean ethics