The Gains and Losses of Corrective Justice

Abstract

In Aristotle's classic account, corrective justice eliminates wrongful gains and their correlative losses.'The question I address in this Essay is, what is the nature of these gains and losses?According to Aristotle, liability is the law's response to an unjust gain by the defendant that is correlative to the plaintiff's.unjust loss.Because the unjust transaction has caused the defendant to gain what the plaintiff has lost, corrective justice links the parties in a bipolar relationship that mirrors the bipolarity of the wrong being corrected.Thus, the correlativity of gain and loss accounts for the nexus between a particular defendant and a particular plaintiff.Nevertheless, even sympathetic readers of Aristotle's text are often puzzled by his reference to correlative gain and loss.