Aristotle what makes a good citizen

London: Routledge. Leunissen, M. Aristotle on natural character and its implications for moral development. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 50 4 , — Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 44 , Lockwood, T. Is natural slavery beneficial? Journal of the History of Philosophy, 45 , — Oxford Bibliographies. Lord, C. Political Theory, 9 , — MacIntyre, A. After virtue: A study in moral theory. Miller, F. Morrison, D.

History of Philosophy Quarterly, 16 , — Nussbaum, M. Nature, function and capability: Aristotle on political distribution. Grimm Eds. Oxford: Clarendon. Aristotelian social democracy. Bruce Douglass, G. Richardson Eds.

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Human functioning and social justice: In defense of Aristotelian essentialism. Political Theory, 20 , — Aristotle on human nature and the foundations of ethics. Harrison Eds. Ethics, , — Reeve, C. Aristotle: Politics. Indianapolis: Hackett. Riesbeck, D. Book III is ultimately concerned with the nature of different constitutions, but in order to understand cities and the constitutions on which they are founded, Aristotle begins with an inquiry into the nature of citizenship.

It is not enough to say a citizen is someone who lives in the city or has access to the courts of law, since these rights are open to resident aliens and even slaves. Rather, Aristotle suggests that a citizen is someone who shares in the administration of justice and the holding of public office.

Aristotle then broadens this definition, which is limited to individuals in democracies, by stating that a citizen is anyone who is entitled to share in deliberative or judicial office.

Aristotle points out that though citizenship is often reserved for those who are born to citizen parents, this hereditary status becomes irrelevant in times of revolution or constitutional change, during which the body of citizens alters. This raises the question: to whom may citizenship be justly granted, and can the city be held accountable for decisions made by governing individuals if these individuals have not been justly granted citizenship?

Further, if the city is not identical to its government, what defines a city, and at what point does a city lose its identity? Aristotle suggests that a city is defined by its constitution, so that a change in constitution signifies a change in the city. It is more difficult for the morally good person to complete a certain task, than it is for the "bad person" to complete the same task because, although they both have the same skill and resources, the morally good person must not only find the solution to the task at hand but also make sure it abides by his morals.

In spite of Aristotle finding a common goal that all mankind want to achieve, he poorly attempts to explain how to achieve happiness. In my opinion, the Nicomachean Ethics do not directly teach a person how to be good, but is a rather confusing attempt to define goodness and virtue. Yes you have to be a good person to be happy, but what is good? Is good and bad not defined differently by different cultures, religions, people and nations?

Philosophers have discuss and debate about friendship and the true meaning to be a friend to others Aristotle have given requirements as well as qualities a friend possession within different types of friendships. He debates that a good man does not need friends but the points he brings up proves that a good man can not live a pleasant life in solitary.

Many believe this to be true based off of Aristotle points that a good man does not need friends as long as they are self sufficient and blessedly happy Aristotle defends that theory by stating that a good man already has all his goods, which would make him self sufficient in itself and as long as the man is good than he does not need friendship. If a friendship were to emerge between. The subject is the genuine nature of man. To discover this nature the facts cannot help because they do not look to the nature of man in his original state but to the man of now.

Facts of the past help more in the discovery in the man of now than the By creating a scenario where man is naturally good, he created a platform for the argument for the freedom of man in society. Home Page Good Citizen vs. Good Man. Good Citizen vs. Good Man Satisfactory Essays. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Good Man The good man and the good citizen are not one and the same. What can be said about one cannot be necessarily said about the other.

It is essential for the good man to be a good citizen. In Books IV-VI Aristotle develops in much more detail what the principles of the different regimes are, and the Politics concludes with a discussion of the kind of education that the best regime ought to provide its citizens.

This examination of existing cities must be done both in order to find out what those cities do properly, so that their successes can be imitated, and to find out what they do improperly so that we can learn from their mistakes. This study and the use of the knowledge it brings remains one of the important tasks of political science. Merely imitating an existing regime, no matter how excellent its reputation, is not sufficient.

