In What Ways does Aristotle Exhibit Ambivalence toward Slavery and Why Does This Matter?

In the times of Ancient Greece, there is an overall acceptance of slavery, where it is nearly uncontroversial to own a human. There are different forms of slavery during this time – chattel (bought and sold, movable) and serf-like (obliged to serve, immovable from the land). However, throughout Aristotle’s Politics, he merges the concept of humans, animals and tools while focusing on their functional forms more willingly than their physical forms to attempt a justification. Aristotle exhibits ambivalence toward slavery by equating humans with tools to justify human ownership and this matters because it indicates he believes slavery is not justifiable or natural. In other words, his justification entails perceiving slaves in practical and teleological terms where “the master uses them as a ‘living tool’ to achieve an end” (Klosko, 2012).

Rather than production, Aristotle sees action as essentially a slave’s end. For a landholder, householder or artisan, the slave is a type of apparatus or tool with the primary task of using other tools in order to generate tangible results. In other words, Aristotle sees slaves as an element of a system or network of tools to help the “master” carry out his business efficiently, creating him a better life. According to Aristotle, this system is hierarchical or ranked, “…a possession is an instrument for maintaining life… a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant an instrument which takes precedence of all other instruments” (Book I, Part IV). Due to his focus on teleology, where the slave is the first tool above all other tools, functionality becomes the primary focal point. He asserts how the center of a slave’s purpose is the capability to trans...

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... benefit of an artificial slave: “chief workmen would not want servants or masters’ slaves” (Book I, Part IV). Besides the inconvenience of getting rid of human slaves due to the troublesome effort of maintaining and controlling the rebellious ones, ambivalence is also prevalent in Aristotle’s notion of enslaving certain classes – including his strain in clarifying how only certain people qualify as being natural slaves. Certainly, the apparent effort to justify the existence of natural slaves insinuates his (or his fellow citizens’) misgivings about slavery. Even if he was averse to disclose it, Aristotle’s writings in the Politics specify he was conscious of how coerced slavery desensitized master and slave equally. In other words, several indications are present in Aristotle’s own text showing he did not hold a firm conviction in his own case to justify slavery.