My lecture this afternoon is on Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BC.
Aristotle was not, unlike Plato, was not an Athenian.
He was born in a small city state called Stagura, but he spent most of his early years were
spent in Macedon.
His father was the physician to the King of Macedon. As a young man, Aristotle went to
Athens where he studied for a number of years with Plato. Plato founded his own school called
of the Academy. Aristotle was a student there for quite a long time. Then, Aristotle later,
at least according to most accounts, was a tutor to Alexander the Great, who was the
son of King Philip of Macedon. When I was preparing for these lectures, I was surprised
to Read. There are some writers such as Richard Kraut in his book on Aristotle who claimed
that it may not be the case, it may be false that Aristotle was Alexander the Great's tutor.
This may just be a legend, although he doesn't give any claims on this. But I've been assured
by competent authority that most people, most scholars accept that he was the tutor of Alexander
the Great. As you know, Philip of Macedon really became the dominant power in Greece.
He was in a war against the various other city-states with Athens as one of his main
and Opponents. In the famous battle in 338 BC, the Battle of Chironia, Philip of Macedon
defeated the Athenians, and then there was a provincial governor who was appointed by
the Macedonian government, I mean, Aenidus, I think, who was in control of Athens. Aristotle
Resume Residence in Athens. Remember, he was not, as I say, he was not an Athenian, he was not a citizen of Athens.
At that time, unlike today, people say couldn't, when they lived in a place for a number of years, you couldn't just take out naturalization papers and try to become a citizen.
A citizen in Athens had to be, at least from 450 BC, had to have parents who were citizens.
So Aristotle was a non-resident alien in Athens, a so-called medic, M-E-T-I-C, not to be confused
with MEDIC, a different word.
So although the reason I mention that is, as you'll see, Aristotle, when he was talking
about the best form of government, various forms of government, had a good deal to say
about citizens and citizenship, but he himself was not a citizen of Athens, even though he
spent a lot of time there.
Then in the, there was a, Philip of Macedon had been, was assassinated in 336 B.C., and
then eventually Alexander, his son Alexander took over.
But in the last years of Aristotle's residence in Athens, there was a revolt against the
Macedonian government. There was an anti-Macedonian party headed by Demosthenes, the famous orator,
famous speaker. For a while, in his last year, Aristotle had to get out of Athens. He left
the city. I think there's a story he said he wanted to avoid having the city commit
a crime against philosophy twice. So, in his last years, he left Athens. Now, at the time
he wrote, as I mentioned, Athens had lost to the Macedonians after the Battle of Carinthia,
But even before that, Athens wasn't as powerful as it had been in the previous centuries.
The number of citizens declined to about 30,000 at one time.
They had 60,000 to 70,000, now they just had about 30,000, so they weren't the power they
once were at the time Aristotle was writing, even before their loss to the Macedonians.
He also had two main works that are of interest to political philosophy.
He wrote first the Nicomachean Ethics and also the Politics.
He also wrote another book on Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and some of the books of the two are identical,
I won't be going into what the various views are of the relation between the two. Most scholars hold that Aristotle's views on ethics are really the best source for them is in the Comachean Ethics, although Sir Anthony Kenny has argued the reverse, that the Demian Ethics is the most important one.
that's very much a minority view. In the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics,
Aristotle indicates that ethics is really part of another discipline called
politicae, or political science, that really, as I'll be explaining a bit
The person, the individual really can only lead the good life in a polis, in a city-state,
and so this really makes politics the supreme science, not ethics, meaning ethics of individual
living.
In the politics, he really takes up the themes of the ethics, explaining exactly what the nature of this supreme science is.
I should say also, before I start on the main parts of Aristotle's argument,
There are various theories on how these, both the Kilimankean Ethics and politics were composed.
What we have now are lecture notes that students have transmitted of what Aristotle said.
But there are various views on stages that the books might have gone through or how the
The German philologist Werner Jaeger was one of the main people in the 1920s and 30s who
argued that there were stages in Aristotle's development.
He had very elaborate theories on how Aristotle had composed his books and how the book should
be arranged, but that's an issue I won't be going into. I'll just be taking the books
as we have them.
Now, you remember when I was talking about Plato, I'm mentioning he attached supreme
importance to the philosophers knowing the form of the good. This was what entitled them
to their ruling position in the calypolis, the beautiful city of the Republic, but it
It wasn't clear in reading Plato what exactly the idea of the good was or how we were supposed
to know it.
It was just people somehow, the philosophies after training had some contact with the idea.
They grasped the idea, Plato has a famous metaphor where the people were in a cave and
then some come out or some are freed and turn around and they see the sunlight, but it isn't
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He doesn't specify exactly what he means, he doesn't spell out in propositions that
we can analyze and argue about what his contentions are.
Aristotle, I think, was much more methodologically self-conscious than Plato.
He was certainly, unlike Plato, he wasn't a great literary artist, but he was very much concerned with giving the exact structures of an argument.
In the Nicomachean Ethics and also the politics, he follows a particular method of proceeding where it's a somewhat empirical method.
He starts with views that are commonly accepted or believed, and then he tries to first make these
more systematic and ask questions about them and try to, not necessarily accepting everything that
con-belief holds, but he starts off from that basis. He says we have their certain
commonly accepted beliefs. And so we start from that and don't just start, say, just trying to think of things on our own and just say, well, we want to ask what's the best life. So we just come up with some idea of our own. And then reason on that basis, we start with what's commonly accepted by especially he says, by ethics, what is accepted by well brought up people in political science,
He and the members of his school he founded when he returned to Athens for his second visit.
