My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.

Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”

And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble?

The answer will necessarily be “no” if we define “virtue” (or any of its species) strictly, so that virtue is by definition individual. But I see no clear reason why we should do this. Going back to earliest accounts of the concept, Aristotle does not limit virtue to individuals; in explaining aretē, the word we translate as “virtue,” he speaks of the aretē of a knife: a virtuous (or excellent) knife is one that cuts well. Even thinking of common English usage, we can speak of an honest car dealership, one where all the sales staff are genuinely expected to be upfront with their customers and act accordingly. We can speak of a courageous action taken by a political party, when it adopts a platform that is politically unpopular but is nevertheless the principled thing to do.

Now common usage can and should be criticized; everyday speech is often inaccurate. Are these examples of category mistakes? Virtue is realized and expressed in action; if human collectivities can take action, that fact suggests that they can also be virtuous. But is it inaccurate to speak of an action taken by a collectivity? When we speak of an honest car dealership, a generous government or a humble tradition, is this merely an inexact way to say that these collectivities are generally made up of honest, generous or humble individuals?

I don’t think so, at least not necessarily. The idea that the virtues or actions of collectivities are merely those of their constituent individuals – this puts me in mind of Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” But in this very quote Thatcher shows that she’s not ready to carry a reductionist individualism all the way: there are families, which she grants an existence distinct from the individuals who make them up. If families are not merely the individuals that make them up, then surely other institutions – including society itself – can also be more than their constituent individuals.

Collectivities can take on a life of their own. (I say “collectivities” rather than “groups” because the latter term tends to connote a mere aggregation of individuals, prejudicing the discussion in that direction.) We understand this point when we make the important distinction between the rule of law and the rule of men (or women). A government (or a corporation) works best when its members act not according to their arbitrary individual preferences, but according to the interest of the whole organization and the precedents that have been collectively established. When an organization successfully acts according to the rule of law, it is that organization as a unit and a whole, and not merely the individual members who make it up, that is acting justly. It is a just organization, not merely a bunch of individuals who happen to be just by themselves. To describe the organization as just is no category mistake; it is correct.

It is in terms similar to these that I think one may accurately speak of the humility of a tradition – and as something quite separate from the humility of individuals. As Jabali108 noted, defining the terms matters here. I set out a basic sketch of the idea of a tradition two weeks ago, as consisting of both a normative ideal and a set of institutions which often does not live up to that ideal. Thill, rightly I think, pointed out a third separable element of a tradition: its body of accumulated knowledge.

As for humility, I take it to mean the awareness of one’s limits and weaknesses, not only in an intellectual sense but also in a practical one – acting on the recognition that one is fallible and dependent on others. In a more specifically intellectual or epistemological sense, it means listening carefully, recognizing that one has never thought of everything, that others very often have something valuable to contribute – even when one maintains the courage to defend one’s own sincerely held convictions. Above all, perhaps, the readiness to admit when one has been wrong. A mean between the vices of arrogance on one hand and meekness or timidity on the other, as I said to Thill. (If this definition seems imprecise, that’s intentional: spelling out the nature of a virtue too precisely implies that one already knows exactly what to strive for, which in my books itself demonstrates a lack of humility.)

On these terms I defend my previous claim, developed with Ben: natural science maintains an institutional humility as a tradition, because it does not take its claims as infallible, is ready to see them overturned when better evidence comes to light. The ideals of scientific tradition encourage its institutions to act in a humble way. This institutional humility is a very different thing from encouraging the humility of individuals; and indeed the two are in distinct tension with one another. When a tradition emphasizes its own unchanging rightness, as Buddhism or Christianity does, it is much more likely to foster a sense of individual humility – a recognition that one as an individual doesn’t have all the answers, that one has been wrong before. I think this is typically a good thing for the individual within the tradition; but it’s not so good for the health of the tradition itself. Science is a whole made humble by its arrogant members; the “religions” are wholes made arrogant by their humble members.

