In Book II of his Politics, Aristotle critically assesses the account of an ideal political constitution set forth by one Hippodamus, a natural scientist described as having no background in political affairs but evidently aiming to impose on the political world the same kind of mathematical regularity that is found in nonhuman nature (say, the annual changes of seasons). As Aristotle demonstrates, Hippodamus’s proposals — among other things, he had a penchant for wanting to divide things into threes (three classes of citizens, three kinds of land, etc.) without any practical reason for doing so — would self-destruct in practice, since he failed to take into account the nonmathematical realities of human behavior and motivation. Hippodamus also wanted the city to reward innovators like himself. Among his ideas, one stands out for its oddity, since it embodies the sort of abstract political morality to which intellectuals — in our time, philosophy professors like John Rawls and Robert Nozick — are prone. To simplify, Hippodamus objected to the fact that in civil or criminal trials, individual jurors were required to vote either “innocent” or “guilty,” rather than allowed to specify the degree of a defendant’s guilt or debt. Requiring them to choose between only two verdicts, he contended, compelled jurors who thought a defendant only partly guilty to “perjure themselves.”
As Aristotle points out, Hippodamus’s proposed juridical reform would make it impossible for a jury to render a collective verdict at all: How would the various individual verdicts be summed? Nor, Aristotle observes, does requiring a juror to choose between only two verdicts entail making him commit perjury, since he wasn’t asked how guilty he thought a defendant was (or how much he owed) but only whether he had or hadn’t committed a crime or owed a debt to the plaintiff.
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