Remember, he'd been there the first time, he was a student of Plato.
When he came back, he founded his own school, which was called the Lyceum.
Plato's school, the Academy, was still in operation.
The Academy continued. It was the longest-lived institution of education in antiquity. It lasted till it was closed by the Roman Emperor Justinian.
but Plato had his own school called the Lyceum in competition with the Academy so
Aristotle and his students collected, wrote accounts of the constitutions of
the various of city-states in Greece and I think there were about 158 of these
He was, in this way, an empiricist. As we'll see later, he didn't accept Plato's theory
of forms. Now, there is an obvious objection to proceeding, by this way of saying, in ethics,
But we start with saying, what are the beliefs that people well-brought-up would hold?
How do we know which people are well-brought-up?
Isn't that begging the question in a way that we're assuming that we say that the good ideas
we should follow about the good are what the well-brought-up people have, but how do we
know what the well-brought-up people have?
Well, those are just the ones who have the ideas we think are good, so that the claim
is that if we proceed in this way, if we try to make systematic the common beliefs people
hold, if we say that we took, we're trying to come up with a contemporary ethics, he
said, well, what do people today think is reasonable?
I think it's reasonable.
I'd say we say, well, a lot of people today think the government should provide various
welfare services to people.
So if other people deny this, but if those views aren't, say, a libertarian says, no,
the government shouldn't do this, then we say, well, the libertarian is in conflict
with what the well-brought-up people say, so we can just cut that view out.
out. We should say this is an obviously absurd view so we can dismiss this. Now there's some
people who actually adopt that style of argument. I remember the Hilary Putnam, who was a very
influential Harvard philosopher, who once wrote an essay where he commented in passing on
libertarianism. He said, well, look, libertarianism, he has great respect for Robert Nozick, who
was at that time a colleague of his. He said, look, this is obviously a system we have to
to Reject, because if libertarianism were correct, then we wouldn't have public education.
Everybody knows we ought to have public education, so this shows that we can just reject the
libertarian view out of hand.
So the question would come up, is Aristotle involved in a similar failing?
Not of course that he's discussing libertarianism, but is he saying something like, we want to
figure out what the views are of the well-brought-up people, but he's just assuming that a certain
class of people who were educated Greeks of his time have the correct opinions, so he's
systematizing the beliefs that people actually hold, but he's not coming up with any truth
of his own.
This is actually a similar criticism of the Ronald Dworkin, who was an influential legal
philosopher, raised this criticism against John Rawls, who was the most influential 20th
century political philosopher.
Rawls had a procedure which he calls reflective equilibrium, which is a very Aristotelian
I was quite aware of this objection. He had a way of answering this, and there was a good discussion of this point in a book by Terence Irwin.
Terence Irwin is one of the leading American scholars on classical Greek philosophy.
He has a very long book called Aristotle's First Principles,
And he says, Aristotle had, besides the procedure I've so far mentioned, where we try to systematize our common beliefs,
in this he calls weak dialectic.
Aristotle had a supplementary procedure called strong dialectic, where he tried,
Aristotle tried to develop certain views just based on what he thought were correct, metaphysical principles.
So he would then test the views that were systematizing what the well-brought-up people said against what the conclusions that he thought he could establish independently by this resort to metaphysical principles.
and this procedure where you bring in not only the beliefs that we the common people have well brought up people back but also the philosophical beliefs this he called strong Erwin called strong dialectic so he said that Aristotle is really combining both weak dialectic and strong dialectic i think we could see also uh whether Aristotle is successful in this of course we'll something we'll have to look at but you see also there's a
The response we could give, I think we could give, defending Aristotle's procedure starting from the beliefs we actually have about ethics, is we can't really do anything else, we really have to start with the beliefs we actually have, if we reject these beliefs, that can only be because we find them somehow in conflict with other beliefs we have that we're prepared to stick with, and
I think are more justifiable than the first belief.
We can't wipe the slate clean, as it were, and just start with nothing at all.
Then we would not be able to proceed anywhere.
We really have to, we really have no alternative to begin with the actual beliefs we have unless,
I suppose one could say, well, somebody could just say, maybe we don't, can't have any
knowledge of morality, but we have beliefs about other things, I suppose.
If one could adopt that position, but that would be a rather nihilistic view.
So if we want to avoid that, if we claim we can have moral knowledge at all, we pretty
much do have to start with our own beliefs.
Now this is in general, as is the method of proceeding, but now how did he actually carry
this out in his work?
Well, he says in the Nicomachean Ethics, he says, well, we want to start, he starts with
this argument, he said, whenever, or he gives this argument, he said, whenever we act, whenever
anybody does anything, there's an end or goal that he's aiming at, say, when you, whatever
Now, he says, well, suppose you ask, given you have this purpose, why did you do that?
What is the purpose of that?
You could come up with some other end for that.
You say, well, supposing I say, I'm giving these lectures because I'm going to be getting
Giving some money in return for doing that, not that I could be motivated by so mercenary
emotive, but just giving this hypothetically.
All right, suppose I say, well, I'm going to get some money, then I say, well, what
do I want the money for?
Then I could give various other things.
Maybe I want to spend it on various other things, then I say, well, what do I want them
for?
So, Aristotle said, well, we can't just keep going back infinite series that way.
We can't say, my end for acting is doing A to get B, I'm doing B to get C, C to get D.
