Question

What are the weaknesses of Aristotle’s theories of justice?

Answer 1

He relies on experience and is too focused on senses. Plato says the senses are very unreliable.


Aristotle suggests that the morally weak are usually young persons who lack the habituation to virtue that brings the passions of the soul under the internal control of reason. According to Aristotle, like sleepy, mad or drunken persons who can “repeat geometrical demonstrations and verses of Empedocles,” and like an actor speaking their lines, “beginning students can reel off the words they have heard, but they do not yet know the subject” (NE 1147a19-21). A young person, therefore, can “repeat the formulae (of moral knowledge),” which they don‟t yet feel (NE 1147a23). Rather, in order to retain knowledge when in the grip of strong passions, Aristotle asserts that, “the subject must grow to be part of them, and that takes time” (NE 1147a22). Avoiding moral weakness, therefore, requires that we take moral knowledge into our souls and let it become part of our character. This internalization process the young have not had time to complete.
If moral weakness is characteristic of the young who have not yet taken moral knowledge into their souls, thereby allowing them to temporarily forget or lose their knowledge when overcome by desire in the act of moral weakness, it would seem that Aristotle‟s account of moral weakness does not in fact contradict Socrates‟ teaching that no one voluntarily does what they “know” to be wrong. Virtue does in fact seem to be knowledge, and, as Aristotle asserts, “we seem to be led to the conclusion which Socrates sought to establish. Moral weakness does not occur in the presence of knowledge in the strict sense”