A reflection on the published work of Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) with special reference to After Virtue (1981)
Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action.
Alasdair. MacIntyre, After Virtue
PROLOGUE
It would be difficult to over-emphasise the importance of the above quote from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It contains, in one succinct sentence, a much-needed reminder that most things that we now take to be ‘normal’ or ‘everyday’ were not so at some time in the past. With the exception of the autonomous nervous system and our basic physiological requirements, every action we perform, every choice we make can be traced back to some alpha point where an initial decision was made by us or our ancestors, remote and not so remote. And such initial decisions are not made in vacuo, so to speak. They are made on the basis of theories and beliefs which, themselves, constitute political or moral actions and which all have a history of their own. And yet we act, for the most part, as if the past were merely a prelude to the present.
Perhaps the chief reason for what I might call the assumed ‘givenness’ of our present condition is our general acceptance of the notion of progress – an idea generally unknown before the 17th C. Whilst the idea of material progress has abated somewhat since the coming of the atomic age and the age of ecology, it still looms large in the area of political and moral life. A great many of us still believe, along with Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, that the modern liberal democratic state, for all if its failings, represents our only real alternative, all other forms of human social and economic behaviour leading inexorably to various forms of totalitarianism or other regressive polities destructive of human freedom. A similarly large number of us believe too, that our modern notion of secular morality, freed from the alleged superstitions and prejudices of earlier religious dogmatisms, delivers a fairer and more just society where the ‘rights’ of the individual are paramount and trump all other considerations within the general provisos given to us by J.S. Mill: “The sole end for which mankind are (sic) warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection”.
And yet it is now apparent that the liberal democratic state and its attendant secular moral order, born only a few centuries ago, is a sickly child indeed. As I write these words, Americans are still reeling from the shock of recent events, where an armed mob stormed the Capitol building – a central symbol of American democracy.
Meanwhile, those citizens who hold to beliefs consistent with their religious traditions find that the so-called ‘tolerance’ and ‘pluralism’ of the modern liberal state is an illusion. It is traditionally-minded Christians, especially, who have suffered under this ‘soft totalitarianism’ of the modern liberal state. I use the term ‘traditionally-minded’ for good reason. There are, of course, many Christians (or at least many who identify as Christians) who are quite at home in the modern liberal order, for they have been prepared to jettison many of those fundamental values once central to the Christian tradition. They are, as it were, “low carb” Christians, for whom any whiff of dogma is the spiritual equivalent of sugary drinks and fatty foods.
How did we get to this impasse and what can we do about it? In the first place, it is now quite evident that recourse to rational argument is useless. It is useless because in the reigning atmosphere of moral relativism, one argument is as good as another. What matters, at the end of the day is power. If my views command a bigger presence on Facebook and Twitter than yours, then it is my views that will generally prevail.
It is, of course, hardly a new story. When Thucydides gave us his account of wars between the Greek city-states (History of the Peloponnesian Wars) he included a famous episodewhere the conquered Melians begged for mercy from the victorious Athenians. Here, in part, is the Athenian response:
Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made; we found it existing before us and will leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else having the same power as we have would do the same as we do.
Here is a justification of raw power and the same justification is implied today whenever the so-called ‘majority view’ prevails. For it turns out that the ‘majority’ are those with the loudest voices and the best social networks on Facebook and Twitter. It is not Truth that matters, but effectiveness. In any case, Truth has been banished.
In the face of such resources then, what hope do we have?
In the following account, I would like to consider some themes in MacIntyre’s most famous book, After Virtue. My version, of course, will be a much condensed and no doubt inadequate account of just how it is that we reached this impasse where it seems that reasoned argument and what we once called “common sense” is now impotent in the face of a sort of collective Nietzschean Will, deeply embedded in the heart of modern liberalism.
At the outset I must remind the reader that I have little professional background in philosophy and, like many others who have attempted to read MacIntyre, have found it a difficult task. It has taken me at least three full readings of MacIntyre’s main work, After Virtue, to glean what I take to be his main messages. It is not that he uses highly technical language, although this does occur from time to time. Rather, his writing style is not conducive to easy understanding. He often uses very long sentences, and one loses track of subject and predicate, etc. such that it is often necessary to re-read the sentence several times. I had thought that this was just my own deficiency as a reader but, having now listened to an audiobook of After Virtue employing a skilled reader, I note that he has the same problem and, every now and then, must repeat a sentence to get the message right.
It will be clear to the reader that I present my analysis from the point of view of a religious believer, but such belief is not a necessary prerequisite either to understand MacIntyre’s arguments or to assent to them. MacIntyre almost certainly wrote the bulk of After Virtue before he became a Catholic. Nonetheless, it is clear that, in the long history of virtue ethics, some form of religious belief always accompanied it – from Homer to the 17th C.
Some background on Alasdair MacIntyre and his work.
Throughout all of his writings on moral philosophy, one of the things that MacIntyre stresses is the need to see the development of all new ideas in the context of their historical settings. It is impossible, in other words, to write a history of philosophy which is entirely divorced from the more general history of the societies and eras within which such ideas developed. Now, precisely the same can be said of MacIntyre’s own philosophical writings. It is important then that I give a brief sketch of MacIntyre’s background and intellectual journey.
MacIntyre was born in Glasgow in 1929 but most of his education was in London (Queen Mary College and later, Oxford, where he took a MA. Degree). He began teaching at Manchester University in 1951 but later taught at Leeds, Essex, and Oxford Universities. In 1969 he shifted to America and there taught at several universities including Brandeis, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and Yale. To me, at any rate, this sort of intellectual nomadism bespeaks a certain restlessness of spirit.
