On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

Justice is the morality of the community. The morality of a community shapes individual thinking, values, and behavior. Aristotle calls justice “anything just that tends to produce or preserve happiness and its constituents for the community of a city.”2 In The Republic, Plato says that virtue in an individual is “a certain health, beauty, and good condition of a soul.”3 Justice, therefore, can be understood as the virtue of a community, the harmony of all the souls that form it. But although justice is enacted in community, each community is made up of individuals who together make a society just or unjust. The just society is the one that frees people to do good. In other words, a just society allows all of its members to cultivate the virtue of justice, for even individual ethics “are much affected by the ethos” of the community in which one lives.4 The virtue of justice is the habit of desiring and doing what is just.5 In “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, simply, “the just man justices.”6