1. Aristophanes, The Frogs , in The Complete Plays of Aristophanes , trans. R. H. Webb, ed. Moses Hadas (New York: Bantam, 1962),394. [BACK]

2. Ibid., 412. [BACK]

3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , trans. David Ross (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), Book 5, 1131a27 (p. 113). [BACK]

4. Ibid., 1131a6-1133b20 (pp. 112-121). Aristotle's position on commensurability is of course a matter of much dispute, a dispute sharpened, perhaps, by many inconsistencies on his part. While his arguments here would seem to suggest that he is not entirely opposed to the idea of commensurability, his statements elsewhere (for example, in Politics 1282b15-1283a15) would seem to suggest otherwise. Martha Nussbaum and David Wiggins have both emphasized this latter aspect of Aristotle. See Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. chapter 10, "Non-scientific Deliberation," 290-317; Wiggins, "Weakness of Will, Commensurability, and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire," in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics , ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 241-266. [BACK]

5. Nicomachean Ethics , Book 5, 1129b13-1130b6 (pp. 108-109). [BACK]

6. Ibid., 1130b26-1131a6 (pp. 110-111), italics in original. [BACK]

7. Aristotle thus speaks of "particular" justice and "particular" injustice, which he distinguishes from justice and injustice "in the wide sense,'' his ethics dealing only with the former, not with the latter. See especially Nicomachean Ethics , 1130a6-1131a6 (pp. 109-111). [BACK]

8. In that ascendancy, St. Thomas Aquinas might be said already to mark a departure from Aristotle. Pondering the question whether "justice as a general virtue [was] essentially the same as every virtue," Aquinas suggested, on the one hand, that "legal justice, if general by power, is a special virtue in essence," and, on the other hand, that "legal justice is one in essence with all virtue though notionally distinct." He concluded, "Hence the need for one sovereign moral virtue, essentially distinct from the rest of the moral virtues, which order them to the common good: this is legal justice." See "Justice," question 58, article 6 (2a2æ. 57-62) in volume XXXVII of the Summa Theologiae , trans. Thomas Gilby (London: Blackfriars, 1975), 37. [BACK]

9. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 3, 12, 4, 11. I should point out that more recently, in response to his critics, Rawls has offered a much more delimited conception of justice, locat-

ing it strictly within the political sphere. As the rest of my book will make clear, this movement away from Kant (toward a conception of justice closer to Aristotle's) is one I entirely agree with. See Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). [BACK]

10. One notable exception is Judith Shklar, and here I can do no better than to quote her on the celebrated case of Bardell v. Pickwick :

Indeed, can any court do justice to Mrs. Bardell's grievances? She was humiliated in front of a lot of people and nothing can make Pickwick marry her. At most he can be made to pay a sum to the lawyers. Dodson and Fogg no doubt played on Mrs. Bardell's natural desire for revenge, but judicial proceedings cannot satisfy that urge fully. Had Mrs. Bardell been the heroine of a Gothic romance, she would have put a stiletto through Pickwick's heart and gone mad. And if the story had been set in Corsica, the male members of her clan would have been obliged to avenge her honor by killing Pickwick and his friends who witnessed her disgrace.

See Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 11. See also her suggestive discussion of justice in Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 113-123. [BACK]

11. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism , in Essential Works of John Stuart Mill , ed. Max Lerner (New York: Bantam, 1961), 227. [BACK]

12. Ibid., 227. [BACK]

13. As Aristotle says: "justice exists only between men whose mutual relations are governed by law" ( Nicomachean Ethics , 1134a12-32 [p. 122]). The description of justice as the "most legal of the virtues" is from H. L. A. Hart, The Conception of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 7. [BACK]

14. Mill, Utilitarianism , 232. [BACK]

15. Ibid., 241, 245. [BACK]

16. See, for example, Isaiah Berlin, "Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements" and "Logical Translation," both in his Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays , ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Penguin, 1981), 32-55, 56-80; Bernard Williams, "Conflict of Values," in his Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 71-82. [BACK]

17. Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), quotation from 1. [BACK]

18. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 73, 74, 160, 172. For an important extension and qualification of Gilligan, see Robin West, "Jurisprudence and Gender," University of Chicago Law Review 55 (1988): 1-72. [BACK]

19. For an exemplary study highlighting the phenomenon of unevenness, see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). [BACK]

20. John Burt has made this point eloquently. "We think of reason as settling disagreements," he writes. "But reason is itself a rich source of disagreement, since it raises new questions in the process of settling old ones, unsettles old answers as it puzzles out their implications, introduces new distinctions

which divide those who thought themselves to be in agreement with each other, or discovers inner unities which put previously distinct views in each other's company." See Burt, "John Rawls and the Moral Vocation of Liberalism," Raritan 14 (Summer 1994): 136. For an important argument about the nonsingular relation between justice and reason, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). [BACK]