Aristotles Discriminating Nature

Politics exhibits Aristotles discriminating nature. It showcases Aristotles insight

towards slavery.

In Aristotles Politics justice was divided into two categories. The first
classification he termed as rectificatory or transactional justice. The first category is also
known as corrective justice. This notion of justice is individual-based, that is, it involves
two individuals. In this concept, one is the cause of something for an instance, pain
while the other is the one who suffers from the consequence of the others action. In this
notion of justice, when one is done harm, it is just that the one injured compensates the
other for the injury done to him. An example of which is if one is a thief, it is just for the
injured party to cut the hand of the thief to compensate for the crime done to him.

The second classification of justice is distributive or social justice. This notion of

justice encompasses the relationship of the individual with the society. That is, what the
societys responsibility to the individual and the individuals duty to the society.

Another central idea in Aristotles The Politics is the concept of Teleology that
is, everything has a telos an end, or a purpose. And when it reaches its purpose it
therefore attains excellence. An example of this is a chair; the telos of a chair is for
people to utilize it for seating. The telos of the state, according to Aristotle, is to promote
virtue, honor and justice.

Aristotles distributive justice refers to the distribution of people and things. In the
state, what is distributed is political office. In distributing, Aristotle argues that people
should be discriminating. That is, when choosing who to occupy political office, only
choose the virtuous someone who participates in politics and public discussions.
Another criterion in choosing people who will occupy political office is that they should
be a citizen of the state which excludes slaves. According to Aristotle, the state can
only attain its telos to promote virtue if the ruler possesses virtue. Aristotle believes
in practical wisdom, that is, being virtuous is something acquired through habit, not
something that is inborn to individuals.
 However, despite the elucidation that Aristotle has made on his notion of
distributive justice, it still has its flaws. One of the weaknesses of this notion of justice is
in its distribution of political office. Keyt [1991:247] has found this problematic, in that he
argued that if one is more virtuous than another, by the aristocratic conception of
justice, he should be allotted more political authority than the other. But how much
more? Aristotles notion of justice argues that things should be distributed according to
what one deserves; however, the distribution becomes problematic when measuring
ones merit. Measuring ones intrinsic worth is difficult because it is something that
varies from person to person. There is no standard measurement for weighing peoples
qualities. It is not something that can be measured quantitatively and if people did
come up with such, there is the danger of being bias of what a good characteristic is,
that is choosing a standard race. As Keyt [1991:259] has said, Aristotles theory of
distributive justice requires a standard of worth. Giving then what a person deserves
becomes problematic because of these drawbacks.

Apart from that, Aristotle was also discriminating in choosing who the rightful
citizens are in the state that is the ones who are allowed to participate in politics and
public discussions. In choosing who the citizens are in the state, he excluded slaves,
and further argued that those who do menial work should also not be considered as
citizens. This is contrary to his concept of practical wisdom in which one acquires
something through practice. Slaves then are robbed the opportunity to acquire wisdom
and to learn from public discussions because Aristotle has condemned them to the
position of slave forever.

From the arguments given, Aristotles discriminating nature is very apparent.

However, despite this, he failed to provide a measure in discriminating the virtue of an
individual.

References:
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. 1885.

Keyt, D. and Miller, F.D. (1991). Aristotle's theory of distributive justice. A

Companion to [Aristotle's] Politics, 238-278. Retrieved from
http://spot.colorado.edu/~pasnau/seminar/keyt.pdf.