The most famous use of this analogy between individual and state is likely in Plato’s Republic. In Book II, Socrates reminds Glaucon that one can typically see bigger things more clearly than smaller things. Similarly it is easier to observe justice in a state than in an individual, so we should first ask what justice is in a state, and then we will be more able to see what it is in an individual. The city or state is larger than the individual; “perhaps, then, there is more justice in the larger thing, and it will be easier to learn what it is.” (368)

Plato’s approach, of using the state to illuminate the individual, is not obvious or natural; it was not taken by the Confucians, as far as I can tell. Confucius in Analects I.2 says that those who behave well toward their parents don’t start revolutions; Mencius argues for benevolence over profit by arguing that a state of benevolent people will flourish. Here – not so surprising given the early Confucians’ social context – the point seems to be to figure out how to run a state, and individual conduct is addressed for its relevance to that goal, rather than the other way ’round.

But one can find a similar approach to Plato’s in a more surprising place, where it plays a different role: the work of the Buddhist thinker Candrakīrti (whom I also discussed last time). In his commentary on Āryadeva‘s Four Hundred – now translated into English as Four Illusions – Candrakīrti also spends a chapter inquiring about how a king might best run a state. His rationale for doing so, however, is telling when compared to Plato’s: “Since the king certainly has egotism and selfishness in abundance, primarily the king is advised about their removal.”

At a theoretical or epistemological level, or in terms of their literary style and method, there is not so great a difference between Plato and Candrakīrti here. Both decide to study the state or the king because this object of study is in some respect bigger than the ordinary individual, and therefore clearer, easier to see. But where Plato sees more justice in the city than in the individual – a good thing, overall – Candrakīrti sees more egotism. The egotistical king is cited as an example of what is worst in us. Plato gives us an abstracted (and idealized) city-state to show us what is good; Candrakīrti gives us an abstracted king to show us what is bad.

With this difference, I think, we see Buddhist anti-politics once again. Candrakīrti is far less hostile to politics than Śāntideva; he doesn’t ever say that the king should give his kingdom away. Still, his advice to the king is chiding, cautionary: do not punish harshly, do not sacrifice your life in battle, and above all, never feel proud or self-satisfied about your status as a king. (Compare how Mencius always returns to the ancient emperors Yao and Shun and how great they were; for him, their pride would have been appropriate.) And so, while the literary function of politics for Candrakīrti and Plato is the same, the value they attach to it is opposed. For Plato, an idealized city-state shows us the heights of good to which we can inspire; for Candrakīrti, a king shows us the depths to which we can sink.

It’s easy, though, to misinterpret the idea of virtue as a mean. Virtue is not merely the middle ground. It is not a combination or a compromise between two vices. Virtue requires that the middle ground one occupy be specifically a good middle ground. It needs, essentially, to preserve what is best in each vice – to be a synthesis rather than a compromise.

On the virtue of justice, for example, a lack of justice may be expressed in a greedy sense of entitlement, claiming things that are not one’s own. As I expressed before, against the criticisms of Grotius, there may also be an excess with respect to justice, of not feeling entitled to things that really are one’s own (an unhealthy submissiveness that is often taught to women). But it is possible to combine these two in an unhealthy way, and I think this is the pattern among narcissistic personalities. Contemporary psychoanalyst Andrew Morrison claims that “shame and narcissism inform each other”: a narcissist can veer between experiencing himself as matching a false and overinflated ideal, and as contemptibly vile for falling short of that ideal; between believing himself entitled to everything and believing herself deserving nothing. Submissiveness and sense of overentitlement, the excess and the lack, can coexist in the same person, both getting in the way of justice. This is a middle ground between simple submissiveness and simple overentitlement, but it is vicious, not virtuous.

I noted the point briefly in the final chapter of my dissertation. I had presented an earlier part of the dissertation at the AAR conference, examining the questions at issue between Śāntideva and Martha Nussbaum on external goods: Śāntideva telling us that having possessions or close relationships will produce dangerous attachments, and Nussbaum saying that they are essential to a flourishing life.

As a respondent to my presentation, Mark Berkson had suggested a middle ground between their two views: one could live with the outward form of Nussbaumian flourishing — living in the world with property, human relationships, political participation — while inwardly renouncing all attachment to them, as is advocated in the Bhagavad Gītā. But I responded: this is indeed a middle ground, a compromise, but it is not a synthesis. Without further justification, at least, the Gītā approach does not answer the concerns of either Śāntideva or Nussbaum. As I said in the dissertation:

Nussbaum sees not merely one’s outward relationships, but one’s inner engagement and attachment, as central to the good life. Something fundamentally human is lost if one goes through those relationships like a play-actor, as surely as if one renounced them entirely for the monastic life. So too, Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation warns us of the dangers posed by external objects themselves, at least if we are not sufficiently advanced. If we did try to go through the trappings of a worldly life in this way, it would affect our minds, bringing us back into the attachment and anger we tried to escape.