In order to create a better regime we must study the imperfect ones found in the real world. We should also examine the ideal regimes proposed by other thinkers.

As it turns out, however fine these regimes are in theory, they cannot be put into practice, and this is obviously reason enough not to adopt them. Nevertheless, the ideas of other thinkers can assist us in our search for knowledge.

Keep in mind that the practical sciences are not about knowledge for its own sake: unless we put this knowledge to use in order to improve the citizens and the city, the study engaged in by political science is pointless. We will not consider all the details of the different regimes Aristotle describes, but some of them are important enough to examine here. Aristotle begins his exploration of these regimes with the question of the degree to which the citizens in a regime should be partners.

Recall that he opened the Politics with the statement that the city is a partnership, and in fact the most authoritative partnership. The citizens of a particular city clearly share something, because it is sharing that makes a partnership. Consider some examples of partnerships: business partners share a desire for wealth; philosophers share a desire for knowledge; drinking companions share a desire for entertainment; the members of a hockey team share a desire to win their game.

So what is it that citizens share? Aristotle has already said that the regime is a partnership in adjudication and justice. But is it enough that the people of a city have a shared understanding of what justice means and what the laws require, or is the political community a partnership in more than these things?

Today the answer would probably be that these things are sufficient — a group of people sharing territory and laws is not far from how most people would define the modern state. In the Republic , Socrates argues that the city should be unified to the greatest degree possible. The citizens, or at least those in the ruling class, ought to share everything, including property, women, and children.

There should be no private families and no private property. But this, according to Aristotle, is too much sharing. While the city is clearly a kind of unity, it is a unity that must derive from a multitude. Human beings are unavoidably different, and this difference, as we saw earlier, is the reason cities were formed in the first place, because difference within the city allows for specialization and greater self-sufficiency. There would be another drawback to creating a city in which everything is held in common.

Therefore to hold women and property in common, as Socrates proposes, would be a mistake. It would weaken attachments to other people and to the common property of the city, and this would lead to each individual assuming that someone else would care for the children and property, with the end result being that no one would. For a modern example, many people who would not throw trash on their own front yard or damage their own furniture will litter in a public park and destroy the furniture in a rented apartment or dorm room.

This may at first seem wise, since the unequal distribution of property in a political community is, Aristotle believes, one of the causes of injustice in the city and ultimately of civil war. But in fact it is not the lack of common property that leads to conflict; instead, Aristotle blames human depravity b Inequality of property leads to problems because the common people desire wealth without limit b3 ; if this desire can be moderated, so too can the problems that arise from it.

Aristotle also includes here the clam that the citizens making up the elite engage in conflict because of inequality of honors b In other words, they engage in conflict with the other citizens because of their desire for an unequal share of honor, which leads them to treat the many with condescension and arrogance.

Holding property in common, Aristotle notes, will not remove the desire for honor as a source of conflict. It is noteworthy that when Athens is considered following this discussion in Chapter 12 , Aristotle takes a critical view and seems to suggest that the city has declined since the time of Solon.

Aristotle does not anywhere in his writings suggest that Athens is the ideal city or even the best existing city. It is easy to assume the opposite, and many have done so, but there is no basis for this assumption. However, two important points should be noted here. One general point that Aristotle makes when considering existing regimes is that when considering whether a particular piece of legislation is good or not, it must be compared not only to the best possible set of arrangements but also the set of arrangements that actually prevails in the city.

If a law does not fit well with the principles of the regime, although it may be an excellent law in the abstract, the people will not believe in it or support it and as a result it will be ineffective or actually harmful a The other is that Aristotle is critical of the Spartans because of their belief that the most important virtue to develop and the one that the city must teach its citizens is the kind of virtue that allows them to make war successfully.

But war is not itself an end or a good thing; war is for the sake of peace, and the inability of the Spartans to live virtuously in times of peace has led to their downfall. Again he takes up the question of what the city actually is, but here his method is to understand the parts that make up the city: the citizens. For Americans today this is a legal question: anyone born in the United States or born to American citizens abroad is automatically a citizen.