We can't just keep going back in some infinite series because then I won't really have any
real reason to do anything. I would have a reason to do anything only if I had an end
that didn't require any further justification in terms of another end. So, Aristotle says,
there must be then some ultimate end at which people aim. And then he raises the question,
is that. Now, some people have objected, all sorts of people raise this objection. Robert
Nozick is one of these. This involves a logical fallacy. Let me put this down here. What was
As I say...
So we have every action involved an end, then if one's avoiding infinite regress, or say we have a circular, sort of a loop where you have something is an end, and then that returns as a means to something else that we've already put in, or let's put this kind of circular loop.
doesn't have any further end. So then he says therefore there is a final or highest end.
Now, can anyone tell me what, the way I put the arguments over, what's the fallacy in
this argument?
Well, I see, I can see, as you see, I probably, it's too obvious, apparently it's too obvious
to require statement.
The fallacy is, supposing it's the case that for each action you have to have an end that
is not justified by some further end.
So for each action there is a stopping point to the series.
Well, it doesn't follow from that that there has to be a single end that you're always aiming for.
It's just in each case where you have an action, there's some final end. But how do we know that
all these final ends have, why do they have to all be the same one? Maybe it's just people have a,
There's a series, it just says that you have a series of chains in which there's a stopping
point for each one, but why do they all have to stop at the same place?
Perhaps you can see the fallacy a little more clearly if we say something like, we say,
instead of saying every action has an end, suppose we just take a structurally similar
The other statement we say, every person has a father, which is, I think, a true statement.
Now then we, instead of saying, every action has an end, then we say, there's some end
And that's the same, that's the goal of all action. We put in the, we substitute, we say someone is everybody's father. Just as we said, you know, instead of saying every, every, instead of saying every action has an end, we say every person has a father, and then we say, instead of saying there's some, therefore there's some end that's the goal of all action, we say therefore somebody's, someone is everyone's father.
Well, that doesn't follow at all. In fact, that's a false proposition. Everyone has a father, but it doesn't follow that some particular person is everybody's father.
That, I think, seems like an unlikely hypothesis.
So, similarly, the claim is Aristotle has made a lot of simple fallacies here. He's thinking that because you have to terminate every chain of actions to be rational in some final end, there's a single final end that holds for all action.
Well, I don't think really Aristotle was guilty of this fallacy. I think Jennifer Whiting,
if I'm not mistaken, has a good article on this. What Aristotle was really suggesting,
I think what he would say in response to this, he said, what if there are all sorts of different
final ends that people have? He'd say, well, then you just have to, the question could
How do these various final ends relate to each other if they're just kind of in some kind of half-hazard order?
This is really not a rational way of proceeding that if we have claimed that there are multiple ends without any further questions to be asked about,
We should kind of arrange these systematically in some way, and this is what would give us our notion of the good.
We would want to know how are these various ends to be related.
So, now, if then, in some sense, we're aiming at an end that doesn't require any justification
in terms of further ends, then the question comes up, well, can we say anything about
this?
How do we know what that end is?
Here is where Aristotle resorts to his general philosophy, engages in what I called earlier
following Terence Irwin's Strong Dialectic. Aristotle has the view in metaphysics that
every substance, a substance is sort of the independent thing that exists, something can
can be the subject of predicates. Every substance has an essence or nature. Say, if I say, what
is the essence of an oak tree, it would be sort of what is the structure of the tree,
what are the essential properties of the tree. They say the tree would just have contingently,
There's something that constitutes, say, an oak tree as an oak tree. What are the characteristics
such that, without these characteristics, it wouldn't be a tree, an oak tree at all?
And it's something we, in the Institute, in Scheme Things, we have for physical objects,
we have kind of a, they're composed of matter, but there's a kind of a shape or structure
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Everything, sometimes things don't realize, don't really achieve their nature all at once,
but if something doesn't really achieve its nature all at once, there's a natural tendency in the
thing to realize its nature. Say, just as we imagine, say, a tree starts off as a seed and
grows into a tree. There is an internal process by which the nature really acts as the goal
of the growth of the tree. To use the example I gave, the oak tree will grow in a certain
in a way because that's its nature, its final end really is somehow determining the process
of its growth.
This doesn't, at the same time, this doesn't mean that there aren't things that are bringing
about, external things that are bringing about the growth of the tree, but they go along
Along with the final causation, there are four types of causings, there's the things
that are sort of happening to bring about what is called the physical change.
We imagine, say, somebody's planted a seed, he's watering the seed and so on, these are
efficient causes, they're bringing something about.
But the reason the tree develops in this way is not explained just by the efficient cause,
It's the pattern that acts, the essence really acts as kind of a guide to the growth tree.
This is called the final cause.
So human beings are distinct from both physical inanimate matter and also non-human animals.
In that human beings have free choice, we can decide whether we want to act in the way
in accord with our natures or not.
So human beings have free choice and this is what distinguishes us from other animals.
So human beings have the question, are we going to act in accord with our nature or
are not. As you see, this has somewhat of a Randian flavor to it. It sounds like Aristotle
has been really reading Ayn Rand, although I think his lecture notes on Atlas shrugs
haven't survived.
So now we have a question, well, if human beings have the choice of whether to realize
their nature, what is the nature of human beings?
We've already got most of the answer, or really the answer, that Aristotle says, well, how
would we answer this question?
We have to ask, what would, how do we distinguish human beings from other entities?
Well, there are vegetative matter, you know, that animate anything that's alive at all,
has certain, we can say, has certain properties in common.
Then we can distinguish further animals that have power of local motion, unlike plants.
Animals can move from one place to another.
And then we have, within the animals, there's a higher class that is able to reason.
