Within the theoretical literature on crime control and offender therapy, little has been written about the importance of virtue ethics in the experience of human justice and in the evolution of the common good. As a theory of being, the aretaic tradition extols eudemonic existence (i.e., excellence, flourishing) as a relational habit of developing character that is both practiced and embodied over time. What this implies is that virtue justice depends on a set of assumptions and predispositions—both moral and jurisprudential—whose meanings are essential to comprehending its psychological structure. This article sets out to explore several themes that our integral to our thesis on the virtues (i.e., the being) of justice. We reclaim justice’s aretaic significance, critique the common conflation of justice and law, discuss how the dominant legalistic conception of justice is rooted in a particular view of human nature, suggest how justice might be more properly grounded in natural moral sensibilities, and provide a tentative explication of the psychological character of justice as a twofold moral disposition. Given this exploratory commentary, we conclude by reflecting on how individual well-being, system-wide progress, and transformative social change are both possible and practical, in the interest of promoting the virtues of justice within the practice of crime control and offender therapy.

在关于犯罪控制和罪犯治疗的理论文献中，很少有关于美德伦理在人类正义经验和公共利益演变中的重要性的文章。作为一种存在理论，阿里泰克传统将幸福的存在（即卓越、繁荣）颂扬为一种发展性格的关系习惯，这种习惯随着时间的推移而得到实践和体现。这意味着美德正义取决于一组假设和倾向——道德和法理——其意义对于理解其心理结构至关重要。本文着手探讨几个主题，这些主题对我们关于正义的美德（即存在）的论文是不可或缺的。我们重申正义的戏剧意义，批判正义与法律的共同融合，讨论占主导地位的法律主义正义概念如何植根于对人性的特定观点，建议正义如何更恰当地基于自然的道德情感，并提供对作为双重道德倾向的正义的心理特征的尝试性解释。鉴于此探索性评论，我们最后反思个人福祉、系统范围内的进步和变革性社会变革如何既可能又实用，以促进在犯罪控制和罪犯治疗实践中的正义美德。