In his early years MacIntyre, like so many western intellectuals in the immediate post-war years, became interested in Marxism. Indeed, it is fair to say that MacIntyre has never completely repudiated all of Marx’s critiques of capitalism. Of course, he quickly renounced such Marxist fantasies as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and of ‘the withering away of the state’. But it has been a consistent feature of MacIntyre’s work that he will draw upon ideas irrespective of their parentage. What matters is their explanatory power and their relevance to his general thesis. Thus readers will find that he has a high regard for some of Nietzsche’s ideas whilst dismissing his mad ravings concerning the Übermensch and the supposed ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. The importance of Nietzsche will become clearer as we delve into MacIntyre’s main thesis concerning the present state of moral discourse in the West.
To my mind, at any rate, MacIntyre’s early interest in Marxism was crucial in the development of his later thought. It gave him a perspective which was outside the dominant liberal/democratic/capitalist worldview, and this allowed him to question the validity of all of those Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies which formed the basis of such a worldview.
To some of my readers at least, such questioning may seem to be bordering on heretical. But it is easy to forget that the system of political and social order which we employ is very largely judged on the basis of the outcome of its hideous totalitarian alternatives. Seldom do we appraise it from the standpoint of those traditional Christian perspectives which are central to the Gospel message. Perhaps there is a “third way” between liberal capitalism and its ugly totalitarian alternatives. And so, maybe that famous line from Kenneth Minogue – “Capitalism is what people do if you leave them alone” – is in need of emendation.
The other features of MacIntyre’s intellectual journey have been his intellectual honesty and his deep commitment to follow the dictates of human reasoning, wherever they might take him. Many professional philosophers of our time seem to regard their profession as an opportunity to advance their skills and defend novel ideas without any necessary personal commitment to such ideas. The whole business seems to be little more than a game of wits and an opportunity to show off. A comparison with the Sophists of Plato’s day would not be out of order. Moreover such philosophizing seems to take place in a sort of moral vacuum. Although “Possible Worlds” philosophy might have its uses in modal logic, etc, it is very far removed, indeed, from our everyday life and the range of moral choices we need to make in that life. “When speculation has done its worst”, said Dr Johnson, “two and two still make four”.
MacIntyre, on the other hand, is much like the Socrates of old, whose life of philosophizing was to answer the question “How should I live?” It is clear from his writings that he takes moral enquiry very seriously at a personal level. This commitment, along with his personal honesty, has seen him modify or abandon many of his early ideas in the face of new-found evidence or in those comments of his critics which he believes are valid critiques of one or more of his ideas.
An example of this intellectual honesty would not go astray here. At some stage in his teaching career, MacIntyre decided he would expose his students to the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. His purpose in doing so was to point out to them just where Aquinas had gone wrong. However, in the course of his reading of the Summa, quite the opposite result ensued. It was Aquinas who ‘showed up’ MacIntyre and not the other way round. MacIntyre now considers himself to be an “Augustinian Thomist”. He converted to Catholicism in 1981, the same year that After Virtue was first published.
At the beginning of this essay, I mentioned that, for MacIntyre, philosophical ideas cannot be divorced from their historical settings. If you go to the Internet and search for “History of Philosophy” you will typically be given a sort of sequence starting, perhaps, with the pre-Socratics, then moving to Plato, Aristotle, Medieval philosophy, early modern philosophy, ‘Enlightenment’ philosophy, and finishing with philosophers of our own era. The inference is a sort of development and enlargement of philosophical thought such that, say, the work of Hume or Kant or WVO Quine ‘corrects’ some of the ‘errors’ made by Plato or Aristotle. But this, as MacIntyre points out, is a nonsense. Every philosopher is a child of his or her own era with all the background baggage which that entails. But just because Plato lived some two and a half thousand years ago does not mean that his ideas are out of date. Indeed, I suspect that, for MacIntyre, the very phrase “out of date” is a loaded one, carrying its own baggage of doubtful suppositions and unquestioned assumptions.
Another general feature of MacIntyre’s work is the sheer range of published material he quotes in developing his arguments. Of course, we would expect that MacIntyre would quote from the works of the major western philosophers over the last two and a half millennia, but we find that he also quotes extensively from great works of fiction, from history books, from sociologists, economists, political theorists, games theory proponents, and so on.
Of course, like all of us, MacIntyre has his personal likes and dislikes. He likes Jane Austen and detests the Bloomsbury crowd. He particularly dislikes the modern bureaucratic manager and, in After Virtue, devotes a good deal of space to dismantling his or her pretensions to some special sort of knowledge. Likewise, he is rather scathing in his treatment of the social sciences in general, and their pretensions to be ‘scientific’. Whether these personal likes and dislikes have overly influenced his arguments is matter for each reader to judge for himself or herself. For my own part, I find his dislike of bureaucracies entirely reasonable. There again, I spent a good many years as a public servant and endured a great many reorganisations and courses in human resource management!
Lastly, I do not want to suggest that the general ideas put forward by MacIntyre are always peculiarly his own. In particular he owes a debt of gratitude to those advocates of ‘virtue ethics’ who came before him, most notably Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geech. Another writer who has clearly influenced MacIntyre is Phillip Rieff and, in parts of After Virtue, there are clear echoes of themes developed by Rieff in his The Triumph of the Therapeutic. For all that though, MacIntyre’s contribution to the debates in modern moral philosophy would be difficult to over-estimate. After Virtue is now in its third edition, with numerous imprints for each one. It has been translated into nearly every major language on the globe. Today, some 40 years after its first appearance it is still widely quoted and widely debated. Moreover, an increasing number of mainly younger Christian scholars, influenced in no small way by MacIntyre’s writings, have taken up many of his ideas to promote various avenues of what they term ‘postliberal thought’.