So reason is the distinguishing characteristic of human beings, so that if we want to achieve
our natures, or want to act in accordance with our natures, then we'll do so by exercising
our reason.
Now, some people have objected to this argument. Robert Nozick, who's one who's raised this objection, he isn't the only one, they say what, Nozick said, well, what is so important about getting a unique characteristic of human beings to get the nature, I mean, supposing it turned out, couldn't we come up with all sorts of peculiar characteristics
What do human beings have, for example, only it turned out that only human beings laugh, joke, should we say this is the essential characteristic of human beings.
What's so important about a unique characteristic?
And then similarly suppose it turned out that some of these science fiction stories are true
This turns out to be some species on another planet who have completely different anatomy
or structure from human beings, but it turns out they're rational also.
Does this mean that rationality no longer gives the essence of human beings just because
it turns out there's some other species that's also rational?
So what's important about uniqueness?
Again, I don't think this objection really penetrates the essence of Aristotle's views because I think his view isn't so much to come up with some way in which human beings are absolutely different from other species.
So if you say, imagine a case, I think, for example, there's a big prize, I think it's
a million dollars if someone can prove the Riemann hypothesis in mathematics.
Suppose a dolphin reads about this and says, oh, I'm going to prove the Riemann, I've
got the proof of the Riemann hypothesis, I want a million dollars.
Suppose he does that, does that show, since he's rational, therefore Aristotle's wrong
about the nature of the human species.
I don't think so because what Aristotle is interested in is just saying, how do we characterize
human beings? What property of human beings will best explain their characteristics? And
he thinks the answer to this is rationality. So rather odd cases where other species are
also rational in our imagination. Cases really don't strike at the heart of what Aristotle
is doing. So, Aristotle then says, well, then if we want to answer our question, how should
we live? It should be in accord with our nature, which is the use of reason, with the full
exercise of our reason. So, Aristotle holds that in nature, it should be characterized
by the full, any nature, the end is the full exercise of its nature. So, applied to human
and Human Beings.
It would be the full exercise of our reason.
Now what does this involve?
Say we're using our reason, what do we do if we're trying to find out what's the proper
way to live?
Well, Aristotle goes through various suggestions, here again he's returning to looking at common
and Belief.
Like he said, supposing somebody said that the aim of life is try to get as much pleasure
as possible.
Well, then he says, we do that, we'll find out we're just constantly at the mercy of
outside forces.
We never really know what's going to happen next.
We won't be able to have any structure to our lives.
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have actually come up with is the correct idea, how should we live rationally? Well, one way,
I think, Bob, it's kind of a reflexive procedure, one way is we think rationally about just
this very question, how to live rationally, another question, so it's somewhat, we're
thinking somewhat reflexively, we're using our reason, we're trying to take what we think
are the, whatever the ends are that we have and kind of arrange them in a systematic way.
So we have, now this view that I'm giving, that we're kind of taking the ends we have
and arranging them systematically, organizing, this is called, what I think is the best interpretation
of it is called the inclusive end view, it's something that we're taking the various ends
Studies that Survive Rational Scrutiny and arranging them systematically and having a
large place for thinking about reason.
Now there's another view that some scholars hold here, place a lot of emphasis on something
Aristotle says in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle says there that contemplation
and Philosophical Contemplation is really the highest activity.
So it seems, according to this view, what Aristotle was really saying is that the supreme
life is the life spent doing philosophy.
This would be a life only very few people can achieve.
So in this way, if you took him to be saying that, he'd be going back in a way to the view
The view that Plato expressed in the Republic where it's the guardians, the philosophers
are the only ones who really have wisdom.
Everybody else really doesn't matter much, but if you adopt this inclusive end view,
you wouldn't, it doesn't have that drastic consequence.
You would just say contemplation is extremely important, but there are other things that
are part of the good life also, including political activity.
Now after he mentions that they, on how we're supposed to use reason, one thing Aristotle
does is he gives particular, he gives a specification of particular virtues that people have, and
Here he has theoretical virtues and also practical virtues, virtues of practical reasoning, which
is reasoning about how we act, how to act in ethics or in our daily life, how we act.
And here, there is division here, there's kind of a guiding virtue which is called practical
Practical reason, fronasis, is kind of telling us how, this is the, what I've been talking
about when I've talked about reason as organizing our ends, this is pretty much what I have
in mind, sort of the practical reason is kind of a wisdom of how we live our lives, and
then there are particular virtues of action that are involved in how we carry out the
and the various actions that we want to do. And these are about such things as courage
and temperance. Here's where Aracel gives the famous view that virtues are a mean between
the extremes. What he means by this is that for each of the virtues, there are vices on
both sides of the virtue. Say, we could imagine, say, courage, we could imagine courage is
someone who meets the situations where he's in danger with the right amount of, the appropriate
amount of valor.
We could imagine somebody exposing someone, we could have a vice of excess, someone, let's
say, let's imagine something like a penny rolls into the street and somebody rushes
out into moving traffic to get it back.
We could say, well, this person is very rash because he's risking his own life.
Maybe we could say, well, wouldn't you think he's very brave because he doesn't care that
he's able to do this even though he's not afraid?
Most people wouldn't do such a thing because even if they tried it, they'd be too scared
to do it.
But this person is afraid, but Aristotle wouldn't say this person is being courageous, he's
being foolhardy because he's risking his life to no purpose.
And then we can imagine on the other side someone, say, refuses, there's a fire and he won't go in, say, to rescue his family, even though he has a good chance of doing so, because he's too afraid to do it, so this person is too, too timorous, he's too afraid.
So, Aristotle says the virtue is the mean between the two vices.