Other people can become citizens by following the correct legal procedures for doing so. However, this rule is not acceptable for Aristotle, since slaves are born in the same cities as free men but that does not make them citizens.

For Aristotle, there is more to citizenship than living in a particular place or sharing in economic activity or being ruled under the same laws. We have yet to talk about what a democracy is, but when we do, this point will be important to defining it properly.

When Aristotle talks about participation, he means that each citizen should participate directly in the assembly — not by voting for representatives — and should willingly serve on juries to help uphold the laws.

Note again the contrast with modern Western nation-states where there are very few opportunities to participate directly in politics and most people struggle to avoid serving on juries.

Participation in deliberation and decision making means that the citizen is part of a group that discusses the advantageous and the harmful, the good and bad, and the just and unjust, and then passes laws and reaches judicial decisions based on this deliberative process. This process requires that each citizen consider the various possible courses of action on their merits and discuss these options with his fellow citizens.

By doing so the citizen is engaging in reason and speech and is therefore fulfilling his telos, engaged in the process that enables him to achieve the virtuous and happy life. In regimes where the citizens are similar and equal by nature — which in practice is all of them — all citizens should be allowed to participate in politics, though not all at once. They must take turns, ruling and being ruled in turn.

Note that this means that citizenship is not just a set of privileges, it is also a set of duties. The citizen has certain freedoms that non-citizens do not have, but he also has obligations political participation and military service that they do not have. We will see shortly why Aristotle believed that the cities existing at the time did not in fact follow this principle of ruling and being ruled in turn. Before looking more closely at democracy and the other kinds of regimes, there are still several important questions to be discussed in Book III.

This is a question that seems strange, or at least irrelevant, to most people today. The good citizen today is asked to follow the laws, pay taxes, and possibly serve on juries; these are all good things the good man or woman would do, so that the good citizen is seen as being more or less subsumed into the category of the good person. For Aristotle, however, this is not the case.

Aristotle has already told us that if the regime is going to endure it must educate all the citizens in such a way that they support the kind of regime that it is and the principles that legitimate it. Because there are several different types of regime six, to be specific, which will be considered in more detail shortly , there are several different types of good citizen.

Aristotle does not fully describe this regime until Book VII. For those of us not living in the ideal regime, the ideal citizen is one who follows the laws and supports the principles of the regime, whatever that regime is. That this may well require us to act differently than the good man would act and to believe things that the good man knows to be false is one of the unfortunate tragedies of political life.

There is another element to determining who the good citizen is, and it is one that we today would not support. For Aristotle, remember, politics is about developing the virtue of the citizens and making it possible for them to live a life of virtue.

We have already seen that women and slaves are not capable of living this kind of life, although each of these groups has its own kind of virtue to pursue. These are the people who must work for a living. They are necessary for the city to exist — someone must build the houses, make the shoes, and so forth — but in the ideal city they would play no part in political life because their necessary tasks prevent them from developing their minds and taking an active part in ruling the city.

Their existence, like those of the slaves and the women, is for the benefit of the free male citizens. Aristotle makes this point several times in the Politics: see, for example, VII. Throughout the remainder of the Politics he returns to this point to remind us of the distinction between a good regime and a bad regime. The correct regime of polity, highlighted in Book IV, is under political rule, while deviant regimes are those which are ruled as though a master was ruling over slaves.

This brings us to perhaps the most contentious of political questions: how should the regime be organized? Another way of putting this is: who should rule? In Books IV-VI Aristotle explores this question by looking at the kinds of regimes that actually existed in the Greek world and answering the question of who actually does rule. By closely examining regimes that actually exist, we can draw conclusions about the merits and drawbacks of each.

Like political scientists today, he studied the particular political phenomena of his time in order to draw larger conclusions about how regimes and political institutions work and how they should work. As has been mentioned above, in order to do this, he sent his students throughout Greece to collect information on the regimes and histories of the Greek cities, and he uses this information throughout the Politics to provide examples that support his arguments.

