• Thesis
In Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, they both believe that for everyone to achieve the just life, it is important to have strict divisions of roles. These divisions outlined by both authors serve as a model for their views on equality. Plato and Aristotle’s core ideas on equality are similar because many of them are prematurely based on the idea of proportional distribution of equality through enabling individuals to play their appropriate roles. Though they both believe people should be assigned specific roles, the way in which they assign roles to each individual is very different. On the one hand, Plato conveys that everyone should be assessed and then assigned specific roles only after they have been…show more content… He explains that those with unequal occupations (doctor and farmer) need to trade equally with each other, but it is impossible to exchange these things since they are not equal. For the sake of these types of relations money is introduced and becomes in sense an intermediate way to measure all things and attribute a certain value to them. This proportional equality works very well in the terms of numbers related things like money. However, humans beings cannot be labeled with price tag money cannot be used as an intermediate good to measure ones worth. Aristotle states that you can not get a “single term standing for a person” 1131 As a result, so he attributes ones justness as an intermediate good to comparatively equate men.
He believed that one should be given awards should be according to merit. While the numbers are a clear way of comparison, it is very hard to compare how just one is based on merit because; merit means something different for every group of people. For democrats this merit is freedom, for oligarchs this may be wealth and nobility, and for aristocrats it may be virtue. Aristotle does not precisely specify what “equality according to merit,” so it is almost meaningless since it is unclear what exactly counts as merit, for how much it must count, who is to measure it, and by what
