Aristotle Plato and Aristotle, two philosophers in the 4th century, hold polar views on politics and philosophy in general. This fact is very cleverly illustrated by Raphael's "School of Athens" ; Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican , where Plato is portrayed looking up to the higher forms; and Aristotle is pointing down because he supports the natural sciences.
In a discussion of politics, the stand point of each philosopher becomes an essential factor. It is not coincidental. By Gerard Chretien Plato vs. Aristotle Numerous experts in modern time regard Plato as the first genuine political philosopher and Aristotle as the first political scientist. They were both great thinkers in regards to, in part with Socrates, being the foundation of the great western philosophers.
Plato and Aristotle each had ideas in how to proceed with improving the society in which they were part of during their existence.
It is necessary therefore to analyze their different theoretical. Plato believed that knowing good was equal to doing good. He said that if a person knows the right thing that will automatically lead him to do the right thing.
Aristotle on the other hand believed that knowing good was not enough to be good. He believed that one had to practice good if one is to be good.
Plato was idealistic. He believed. Man creates society to enforce justice which allows man to own and use property as he desires. A grand idea but is it so simple? Such love seems to be a matter of motivationally active feeling rather than of being rational, and some writers on morality eventually allowed this side of Christianity to have a major influence on what they had to say about virtue. First, justice is first and foremost a virtue of character rather than institutions, although Aquinas draws a distinction among such virtues not found in Aristotle.
Second, Aquinas grounds the norms for these exchanges in the ancient formula of Justinian, which hearkens back to Plato: justice is giving each his own. But his interpretation of this formula situates him astride a deep but subtle divide between ancient and modern thought. To some extent this effect is an upshot of his inheriting not only the Greek eudaimonist tradition, but also a Roman jurisprudential tradition in which notions like standing and right as claim rather than, say, fairness had begun to emerge Porter , p.
One major complication, relative to the ancient accounts, is that what is ours by right is a recognition of a kind of status, as an effect of the order among people ordained by God ST I-II There are two significant follow-on implications.
First, the fabric of the eudaimonist approach to practical reasoning and life — inherited from the Greeks — begins to fray. For better or worse, on the Greek eudaimonist views including here Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus our reasons for action arise from our interest in a happy life.
If the reason-giving nature of others arises from a different source, as this reading of Aquinas suggests, then practical reason seems to have a duality of ultimate sources, with the complications that kind of duality brings.
Second, this is the first step in the diminution of the theoretical significance of the virtues — a process that will not begin to be reversed until the middle of the 20th century.
Virtue is no longer the normative epicenter of the theory, as it was for the Greeks. Hume is an excellent exemplar of this point, in both the Treatise and the Enquiries.
T III. I, We can think of that as the criterion some quality of character must have to be deemed a virtue. In consequence, what counts as virtuous is an upshot of, and not the source of, the normative foundations of this view.
We may always be aspiring for more but justice aims at the preservation and security of what one has already E III. So the virtue of justice, as Hume thinks of it, will in the main consist of a quality in one which disposes one to observe and uphold these rules.
What Hume wants to show is, first, that we can have such a disposition or quality that is, that it is possible for us to have a quality or character to observe the rules of justice , and, second, that such a quality would count as a virtue, given his criteria. His approach to these questions in the Treatise is framed by a problem he has set up himself.
Morality, and virtue, is a matter of sentiments or passions. Hume marshals a number of arguments to this effect which are not relevant to our purposes. I ; as such, it utterly lacks the capacity to move us to action.
Only the passions can do that T II. Virtue is paradigmatically a practical matter: it is a property of what we do, and to act we must be motivated. That means any successful account of virtue must find it in our passions, not in any aspect of our reason T III. So far so good. However, when we come to justice, we look in vain for a passion that can supply motive power for us to act justly.
If anything, our natural motives move us away from justice T III. And only a passion can do that. But which? Hume himself dismisses the possibilities of public or private beneficence or universal love. In the end he concludes that there is no natural passion to explain it. Instead, it is in a certain crucial sense artificial T III. Two facts about the conditions in which we act — one about us, one about our environment — set this alteration in motion.
First, Hume maintains, we are limited in our generosity or benevolence. And second, we live in conditions of scarcity T III. We have to work to make a go of it, and we cannot count on others to do so for us.
We need control of our world to meet our needs, but we are vulnerable to the selfishness and predation of others. This convention is no formal agreement; Hume argues that it cannot be something like the product of promise or compact T III. II, p. Much as two men pulling the oars in a boat together need no explicit agreement to find they prosper by such an arrangement, so do we generally.
So in the end it is self-interest that drives us to comply with the requirements of justice, though Hume adds that sympathy with the public interest induces our endorsement of it once justice has become established.