MacIntyre is now in his nineties but, as of a year or two ago, was still giving lectures and developing his ideas. For him, as for Aquinas, all conclusions in philosophy are tentative and amenable to improvement and emendation. We are after all, fallen creatures with imperfect knowledge. Looking back over those ninety plus years, MacIntyre might reflect along with us that God works in mysterious ways indeed!
What is virtue ethics?
In my attempted exposition of Alasdair MacIntyre’s most famous work, After Virtue, I propose to take a slightly different course than that taken by the author. I do this because, in my own case, I have found it easier to follow his general argument by first understanding precisely what he wishes to defend and to recommend in the book. What he wishes to defend, in fact, is something called virtue ethics and it would be helpful to understand that term before we delve more deeply into the book. In what follows, I am going to assume that my readers have no significant background in in the field of moral philosophy – very much my own situation when I first began to read After Virtue many years ago.
At the outset, it needs to be stressed that what may first seem to be a rather tedious and obscure set of explanations and definitions turn out to be of critical importance for our understanding of the whole problem associated with those modern moral philosophies which purport to offer ‘reasoned’ and ‘inclusive’ alternatives to an historical system of moral reasoning which dates back to the very birth of the West and which sustained Christendom for the greater part of its history – certainly until the 17th Century. That historic system is called virtue ethics.
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Very often, you will hear someone say something like the following: “He was saved from serious injury by virtue of wearing a safety helmet”. Or, perhaps, “He was given a promotion by virtue of his long and dutiful service to the Company”. In these, or similar sentences, the word virtue is being used in a much older context than we might suppose. For here it might be substituted for something like “by means of”, whereas in more modern usage a virtue is more commonly used to denote something like an admirable quality in some person. Indeed, even the latter usage is going out of date rapidly for, today, to be ‘virtuous’ almost means that you are missing out on something – that you are not enjoying life to the full. So, for instance, there is a film called “The Forty-year-old Virgin”, in which the once praised virtue of chastity is ridiculed.
And so, in its older usage – a usage which, as I have said above, dates back to the birth of Western Civilisation – a virtue is a means to some end. But what end? The short answer is human happiness or human flourishing. But why happiness? Why not ‘peace’ or ‘prosperity’ or any other desirable human state? The answer, I suggest, is that all other end states are more correctly to be classed as means, not ends. All other desired human states are desired, in the final analysis, because they promote or enable happiness.
It was Aristotle who first codified the virtues that he supposed were necessary to achieve the end state of happiness. Of course, the general concept of a virtue long predates Aristotle. As MacIntyre points out, certain virtues are implicit in Homeric Greek society –courage being the pre-eminent example. But irrespective of whether the virtues are those of Homeric Greece, the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, or, indeed, the virtues of the later Christian era, they all share one thing in common: the practice of the virtues is only possible within a system of co-operative human activity – a system of shared beliefs and customs, of defined roles (soldier, craftsman, housewife, etc), and of recognised social obligations. Note immediately how this differs from our own situation where “the rights of the individual” trump all other rights and obligations.
This brings us to another notion employed by MacIntyre, that of a practice. Now, it is typical of MacIntyre that his careful definitions of things like ‘virtue” and ‘practice’ are themselves reliant on antecedent definitions of other things. We cannot fully define what a virtue is until we have defined what a practice is and vice versa. But to define a practice requires us to back-track even further and define something which MacIntyre calls ‘internal goods’.
Perhaps the best way to explain the term ‘internal goods’ is via example. MacIntyre uses the game of chess as his example. Suppose you wish to introduce your young child to the game of chess. You wish to do so because you know the game is challenging and rewarding. You also know that it is a good vehicle for social interaction with others. At the beginning, the child may not show much interest in the game, so you decide to offer him or her a reward for playing. Note that this reward has nothing to do with the game itself. It is an external reward. Now, of course, initially there is nothing to prevent the child from cheating in order to receive the reward.
If the child persists with the game, however, eventually he or she will come to appreciate the game for the challenges it presents, and cheating would clearly negate any such challenges. The child will come to see that the rules of the game are absolutely necessary if one is to really enjoy the challenges it presents. And this latter reward – the challenge and the ensuing satisfaction is an internal reward. It can only be obtained within the rules and methods of the game. The child will now play for love of the game itself and external rewards will not be necessary. Moreover, one can discern a definite end or goal – that of achieving excellence in the skill of outmanoeuvring an opponent.
MacIntyre would call the game of chess a practice. It is a practice because the ‘goods’ it offers are internal (they come from the game itself) and the game has its own standards of excellence towards which the player can aspire. And it will be obvious too, that the game of chess requires certain virtues, the most obvious being that of honesty.
Note that the standards required for the game of chess are not the same as those for some other form of activity – sheep farming or building fine furniture. Note too, that not all human activity is a practice in the MacIntyrean sense. ‘Skipping’ stones across a lake is not a practice because there are no defined rules or standards required and there is no sort of co-operative human activity involved.
So now, hopefully, we are in a position to understand MacIntyre’s own formal definitions of practice and virtue:
By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.
A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.
Note that MacIntyre uses words like ‘acquired’, ‘possession’ and ‘exercise’ to emphasis the fact that a virtue is not just some spur-of -the-moment impulse to do something good. It is, rather, a habit of mind, developed and maintained over time. Such habits of mind enable us to achieve the excellence (or happiness) we seek. They are, in fact, settled character traits – entrenched dispositions which enable us to become good human beings – not just good in reference to our own disposition, but good also in the sense that that they promote the human community (the family, the village, etc). And these character traits are acquired by a process of training – they do not just happen.
It is also important to understand that in what MacIntyre calls practices, the goods to be obtained and the standards required to do so are above any subjective individual judgement (i.e. they are objective and not subjective). Contrast this with today’s emphasis on the individual where subjective standards are held to be good things – “doing your own thing”.
