Aristotle and Augustine Comparative Investigation of Virtue, Political Regimes, and Individual Moral Development:
Justice and virtue are fundamental within the understanding of how political regimes form, specifically towards how individuals within society uphold their moral standing. Aristotle and Augustine’s views on virtue and justice overlap in the manner that they both present the difficulty of our humanistic nature to sin and their perspectives on political regimes. They differ by how Aristotle forms the basis of virtue as an essential element of society and how Augustine ascribes virtue to divine grace. I will prove this through textual analysis of their works, through comparing their definitions of the “just” and “virtue” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (2011), and Augustine’s City of God (2014). Aristotle first defines justice by defining the characteristics of its opposite: injustice. He asserts, to be unjust is to be unlawful and unequal. Oppositely, to be just means to be lawful and equal . His definition of la...
