Dissertation
© 2025, Chuyu Tian
The aim of my dissertation is to investigate the “why” that grounds Aristotle’s ethical theory. I clarify the meta-ethical status of ethical judgments and investigate the foundation of Aristotle’s ethics. My project takes ethical naturalism as a point of departure. That is, it explores the way in which the foundations of Aristotle’s ethics lie in human nature, especially political nature.
In the first chapter, I propose a person-centric account of virtue and virtuous action. Although Aristotle’s ethics involves rules, it differs fundamentally from rule-based ethics by beginning with the human being: the notion of the good person is necessary in defining virtue and action in accordance with virtue. I argue that rules do not pre-exist the users of rules. The virtuous person is not only an exemplar or someone who has unique epistemic access by being (1) a good observer, but is (2) a litmus test to what is good for human beings, as well as (3) the definition of what is good for humans by being the natural human form. I devote the rest of the chapter to defending this account against hyper-realists by showing that it is not relativism, but constitutivism.
In the second chapter, I elaborate on the role of experience in habituation. I first reconstruct a two-part account of habituation: learning the “that” and, secondly, studying. I argue that through particulars, experience leads to universal knowledge of the goal. Experience also attunes our emotions and sets right our perceptions toward particulars. After that, I argue why becoming meta logou (with reason) from kata logon (in accordance with reason) involves experience: the progression to higher levels of universality in legislation necessarily takes a detour to specificity and particularity. I end by explaining the other side of the Unity of Virtue thesis, i.e., practical wisdom requires virtue, since the well-attuned perception of ethically salient particulars requires habituation.
For the rest of my dissertation, I inquire into the political foundation of Aristotle’s ethics. In the firsthalf of my third chapter, I argue that “political animal” is neither merely social nor just any relationship between strangers. It is a relationship based on a constitution. I locate “free and equal” as the crux of Aristotle’s constitutionalism from a point of justice qua proportionality. In explicating this idea, I defend what I would call “Proportional Political Organicism.” In the second half, I extend my constitutive account to virtue politics. The virtuous person is the measure not just in ethics but also in politics. I argue that “πολιτικὸν ζῷον” means any good person should want to live as a full-fledged citizen in a state that provides not just necessities but also the very conditions for cultivating and exercising virtue in collective self-governance.
This raises a question: is Aristotle’s ethics prior to his politics, or vice versa? Does a good human life ground a good political constitution, or is it the other way around? In my last chapter, I first present the Basic Picture, in which the ideal constitution is determined by a conception of the best human life. The telos of a polis is ultimately good human lives. The Subtler Picture of Proportional Political Organicism, however, questions how common the common good is. Even in an ideal polis, not everyone is expected to be virtuous qua human. The virtues of women and slaves are defined by their social roles in ways that make sense only within certain political contexts. The abstract “Man” to be actualized within the network of paradigmatic free and equal citizenship is a socio- economically conditioned one. Aristotle’s politics starts from the “we” of an exclusive citizenry, and normalizes such a social position. More worryingly, even his naturalistic thesis of the virtuous human being providing the ideal and the mean can be part of the problem: for who counts as a human being in the first place is defined with this measure and norm through the constitution. This politicized and normalized conception of the human being contributes to a potential dehumanizationof “human beings,” when citizenship becomes the gateway to personhood itself.
Reflecting from a meta-textual perspective, I contend that Aristotle’s political treatise is perspectival. His politics begins from the “we” of the citizenry. I conclude that Aristotle’s constitutional objectivism ostensibly claims ethics precedes politics, but his ethics is determined bythe “common" good of a qualified “we,” and is therefore preceded by politics in this very sense.
Ultimately, Aristotle’s politics is prior to his ethics.