In dealing with this whole area of virtue ethics there is another important concept to be considered. This, Aristotle called phronesis and we translate as ‘practical wisdom’. Practical wisdom is the exercise of reason (good judgement) in the practice of the virtues. It is knowing the best way to act in a given circumstance – not just the best way for us, but for our families and our communities as well. Here again, a certain training in the art of good discernment is required. Wisdom comes with experience.
Translated into the traditional Christian moral order, the virtues enable us to practice the message of the Gospel in this life and to achieve our ultimate aim of the beatific vision. Importantly, though MacIntyre does not stress the religious side of virtue ethics in After Virtue because he wishes to engage with other post-Christian moral schemas on their own ground. His arguments do not require religious belief as a pre-requisite.
Now, the reader might be tempted to say; “well, all this is pretty self-evident, so what’s the point”? Well, as we shall see later on, this traditional schema of the moral order was overturned some three centuries ago due to the confluence of many things – the aftermath of the Reformation, the rise of the scientific worldview and the increasing secularisation of western society. The critical question then arises: have we managed to provide some workable alternative system of moral philosophy to supplant what was destroyed? MacIntyre argues that we have not. Indeed, he goes further. He suggests that what we have today are mere unconnected fragments of this older schema which masquerade as a coherent moral enterprise.
One final reflection on the virtues before we move on to consider MacIntyre’s reasons for his claim. Let us suppose that the traditional system of moral philosophy is, indeed, the only one which can adequately (but by no means perfectly) provide what humans most desire – happiness or a sense of wellbeing. In that case, we would expect that those substitute philosophies cannot deliver on what they claim. And so, the end result would be a great deal of unhappiness in the modern West. Now, I invite readers to visit the Beyond Blue website at (https://www.beyondblue.org.au/). There you will find some staggering figures on the scale of depression and suicide in Australia. Much the same situation is occurring in the USA and I recently reviewed a book entitled Deaths of Despair. Indeed, in the USA life expectancy has fallen for the past three years in a row. The increases in such deaths are not just from straight suicide, but from alcohol and drug overdose as well. In other words, when true happiness cannot be gained, the attempt to achieve chemical happiness is bound to fail.
Of course, the modern-day secular humanist will here protest that I have no way on knowing the figures for depression and suicide in former ages. Indeed, even if I did have such figures, the old, weather-beaten excuse would immediately be proffered: “But the people back then were too scared to take their own life because of the fear of eternal damnation”! This completely evades the issue. The whole point of abandoning the old schema was, so we are told, to deliver people from the fear and ignorance of an earlier age – to relieve them of their superstitious religious beliefs or irrational fears and ‘enlighten’ them. In this task, it has manifestly failed. We are now faced with little short of an epidemic of depression, suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. We ought to examine why this is so. Here, Macintyre can help us.
Having now given his brief and no doubt inadequate account of virtue ethics we will, now need to consider the genesis of the modern-day alternatives, their inadequacies, and their consequences.
The demise of the old moral order and “The Enlightenment Project”.
Let us first go back a step and reconsider one of the concepts at the core of virtue ethics. What the ancient Greeks called a telos, we normally translate as an ‘end’ or final destination. It is also translated as ‘final cause’ and thus, Aristotle’s definition often reads: “that for the sake of which a thing is done”. It was one of the four causes which explained why things are as they are – formal cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause.
Now, clearly, there is no point in practicing the virtues if one has no clear purpose in mind – some sort of ‘end game’. For Aristotle it was happiness or ‘wellbeing’. We are unsure as to whether Aristotle projected his ‘happiness’ beyond this life as he is equivocal on this point (Plato, on the other hand, is not). Nonetheless, when the medieval scholastics incorporated Aristotelianism into Christian philosophy (most famously in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas), the final end of a human life was not just earthly happiness but the beatific vision of the next life. Practicing the virtues would assist us in this task not, of course, without the help of God’s grace.
Consider now the fate of such a notion as ‘final cause’ after the Reformation. Martin Luther asserted that we can only attain salvation by faith alone (Sola fide). Such was the wretchedness of Fallen Man that, to suppose he could do anything to improve himself in God’s eyes was out of the question. He was utterly dependent on the mercy and grace of God. Men and women could not, by the practice of the virtues, help themselves to achieve their final end. Of course, this did not mean that humans should cease to be virtuous. Rather, they would be virtuous purely as a sort of unearned side-effect of following the Gospel message. Final causes would be otiose.
Remember, too that the Reformers disliked the late medieval scholastics because of what they saw as their rarefied arguments and point scoring which seemed (to them) to have little to do with the practice of the Christian faith. In fact, the Reformers had already retreated from classical metaphysics, and they charged the scholastics with having introduced paganism (Plato and Aristotle) into Christianity, thus sullying the purity and simplicity of the Gospel message.
If we now move forward a little to the 17th C, we have famous figures like Descartes and Lord Bacon completely dismissing the notion of final causes. These two figures were enormously influential. Indeed, we generally date the birth of modern philosophy from the publication of Descartes’ works and Francis Bacon is often called “the father of modern science”. It is beyond my remit here to explain their reasons. Sufficient to say that, in both cases, they felt it was an impediment to true scientific discovery.
Further attacks on virtue ethics came in the 18th C. One of the key ideas in virtue ethics is what is sometimes termed a ‘functional concept’. So, for instance, the word ‘clock’ is such a functional concept. When we think of a clock, we immediately associate it with the purpose of keeping time and not for “throwing at the cat”, for instance (one of Macintyre’s rare lighter moments in After Virtue). So it is with a huge range of words. In virtue ethics, the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are such functional concepts because the very words imply some end or purpose. We could not adequately replace such words with, say, ‘higher vertebrate animal’. Being a man or a woman immediately implies certain functions, values, and ends. But this view was challenged head on by the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) in a famous argument often called ‘Hume’s guillotine’.
