Section 11: Can people be unjust to themselves?

Whether someone can treat himself unjustly or not is evident from what has been said.

For one class of just actions are those actions in accordance with any _[5] virtue that are prescribed by the law. For example, the law does not permit suicide, and what it does not permit it forbids. Again, when someone in violation of the law harms another (and not in retaliation), and does so voluntarily, he acts unjustly, and a voluntary agent is one who knows both the person he is affecting by his action and the instrument he is using. But someone who through anger voluntarily stabs himself does this contrary to right reason, and this _[10] the law does not allow. Therefore, he is acting unjustly. But towards whom? Surely towards the state, not towards himself. For he suffers voluntarily, but no one is voluntarily treated unjustly. This is also the reason why the state punishes. A certain dishonor attaches to the person who destroys himself, on the ground that he is treating the state unjustly.

Further, in that sense of “acting unjustly” in which the person who “acts unjustly” is only unjust and not bad all round, it is not possible to treat oneself unjustly. (This _[15] is different from the former case. The unjust person in one sense of the term is wicked in a particularized way, like the coward is, not in the sense of being wicked all round, so that his “unjust act” does not manifest wickedness in general). For that would imply the possibility of the same thing’s having been subtracted from and added to the same thing at the same time. But this is impossible–the just and the unjust always involve more than one person.

Further, unjust action is voluntary _[20] and done by choice, and takes the initiative. For someone who because he has suffered does the same in return is not thought to act unjustly. But if someone harms himself, he suffers and does the same things at the same time.

Further, if someone could treat himself unjustly, he could be voluntarily treated unjustly.

Besides, no one acts unjustly without committing particular acts of injustice. But no one can commit adultery with his own wife or break into _[25] his own house or steal his own property.

In general, the question “can someone treat himself unjustly?” is solved also by the distinction we applied to the question “can a someone be voluntarily treated unjustly?”

It is also evident that both being unjustly treated and acting unjustly are bad. For the one means having less and the other having more than the intermediate amount, which plays the part here that the healthy does in _[30] the medical art, and that good condition does in the art of athletic training. But still, acting unjustly is worse than suffering injustice, for it involves vice and is blameworthy. It involves vice that is either of the complete and absolute kind, or almost so (we must admit the latter alternative, because not all voluntary unjust action implies injustice as a state of character), whereas being unjustly treated does not involve vice and injustice in oneself. In itself, then, being unjustly treated is less bad. _[35] But there is nothing to prevent its being incidentally worse. _[1138b1] But theory cares nothing for this. It calls pleurisy a more serious malady than a stumble. Yet a stumble may become incidentally more serious than pleurisy, if the in some situation stumbling results in you being taken prisoner or put to death by the enemy.

Metaphorically, however, _[5] and in virtue of a certain resemblance, what is just is found, not indeed between a person and himself, but between certain parts of him. Yet not every kind of justice but that of master and servant or that of husband and wife. For these are the ratios in which the part of the soul that has a rational principle stands to the irrational part. And it is with a view to these parts that people also think someone can be unjust to himself, namely, _[10] because these parts are liable to suffer something contrary to their respective desires. There is, therefore, thought to be a mutual justice between the parts of the soul like that ruler and ruled.

Let this be taken as our account of justice and the other virtues, that is, the moral virtues.