Hume believes the benefit of the system overall, both to society and to individual, requires that rules not admit of exceptions T III. Self-interest accounts for the possibility of our being motivated to act as the virtue of justice requires, and both the utility and the agreeableness, both to ourselves and others, of a resulting social order with respected property rules, leads to our approbation of that motivation as a virtue.
Scarcity imposes a need for us to distinguish mine from thine, and we have not sufficient generosity in our natures to do without property rules as we might, say, in our families. As David Johnston observes Johnston , p. Such a sentimentalist account of justice is also found in Adam Smith; in fact, a focus on the sentiments almost completely swamps concern for virtue. He does however explicitly countenance a virtue of justice, developed in contrast with the virtue of beneficence.
It is essential to the subsistence of society, Smith tells us Smith , II. In Kant, finally, along with a movement away from sentimentalism we see the completion of the distinction between justice as a virtue and justice as a norm to which a virtue may or may not correspond. Little remains here of the notion of justice as a virtue of individuals as it began with the ancient Greeks.
More particularly, Piaget saw that sophistication as a matter of taking more and more general or universal views of moral issues, and endorsed the Kantian and rationalist idea that morality rests on and can be justified in terms of considerations of justice.
This transition is fostered through social interaction, and attention to norms of equality and reciprocity replace those of mere obedience. Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was inspired by Piaget to propose a conception of moral development that postulated six stages of human moral development. In his earliest work, Kohlberg identified the highest stage of such development with a concern for justice and human rights based on universal principles.
Concern for relationships and for individual human well-being was embedded in a framework of conformity to social norms, at lower stages of the process. Moreover, he saw the ordering of the different stages in Piagetian fashion as basically reflecting differences in rational understanding: those whose moral thinking involved the invoking of universal principles of justice and rights were thought to show a more advanced cognitive development than those whose moral thought appeals primarily to the importance of relationships and of human well-being or suffering.
For example, the reason should rule on behalf of the entire soul with wisdom and forethought. The element of spirit will sub-ordinate itself to the rule of reason. Those two elements are brought into harmony by combination of mental and bodily training.
They are set in command over the appetites which form the greater part of man's soul. Therefore, the reason and spirit have to control these appetites which are likely to grow on the bodily pleasures. These appetites should not be allowed, to enslave the other elements and usurp the dominion to which they have no right.
When all the three agree that among them the reason alone should rule, there is justice within the individual. Corresponding to these three elements in human nature there are three classes in the social organism-Philosopher class or the ruling class which is the representative of reason; auxiliaries, a class of warriors and defenders of the country is the representative of spirit; and the appetite instinct of the community which consists of farmers, artisans and are the lowest rung of the ladder.
Thus, weaving a web between the human organism and the social organism, Plato asserts that functional specialization demands from every social class to specialize itself in the station of life allotted to it. Justice, therefore to Plato is like a manuscript which exists in two copies, and one of these is larger than the other.
It exists both in the individual and the society. But it exists on a larger scale and in more visible form in the society.
Individually "justice is a 'human virtue' that makes a man self consistent and good: Socially, justice is a social consciousness that makes a society internally harmonious and good. Justice is thus a sort of specialization.
It is simply the will to fulfill the duties of one's station and not to meddle with the duties of another station, and its habitation is, therefore, in the mind of every citizen who does his duties in his appointed place. It is the original principle, laid down at the foundation of the State, "that one man should practice one thing only and that the thing to which his nature was best adopted". True justice to Plato, therefore, consists in the principle of non-interference.
The State has been considered by Plato as a perfect whole in which each individual which is its element, functions not for itself but for the health of the whole. Every element fulfils its appropriate function. Justice in the platonic state would, therefore, be like that harmony of relationship where the Planets are held together in the orderly movement.
Plato was convinced that a society which is so organized is fit for survival. Where man are out of their natural places, there the co-ordination of parts is destroyed, the society disintegrates and dissolves. Justice, therefore, is the citizen sense of duties.
Justice is, for Plato, at once a part of human virtue and the bond, which joins man together in society. It is the identical quality that makes good and social. Justice is an order and duty of the parts of the soul, it is to the soul as health is to the body. Plato says that justice is not mere strength, but it is a harmonious strength. Justice is not the right of the stronger but the effective harmony of the whole. Open Journal Systems. Abstract The Greeks looked upon justice as virtue in action and therefore a virtue.
The Greek conception of justice was the virtue of soul and injustice its vice. To both Plato and Aristotle justice meant goodness as well as willingness to obey laws. It connoted correspondence of rights and duties. Justice was the ideal of perfection in human relationships.
And the spirit which animated men in the proper discharge of their duties.
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