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I tend to agree with Aristotle, but I don’t think it’s just IQ, but things like conscientiousness, decisiveness, courage (both moral and practical). Most people behave more like herd animals in a sense, carried along by the greater society, or base impulses, or other forces. They don’t choose a lifestyle they want, they float along doing whatever the path of least resistance sets before them. Furthermore, most people have little to no actual leadership ability in the sense that they can plan an action, follow it and get others to go along with it. They need some sort of guidance to tell them to want useful, productive things, to live In non destructive ways, to basically not be a burden to everyone else.
But it doesn’t matter what the person’s IQ is. There are lots of geniuses who rot away working obscure arcana that no one will ever care about, or who burn out and end up living in squalor and memorizing the lore of TV shows, video games, or books. Are those people any less in need of guidance?
We used to know this, and actually corrected for it by creating formal etiquette that required that people obey their betters and do productive things and learn to hold polite conversations about topics without turning them into mini lectures on stuff no one cared about. And we used to basically require some sort of skin in the game to participate in society. I think we could be well served by doing so. At minimum, a person should be a net taxpayer if they want to vote.
I think what we are not getting here is that Aristotle means slaves. Not "people who need to be looked after" or "people who are incapable of not fucking up their lives" - we do accept that there is a social duty to look after the mentally ill or the intellectually disordered who can't live without support.
He means "people who are born to be property". And that, dear Mottizens, is the nettle you need to grasp: do you really advocate that some people are property?
I personally agree with you that arguments of the form “natural slave” have a central purpose of eliding the distinction between “many people need some guidance or curtailment of their behavior in order to avoid going wrong” and “some people deserve to own others like livestock.”
What I think the argument most supports, as a matter of fact, is societal laws forbidding many of the worst pitfalls of those who need guidance. Strong limits on drugs, gambling, and debt can really raise the floor for people, and in fact these are precisely the traditional strictures in most societies.
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There are people meant to live their lives doing grunt work without much say in the matter. Every society will find some way of making this happen- in ours it’s generally carceral, but other societies have held them(as well as lots of random people) as slaves.
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Hoping to catch an edgelord grasping the nettle? Aristotle discusses this in his writing on slavery - he distinguishes "slaves by nature", i.e. people whose nature is such that they are incapable of maintaining their freedom, and "slaves by convention", i.e. those who are actually legal slaves. He was not a fan of the fact that not all those who are slaves by convention are slaves by nature (Plato himself did some time in chains), and he does not endorse the mass enslavement of natural slaves who are legally free (they are already enslaved, but enslaved to vices, to menial employment, to patrons, etc., such that enslaving them legally would be superfluous. In fact, some of those natural slaves are otherwise wealthy, strong men who would be practically impossible to enslave except through capture in war).
Furthermore, the actual legal institutions required to deal with the fact of natural slavishness are contingent, and there's no reason that a more prosperous society would need to use Greek-style slavery. One way to put it in a modern context would be that those who are dependent on the state to survive are de facto property of the state, and that modern states have largely chosen to bind themselves to take care of their human property, but this is likewise just an historical contingency. There is nothing, besides the choice of voters, stopping the US from repealing some constitutional amendments and making fentanyl addicts pick cotton (to pick the most extreme case of natural slavery in the modern day. The capacity for freedom of a drug addict would not change if we were legally to enslave him, except that he might luck into a kinder master). So, from an Aristotelian perspective, in the modern age, we can pick out a couple categories:
Incidentally, in an American context, that last "choose and prefer" is crucial. Natural rights of the type the Constitution enshrines are based on very simple human capacities, in particular the capacity to choose and prefer. The rationality or quality of that ability to choose doesn't enter into it. Hence why we have a system that is able to assign legal rights without reference to more complex aspects of the individual's nature, including inner slavishness/freedom. This certainly causes problems over time, as people forget that they need other methods to deal with the naturally slavish, like occasionally throwing a chamberpot at the town drunk, but is better-adapted to modern norms and technologies than Classical slavery. Even if some people are born to be property, that does not imply that legal slavery is the solution. Instead, let a free market and healthy social norms deal with them (I'll leave to the reader the question of whether achieving a free market and healthy social norms today would be easier or harder than reinstating slavery).
If natural slaves exist, there's a lot of conflicts of interest and motivated reasoning in deciding that any particular individual is a natural slave, to the point where we're probably better off acting as though natural slaves don't exist.
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I think we are broadly in agreement, but this bit I think is important:
This is surely false on its face; at some point, your IQ is clearly too low to do anything but behave like a herd animal (at best!). I think what you might mean to suggest is that "a sufficiently high IQ is a necessary but insufficient condition to not being a slave," and I think that's right--that's why I pointed out that youth, drug addiction, or mental illness are also things that lead to "natural slavery" (Aristotle regarded even free children as essentially slaves, albeit temporarily).
Something I have seen happen a lot in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces is someone getting really angry (or sneery) about IQ discussions, because of a tendency to valorize high IQ in ways that might be explained as well, or better, by reference to conscientiousness, emotional awareness, family wealth, etc. But I suspect that the area where actual IQ tests have the most real world impact, at least in the U.S., is in the legal system--and it's not high IQs under discussion there! IQ is the gold standard for objective evaluation of whether a person can be made a slave, not in name but in the Aristotelian sense of being subject to the rule of another, because they are not intelligent enough for adequate self-care.
Yes, a high IQ person may also be in need of guidance, temporarily or permanently, as the result of other circumstances, and I agree with you re: etiquette etc. But a completely conscientious, totally decisive, utterly courageous person with an IQ of 50 would still be better off with a
masterguardian (which is, not coincidentally, the world Plato often used to describe the philosopher-king rulers of his ideal Republic).I think the way I’d put it is that it’s not just IQ, though sure, until you reach a reasonable threshold for IQ the chances you’d live independently go down to near zero. But I think in rational spaces especially, you end up ignoring the gifted Reddit user base who have decided to spend their lives in mom’s basement posting long paragraphs about things nobody cares about.
But I think the over identifying the idea with literal BCE slavery in whatever form is unnecessary, as other forms of control, and even relatively invisible and gentle forms of control are possible. You can use debt or consumption to get people to have jobs. You can enforce things through social structures (make it socially necessary to have a job). You can tie necessary services to jobs (like the USA does with health care.
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