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Essay on Aristotle's Perception of Society

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Aristotle believes that money is a form of justice, and not an end in itself. This has been a controversial perception amongst people for many years; some tend to agree while others have a different belief. From my point of view, Aristotle’s belief was not arbitrary. I support this belief because unfortunately our society is continuously being corrupted by many people who possess the money, wealth, and influence in our current days, are using their means to promote injustice. It is also true among modern thinkers that money might also be the only way to justice. Such perspective leads them to believe that a wealthy person might be a fair person and makes no mistakes because they judge with respect and integrity. In my opinion money is a …show more content…

Aristotle says that
“Money, as a common measure of everything, makes things commensurable and makes it possible to equalize them. He states that it is in the form of money, a substance that has a purpose, that individuals have devised a unit that supplies a measure on the basis of which just exchange can take place. Aristotle thus maintains that everything can be expressed in the universal equivalent of money. He explains that money was introduced to satisfy the requirement that all items must be comparable in some way.”(3)

In addition Aristotle defined the characteristics of money to be durable, portable, divisible, and have an intrinsic value. This is to say, money should not change through time. It should hold a high amount of worth relative to its weight and size it should also be relatively easy to justly separate and recombine. Finally its value should be independent of any other object and contained in the money itself
Secondly, what did Aristotle mean when he said that money is not an end in itself? Here he was trying to tell us that the reason of money is not the sake of having money only or for the sake of accumulating money because that will not make us happy or even a good person. But because Aristotle believes that we have to define things by its purpose and the principle of money is not to have more of it to accumulate more but to use it in good things that will benefit me and my society, as well as it will make me happy.

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