Rousseau's Discourse On Inequality

Both Aristotle's “Politics” and Jean Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality address the natural right and superiority of man and his subsets. In his piece, Aristotle discusses the emotional feeling of superiority, while Rousseau discusses the more logistic aspects. Together, their writing begs the question of the morality of slavery. Aristotle seems more willing to accept slavery as a natural creation by humans, however, in the end both of their pieces show the immorality and abnormality of slavery.

Rousseau and Aristotle both believe that some people are naturally superior to others and together they create a well-rounded understanding of how superiority complexes are justified. While Aristotle believes that this implies that men are better than woman and the horribly disfigured (or slaves), Rousseau feels humans have evolved so much over their history that “civil” humans are naturally

Aristotle.thinks that it’s natural for humans to use those who are inferior. Rousseau disagrees. He states, “It is impossible to make any man a slave, unless he be first reduced to a situation in which he cannot do without the help of others: and, since such a situation does not exist in a state of nature, every one is there his own master, and the law of the strongest is of no effect.” Unless somebody is severely disfigured (in an unnatural way), in Rousseau’s eyes they could never be a slave. Though they disagree on the innateness of slavery, Aristotle would have supported Rousseau’s idea of a slave. What Aristotle is really saying is that it would be natural to enslave someone who was unnatural. However, since someone so deformed and who is barely human has never existed, slavery should never have existed. Neither Aristotle nor Rousseau supports the owning of another human being based on skin color, religion, gender, etcetera, even though they may think that certain people are