In brief, what Hume claimed is that we cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. That is, from a factual statement or a series of factual statements we cannot derive values. To put it another way, if a reasoner only has access to non-moral and non-evaluative factual premises, the reasoner cannot logically infer the truth of moral statements. When we use the word ‘man’ or ‘woman’, nothing ‘extra’ can be implied. It is a bare factual statement and gives us no information on purposes or functions. This and related arguments in Enlightenment philosophy have had an enormous influence, despite the fact that Hume’s reasoning here is very dodgy and hardly ever applies in real life. When we are given the factual statement “this is a wristwatch”, we immediately (and quite naturally) know what it ought to do. It ought to keep good time and not be used to throw at the cat. In their futile attempt to make words more ‘scientific’, the Enlightenment thinkers actually impoverished the language.
It is worth noting here that, if you deny that the term ‘man’ or ‘woman’ implies some specific set of functions, then you are more or less in the Nietzschean universe where you are completely free to determine your own destiny – what you are and what you do (MacIntyre has a chapter in After Virtue entitled “Nietzsche or Aristotle” – these are, finally, the only two options we have). And so, too , does the abandonment of a set of specific functions for humans led to that familiar modern catchcry “do your own thing”. Other consequences spring to mind. One is supposed ‘gender fluidity’ and the assumed right to choose whether to be a man, woman or…. whatever. In the universe of virtue ethics, such arbitrary choices cannot be employed without imperilling the whole system. Functional concepts are a given.
The mention of ‘right to choose’ brings us to another rather surprising outcome of the loss of the concept of final cause/function in modern moral discourse. It has to do with the distinctly modern notion of ‘Rights’. During the course of his exposition, MacIntyre makes what first seems to be a shocking claim – that the so-called ‘Charter of Human Rights, and other related ‘Rights’ are moral fictions! “But surely”, we say, “that cannot be the case. What about the ‘Right to Life’”? Now, of course, MacIntyre, as a Catholic and a Thomist, surely believes that it a grave crime to kill an unborn infant. What he objects to is the modern use of the word ‘right’ without any stated context. By virtue of what, exactly, do we have ‘rights? he would ask. We must understand that MacIntyre is quite specific about the type of rights which he believes to be moral fictions:
By ‘rights’ I do not mean those rights conferred by positive law or custom on specified classes of person; I mean those rights which are alleged to belong to human beings as such and which are cited as a reason for holding that people ought not to be interfered with in their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
And so, in order for humans to have ‘rights’, we need to ascribe to such humans some universal function/end such that the perceived violation of some ‘right’ prevents the human agent from achieving or attempting to achieve his or her proper function/end. What is that function? It is, of course, the traditional concept of the purpose of a human life, as I have discussed above. With some acerbity, MacIntyre points out that: “In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertions whatsoever is followed with great rigor”.
Of course, some modern moral philosophers assert that we have basic ‘intuitions’ concerning human rights. But what, exactly is an intuition – what gives it sufficient moral force to demand our assent? As MacIntyre says: “one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.”
But now, let us return briefly to Hume. One of the obvious corollaries of Hume’s argument ‘no ought from as is’ concerns his attitude to moral philosophy. Quite obviously (to Hume), we cannot derive moral propositions simply by applying human reason to a series of facts. So where do we get them from? Hume thinks that they are part of what he calls our ‘moral sentiments’. It is the ‘feelings’ and ‘passions’ which move us to moral action. But, as MacIntyre points out, the great advocate of human reason here betrays himself, for in his description of ‘the passions’ he rules out the passions of ‘enthusiasts’ (the Levellers and Catholics of an ascetic bent to name but two), thereby showed the prejudice of his age. And anyway, why should we trust our feelings and passions? What gives them sufficient force for global assent?
As has often been said by wise men and women, ideas have consequences. One of the consequences of Hume’s advocacy for the passions was the decision by Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher (1724-1804) to examine the whole notion (Hume, he said, “awoke him from his slumbers”). And so it was that Kant erected his moral philosophy (countering Hume) specifically on the basis of a higher human reason. He proposed that our moral order is imprinted – part of the architecture of the mind, as it were – and that it manifests itself as a duty – an imperative or a reason beyond question. It is an irreducible part of our makeup.
Here then, are two new and quite different secular approaches to moral philosophy, both designed to fill the void left by the destruction of the traditional notion of virtue ethics. But there were other candidate philosophies too. One of the most important was that of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). He is the ‘father’ of what we call utilitarianism. In determining our moral stance, he maintained, we must consider ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. What is ‘the good’ for Bentham? It is simply the maximising of pleasure and the minimising of pain. Bentham seems to equate pleasure with happiness and quite obviously seems to regard it as almost a physical sensation.
The problem is, of course, that not all pleasures are equal. Bentham’s successor, J.S. Mill tried to address this problem but, so MacIntyre would argue, was completely unsuccessful. Even so, utilitarianism remains as a strong current in modern moral philosophy, one well known and current advocate being the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer.
Here then, in the briefest of outlines I have tried to sketch three different approaches designed to replace the traditional concept of the virtues. There are, of course, other approaches, but most of them are variants of those I have already identified. Can they all be right? Not only would MacIntyre answer in the negative, but he would also further claim that their adherents, though they might claim to base their arguments on careful reasoning, are actually engaged in what MacIntyre calls emotivism. This is a master stroke by MacIntyre because he turns a common argument, put forward by many secular-minded philosophers of our era, directly on its head.
