For it makes no difference whether a good man
has defrauded a bad man or a bad man a good one, nor whether it is a
good or a bad man that has committed adultery; the law looks only to
the distinctive character of the injury, and treats the parties as
equal, if one is in the wrong and the other is being wronged, and if
one inflicted injury and the other has received it. Therefore, this
kind of injustice being an inequality, the judge tries to equalize it;
for in the case also in which one has received and the other has
inflicted a wound, or one has slain and the other been slain, the
suffering and the action have been unequally distributed; but the
judge tries to equalize by means of the penalty, taking away from
the gain of the assailant. For the term 'gain' is applied generally to
such cases, even if it be not a term appropriate to certain cases,
e.g. to the person who inflicts a woundand 'loss' to the sufferer;
at all events when the suffering has been estimated, the one is called
loss and the other gain. Therefore the equal is intermediate between
the greater and the less, but the gain and the loss are respectively
greater and less in contrary ways; more of the good and less of the
evil are gain, and the contrary is loss; intermediate between them is,
as we saw, equal, which we say is just; therefore corrective justice
will be the intermediate between loss and gain.
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