Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [93]
Why, then, does Aristotle think that participating in politics is somehow essential to living a good life? Why can’t we live perfectly good, virtuous lives without politics?
The answer lies in our nature. Only by living in a polis and participating in politics do we fully realize our nature as human beings. Aristotle sees us as beings “meant for political association, in a higher degree than bees or other gregarious animals.” The reason he gives is this: Nature makes nothing in vain, and human beings, unlike other animals, are furnished with the faculty of language. Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn’t just for registering pleasure and pain. It’s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don’t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.10
Only in political association, Aristotle claims, can we exercise our distinctly human capacity for language, for only in a polis do we deliberate with others about justice and injustice and the nature of the good life. “We thus see that the polis exists by nature and that it is prior to the individual,” he writes in Book I of The Politics. 11 By prior, he means prior in function, or purpose, not chronologically prior. Individuals, families, and clans existed before cities did; but only in the polis are we able to realize our nature. We are not self-sufficient when we are isolated, because we can’t yet develop our capacity for language and moral deliberation.
The man who is isolated—who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient—is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.12
So we only fulfill our nature when we exercise our faculty of language, which requires in turn that we deliberate with others about right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice.
But why, you might wonder, can we exercise this capacity for language and deliberation only in politics? Why can’t we do it in families, clans, or clubs? To answer this question, we need to consider the account of virtue and the good life that Aristotle presents in the Nicomachean Ethics. Although this work is primarily about moral philosophy, it shows how acquiring virtue is bound up with being a citizen.
The moral life aims at happiness, but by happiness Aristotle doesn’t mean what the utilitarians mean—maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain. The virtuous person is someone who takes pleasure and pain in the right things. If someone takes pleasure in watching dog fights, for example, we consider this a vice to be overcome, not a true source of happiness. Moral excellence does not consist in aggregating pleasures and pains but in aligning them, so that we delight in noble things and take pain in base ones. Happiness is not a state of mind but a way of being, “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.”13
But why is it necessary to live in a polis to live a virtuous life? Why can’t we learn sound moral principles at home, or in a philosophy class, or by reading a book about ethics—and then apply them as needed? Aristotle says we don’t become virtuous that way. “Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit.” It’s the kind of thing we learn by doing. “The virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well.”14
Learning by Doing
In this respect, becoming virtuous is like learning to play the flute. No one learns how to play a musical instrument