Back some decades ago when I first started reading elementary philosophy texts, something called ‘Logical Positivism’ was all the go. It was made popular by AJ. Ayer (the Legs Diamond of philosophy) in a book titled Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer (who especially disliked religious belief) supposed that when someone says, “This is good”, they are saying no more than “Hurrah for this”. In other words, they are simply expressing an emotion (hence emotivism). MacIntyre now turns the concept straight back upon the various modern contenders in the area of moral philosophy. Lacking any real basis for some universal assent based on reason, the various contenders, (Kantians, utilitarians, etc) invariably end up with nothing more than emotive arguments. Each side simply speaks past the other since their arguments are totally incommensurable.
The failure of modern moral philosophies.
We generally assume, when we talk to our friends and neighbours, read the newspapers, watch the news on television or listen to radio talkback shows, that most people share the same general ideas concerning what is good and what is evil.. However, it is the detailed process of applying such general beliefs to our everyday life that such apparent agreement tends to unravel. Murder, for instance, is almost universally recognised as an evil thing. But what about euthanasia and abortion? In these and similar scenarios, the near-universal assent suddenly dissolves into interminable argument. Why?
MacIntyre argues that the reason we fall into such interminable arguments is because each camp in the debate argues from different premises – neo-Kantians against utilitarians against Rights theorists etc. And there can be no resolution in these debates because, ultimately, there is no shared ground of reasoned argument on which to resolve differences. This suggests, in turn, that in each of the arguments there is some element of subjectivity, perhaps quite unrecognised.
It is at this point that MacIntyre introduces Nietzsche to bolster his argument “What!”, you exclaim with horror, “that mad dog!” Now it is true that Nietzsche did end up in an asylum and that his crazed utterances about the Übermensch and the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity are beneath contempt. But Nietzsche’s dismissal of the whole Enlightenment moral project in The Gay Science is a brilliant piece of writing – incisive, witty, and utterly devastating. MacIntyre does not quote Nietzsche directly, but I would like to do so here by reproducing just that part of his critique aimed at Kant’s moral philosophy. Recall that Kant tells us that our moral order comes to us in the form of an unconditional duty, something he calls ‘the categorical imperative’ Here is part of Nietzsche’s response:
What? You admire the categorical imperative within’ you? This’ “firmness” of your so-called moral judgment? This “unconditional” feeling that “here everyone must judge as I do”? Rather admire your selfishness at this point. And the blindness, pettiness, and frugality of your selfishness. For it is selfish to experience one’s own judgment as a universal law; and this selfishness is blind, petty, and frugal because it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself, nor created for yourself an ideal of your own, your very own-for that could never be somebody else’s and much less that of all. (Section 335).
Nietzsche simply thumbs his nose at Kant, saying “why should I follow your advice?” And, of course, to all of the other contenders in the field, he would do likewise. To the utilitarians he would say: “you want me to act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Whose conception of happiness – yours or mine?” And so on.
And it is worth elaborating a little on the utilitarian schema. Earlier on, I hinted that there were problems with Bentham’s conception of “good” and that equating it with pleasure (as the opposite of pain) seems to demote it almost to some sort of physiological sensation. J.S. Mill, as Bentham’s successor could see this problem and tried to get around it by proposing ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures. But irrespective of their quality and whether pleasure and happiness are the same thing (to me, very doubtful), massive problems are still involved. Confronted with Mill’s utilitarian formula, you or I (or Nietzsche) might reasonably ask; ‘but how do you arrive at the greatest pleasure for the greatest number?” Pleasures are of many sorts and the various sorts are non-additive. Without stooping to unnecessary crudity it is fair to say that there is a sort of base pleasure in evacuating one’s bowels. Is this to be equated with listening to the Bach C minor Passacaglia and Fugue? Pleasures, in short, cannot be aggregated as Mill or Bentham suppose. There is no way of providing a calculus of pleasure such that we can deliver the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
Another writer that MacIntyre draws upon at some length is Kierkegaard. In his famous work Either Or, Kierkegaard introduces us to three ‘characters’, ‘A’ (a rich aesthete), ‘B’ (who commends an ethical way of life) and ‘Victor Eremita’ who simply edits and annotates the literary output of A and B. In commending the aesthetic way, A maintains the primacy of immediate experience – the total immersion of the self in one’s own immediate pleasures, whilst B maintains that primacy must be given to one’s obligations to others, to futurity, etc.
Suppose someone comes along wo has not yet chosen which path to follow – the aesthetic or the moral. Suppose, though, that he or she is slightly inclined to choose the moral. But to be so inclined is to have already decided that the moral argument has some force which the other lacks. And this, in turn, shows that the enquirer was not really a tabula rasa, so to speak. He or she, in fact, had already made a choice. In short, what Kierkegaard puts before us is not the choice to decide between the aesthetic and the moral, but to accept whether or not to make any judgements using those terms. He implies a sort of meta-judgement – a judgment whether to judge on those terms!
This again highlights a sort of deep incoherence in all of those secular moral schemes associated with Enlightenment philosophy. Our much-vaunted reliance on human reason to provide an adequate moral base seems to have led us to an impasse.
This brings us to the question as to whether Nietzsche’s dismissal of Enlightenment moral philosophy is also effective against the older traditional schema involving virtue ethics. Nietzsche, of course, believes he can so dismiss it as being part of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. So, in bringing Nietzsche to his aid is MacIntyre thereby hoist on his own petard? MacIntyre would claim otherwise. In a later book, Dependent Rational Animals, he defends virtue ethics from a very different angle – one that would counter Nietzsche’s claim. I have only briefly glossed through Dependent Rational Animals and what I have to say here may well misrepresent MacIntyre on many points. However, let me proceed with what I imagine MacIntyre’s response to Nietzsche would be.
