Ethics Course Materials: Aristotle on Justice

A few entries back (here and here), I posted some materials I'd developed and uploaded into the course management system of which I make heavy use for both my online and my face-to-face Ethics classes.  This semester, because of all the work I'd put into creating modules on the specific lessons, texts, ideas, and thinkers last semester, much of what I've been doing has been tweaking and improving the modules I'd already designed. 

Still, there was some room for creating a few new modules from the ground up -- either filling in gaps I'd left last semester, or leading my students through texts newly added this semester.  One of those, which I teach is Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics book 5 -- the place where he most intensely and intensively examines the virtue of Justice and its corresponding vice of Injustice -- and I thought it might be of some interest or value to share. So, here are -- admittedly a bit longer than my usual posts -- portions of that module:

Anselm, Justice, and Virtue

Yesterday, I gave a guest lecture on St. Anselm's moral theory in a colleague's Medieval Philosophy class, introducing his students to some Anselmian themes beyond the "ontological argument" they recalled from their earlier Intro to Philosophy classes.  Central among those was Anselm's understanding of justice -- or the variety of goodness distinctive to humans and other rational beings -- as rectitude or uprightness of will.

What is particularly interesting about Anselm's examination of this idea -- which he plays with throughout his works, progressively developing a more and more complex picture of moral goodness and evil -- is that early on he articulates this standard of rectitude not simply in terms of the will conforming to some standards, ideals, or rules, but in a more reflexive manner.  Justice is rectitude of will kept for its own sake (rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata).