There is a view of Aristotle’s conception of corrective justice which has enjoyed some following among tort theorists in recent years, according to which corrective justice is distinct from distributive justice and entirely independent of it. The distinctness of the two is, of course, asserted by Aristotle in a well-known passage in the Nicomachean Ethics, and no one could seriously doubt that he does take the forms of these two kinds of justice to be distinct:
What is just in distributions of common assets will always fit the [geometrical] proportion mentioned above,... On the other hand, what is just in transactions is certainly equal in a way, and what is unjust is unequal; but still it fits numerical proportion, not the [geometrical] proportion of the other species.