At the time of publication of The Gay Science, Nietzsche was living off a pension from his former employer, the University of Basel. He travelled widely throughout Europe in those years, meeting a great many intellectuals. He had, at this time a private secretary, Peter Gast. Responding once to Nietzsche’s claim that the Übermensch or Nietzschean ideal type had no need of ‘superfluous people’, Gast enumerated the number of people that Epicurus required in order to supply him with his simple diet of goat cheese (goat herder, dairymaid, cheesemaker, carter, retailer, etc).
In short, as a dependent, rational animal, Nietzsche, like all of us, needed food and clothing for survival, and money to purchase such items. His travels, his very writings, were only made possible because he lived in a society – a polis – within which the normal requirements for the life of an intellectual and writer and a higher vertebrate animal could be met. And that matrix of societal relationships and functions required, in turn a plethora of MacIntyre’s practices. Such practices required the virtues for, without them, how could Nietzsche be assured that when he ordered opium or chlorate hydrate from his chemist, he would not be supplied with talcum powder or rat poison. Nietzsche was, by the necessities of his animal nature wholly dependent on the operation of a society which in turn, could not be held together without the virtues. The Übermensch, it turns out, still has to submit to the exigencies of nature –and nurture.
Some consequences of the breakdown of the traditional moral order.
As I indicated at the start of this essay, MacIntyre’s account differs from my own attempted synopsis in that he follows a different sequence. He works backwards from the present, whereas I have done pretty much the opposite.
In his first chapter, Macintyre’s draws upon the substance of a famous work in science fiction, A Canticle for Lebowitz (Walter Miller, 1959). In some dystopian future, perhaps after a nuclear holocaust, the survivors vow to stamp out the practice of science so it may never again imperil their future. All scientific books are burnt, the study of science banned, and so on. Then at some later and more enlightened stage, an attempt is made to reconstitute the sciences. But, of course, only scraps of the former sciences have survived – half burnt pages from books, unconnected pieces of equipment, and so on. Nonetheless, from these fragments some sort of scientific enterprise is patched together. But now, of course, the context in which these surviving fragments were initially embedded is no longer available.
The adherents of this ‘new’ science, are of course, blithely unaware of such a context and, from their cobbled together information, produce theories where phlogiston rubs shoulders with neutrinos, dark matter, and Bohr atoms. Indeed, their philosophers produce ‘philosophies of science’ in which, say, some future W.V.O. Quine can argue that all philosophy should become more ‘scientific’.
Transfer this scenario to moral philosophy, says MacIntyre, and you have exactly the present state of moral discourse. What we have are mere fragments of a former coherent moral enterprise and yet we use these fragments as if they comprised some fully formed, rational moral schema. But of course the very diversity of such moral enterprises today betrays their supposed rationality. They cannot all be right and, lacking a proper context, none of them can be pinned down to some ultimate ground of rationality.
The end result is emotivism masquerading as rational argument. Each side in the interminable debates between utilitarians, neo-Kantians, etc supposes that rationality is on their side. However, as MacIntyre notes, when pressed for detail, the result is generally no more than assertion and raised voices. MacIntyre puts it this way:
I have … characterized that predicament as one in which the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent. Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone else now listen to him?
Another consequence of the incommensurability of modern moral discourse is the rise of the distinctly modern notion of protest. To protest, once meant to affirm something- to bear witness to something. Now, as Macintyre explains, it means exactly the opposite:
But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument, the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises.
Note, in the above quote, that protest is the inevitable outcome of the clash between two modern moral schemas – one based on rights, the other on the application of utilitarian principles.
At the very beginning of this essay, I reproduced a quote from MacIntyre concerning the inevitable connection, however distant, between theory and action. And so, with emotivism, you would expect to see some expression of the phenomenon in everyday modern life, not just in abstruse moral debates. Not unexpectedly, MacIntyre spends a good many pages dealing with the social outcomes of emotivism in our dealings with others.
There are, he supposes, three typical characters in which the phenomenon of emotivism is clearly at play. I have italicised the word character because MacIntyre uses it in a special setting. He asks us to consider the characters in a Japanese Noh play (a Punch and Judy show might have sufficed). As soon as we see and hear such characters, we know roughly what to expect from them. Their role and their character are intermixed These are the types that MacIntyre calls characters. They are as MacIntyre says, “the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in which moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world”.
There are, no doubt, many such characters in modernity, but MacIntyre deals with only three – the bureaucratic manager, the therapist, and the aesthete. How then, is their emotivism manifested?
In the case of the manager and the therapist the answer is clear enough. In their respective roles, they lay claim to special knowledge and expertise which, in fact, they do not possess. MacIntyre is not here talking about specialist managers or therapists (e.g. the manager of a small engineering shop who must have some detailed engineering background or the physiotherapist who must have a good knowledge of the human musculature and skeletal structures). Rather he has in mind (in the case of the manager) a typical graduate of a university course in business management who, by virtue of his or her training is supposed to be equally competent in managing say, a bus company, a brewery, a large chicken farm, or a stockbroking firm.
Since this form of management is clearly divorced from the nature of that being managed, exactly what is its area of expertise? In can be none other than the ability to successfully manipulate others to compliant modes of behaviour. And to do this, those others must be treated as means to the manager’s own ends and not ends in themselves.
If such management is to be a true ‘social science’ (which it claims to be), then it must have at its disposal a stock of laws or law-like generalisations (as the natural sciences do) to merit the name ‘science’. But it manifestly does not have a stock of such laws and MacIntyre gives many examples of the failures of supposed ‘laws’ in the social sciences. But precisely because bureaucratic management does claim scientific expertise, its operation cannot but involve the expression of emotivism.
