>>>>As we've been discussing Aristotle as a philosopher of justice, I've presented a
generally favorable account. It comes through I think we have much learn from Aristotle.
But at the same time, that doesn't mean that Aristotle's political philosophy is complete
and or acceptable in all of its terms to us. And in fact, if you begin reading "The Politics"
you should notice something in its very first pages that might be highly disturbing to you.
Aristotle provides a quite elaborate defense, an elaborate justification of slavery. Aristotle,
in other words, offers a theory of slavery, an account of why slavery is justified -- and
it's called Aristotle's natural slave theory. It's revealing because it shows us Aristotle's
political philosophy at work, and the way that it could justify what we would maybe
think of as unjust institutions. And it's also useful for us to think through the foundations
of our own philosophy of justice. Why do we disagree with Aristotle? It's not enough simply
to react and say that Aristotle lived thousands of years ago and he was ignorant. He's one
of the most profound moral philosophers of all time, and so where is it that we disagree
with Aristotle? Aristotle says in the opening pages of "The Politics" that some humans are
meant, by nature, to be slaves. Now this is quite a profound and extensive claim. Aristotle's
world, the classical world of the Greek polis, was a world in which slavery was a very real
institution. And in fact, slavery has been common across human history. Many, if not
most societies have known some form of human enslavement down into the modern world when
the rise of the abolitionist movement forever abolished slavery as a legitimate form of
practice. But in Aristotle's world, classical Greece, slavery is not just existent--it's
in fact unusually common. The empire that's built by Athens, for example, this great democratic
empire of the Athenians, is home to the one of the most extensive slave systems in all
of human history. And it's somehow a paradox that as freedom develops, as an ideal of the
Athenian democracy, so too somehow slavery exists as a kind of cancer on this society
that compromises, for us, it's moral integrity. But for the Athenians there's no contradiction
between the freedom of the citizen and the enslavement of the slave. Now the Athenians
had, undoubtedly, many different ways of rationalizing their slave system, but Aristotle provides
an elaborate philosophical account of why slavery is justified in terms of his own philosophical
outlook. And it's no accident that Aristotle says that some people are made by nature to
be slaves. And it's telling that Aristotle's philosophy of slavery is called natural slave
theory, because nature is a central term in Aristotle's philosophical system. And he believes
that some people have been naturally intended to be slaves. There was a common Greek belief
that the Greeks themselves were a superior culture, and that those who didn't speak the
Greek language were barbarians. And in fact, barbarian is a Greek term. It means barbar,
the people who speak the vulgar tongues instead of the beautiful Greek language. And the
Greeks believe that they are superior in reason, in mental capacity, in culture, in political
achievement to the barbarian cultures that surround them. And many of the people who
were enslaved in Athenian society were in fact ethnically barbarians. They were non-Greeks,
they were foreigners who didn't speak, at least natively, the Greek tongue, and the
Greeks believed that they were superior to these barbarians. Aristotle takes a generic
kind of cultural chauvinism and turns it into an elaborate theoretical justification for
the institution of slavery. He says that in fact some people lack the mental power. They
lack the capacity of reason to govern themselves and that these people are meant, by nature,
to be in the power of someone else. Slavery is a particular kind of relationship in which
one human being is the master, and one human being is the property, and they're under the
complete dominion of the master. And Aristotle thinks that for some people this is what nature
intended for them. In fact, he thinks that they lack the reason to guide their own lives,
and that it's beneficial for them to be enslaved. Now this is so counterintuitive to us that
maybe the only example, the parallel we can think of is we can think of someone who has
a mental illness or a condition that to some extent, requires them to be hospitalized.
It's for their own good for them to lack this kind of freedom. That's an extreme example,
but it's somehow parallel to what Aristotle thinks is in fact the case for the slaves
in his own society--that it's best for them. Now we hopefully can see through this to the
fact that it's an ideology. It's a way of justifying a set of arrangements that allowed
one group of people to exploit another. Nevertheless, Aristotle describes in his own philosophical
terms a kind of inequality. That Aristotle says that nature has so unequally distributed
the potential for human capacity, for human reason, that some people actually benefit
from being the property of another. Now this is integral to Aristotle's view of the world,
and it requires us to think through--why do we think that slavery is wrong?