>>>>Both Friedman and Rawls, in their theories of what a just society is like, draw deeply
from a liberal tradition, which says that people are and ought to be free. And at the
same time, in a maybe more subtle way, both of them draw from a utilitarian tradition.
Certainly Friedman's economics are a way of accommodating markets or allowing mechanisms
and social organization to work in a way that maximizes individual utility, and that is
highly deferential, that is completely willing to let individuals choose their own ends--that
individuals should be free to choose what they want to consume. Rawls is, in a different
way, also unwilling to make very strong claims about what the good is and is relatively willing
to let individuals choose for themselves the kinds of things they want, the kinds of goods
that they wish to have. Now, let's look at a third and final way of defining our own
contemporary landscape. And it's of interest to us in this course that over the last generation,
the political thought of Aristotle, Aristotle's way of viewing the world and thinking about
the nature of justice has seen a tremendous revival of interest. That contemporary thinkers
about justice, in fact, both on the left of the political spectrum in America and on the
right look to Aristotle and his way of thinking about the world, his way of thinking about
the individual and his or her relationship to the community, has seen a resurgence of
interest, because Aristotle's thought is relevant to us today. Now it's worth saying that fundamentally,
there are ways in which we, I think broadly, would never be willing to accept some of Aristotle's
starting assumptions--above all in his conceptions of equality. Aristotle has a very strong vision
of human inequality, and he thinks some people are more worthy than others in a way that,
to us, seems completely unacceptable. Both in terms of his outlook on men and women and
the superiority of men, and for instance, on his outlook on Greeks or barbarians, on
free and slave. We have inherited a long tradition of equality that is deeply embedded in religion.
And in fact in this course, we've seen the way that although Stoicism begins to articulate
a vision of human equality, that in fact Christianity is the principal bearer of a view in which
all people are equally morally worthy, and that all individuals are bearers of a certain
kind of dignity that entitles them to equal with respect in a political arrangement. And
so in that sense, Aristotle is very distant from our world. But in other ways he's very
close, as many today recognize. And let me say three ways in which Aristotle's political
thought is highly relevant, and in some ways, can seem to cut through some of the more traditional
political ideologies of our own world. One is Aristotle's conception of human community.
Aristotle starts from the assumption that humans are naturally political creatures and
we've seen how the tradition that goes back to Hobbes and Locke, and which sees people
as individually free in a natural state, in a state of nature that precedes the existence
of the state, which is established by a social contract. Aristotle by contrast says that
humans are naturally part of communities. For him, it's the polis. For us, it's a different
world and we should recognize that the nation-state with its subordinate kinds of communities
of which we're a part is a very different world than that in which Aristotle lived.
But nevertheless, the idea that we exist naturally in communities, that we fulfill our virtues,
that we express our human nature only completely if we are in a community is a deeply Aristotelian
idea and it's at its foundations very different from the more liberal tradition of politics.
Secondly, Aristotle's conception of the good. Many of the theories of modern justice, including
both Friedman's and Rawls', are essentially neutral in terms of what the good is. That
they allow wide space for individuals to choose their own preferences, that they are neutral
with respect to what individuals should pursue, what they should become. The people should
be free to choose, and that people should be able to maximize their own individual utility.
And we've seen how this is powerfully embedded in an idea of happiness that goes back to
an ancient conversation that starts with Socrates and the Sophists. Is happiness simply pleasure
or is happiness somehow virtue? And it descends through the Stoics and the Epicureans, and
we've seen how the Epicurean vision of happiness as pleasure is transmuted into the utilitarian
tradition and is then deeply embedded in the philosophical assumptions of marginal economics
and of the way that markets work. Aristotle would stand apart from this tradition, and
would say that, in fact, we as humans are endowed with capabilities like speech and
moral reason that allow us to debate what the good life is, that eudaimonia, that happiness,
that flourishing isn't simply pleasure. And in particular, that property is only instrumental
in creating happiness. That property isn't a good in itself, that it's not something
that is an end. It's not a final purpose. Rather, it is an instrument it is something
that allows us to pursue our own individual flourishing, but it is not something that
is to be sought for its own sake. And so Aristotle says that that is something, eudaimonia is
something that is able to be scrutinized to public reason. And in fact there is a strong
tradition in contemporary thought that's called the capabilities approach. And so I've asked
you to read an essay written by a contemporary philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, that draws deeply
out of the Aristotelian tradition and says that humans exist in communities naturally
and that the purpose of the state is to promote the flourishing of each individual citizen.
So the purpose of the state is not to protect natural rights, is not to protect property
rights that exist in some state of nature, in some prior condition. Rather, the very
purpose of human life is to live in communities and the purpose of those communities is to
promote the eudaimonia, the flourishing of each of its individual citizens. And we can
discuss what that entails. We can talk about the kinds of capabilities that humans need
to flourish, to live well. That we shouldn't simply leave it up to individuals to pursue
their own interests, but rather, we should as we can make the purpose of human life part
of our community and the way we organize it and the way we distribute resources. And the
capabilities approach is very much about the distribution of resources. And in a third
way, Aristotle's political thought remains relevant to our world. And it's his view of
excellence, his view of virtue. Aristotle believes that a political order ought to distribute
honor and wealth to those who are deserving--that there is such a thing as excellence, virtue,
what he calls arete, and that that is how we should distribute honor and money. And
for Aristotle, we can live with differences. Some people have more honors than others.
Some people have more property than others. And Aristotle has a very strong view of human
difference, and to an extent that we wouldn't be willing to accept. But Aristotle does think
that some people are more deserving of honor and of wealth than others. And that, too,
is a very resonant idea for the modern world. How do we distribute wealth and how do we
distribute honor? And is it in a way that reflects that recognizes merit, that is grounded
in some virtue, some excellence--some qualities that the individual achieves and practices
through the use of his or her reason. So in all these ways, Aristotle remains tremendously
relevant to us today. But there's a way in which Aristotle is distant from us. Just as
he is profoundly inegalitarian, that is, that he views humans as so unequal in a way that
we can't accept, Aristotle lives in a very different kind of society and in a very different
kind of economy. And this is, perhaps, the greatest problem, the greatest division for
us in our world. We live in a society that isn't a slow-moving, agricultural society.
When Aristotle imagines that wealth should be distributed based on merit, he thinks of
land and it's a static economy. We live in an industrial and a post-industrial world,
a world that's dominated by markets. And it was the great achievement of classical and
particularly neoclassical political economy to describe that world, and to describe how
markets work and why they work. Why they create incentives that have empowered us today that
have created the prosperity, that have created the well-being that we have in our world today.
And it is one of the hardest questions for us if we want to take Aristotle seriously.
How do we live in a society that encourages and rewards virtue, but also recognizes the
powerful mechanisms that have engineered the kind of prosperity we enjoy? We live in a
world where prosperity is an end in itself, and has been very successful in creating that
prosperity. And so many of our debates turn on whether that prosperity is fair and how
that prosperity can be increased. But Aristotle asks us to think about a third dimension.
What does it do to us as humans? Does it encourage us to live well, to flourish? Can we live
in a world of markets that is also a world that recognizes that property is simply an
instrument of well-being? That it is something that allows us to flourish, but is not in
and of itself the end of life?