Aristotle on Subjective Rights

A study of the notion of rights in classical Greek thought naturally focuses on Aristotle’s ethics and politics. Plato’s ethics shows a much greater concern with people’s interests than with their rights. In Plato, too, these interests are identified with reference to the community as a whole; that is, it is the good of the community that comes first in order of justification. At the same time Plato believes that interests justified in this way (that is, identified and determined with reference to their contribution to the common good) are people’s true interests: his politics and ethics are therefore paternalistic and illiberal. As such, they do not allow for a theory of subjective rights as morally or legally sanctioned entitlements that are concerned with the individual qua individual, independently of the contribution that they might make to the common good. Plato’s predecessors, for their part, had mainly focused on the relation between morality and self-interest and the potential conflict between the two. Whether it was seen as consisting in just behaviour or in the unrestrained pursuit of one’s own ambitions and desires, self-interest was the guiding principle of ethical thinking. It is only with Aristotle that the issue of subjective rights and their justification as the means of protecting individual interests becomes a central one in political and moral philosophy. This chapter examines both Aristotle’s descriptive approach to the study of political theories and his theory of justice by focusing on the concept of axia, that is, the criterion by which rights are (or should be) attributed in different constitutions.