Nature and Justice

A collection of articles on Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. The newly written introductory chapter offers a sketch of the metaphysical foundations of Plato's and Aristotle's ethical and political philosophy. Two chapters on the Republic examine Plato's account of justice and his use of the ship of state metaphor. The remainder of the book is devoted to Aristotle and discusses such topics as his view of the best life for a man, his political naturalism, his proto-anarchism, his theory of distributive justice, and his ideal polis. The final chapters, also newly written, address the unattractive features of Aristotle's political ideal-natural slavery, the subordination of women, and the denigration of technical skill-and argue that these feature are in fact inconsistent with the basic principles of his ethical and political philosophy. The volume ends with a defense of the claim that Aristotle's political philosophy, once shorn of its excrescences, is updateable to the twenty-first century.