Much the same goes for the therapist and I do not propose to elaborate on MacIntyre’s arguments here. The interested reader will find a devastating critique in Phillip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic. Nonetheless, I cannot resist a mention of that famous Sunday Observer columnist, Peter Simple (David Wharton), whose satirical pieces were hugely popular. In the (non-existent) Grey Book of Glynasbon, an ancient ‘wisdom text’, the following advice is given under the title ‘Three things to avoid’: 1. A bottle labelled ‘wine-type-wine’, 2. A bardic deckchair, and 3. A ginger-bearded interpersonal relations expert.
MacIntyre’s third ‘character’, the aesthete, is an interesting choice. In what way is a rich aesthete given to emotivism? If part of emotivist behaviour implies treating other people merely as means to your own ends, then the aesthete is certainly a candidate. Quoting another writer, MacIntyre calls the aesthete “a consumer of persons”. But, for me at least, the case Macintyre makes is not as strong as that for the manager and therapist. What has clearly influenced MacIntyre here, I think, is a particular episode in the history of moral philosophy which centres about the work of G.E. Moore.
In tracing the failure of utilitarianism, MacIntyre notes that one of its last advocates, Henry Sidgwick (late 19th C) ruefully concluded that “where he had hoped to find a cosmos, he found only chaos”. At the foundation of moral thinking, he concluded, lie beliefs in statements for the truth of which no further reason can be given. To such statements Sidgwick, gave the name intuitions. Then, early in the 20th century, G.E. Moore borrowed the term, presenting his borrowings, MacIntyre tells us “With his own penumbra of bad argument in Principia Ethica” [MacIntyre is not adverse to sticking in the knife from time to time].
When the Bloomsbury crowd came across the work, they were thunderstruck with awe and admiration, for what Moore had concluded in Principia Ethica was that the essence of intuitionism was that “one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge”. This was their own very project – especially the love part [Dorothy Parker famously said that “They lived in circles, painted in squares and loved in triangles].
Intuitionism was embraced as a philosophical stance with impeccable credentials, so they told themselves. It soon became evident however that this intuitionism was, in fact, no more than a thin disguise for their own selfish actions as “consumers of persons”. Here then, was a form of emotivism at work amongst the rich aesthetes of Bloomsbury.
The other source for MacIntyre’s particular choice of the rich aesthete can be found in famous novels. We have already discussed the aesthete in Kierkegaard’s Either Or. To this, Macintyre adds the eponymous character in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. Both are ‘bad boys’, thumbing their nose at conventional morality, and both “lounge so insolently at the entrance to the modern world”. Another rather obvious source is Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. Against such emotivist characters Macintyre places those who appear in the novels of Jane Austen. These characters practice the virtues and represent, at least in some degree, MacIntyre’s ‘type-specimen’ of the well-lived life.
Conclusion
So, having now dealt with the pathologies of modern moral philosophy, what is MacIntyre’s ‘take home message’? In fact he does not offer any clear pathway out of our dilemma. At the end of the day, he says, we have two choices – Nietzsche or Aristotle. That is to say, we can opt for precisely the sort of rampant individualism that we see all around us, or we can embrace the virtues as the only real and permanent avenue for human fulfilment.
I find it strange, to say the least, that today’s promoters of the Darwinist schema for humans have little to say on this matter. It seems clear that the social units of the family and the polis (whether the latter be a tribe, a village, or a city-state) have historically provided the only clear way in which the human species can thrive. When the early Greeks pronounced their admiration for the social organisation of the beehive, they surely thereby showed some deep knowledge of the human condition and human vulnerability in nature. That man is a social animal has been recognised since the dawn of civilisation. That liberal individualism, with its attendant emotivist philosophies, directly opposes this fact ought to be equally obvious.
In the liberal version of multiculturalism, every culture must be praised and nurtured except that culture from which the whole liberal tradition itself emerged as a sort of mutant species (to continue with our Darwinian schema). There is a good deal of self-hate here. Liberalism, after all, can be seen as a Christian heresy.
MacIntyre’s vision for the immediate future is bleak. He does not suppose that our present circumstances compare directly with those of 4th C Rome, but he does suppose that there is an historical precedent in the figure of St Benedict. Just as Benedict fled the dying Rome and set up his little community in the desert, so might it be that we will need some similar sort of figure. Our barbarians are not at the gate, they are already amongst us. Unlike Benedict, though, we cannot flee the city.
There is, in fact, quite a diverse group of mainly younger intellectuals who take MacIntyre seriously, and are seeking ways in which, what we once called the western tradition, can survive. Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option is just one example. One of the things that characterises this group is their political stance. They stand equally apart from the Left and the Right. Their conservatism, if one can really call it that, is not Burkean conservatism. It is much older and goes all the way back to Plato. They are post-liberal and pre-conservative at the same time.
Then again, of course, there are a great many people today who think that what we call “the western tradition” is an anachronism – something to be ashamed of, and something we must jettison. Every day, we see new assaults on concepts that only a couple of decades ago, were considered to be beyond argument. Little by little, the edifice of the polis is crumbling. This, they take to be a measure of progress toward some Brave New World of supposed unlimited freedom – a “freedom from reality” (to borrow the title of a recent book by D.C. Schindler).
Against such sentiments and developments what can one say. Not very much. I can think only of that lone figure of Dr Johnson standing among the ruins of Ionia and later writing “That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona”.
And so we await, as MacIntyre says, another and doubtless very different St Benedict. But we cannot wait in inaction. Each of us, in our own little social setting, must sow what seeds of truth we can. The exact mechanics of how this is done are beyond my scope here and perhaps will require a great deal more careful thought. Some have suggested a model not unlike that used by the underground resistance in some of the former Soviet satellite countries. Whatever the case, those who believe in an objective moral order will need to enter the field of battle. And MacIntyre has given us some valuable weaponry.
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