According to Aristotle, the best sort of human being was one like himself – male, slave-owning and Greek – who was devoted to intellectual inquiry. Apart from justifying the local prejudices of his time – a practice nearly universal among philosophers – this view has a more radical defect. It assumes that the best life for humans is the same, at least in principle, for everybody. True, most cannot achieve it, but this only shows their inferiority to those that can. The possibility that human beings might flourish in many different ways, which cannot be ranked in any scale of value, did not
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