One could argue, then, that the life promoted by the Gītā satisfies neither concern: one does not experience the joys of a Nussbaumian life passionately tied to attachments, but also doesn’t get Śāntidevan serenity because the attachments creep back in when one doesn’t want them to. It is the worst of both worlds, and not the best. I’m not arguing here that the Gītā’s proposed life actually is this bad (although I do find that view plausible), merely noting why a compromise is not good enough without being synthesis: one must make sure that the mean is virtuous and not vicious.

Whether one is putting together different worldviews or trying to navigate between the vices that prevent one from being a better person, one must constantly be aware that merely putting two things together or inhabiting two worlds is not enough. If one does not make sure to get the best of both worlds, one may easily end up with the worst. I am reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) exchange between an aged George Bernard Shaw and a beautiful young dancer. The dancer told him they should have children together: “Imagine a child with my body and your brain!” “Yes,” Shaw demurred, “but what if it had my body and your brain?”

1. It involves a lot of lying and deception practiced on credulous people.
2. It tends to foster greed in children and contributes to their false impression that one’s happiness is determined by one’s material possessions.
3. In telling children that the quantity and quality of one’s gifts are a function of one’s behavior, when actually they are a function of one’s socio-economic standing and parental temperament, it induces moral complacency in well-off children and false feelings of moral inferiority in less well-off children.

Now, I am no parent, and (as I’ve noted before) have no plans to be one; so my reflections here are not grounded in personal experience, and I urge parents and potential parents to take them with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, childrearing is a central part of life for most people, and our approach to it tells us a lot about what we value, so I don’t expect this to be the last time I dip my toes into these particular muddy waters.

The first of these objections appears the most radical. It would seem to suggest that telling stories is a form of lying or deception. Such a view is hardly without philosophical precedent; we can recall Plato banishing the poets from the ideal city. But in Plato’s work this is clearly understood to be a radical approach, of a piece with his other radical ideas about childrearing (especially, that children should be raised in common rather than by famillies). Do we really want to raise children without stories, without fictions – at least, without fictions that are clearly marked as such? One can tell children stories they will understand, long before they understand the difference between myth and reality. Is this a lie? Perhaps, but one shudders before the implications of an account of truth so unflinching and demanding that it requires all children’s stories be clearly marked as false and fictional. The worldview at issue sounds rather like Dickens’s unsympathetic Mr. Gradgrind; the burden of proof would seem to be on whoever would count such a cold way of life admirable.

White’s second objection is close to my heart, since I’m enthusiastic about Buddhist critiques of wealth. The objection would seem to apply not merely to the Santa myth, but to Christmas gift-giving in general: we will make our children better and happier people if we don’t train them to value material goods. While I’m sympathetic to the position, the advice seems to overestimate the influence that single decisions can have on a child’s emotional development. If a parent withholds Christmas gifts and gives a child only the bare necessities, will that teach the child Buddhist/Epicurean moderation, or will it teach the reverse? My empirically uninformed money is on the latter: a child raised in relative poverty will crave possessions far more, because she will not have had the opportunity to learn the fleeting nature of wealth’s pleasures (let alone the hedonic treadmill they might put you on). I suspect this is a reason the historical Buddha was (said to be) a prince: we do better to find out for ourselves that wealth is inessential (or worse) for our happiness and well-being.

The third objection is very Rawlsian, in a way particularly close to the heart of the young Rawls but in keeping with Rawls’s mature work as well: we deserve nothing, our station in life is determined primarily by external factors. Now while the point seems largely true to me on a macro level, it seems like it does not need to be true at a micro level. Within the household, parents are quite capable of setting up an environment in which children are rewarded with material goods for acting well. (It would seem important, however, that the parents follow through with such rewards and the denial of the rewards, holding them back when children have been genuinely “naughty”; if they’re not prepared to do so, it may not be appropriate to spread the Santa myth.) I think here of Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of goods internal and external to practices, an account which is also central to his more general account of virtue (at least in After Virtue). It is no coincidence that he introduces the distinction with a discussion of childrearing: specifically, how to teach an intelligent child to play chess when he or she does not want to play. At first, one offers the child some candy if she wins, and then her motivation is always to win, so that the child will cheat if she can.

