Natural Right and the Problem of Aristotle's Defense of Slavery

Abstract

Many social theorists, appalled at the moral enormities made possible by the modern scientific conquest of nature, now look to a restoration of classic natural right as a standard for human affairs. But the key role of slavery in Aristotle's magisterial exposition of natural right is typically overlooked. Commentators on Aristotle's account of natural slavery add to the perplexity, charging that this account is culturally biased and logically inconsistent. Such charges play into the hands of the opponents of natural right, whose common theme is the inability of reason to overcome such biases in its search for what is right by nature. Lacking a defense of the moral and theoretical respectability of Aristotle's account of slavery, the restorationists' cause must remain unpersuasive. To provide this defense, I suggest that Aristotle's teleology implies that the natural slave, generally speaking, is made not born. Childrearing and other cultural practices, which ordinarily promote the natural destiny of mankind, may instead subvert this telos by inculcating a dysfunctional, slavish second nature. Despotic rule may be said to be natural in such cases, and only insofar as it aids the slave in better realizing the telos proper to a human being. Aristotle quite consistently condemns all employments of the slave that are uncongenial to the reformation of slavishness and allows for emancipation in the event of this achievement. C lassic natural right is rooted in a teleological account of human nature and nature as a whole (Strauss 1953, 7-8; 126-33). There are, of course, several variations on this classic theme, but each characteristically grounds its moral and political judgments in an objective and ontologically prior account of the distinctively human vocation. The exponent of classic natural right attempts, then, to describe the quality and operations characteristic of mature human nature and to prescribe how-given our individual circumstances-I, you, or the next person can get there from here. Natural right neither requires nor furnishes a guaranty that any particular being will attain this goal of perfect maturity; on the contrary, it entails the possibility of developmental failure. In fact, natural right recognizes the complete spectrum of diversity as to the manner and the extent to which a given person, at any given time, may fall short of the finality of perfect maturity. The precise adjustment necessary to bring a particular individual into a condition of objective maturity is necessarily, then, a matter of prudential judgment. One may say that a natural right prescription exists for every circumstance, even though all such prescriptions are mutable. But the prudential excellence, as distinguished from the mere cleverness, of such prescriptions is rendered all but invisible to us by modern science. For modern science vilifies any consideration of final