What is it to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice

ion, to the ‘movement’ of a detached frog’s leg. A teaching of this type might be developed in a number of ways. It is of course consistent with its central thought that the dictates of this virtue might, in respect of a given pair of agents, be massively aVected by some of the so-called social practices under which the pair happen together to fall. Similarly, Hume’s doctrine is consistent with the idea that some fundamental justice-inducing customs should have grown to encompass an extensive empire (non-politically speaking), but that their dictates in the case of a given pair might be massively aVected by some of the more local and determinate justice-inducing ‘practices’ that the agents in question happen both to bear. On an Aristotelian account, though, every bipolarityinducing custom will be understood as either determining, decorating, or competing with a deeper form of dikaiology of a categorially distinct type, not merely a more extensive form of the same basic customary type. On such a conception of the matter, it is thus intelligible to speak of relations of ‘moral right’ as joining pairs of individuals who share no social practices or institutions nor suVer any one common Bildung. In this it contrasts, I think, with the Humean doctrine, properly understood. Nevertheless, the class of individual ‘persons’ with whom a just agent is prepared to reckon pairwise will, on this view, at best (I will suggest) be the class of bearers of the nature or life form in question, the class of all human beings. 9. Excursus on the Concepts Life Form and Practice Before describing the third competing conception of the manifold of persons into which our heroine inserts herself—the view, namely, of Kant—it may be well to emphasize three points about the leading concepts on which the Humean and Aristotelian doctrines turn. These are the concepts practice and species, respectively—or form of life and life form, as we might better call them, or again second nature and Wrst nature, as we might equally well call them. 32 I discuss the concepts life and life form, and their relations, in my paper ‘The Representation of Life’, in Rosalind Hursthouse, Warren Quinn, and Gavin Lawrence (eds.), Virtues and Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 247–96. I discuss the concept practice or social 360 / Michael Thompson