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Wellsprings
politics

Distributive Justice (Proportional Equality)

τὸ ἴσον κατ' ἀξίαν

Should power be split equally among all, or doled out by desert? The ancient fight over what "fair" even means.

When a city shares out offices, honors, and wealth, by what measure does each person get a share? Aristotle distinguished arithmetic equality — the same to everyone — from geometric or proportional equality, where shares track merit or desert. The catch is that no one agrees on the standard: democrats count free birth, oligarchs count wealth, and aristocrats count virtue, so each faction calls its own ratio "justice." This dispute over the criterion of desert became the engine of Greek thinking about who deserves to rule.

Where this idea shows up

15 Greek sources·1 Jewish-canon citation

Where to read it