But, so we may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those goods specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons, reasons now not just for winning on a particular occasion, but for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands. Now if the child cheats, he or she will be defeating not me, but himself or herself. (After Virtue, p. 188)

Chess, for MacIntyre, is one example of a social practice, and virtues are those qualities that allow us to achieve goods internal to practices – such as the good of enjoying the challenge of chess, for its own sake. One teaches children to be virtuous first through external motivation, such as candy, in the hope and expectation that soon they will discover motivation internal to the practice. It strikes me as entirely reasonable to see Santa as analogous to the chess-player’s candy: he is the external motivator for virtue, who we expect will give way to internal motivation as the child matures.

In short, I don’t think White’s objections to Santa are compelling individually or collectively. Nonetheless, it’s a thought-provoking short piece, exactly the sort of challenge to social convention that philosophical reflection should provoke us to from time to time.

If one is to live in society, dependent on others, one is likely to require justice. That’s what I learned dealing with my loud neighbours in Texas: without a conception of justice, you cannot have a clear conscience; you cannot arbitrate between the competing demands that others make on you. The rub is that justice seems to require blame and moral responsibility (and therefore some kind or degree of free will). Aristotle says that justice consists of giving people what they deserve; doesn’t that very idea of desert or merit imply moral responsibility?

I don’t know Aristotle well enough to know his answer to that question. But Aristotle or not, I suspect it’s possible to have a conception of justice that doesn’t require moral responsibility. The virtue of justice is a mean, in that just behaviour lies somewhere in between taking too much and giving too little (greed, miserliness) and giving too much and taking too little (submissiveness, servility). How do you decide what’s too little or too much? It depends on the particulars of the situation, but it would surely involve some combination of prevailing social norms and mores (what Hegel would call Sittlichkeit) and something like the Golden Rule, treating others as you would wish to be treated (or in some cases as they would wish to be treated, if their desires are not inordinate). Does that require assigning moral responsibility and blame? Not as far as I can tell.

The thing is, Buddhists – and their predecessors in Indian culture – don’t need an answer to this question. The suffering of good people, it seems to me, is a major problem for those who believe in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god. If God is really all-powerful and all good, it would stand to reason that he would stop bad things from happening to good people (and maybe bad people too) – so why doesn’t he? It’s a logical problem – theodicy – that monotheists continue to wrestle with answering.

But for someone who’s not a monotheist, the question seems like a non-starter. The question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” seems to me like the question “Why do yellow things fall when they’re dropped?” The very phrasing of the question suggests a certain lack of understanding. Why would we ever think that bad things wouldn’t happen to good people? What, other than the belief in an omnipotent being, would lead us to make such a connection?

I wonder if there’s something in the human condition that compels us to expect that the good will be rewarded and the bad punished – basically, that the world is fair. I’ve heard of studies of chimps that show signs of distress when others get more than they do – more distress than they feel when they have less themselves. Is there, perhaps, a justice instinct – even a theodicy instinct?

My problem is with the literal concept of hell, the one you see preached in evangelical sermons. I’ve been tempted to think of it as just a superstition for those who haven’t thought their Christianity through very well. But it isn’t that. Even Augustine, a profound thinker I have a deep respect for, seems to say fairly clearly that the damned suffer physical and psychological torment for eternity. This, to me, raises huge problems.

I can’t figure any way around the view that a God who damns people to hell for all eternity is evil. Such a God would deliberately inflict far more suffering than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot put together (and added to every other vicious tyrant you might care to name). Moreover, such a punishment seems completely gratuitous, far more than anything the sufferers could reasonably be said to deserve. Augustine argues the point merely by reference to Cicero and the Roman customs of the time: “we have punishments more severe than the crime all the time!” Such a point convinces me only of the barbarism of Rome, not of God’s justice. Nietzsche notes with some satisfaction that Aquinas and Tertullian go even further than this: among the pleasures granted to the elect in heaven comes the ability to see the ways the damned are punished. What kind of God would encourage such a thing?

