Nicomachean Ethics

Answers

• Q11JUDGMENT

  Should a judge follow a general rule when it produces an unjust result in a particular case?

  No. equity corrects the rule. Defines equity as the correction of law where it is defective because of its generality, and says the judge should decide as the legislator would have if present.

  What creates the problem is that the equitable is just, but not the legally just but a correction of legal justice. The reason is that all law is universal but about some things it is not possible to make a universal statement which shall be correct. In those cases, then, in which it is necessary to speak universally, but not possible to do so correctly, the law takes the usual case, though it is not ignorant of the possibility of error. And it is none the less correct; for the error is in the law nor in the legislator but in the nature of the thing, since the matter of practical affairs is of this kind from the start. When the law speaks universally, then, and a case arises on it which is not covered by the universal statement, then it is right, where the legislator fails us and has erred by oversimplicity, to correct the omission--to say what the legislator himself would have said had he been present, and would have put into his law if he had known. Hence the equitable is just, and better than one kind of justice--not better than absolute justice but better than the error that arises from the absoluteness of the statement. And this is the nature of the equitable, a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality.

  Book V, chapter 10 · Passage and chapter confirmed in search results (sacred-texts, Toronto Metropolitan pressbook). Widely read in the period.