According to Diogenes Laertius, histories and descriptions of the regimes of cities were written, but only one of these has come down to the present: the Constitution of Athens mentioned above. Another way he used this data was to create a typology of regimes that was so successful that it ended up being used until the time of Machiavelli nearly years later.

He used two criteria to sort the regimes into six categories. The first criterion that is used to distinguish among different kinds of regimes is the number of those ruling: one man, a few men, or the many. The second is perhaps a little more unexpected: do those in power, however many they are, rule only in their own interest or do they rule in the interest of all the citizens? The correct regimes are monarchy rule by one man for the common good , aristocracy rule by a few for the common good , and polity rule by the many for the common good ; the flawed or deviant regimes are tyranny rule by one man in his own interest , oligarchy rule by the few in their own interest , and democracy rule by the many in their own interest.

Aristotle later ranks them in order of goodness, with monarchy the best, aristocracy the next best, then polity, democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny a People in Western societies are used to thinking of democracy as a good form of government — maybe the only good form of government — but Aristotle considers it one of the flawed regimes although it is the least bad of the three and you should keep that in mind in his discussion of it.

The women, slaves, and manual laborers are in the city for the good of the citizens. Almost immediately after this typology is created, Aristotle clarifies it: the real distinction between oligarchy and democracy is in fact the distinction between whether the wealthy or the poor rule b39 , not whether the many or the few rule.

Since it is always the case that the poor are many while the wealthy are few, it looks like it is the number of the rulers rather than their wealth which distinguishes the two kinds of regimes he elaborates on this in IV. All cities have these two groups, the many poor and the few wealthy, and Aristotle was well aware that it was the conflict between these two groups that caused political instability in the cities, even leading to civil wars Thucydides describes this in his History of the Peloponnesian War, and the Constitution of Athens also discusses the consequences of this conflict.

Aristotle therefore spends a great deal of time discussing these two regimes and the problem of political instability, and we will focus on this problem as well.

First, however, let us briefly consider with Aristotle one other valid claim to rule. Those who are most virtuous have, Aristotle says, the strongest claim of all to rule.

If the city exists for the sake of developing virtue in the citizens, then those who have the most virtue are the most fit to rule; they will rule best, and on behalf of all the citizens, establishing laws that lead others to virtue.

It would be wrong for the other people in the city to claim the right to rule over them or share rule with them, just as it would be wrong for people to claim the right to share power with Zeus. The proper thing would be to obey them b But this situation is extremely unlikely b Instead, cities will be made up of people who are similar and equal, which leads to problems of its own. The most pervasive of these is that oligarchs and democrats each advance a claim to political power based on justice.

For Aristotle, justice dictates that equal people should get equal things, and unequal people should get unequal things. If, for example, two students turn in essays of identical quality, they should each get the same grade. Their work is equal, and so the reward should be too. If they turn in essays of different quality, they should get different grades which reflect the differences in their work.

But the standards used for grading papers are reasonably straightforward, and the consequences of this judgment are not that important, relatively speaking — they certainly are not worth fighting and dying for. But the stakes are raised when we ask how we should judge the question of who should rule, for the standards here are not straightforward and disagreement over the answer to this question frequently does lead men and women to fight and die.

What does justice require when political power is being distributed? This was the political problem that was of most concern to the authors of the United States Constitution: given that people are self-interested and ambitious, who can be trusted with power? The oligarchs assert that their greater wealth entitles them to greater power, which means that they alone should rule, while the democrats say that the fact that all are equally free entitles each citizen to an equal share of political power which, because most people are poor, means that in effect the poor rule.

And poll taxes, which required people to pay a tax in order to vote and therefore kept many poor citizens including almost all African-Americans from voting, were not eliminated in the United States until the midth century.

At any rate, each of these claims to rule, Aristotle says, is partially correct but partially wrong. We will consider the nature of democracy and oligarchy shortly.