Now, there's one point about courage, I think perhaps one could raise an objection to what
What Aristotle says here is that supposing someone always correctly judged that situations
were too dangerous to be worth risking his life, imagine he's a soldier in battle and
he always correctly judges that you want its best to retreat, it seems like it would be
It would be odd to say that such a person would be using good judgment, but it would seem to be odd to say he's courageous, but perhaps Aristotle could just respond to that by saying, well then, we would have to ask, how would the person have acted in cases where his life or his other thing of value were at stake?
How would he have acted in those cases?
So perhaps we would have to bring in the counterfactual here to get to answer this, but I just give
that as kind of a sideline that perhaps there's an objection there that someone who always
thought prudence the better part of valor and always acted prudently and avoided risk
could still count as courageous on Aristotle's definition.
Now, one thing before I turn from this topic that I think is an important mistake to avoid
is when Aristotle says that virtue is a mean between two vices, he doesn't mean by this
that a virtuous person will always act in a half-hearted way, will never exert himself
to the full. Let's say someone is extremely enthusiastic about his work. He pours everything
he has into a project. This would not be acting in an un-Aristotelian way. It isn't that you're
not supposed to give your all-out effort. The mean is just that it's their breach. Virtually
We can identify two vices, one on each side of it. It isn't how much you're supposed to exert yourself.
You're only supposed to exert yourself to a limited extent. That isn't what Aristotle is saying.
I should say there's an exception to the Aristotle principle that every virtue is a mean between two vices.
He thinks that justice isn't a mean between two vices.
This point, this Aristotelian point, led to a famous incident in American political history.
Some of you may be old enough to remember this.
In the 1964 presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater, who was the conservative Republican candidate,
said in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination,
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is not a vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue.
Now, that part of the speech was written by Harry Jaffa, who was the father of Leo Strauss and has written a book on Aristotle, Thomism and Aristotelianism.
So Jaffa was making a good Aristotelian point there in what he wrote for Goldwater State.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the best time to be making points about Aristotle's politics and that statement cost Goldwater a good deal in the campaign because his enemies were then able to picture him as an extremist.
Now, I've spent a good deal of time on, oh, I should say one point I haven't gone into.
When I said that fractal wisdom from Mises involved really systematizing our ends, there's
really something that goes against that that I don't think in a sense really does what
he said.
Deliberation is of means and not ends, but here what I think, I don't think there's a real contradiction, because what Aristotle means when he says that, the deliberation means, and he's just talking by deliberation, just has in mind what we're doing when we've settled a particular goal, and then we're asking how are we supposed to achieve that goal, so I don't think he's meaning by deliberation, he's not extending that goal.
to all kind of rational activity. Quite the contrary, it's essential to his view that we can
have some kind of structure to our ends and order them rationally by practical wisdom.
So the reason I've spent a good deal of time talking about Aristotle's ethics is I think
I think this gives an excellent basis for a classical liberal or libertarian perspective because we would then say, well, each person should try to achieve his end, his goals as a rational being, he should try to live a rational life.
and we say well one of the constituent parts one of the constituents of good
life is freedom Aristotle says is very critical of being a slave is a very bad
state of affairs to be and we don't want to be slaves freedom is essential if we
say that freedom is part of the good life so each person then would we want
and work out his life, try to achieve a rational life without interference from other people,
at least so long as he doesn't interfere with them.
So we could get a libertarian theory fairly readily from this, and in fact, various, various
philosophers have attempted to do this, one of whom is in the lecture room, Roderick Long.
You see, perhaps the best book that's come out so far is a book by Douglas Denial and
Doug Rasmussen called Norms of Liberty that argues on just this basis, there's, on Aristotelian
theory of the good, it combined with the view that freedom, including freedom, is a good
The problem that we can't coerce people into virtue, we get that, we get to libertarian conclusions very, very readily.
They say this book is by Doug Rasmussen, Doug Denial. I don't know what happened to Doug Affirmation.
Sorry, you'll have to laugh now.
But there is one possible problem with this way. It certainly would be a very good way to go, at least in my opinion, but there's a problem with it, is that that at least doesn't appear to be the way Aristotle himself went with his moral theory.
In fact, there's one way of looking at Aristotle's politics, in which it makes him out to be
not an individualist at all, someone who's not, shouldn't be considered part of ancestral
to the classical liberal tradition.
Paul says in the politics, he says that he seems explicitly to mention a quasi-libertarian
idea, which he mentions that Lycafron, who was one of the Greek thinkers, had said that
He says that the policy exists just only for the purposes of securing justice and protecting
people.
Sounds like something like a minimal state.
And he says, no, this is not the correct view, that the policy exists so that people can
live well.
And further, he says that the policy is prior to the individual.
He says that individuals are parts of the policy. He compares this saying to it, saying that the hand is part of the human body.
He says if the hand is detached from the body, then it isn't a hand anymore. It's just something that's just kind of some bones and flesh,
in 1945 or so by Karl Popper, called The Open Society and Its Enemies. The first volume
of this is a massive attack on Plato. Aristotle also comes in for attack in Popper's book.
Popper particularly doesn't like Aristotle's notion of essences. He says something like,
If you believe in fixed essences or things that are somehow totalitarian, if you think
they're a fixed nature thing, this isn't such a – perhaps it's not as odd of you
as it sounds.
First, it's a bit like the view I mentioned in the first lecture, but if you think there's
an objective truth in morality, then this will lead to totalitarianism or statism and
and that the people know the truth will want to impose it on other people.
