Daryl Li

Current discourse on the mutability of natural justice in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics adopts two approaches. The first approach argues that natural justice is exclusively mutable; the second, exclusively immutable. Both are inadequate because Aristotle implies that both are aspects of natural justice. I argue that natural justice, as the exercise of our virtues for the common good, is both mutable and immutable, just in different respects. My account has four advantages: (i) it restores Aristotle’s original reading of natural justice as possessing immutable and mutable aspects; (ii) it acknowledges Aristotle’s claim that natural justice perfects our virtues; (iii) it allows us to judge if a system of law is truly just; (iv) it is a more elegant interpretation since it adheres closely to Aristotle’s teleological account of nature. I conclude by showing how natural and conventional justice work in concert to achieve political justice.