Buddhist hells, by contrast, give us two ways out of the dilemma. First, they’re not permanent; everybody gets a second chance, as one should expect from a merciful god. Second, and more fundamentally, nobody put them there. Like all the other suffering in the world, they’re just an unpleasant fact of nature, one we need to find a way to deal with. If the Buddhas could eliminate the hells, they would; they’re omniscient and omnibenevolent, but not omnipotent. Śāntideva, in redirecting his good karma, hopes that the hells will become glades of lotuses – he just doesn’t succeed in effecting this transformation, at least not for the majority of the hells.

Am I missing something here? With respect to the God of the medieval theologians, if he existed, it’s not just that I would find it hard to believe him omnibenevolent. Rather, I would find it hard to believe him benevolent at all.

So after the Thailand trip, I started trying to compile a list of the virtues. This was before the long and comprehensive lists found in André Comte-Sponville’s book and the research of Peterson and Seligman, so there were some virtues I missed just because I didn’t think of them. But another virtue was a deliberate omission: justice.

Love and honesty, I thought, did all the work that we might think justice needs to do; justice is superfluous. (Walter Kaufmann made a similar claim in The Faith of a Heretic.) Being honest makes it easier to trust and be trusted by the people around us; giving love allows us to be loved. So the two each make us happy, and together they produce most of what is conventionally thought of as morality: love makes us concerned for the consequences of our actions on others, honesty prevents us from doing deceptive things. Justice seems unnecessary, and especially, it doesn’t make us happy. So it’s dispensable.

I think I had this view about because of an ambiguity in most discussions of justice.
Comte-Sponville’s often edifying book exemplifies the problem. While he says justice is the most important virtue, he doesn’t give us reason to believe that it is a virtue – at least, not a personal virtue in any way comparable to the other virtues in the book (gratitude, gentleness, compassion). Most of Comte-Sponville’s discussion of justice draws on John Rawls, and Rawls is clear from the outset of his book that he sees justice as a virtue of social institutions, not of people. Comte-Sponville could have dropped his justice chapter entirely, and the account of personal virtue presented by the book would not have been diminished; what that chapter addresses .

Eventually, though, my views changed. I came to realize that justice is a virtue after one difficult incident. While I was a visiting scholar in philosophy at the University of Texas, I lived in an apartment complex where the concrete walls were paper-thin, to the point where one could hear neighbours peeing in their bathroom. There was a terrible dispute there between my then wife (now ex-wife, for unrelated reasons) and our neighbours, who insisted on playing loud music at all hours. They didn’t want to speak to each other, so I went between them, trying to make everyone happy – the kind of thing one might be led to do by a worldview like Śāntideva’s, where only others’ happiness and not justice is a significant consideration. The result was the kind of masochism that Śāntideva sometimes seems close to advocating, where you let others walk all over you. Which might work all right if you’re a monk, but it’s a big problem when other people – like my wife – are depending on you. I wound up giving in to the neighbours’ demand that they keep playing the music loudly, and (justifiably) angering my wife as a result.

No solution was going to make everyone happy. My wife, the neighbours, and I all had very different, and incompatible, expectations of each other. How can one be happy in such a situation? What one needs above all, I came to realize, is a clear conscience, a sense that one has done the right thing. And in this case, not merely the loving or honest thing, but the just thing. One needs to have reasonable expectations of others, and act according to others’ reasonable expectations of oneself – which are typically very different from their actual expectations.

Once you say that, once you let in the idea of reasonable expectation, then with it comes obligation, and some of the related concepts one finds in Rawls and analytical moral philosophy (such as permissibility). You are obligated to do certain things, forbidden from doing others; it’s not that you can’t break your obligations, but that doing so will stain your conscience, make you feel guilty, make you less confident and less able to act well in the future. In that sense, acting unjustly is bad karma.

The key point here, though, is that this view of justice only holds up if Aristotle is right and justice is a mean. You’re being unjust if you act selfishly and demand more than you can reasonably expect of others. But you’re also being unjust if – as I had initially done – you cave in and let others demand more than they can reasonably expect of you. Just as importantly, justice here is a virtue of people, irrespective of its role in social and political institutions.

