Epikeia aristotle biography

In the tenth section of the fifth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses “equity” — which is either a corrective exception to Justice or its culmination, depending on how you look at it.

(I’m covering section ten before section nine because sections nine and eleven seem to go together. The way The Nicomachean Ethics was stitched together has left some odd seams, and this is one of them.)

Justice, Aristotle has said, concerns following the accepted legal principles of the community, on the one hand, and being fair in interpersonal transactions (that is, not seeking to come out ahead at the expense of the person you’re transacting with) on the other.

But what about those cases in which a strict adherence to law or to transactional proportionality seems wrong — when mercy or charity or just the peculiar circumstances of some particular case would seem to require us to make an exception to the law or to authorize an unproport