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What is the Ethics of Politics? Aristotle believed that human beings are political animals, not in the electoral sense, but in the deeper sense that we can only fully develop and flourish within a community. That means the kind of person you become is inseparable from the community that formed you. This episode examines the relationship between personal ethics and the society that shapes it, and why Aristotle thought you couldn't fully understand one without the other. Ethics fit the person to the society. Politics asks whether the society is worth fitting into. The two questions are linked in ways that matter, and a purely personal ethics that ignores the political question is never quite enough.

Art: Albert Bettannier, Der Schwarze Fleck; Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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