(In the end, in case you’re wondering, we just moved out of the complex. I wish I could say that my new understanding solved the problem, but it didn’t. I do think, though, that it helped me deal better with similar situations in the years that followed.)

Thanks to Jeff Colgan for suggesting this topic.

Bentham’s philosophy is undisputedly utilitarian to the core: all that matters is the greatest pleasure of the greatest number. Mill recognizes that such a philosophy entails some seemingly unpalatable logical consequences: frivolous entertainments like push-pin (we have far more examples available to us now than Mill did in his time) are valued as much as great poetry. And so Mill winds up introducing a distinction of quality between “higher” and “lower” pleasures, a criterion which can’t really be derived from the principle of greatest pleasure for the greatest number. That is to say that in order to soften the disturbing consequences of a fully utilitarian view, Mill introduces non-utilitarian criteria into utilitarianism without realizing it. Few would dispute that Mill remains basically a utilitarian – just a watered-down utilitarian.

My contention here is that the same thing applies to Rawls. Mill is aware that he remains basically utilitarian, but is unaware of the non-utilitarian nature criteria he adds to Bentham. Rawls, by contrast, is fully aware that he’s adding non-utilitarian criteria to Mill, but is unaware that he remains basically utilitarian. The non-utilitarian addition, comparable to the higher/lower pleasures distinction, is the condition that a just society must always respect basic rights – that this is a perfect duty, in Kantian terms, one which cannot be overridden.

But that’s a relatively small part of what Rawls is up to. It’s just a boundary condition – a limit beyond which one’s actions cannot go. But where does one go within those limits? To the maximin principle, maximizing the well-being of the person worst off in society. But given utilitarian assumptions and an informed understanding of human psychology, that’s exactly what a utilitarian would do. Empirical studies of happiness typically indicate that an amount of money made by very poor people adds much more to their happiness than the same amount of money made by relatively wealthy people. An informed utilitarian, in practice, is going to want to raise the well-being of the worst off. And both Rawls and utilitarians think of well-being in primarily material terms, making sure that the worst off have more stuff. They also take the further step of trying to quantify this well-being, in terms that economists can measure; the economic graphs and charts that line A Theory of Justice are direct descendants of Bentham’s hedonic calculus – by way of the economic theory that Bentham influenced and Rawls replies to.

And that’s just the particular policy implications of the two modes of thought. There’s a much broader connection as well: for both, the most important element of ethics is political action. Rawls focuses single-mindedly on institutions; he tries to say as little as he possibly can about individuals’ “comprehensive conceptions of the good,” while still elaborating a detailed conception of a good government. Utilitarianism, by contrast, is a system that aims to expound both the individual good and the good for institutions – but the nature of that good is one that inherently privileges institutions over individuals. For institutions, in nearly all cases, can accomplish far more, create more total benefit, than individuals acting alone. If one must act to bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one will need to do it in political institutions. So Rawls and the utilitarians share both this overarching concern with politics and institutions, and a general conception of what it is those institutions should do. In these respects I think it’s quite fair to say that, just as Mill shared Bentham’s essential concerns while smoothing out his theory’s rough edges, so Rawls has smoothed out Mill while preserving the essentials of Mill’s utilitarianism.

But what about justice? Aristotle thought that this too was a mean. If we demand more than we deserve, we are greedy; fair enough. But what if we demand less than we deserve? Aristotle thought that this too was a vice. But isn’t it a good thing to be nice and generous in this way? The Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius certainly thought so, and therefore disagreed with Aristotle. The essence of justice, said Grotius, “lies in abstaining from that which belongs to another.” Grotius’s claim moved society away from an understanding of justice based on virtue, and toward one based on law.

I think, however, that Aristotle is smarter than Grotius gives him credit for, in a way that has significant implications. If one asks for too much, Aristotle tells us, one commits injustice; but if one asks for too little, one suffers injustice, and both, in their way, are serious wrongs. It is unjust to refuse to stand up for yourself, to allow others to walk all over you.

The point is particularly important in an age where women are struggling for equality. The vice of submissiveness or meekness, of not asking for enough, is probably more prevalent in women than men. Sociological works like Women Don’t Ask note that gender wage gaps often arise because women don’t feel entitled to their fair share. Aristotle’s view is empowering.