In Aristotilean ethics, justice revolves around the concept of reasonable expectation. According to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics when 'injury takes place contrary to reasonable expectation, it is a misadventure'. Aristotle believes that if an action you take results in a negative outcome, then you have not committed an act of injustice as long the negative outcome was contrary to reasonable expectation.
The problem with this categorization comes from defining reasonable expectation. If you deliberate for long enough, you can take any action and find a chain of events that leads to a negative outcome. For example, suppose you shut a window, which causes a cat to be startled and jump out onto the road. This then causes two cars to swerve around the cat, crashing into each other and killing both drivers instantly. If you had contemplated long enough, you would have foreseen this scenario. In fact, there are an infinite number of possible ways that closing the window could have led to disaster. The reason that most people would still choose to close the window is because they'd decide that the probability of these disasters is negligible. That is to say, they believe that the catastrophe scenarios are all contrary to reasonable expectation. This example appears to be pretty clear-cut, however the concept of ‘reasonable expectation’ is not an absolute one. For example suppose I set up a fake lottery with a grand prize of $1 billion. Suppose also that I have no way of paying this money if someone wins, however I have somehow convinced everyone that I do. If the odds are 1 in a billion of winning and only 100 000 tickets are bought, is it contrary to reasonable expectation that anybody will win this lottery? What if the odds were 1 in a trillion? There must exist some threshold, beyond which a negative outcome is considered ‘contrary to reasonable expectation’. Most people would instinctively consider running this fake lottery an unjust act no matter what the odds are. But Aristotle believes that we can’t be blamed for consequences that happen ‘contrary to reasonable expectation’, and so as long as I set the odds of winning high enough, I’m not acting unjustly by running this lottery.