So Hopper holds that Aristotle had this kind of organic or collectivist view of things
and he mentions that in support of his view, he mentions that two great 19th century historians
of Greek Philosophy, the German writer Edvard Seller, and also George Grote, who was an
English historian, he wrote a multi-volume history of Greece, he was a great friend of
John Stuart Milken. They held that Aristotle's politics was really very close, close in structure
and views to Plato's laws, which as we've seen is not a very libertarian view, book.
So on this you then, Aristotle might have a promising ethics for libertarianism, classical
liberalism, but his own politics were completely the other way.
He was a collectivist.
Now I don't think we should accept this view, and here I've been influenced very much by
There's a book on Aristotle called Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle's Politics
by Fred Miller, which was published by Oxford in 1995, who argues that contrary to the very
frequently expressed belief, Aristotle very much did have a notion of individual rights.
Some people, like Alastair McIntyre, have said, rights are just a later invention that
came in at some time fairly late with the, say, with the medieval nominalists or even
later with Hobbes and Locke, we don't have, it would make no sense to talk about rights
in antiquity, but Miller says he was an extremely good Greek scholar, but no, Aristotle did
have a notion of rights. Now, unfortunately, Miller's views haven't been accepted by most
scholars, but I think he makes a very good case for it. I should mention also there is
an additional article that supports Miller and argues that he hasn't gone far enough
in ascribing individualist views to Aristotle. This is by Roderick Long, it's called Aristotle's
and Israel's Conception of Freedom, which came out in Review of Metaphysics, I think, June 1996, if I'm not mistaken, pages 775 to 802.
Don't check that, please.
So, why should we accept this particular view of Aristotle? He was sympathetic to individualism, aside from the reason it's convenient for our own purposes to do so.
Well, one reason is, we can get, just from what I've said already, supposing Aristotle
has the view, which clearly does, that each person is trying to achieve his own best life.
He's asking, how can each individual live the best life?
Well, it really wouldn't make sense then to say the individual should completely subordinate
himself to the fullest and then possibly have to be in a situation where his own life is
just completely a tool of whoever is in power. Say, he might have to give up his own good
life because this would maximize the good life for other people or a good life for the majority
of People. How could Aristotle possibly hold both this particular view of ethics that individuals
should try to achieve their own best life and also hold that individuals are subordinate
to the policy, just constituent parts of the policy, and so how could you have both views
at the same time.
Now, what Greg Miller has done is to look exactly at what Aristotle says.
What does he mean when he says that individuals are parts of the policy?
Well, it doesn't mean that really, although Aristotle does use this analogy of the body,
that isn't really expressing, wasn't the best way really to grasp Aristotle's meaning.
What he really means is that one of the goods we need for a good life, there are certain
kinds of goods, they're called external goods, in order to lead a good life, we need not
just certain qualities that we have internally like rationality, we need external goods also,
One thing also we need is friends. We need people reasoned together. They require companionship.
We don't just think as individuals in isolation. We require other people. A friend is what
What he calls a second self, so we need a larger community than just individuals in
which to lead a good life.
Aristotle traces, he says, Paulus really is the complete community.
We could have, we have stages we could imagine going through.
We have individuals and families and combinations of households into villages, but we need,
We have to have a larger association in order to lead a good life because this is what's
needed so we could reason together and have political friendships.
The political friendships aren't as close as, say, individual friends.
A political friend wouldn't be a second self, but still we need to have these friendships
as well as our families and households.
So also one advantage of living in a city-state is sometimes we might be, we don't have always
in our lives, have full control, we don't always exercise our reason fully, we sometimes
are overcome by passions or desire. We act wrongly, even though we know what's the right
thing to do. And being in a city-state, we're in a position where other people will be able
to stop us from acting badly. This is not a particularly libertarian way of looking
at things, but I mean, this is one thing Aristotle said why we would want to live in a, in a
Paulist. So, in this way, it isn't that individuals are subordinate completely to the group, as
this other view of you that Popper held and others, that individuals are just parts of
the collective. It's that the Paulist, the community, is to the advantage of each individual.
It isn't just that the policy is a benefit for the majority of people, it has to be benefit
for everyone, every citizen in the group, it has to benefit.
So the view that the policy is a complete community or prior to the individual doesn't
rule out by any means an individualist way of looking at Aristotle.
Now given that general point though, we can now ask what specifically does Aristotle say
about how the good city-state should be organized.
In the, he holds the view that there is a single constitution, but when the Greeks talk
about constitution, like when I was mentioning the early, the collection constitution, constitution
doesn't mean as it does in contemporary America, constitution kind of the written body of fundamental
Constitution is the principles not necessarily written down, but giving the structure of
the way the city-state is organized, these basic rules and customs by which it operates.
The Straussians use the word regime, the Greek is politeia, so it's really the basic structure
of the Society. So, Aristotle holds that there's a single best constitution that's true, that
holds overall, and he also holds that there's a second best constitution, but he doesn't
confine politics to discussing what the best constitution is. He also, he just classifies
all sorts of other constitutions, and he asks what would be the best constitution given
He has all sorts of questions that he raises, but I won't be going into the details of
those.
But to see what he means by the best constitution, he has a basic way of classifying constitution.
First we divide the constitution of governments into two classes, ones that aim at the good
of everyone in the city-state, and then ones that don't, ones in which they're just aiming
at the good of some interest group within these, and the first group are the good constitutions,
The others are the bad ones, so the good constitution, the one in which to the benefit of the benefit
of all the citizens in them.
And here there are three good types, there's kingship, aristocracy, and polity.