Aristotle also in Book III argues for a principle that has become one of the bedrock principles of liberal democracy: we ought, to the extent possible, allow the law to rule. Desire is a thing of this sort; and spiritedness perverts rulers and the best men. This is not to say that the law is unbiased. It will reflect the bias of the regime, as it must, because the law reinforces the principles of the regime and helps educate the citizens in those principles so that they will support the regime.

But in any particular case, the law, having been established in advance, is impartial, whereas a human judge will find it hard to resist judging in his own interest, according to his own desires and appetites, which can easily lead to injustice.

Also, if this kind of power is left in the hands of men rather than with the laws, there will be a desperate struggle to control these offices and their benefits, and this will be another cause of civil war. So whatever regime is in power should, to the extent possible, allow the laws to rule. There are masters and slaves, but there are no citizens.

In Book IV Aristotle continues to think about existing regimes and their limitations, focusing on the question: what is the best possible regime? This is another aspect of political science that is still practiced today, as Aristotle combines a theory about how regimes ought to be with his analysis of how regimes really are in practice in order to prescribe changes to those regimes that will bring them more closely in line with the ideal.

Aristotle also provides advice for those that want to preserve any of the existing kinds of regime, even the defective ones, showing a kind of hard-headed realism that is often overlooked in his writings.

In order to do this, he provides a higher level of detail about the varieties of the different regimes than he has previously given us. There are a number of different varieties of democracy and oligarchy because cities are made up of a number of different groups of people, and the regime will be different depending on which of these groups happens to be most authoritative. For example, a democracy that is based on the farming element will be different than a democracy that is based on the element that is engaged in commerce, and similarly there are different kinds of oligarchies.

We do not need to consider these in detail except to note that Aristotle holds to his position that in either a democracy or an oligarchy it is best if the law rules rather than the people possessing power. In the case of democracy it is best if the farmers rule, because farmers will not have the time to attend the assembly, so they will stay away and will let the laws rule VI.

It is, however, important to consider polity in some detail, and this is the kind of regime to which Aristotle next turns his attention. Remember that polity is one of the correct regimes, and it occurs when the many rule in the interest of the political community as a whole.

The problem with democracy as the rule of the many is that in a democracy the many rule in their own interest; they exploit the wealthy and deny them political power. But a democracy in which the interests of the wealthy were taken into account and protected by the laws would be ruling in the interest of the community as a whole, and it is this that Aristotle believes is the best practical regime. The ideal regime to be described in Book VII is the regime that we would pray for if the gods would grant us our wishes and we could create a city from scratch, having everything exactly the way we would want it.

But when we are dealing with cities that already exist, their circumstances limit what kind of regime we can reasonably expect to create. Creating a polity is a difficult thing to do, and although he provides many examples of democracies and oligarchies Aristotle does not give any examples of existing polities or of polities that have existed in the past.

One of the important elements of creating a polity is to combine the institutions of a democracy with those of an oligarchy. For example, in a democracy, citizens are paid to serve on juries, while in an oligarchy, rich people are fined if they do not.

In a polity, both of these approaches are used, with the poor being paid to serve and the rich fined for not serving. In this way, both groups will serve on juries and power will be shared. In addition to combining elements from the institutions of democracy and oligarchy, the person wishing to create a lasting polity must pay attention to the economic situation in the city. In Book II of the Ethics Aristotle famously establishes the principle that virtue is a mean between two extremes.

For example, a soldier who flees before a battle is guilty of the vice of cowardice, while one who charges the enemy singlehandedly, breaking ranks and getting himself killed for no reason, is guilty of the vice of foolhardiness. The soldier who practices the virtue of courage is the one who faces the enemy, moves forward with the rest of the troops in good order, and fights bravely.

Courage, then, is a mean between the extremes of cowardice and foolhardiness. The person who has it neither flees from the enemy nor engages in a suicidal and pointless attack but faces the enemy bravely and attacks in the right way. Aristotle draws a parallel between virtue in individuals and virtue in cities. The city, he says, has three parts: the rich, the poor, and the middle class. For [a man of moderate wealth] is readiest to obey reason, while for one who is [very wealthy or very poor] it is difficult to follow reason.