Lesson 25 (Part 1): How Libertarians Argued for Liberty Based on Aristotle’s Ideas

In Aristotle’s day, liberals were not what we now consider as the left-wing people of American politics. Liberals, now better known as libertarians, were people who believed in peace. They were against violence and force. They knew, of course, that if someone attacked them or a loved one, they should defend themselves, but they did not resort to violence. This is what we mean here by libertarians, liberalism, or Aristotelian liberals.

Libertarians say that Aristotle, even though he didn’t know it at the time, actually supported liberalism. Aristotle expressed in his book Ethics that each person must possess the freewill to conduct virtuous behavior. People were entitled to freewill. They must be virtuous, and when a government attempted to extract their freedom from them, the people had the right to overthrow their government. The Founding Fathers of America believed people were bestowed with freewill by God and put laws in play stating such. “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” (The Declaration of Independence).

Aristotle also stated in his Ethics that eudaimonia is the ultimate good we strive for in our lives. Aristotelian liberals based their rights on the requirement to attain eudaimonia. The Greek word eudaimonia translates to happiness. A closer way to describe it is the contented, satisfied happiness of human flourishing. But to flourish, one must be virtuous and choose to be virtuous with their freewill. There must be liberty so people are free to build up, hone, and use virtue, which would bring them eudaimonia.

Aristotle states that when one is forced to be virtuous, it’s not real virtue. Holding a gun to someone’s head and making them give money to a homeless child does not make that person virtuous. At first, children should be guided on what to do and how to act by the authority of their parents, but once they grow up, virtue would be planted inside them as their go-to course of action, and they would use their freewill to be virtuous.

The distinguishing feature of a human being, according to Aristotle, is our ability to reason. Animals do not reason. Aristotelian libertarians latched onto this, saying that humans should be allowed to use their reason. Therefore, the government should not restrict human freewill because that would restrict human reason and put a sock in their distinguishing feature. According to libertarians, government should not use force, coercion, jail, or execution against their citizens. This would make mankind no better than beasts since animals use violence, not reason. To have freewill and liberty, we must have peace and reasoning.