The kingship is ruled by the one or the best, and aristocracy ruled by a group of the best
and Policy is ruled by a larger group. It's similar in a way to democracy, but democracy
is in the bad side because according to Aristotle, democracy is a system in which is run for the
benefit of the poor people in society, the large class of poor people, not for the society
as a Whole, City-State as a Whole. So the bad groups are corresponding to the three mentioned here,
tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. These are the bad ones. In considering the good ones, there's
a tie for first. Kingship, supposing we had a system where there's a single person who's superior
If we're in virtue and knowledge to everybody else, then Aristotle holds that person should rule.
That would be the best state of affairs.
But that's something that's extremely unlikely to be realized, that a single person was the best overall.
So, really, the best possible system is one where all the citizens are virtuous and they
rule in turn over each other, say, some people hold office at one time, then others at another
time.
This is sort of an aristocracy, but it really consists of all the citizens in the city-state.
Aristotle holds, there's a basic principle he holds when he's trying to explain what
the best system is, which Fred Miller has called the principle of rulership.
Aristotle holds that no one should be, in any circumstance, should be ruled by anyone
inferior in moral merit to himself, and he should only be ruled by someone who is equal
in moral merit to himself if this is based on a system of rotation, so that the equals
would sometimes be ruling over each other, but no one would be in a permanently inferior
position.
So this is one of the extensions, when Aristotle talks about justice, he has what he calls
particular justice.
General justice just means that we're lawful in this, but in particular justice is distribution
of Honours or other good things. And he holds that distribution of honours should always be in
accord with the virtue of the people involved. So this view of political rule is somewhat like
his view of particular justice. He says you should never have rule by someone who's
is inferior in virtue, always the superiors in virtue should rule.
So to see the question how libertarian is Aristotle, how individualistic is it, we have
to say that let's look at this best constitution, this aristocratic government where all the
and the Citizens Rule, and we could ask, is that at all an individualist system?
Well, it has the individualist element in it that really everyone, all the citizens, are ruling.
So in a way it's strange to call it aristocracy and contrast it with polity,
because there are more people, more citizens, a greater proportion of the citizens are ruling in aristocracy.
All the citizens are ruling than in the polity, which is kind of the good democracy, which is majority ruled by the majority.
Here, everybody is ruling, not just a particular class of people in the polity, it's really middle class, especially stressing a certain military class that's the dominant ruling element.
But in aristocracy, it's all the citizens are ruling.
So, however, the society has some decidedly non-libertarian aspects to it.
For example, Aristotle doesn't hold that as denial and Rasmussen and 20th century libertarian
Aristotelian's Whole, that individuals can only develop habits of virtue if they're not coerced.
He favors public education in which habits of virtue are inculcated by the government.
He doesn't leave it up to the parents or families to develop virtue, and people have to have common meals.
There are also regulations on governing reproduction.
For example, deformed babies have to be exposed.
Now, if abortion, though, is allowed only,
I think abortion is allowed only, though,
Aristotle doesn't think that only to the extent that the fetus isn't considered alive, isn't
considered fully conscious, once it has, it could be considered at all rational, it would
would have certain individual rights.
So the state could, in theory, require, the city state could require, if the city were
becoming too populated, they could require early abortions, but they couldn't, if a healthy
child were delivered, they couldn't require, they couldn't expose the child.
That would be violating individual rights to do that, but not early abortions would be
allowed.
Now, perhaps the most serious, though, non-libertarian aspect of the society is, we come to a notorious
past part of the politics where Aristotle says that some men are slaves by nature, and
What he means by slave by nature is someone who isn't controlled by reason, someone who
is just not capable of reason in the way I tried to develop earlier, wouldn't be leading
a rational life.
So those people are better off, in his view, if they're ruled by other people.
There are passages where Aristotle sometimes suggests a more beneficent view.
For example, he thinks that it would be a good idea to hold out freedom as a prospect for slaves.
So he raises the question, well, if slaves would benefit from freedom, maybe they aren't that irrational after all.
Law. Why would you hold this out as something for the slaves to get if they're incapable
of reason? And then also, he suggests in some places, you can't have a friendship with a
slave to the extent he's just a slave, but you could to the extent he's a human being.
So, there's some question as to how strongly Aristotle would insist on this point that some
people were slaves by nature. However, in his plans for, in his description of the aristocracy,
he clearly has slaves there and they don't have the, they are not part of the ruling
Because most people, most slaves, say, slave have been acquired by conquest, say, one,
polis would defeat another, and then they sell the inhabitants into slavery.
They wouldn't be, in fear or incapable, being dominated by reason.
They would just be slaves because they lost the battle.
So they wouldn't qualify as slaves by nature, so in this view, Salerno would be really saying
existing slavery is really pretty much all wrong, it's just in this odd case where maybe
we have people who are mentally defective in some way, we could have justified slavery.
But it seems hard to reconcile that interpretation with the fact that he does have large numbers
of Slaves in his Description of the West State.
One thing also is a very important aspect of the aristocracy that is very distinct in
Aristotle is that ordinary workers, the people who do, say, labor, don't count, can't become
Some citizens, because Aristotle holds that in order to be rational, we need leisure time.
Say, if I didn't have any leisure time, I wouldn't be able to think about philosophy,
I wouldn't be able to contemplate or even to, I wouldn't be able to consider how, what,
how the best, what's the best life to live, say, lead if I had to work, say, in one of,
One of the minds working, say, 18 hours a day, I wouldn't be able to be very, devote
much time to reason.
So those people don't have citizenship rights.
