Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [91]
What can we do if people disagree about the telos, or purpose, of the activity in question? Is it possible to reason about the telos of a social institution, or is the purpose of a university, say, simply whatever the founding authority or governing board declared it to be?
Aristotle believes that it is possible to reason about the purpose of social institutions. Their essential nature is not fixed once and for all, but neither is it simply a matter of opinion. (If the purpose of Harvard College were simply determined by the intention of its founders, then its primary purpose would still be the training of Congregationalist ministers.)
How, then, can we reason about the purpose of a social practice in the face of disagreement? And how do notions of honor and virtue come into play? Aristotle offers his most sustained answer to these questions in his discussion of politics.
What’s the Purpose of Politics?
When we discuss distributive justice these days, we are concerned mainly with the distribution of income, wealth, and opportunities. For Aristotle, distributive justice was not mainly about money but about offices and honors. Who should have the right to rule? How should political authority be distributed?
At first glance, the answer seems obvious—equally, of course. One person, one vote. Any other way would be discriminatory. But Aristotle reminds us that all theories of distributive justice discriminate. The question is: Which discriminations are just? And the answer depends on the purpose of the activity in question.
So, before we can say how political rights and authority should be distributed, we have to inquire into the purpose, or telos, of politics. We have to ask, “What is political association for?”
This may seem an unanswerable question. Different political communities care about different things. It’s one thing to argue about the purpose of a flute, or a university. Notwithstanding the room for disagreement at the margins, their purposes are more or less circumscribed. The purpose of a flute has something to do with making music; the purpose of a university has something to do with education. But can we really determine the purpose or goal of political activity as such?
These days, we don’t think of politics as such as having some particular, substantive end, but as being open to the various ends that citizens may espouse. Isn’t that why we have elections—so that people can choose, at any given moment, what purposes and ends they want collectively to pursue? To attribute some purpose or end to political community in advance would seem to preempt the right of citizens to decide for themselves. It would also risk imposing values not everyone shares. Our reluctance to invest politics with a determinate telos, or end, reflects a concern for individual freedom. We view politics as a procedure that enables persons to choose their ends for themselves.
Aristotle doesn’t see it this way. For Aristotle, the purpose of politics is not to set up a framework of rights that is neutral among ends. It is to form good citizens and to cultivate good character.
[A]ny polis which is truly so called, and is not merely one in name, must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness. Otherwise, a political association sinks into a mere alliance… Otherwise, too, law becomes a mere covenant… “a guarantor of men’s rights against one another”—instead of being, as it should be, a rule of life such as will make the members of a polis good and just.5
Aristotle criticizes what he takes to be the two major claimants to political authority—oligarchs and democrats. Each has a claim, he says, but only a partial claim. The oligarchs maintain that they, the wealthy, should rule. The democrats maintain that free birth should be the sole criterion of citizenship and political authority. But both groups exaggerate their claims, because both misconstrue the purpose of political community.
The oligarchs are wrong because