A neo-Aristotelian account of education, justice, and the human good

Abstract

This article sketches the contours of a neo-Aristotelian account of education, justice, and the human good, organized around a sequence of three increasingly distinctive features of the Aristotelian understanding of respect for persons as rational beings. The first and second of these features bear on important aspects of educational justice, especially in the realm of civic education, and the third bears more generally on the just provision of educational foundations for human flourishing or eudaimonia. A liberalized and empirically grounded version of Aristotle’s conception of flourishing and its promotion by means of ‘liberal’ education is presented in the context of a contractualist reconstruction of Aristotle’s account of a just constitution.