Aristotle has the view, it's somehow, perhaps an unusual view, that production where we
act and make something outside of ourselves is somehow inferior to action in which the
thinking, where the product of our action isn't distinct from what we're, our activity
in producing it, so the thought isn't something outside of us that we made like a tool, but
The thought is, really, the action and the end are really the same thing just considered
from other points of view.
So this kind of view also, I think, was part of his denigration of manual labor, although
now we have, in English you might be familiar with the word, just put this down, some of
and you may know this word, benausic would be sort of, where it's a lower characteristic,
especially of certain unintellectual, this is derived from a Greek term, Aristotle calls
it, benausic activities, you don't get, you don't have full citizenship, you don't have
rights of citizenship because they're on a lower level.
I should say the one way perhaps one can reconcile some of these views with a more classical liberal approach is to say that Aristotle holds the view that consent is necessary for a good system.
System. Otherwise, it's a despotism if you have a system established without people consent. That counts as despotism. So people would have, except of course for the slaves, would have voluntarily entered into this kind of arrangement. So similar way, it's something Hans Hoppe has written about where he says that people, he imagines people forming sort of societies within a libertarian order based on
the article by Roderick that I've mentioned so inclusion I think we can see
that Aristotle provides a very good basis I think for developing a classical
liberal view even though he didn't fully achieve that in his in as he developed
his system himself so I think we have a few minutes for questions objections
In the t-shirt out there, Aristotle's name on it is private property. Can you say anything about what Aristotle said about private property?
He says one reason each individual is entitled to property is because each individual has
properly some self-love, and each individual wants to have property in which he can express
himself.
So you want property for that reason.
Also people need property in order to live, and there's a third motive that people need
In order to display the virtue of generosity, people want to be able to have things to give
to others.
People if, say, we had communal property, you couldn't be generous because how could
you give something that you have to somebody else because you wouldn't have anything to
give?
Terrence Irwin, who I think is not very sympathetic to individualism and capitalism, in fact, he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement,
he wrote an extremely negative review of Fred Miller's book, really suggesting that Fred Miller was a political propagandist for libertarians,
In fact, which was odd because Irwin had been a participant in conferences at the Social
Philosophy and Policy Center, that Fred Miller was one of the people who run that.
So it was apparently all right for him to accept money from them, but that didn't stop
him from calling Fred Miller a propagandist.
Irwin said, well, Aristotle's wrong here because we don't, you know, we could be generous and have the state could just temporarily assign us some property, then we could give that out to others.
But it really, that isn't, that's a rather pallid view of generosity. We really couldn't be very generous. It really was just ours on loan, as it were.
I think Aristotle makes some extremely strong defenses of property, although in the people don't have in the best constitution, they can't amass as much property as they want to have property without restrictions you could have, they could be required to give property.
other people under certain circumstances. Again, we have the point that raised in your article,
people voluntarily agreeing to such a thing. Any other questions?
You mentioned one of your goals was to look at the notion of objective truth leading to authoritarian
in the system. And Aristotle, to me, he seems to have the notion that there is objective proof of it. He tends to be, you say, leading a foundation for libertarian thought. Would this indicate that maybe the search for objective proof doesn't necessarily lead one to the truth?
The view that just what the objective truth is, is that people should be free to lead their own lives without interference from others so long as they don't violate other people's rights.
The question of whether, I mean, I think if we want to support libertarianism, we want that view to be true.
If that's just a particular preference that some people have and not others, then we don't really have a good basis for saying, for libertarianism,
is just a preference particularly people have and others don't really lead us, get us very far.
Dan. This perhaps speaks also to something that I've already long worked on, is the Aristotle
Contra of microforms. Aristotle doesn't like people to know microforms idea of it, that might
in Washington State, and that seems to be one of the challenges with that.
People think Aristotle is not a pro-actual liberalist, but it seems to me that Aristotle's
anthropology is one of the reasons why he disagrees with like-a-thon.
It's not simply that the like-a-thon state isn't sadist enough for Aristotle, rather
that Aristotle seeks the purpose of a human community, all this not just as a political
unit, but also as a sociable community, as being the furtherance of these other goals.
So like O'Connor basically, he's not going far enough back.
Aristotle says, there's more than just security, obviously,
that a person wants, even a night watchman's state
ultimately has another purpose behind it.
And that purpose, the reason that people come together
to form a community, as well as a political or an organization,
is for even better, higher goods,
which I'll talk about virtually in this portion of life.
I know that I think Roderick Long has said
that he sees the fullest as a really being just
in the worst of the political element.
Is the policy a purely political thing, or is it also a kind of social political blend?
Oh yes, I see. I neglected it. I was supposed to repeat the questions, which I didn't.
And the question was on, about Aristotle's criticism of Lycafron, where he seems to be rejecting Lycafron's minimal state views.
Was this because he thought that, like a friend, wrongly thought only the city-state is a coercive entity, but what about it?
Couldn't we take it also as kind of a larger group involving certain social or civil activities, not just coercive ones?
The question was, does Aristotle regard the polis only as a coercive entity or does he have this broader view?
I think clearly he has the broader view because he calls polis living, is an association for living well, a complete community.
It isn't only, he doesn't certainly think that not all aspects of living well involve coercion, not by any means.
I think so he does very much have a combined view and I think in trying to develop Aristotle's views
more classical liberal libertarian way, I think the thing to do would be kind of to separate out
the purely coercive part from the larger social group and say we could have these larger social
groups without having any coercion. That's what we're trying to do. Well, I think we're
out of time now, so thanks very much. Tomorrow we have to go on. We're skipping to the Middle Ages.