Why Does HE Get to Rule? -Aristotle’s logical fallacies in the marital relation Anonymous College

Aristotle dedicates the first book of Politics to discuss households, and argues that to study the larger political community of a city-state, we need to first examine households as its building blocks (Politics, 5). The three major household relations Aristotle defines in Politics are master-slave, husband-wife and father-son, and they are all essentially ruler-ruled relations, as Aristotle lists that “free rules slaves, male rules female, and man rules child” (23). Aristotle believes that the natural inclination to rule or to be ruled is predetermined at birth, and there exists the natural inequality between the ruler and ruled (7). Moreover, Aristotle draws the analogy between domestic relationships and the larger political community because both households and city-states share similar ruler-ruled power dynamics. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle maps different household relations to different constitutions: “the association of a father with his sons bears the form of monarchy, ...., The association of man and wife seems to be aristocratic,..., The association of brothers is like timocracy” (The Nicomachean Ethics, 115). While Aristotle assumes that all three domestic relations share the ruler-ruled power dynamics,...