THANK YOU BROTHER ARISTOTLE !
As a body after a big meal or feast must rest, to allow its digestion, the processing of intake, along its way, through a body's system, so was I much obliged to rest from reading, as I digested, as I processed, an aspect of Aristotle's explication of justice, with present day practical applications for African American people respecting vainly sought "reparations" for wrongs done, in his classic work NICOMACHEAN ETHICS (1941, 2001). Therein he wrote:
"This, then, is what the just is--the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion. Hence one term becomes too great , the other too small, as indeed happens in practice; for the man who acts unjustly has too much, and the man who is unjustly treated, too little, of what is good. In the case of evil the reverse is true; for the lesser evil is reckoned a good in comparison with a greater evil, since the lesser evil is rather to be chosen than the greater, and what is worthy of choice is good , and what is worthier of choice a greater good. This then is one species of the just.
"The remaining one is rectificatory, which arises in connection with transactions both voluntary and involuntary. This form of just has a different specific character from the former. For the Justice which distributes common possessions is always in accordance with the kind of proportion mentioned above (for in the case also in which the distribution is made from the common funds of a partnership it will be according to the same ratio which the funds put into the business by the partners bears to one another); and the injustice opposed to this kind of justice is that which violates the proportion. But the Justice in transaction between man and man is a sort of equality indeed, and the injustice a sort of inequality ; not according to that kind of proportion, however , but according to arithmetic proportion. For it makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man a good man, nor whether it is a good or bad man who has committed adultery; the law looks only to the distinctive character of the injury, and treats the parties as equal, if one is in the wrong and the other is being wronged, and if one inflicted the injury and the other received it. Therefore it is this kind of injustice being an inequality, the judge tries to equalize ; for in the case also in which one has received and the other has inflicted a wound, or one has slain and the other been slain, the suffering and the action has been unequally distributed; but the judge tries to equalize things by means of penalty, taking away from the gain of the assailant. For the term 'gain' is applied generally to such cases even if it be a term not appropriate to certain cases, e.g. to the person who inflicts a wound--and 'loss' to the sufferer; at all events when the suffering has been estimated , the one is called loss and the other gain. Therefore the equal is intermediate between the greater and the less, but the gain and the loss are respectively greater and less in contrary ways, more of the good and less of the evil are gain, and the contrary is loss; intermediate between between them is, as we saw, the equal, which we say is just; therefore corrective justice will be the intermediate between loss and gain."
P. 1007-1008, [sections 1131-1132], THE BASIC WORKS OF ARISTOTLE (1941, 2001)
Corrective justice or 'rectificatory' justice is a form of reparations in modern terms. When I realized the impulse what I was reading and its present day applications to African Americans, I was overwhelmed!
Aristotle, a student of Plato, lived 300 years before the birth of Christ and was the tutor of Alexander the Great, who is said to have set out to conquer the known world, before being killed in battle, in or near Persia/Afghanistan. Egypt was among Alexander's conquests, where Aristotle was based in Alexandria with its great library, the principle repository of the world's knowledge, which was burned to the ground by who knows whom?
May that Justice that Aristotle herein had defines as rectificatory, "rectification," or corrective justice, richly rectify, proportionally bless our people! The 400-year African slave trade was both a voluntary and involuntary transaction," as Aristotle describes. "African" who knew not they were "African" but tribal, voluntarily have profited by their insane self-pillaging and are yet paying for their own wantonly ignorant apostasy to fellow African Americans by colonization , coups, instability, and global exploitation.
For their part, African Americans in the United States of America and in the Caribbean have made a go of it; have prospered amazingly under a regime of official white supremacy, terrorism, that imploded under the weight of internal contradictions, and various African resurgences.
Thus, a final amend is rectification: setting aright thefts, usurpations, deaths, tyranny, abuses, since. at least, the Americans ': Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights Movement and the rest, post-1865, with interest for loss.
Thanks brother Aristotle!
