Comments on: Creating Statesmen, Part 1: Aristotlean Natural Right

By: ashok

ashok — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 04:49:03 +0000

Addendum: The considerations on the changeability of natural right and the conventions which establish society are a somewhat garbled version of what was taught to me by Leo Paul de Alvarez in class on Aristotle’s Politics some years ago.

By: ashok

ashok — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:59:32 +0000

@ ifatree: Thanks for your comment, but a few points of clarification, before we argue over whether the classical vision is correct or not. There are things you’re just straight up misrepresenting.

You’re skipping over the social nature of man that necessitates manners of some sort, and demanding that nature make itself manifest however we behave, good or bad. That kind of reasoning is characteristic of the moderns, who ditch nature altogether. Not everything lives up to its nature, though.

You’re also making a pretty big mistake with “convention.” For Plato and Aristotle it is what a majority of people found unjust, and I think it is treated as such in the post. But a philosopher has to be clear on what the truth is; if the conventional admits of exceptions, it must be treated.

By: ifatree

ifatree — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:21:59 +0000

I was (badly) having a discussion just recently on some comment thread about this very subject – “de facto” rights versus “de jure” rights and their relation. The problem is that anything can be discussed in terms of “rights” – Aristotle might have been trying to hedge more than you give him credit for for that very reason. For example, you say two men hunting in a forest don’t have rights? Have you been hungry and hunting for food? They’re in a state of anarchy only until the meal is caught – then it’s back to social order. If you scored a kill alone and your “friend” knocked you down and took the best meat, you’d be angry. You’d naturally feel the type of injustice that lets you know that some right has been violated (if not precisely how to formulate it in words so that everyone will agree with you). The fact that a government can exist is built on a (sometimes unstated) right for people to associate and make agreements with one another. “Injustice” is a pretty strong, universally human emotion, whether they categorize the same things as “unjust” or not. The “convention” part is just codifying what a majority of people found unjust in the past, not what some “philosopher/statesman” tells them they should probably feel.