A commentary on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Gifford Lectures (written before MacIntyre’s death in 2025)
The Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University were financed by Lord Gifford (1820- 1887) as part of his will, and began the year after his death. He was a prominent judge in Edinburgh and much in demand as a public speaker in the latter part of his life. The terms of his will concerning these lectures stipulate that they must, in some way, contribute to our understanding of natural theology. Inter alia they state:
“I wish these lectures to treat their subject [knowledge of God] as a strictly natural science, the greatest of all possible sciences, indeed, in one sense, the only science, that of Infinite Being, without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation. I wish it considered just as astronomy or chemistry is …”.
Gifford’s approach to natural theology is very much in tune with the general optimism shown in the Victorian era concerning the ability of human reason – or a least, the human reason of a well-educated Englishman – to establish ‘facts’ about the moral and spiritual order no less reliable than those of chemistry, physics and astronomy which had proved so enormously successful and self-validating. Most importantly, Gifford and his educated contemporaries regarded moral philosophy as something entirely separate from theology. It was, for them, just one more field of ‘scientific study’ in which endeavour they had no doubt, indubitable laws or principles concerning the human moral order could be demonstrated, purely by the exercise of human reason.
In 1987, the well-known moral philosopher Alasdair McIntyre was invited to give the Gifford Lecture(s) and the substance of these talks was later published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition. The title is not immediately self-explanatory but will become so as we proceed. First, though, it will be necessary to say something about McIntyre himself.
McIntyre is a Scottish born (1929) philosopher who has had a long and distinguished career, lecturing in both the USA and the UK. As a young postgraduate, he became interested in Marxism, like so many young intellectuals of his day. Indeed, his first book, at 24 years of age was Marxism: An Interpretation. Not surprisingly, the revelations concerning the Stalinist Labour Camps, which came to light in the West with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s books caused him to rethink his allegiances. Even so he has not totally repudiated all of the Marxist canon, arguing that many of Marx’s reflections on capitalism held some force.
McIntyre has always had a special interest in moral philosophy and, indeed, part of his early attraction to Marxist stemmed from the injustices he perceived in working class England. Although initially seeking answers via the current philosophical trends (he was a student of Freddie Ayer, and avidly read most of the philosophers of his day), he gradually came to the view that the varied forms of analytical philosophy being pursued were unable to supply a rationally based account of human morality. The key problem he saw was one of incommensurability. That is to say, the various camps in moral philosophy could not really talk to each other or make any progress because each argued from different premises – neo-Kantians against utilitarians, against rights theorists, and so on.
He then turned to Plato and Aristotle, having studied them in his student years. He became particularly interested in Aristotelian teleology and the notion that philosophy was actually a craft, no different to that of cabinet making or stonemasonry. One needed to learn the craft under the guidance of a Master, and one needed to achieve certain standards of excellence that had already been supplied by past experts. So, for instance, to take our example of the cabinet maker, the master might put before the apprentice the detailed drawings of Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director. The apprentice was then to judge his or her own work not by his or her own standards of excellence (for they could be in error) but by the best of what had been achieved in the past. In other words, what had been achieved in the tradition of cabinet making. This goes some way to explaining one of McIntyre’s most famous aphorisms ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do’? if I can answer the prior question ‘ Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” And the story chosen by McIntyre was a version of the perennial philosophy, so named because its principles, often ignored, derided or actively put down, continue to arise throughout history, albeit in different forms.
This broadly Aristotelian approach McIntyre applied to moral philosophy, and it led him to publish his most famous book, After Virtue, in 1981. It immediately became a top seller and has now gone through three editions and who knows how many printings. It has been translated into virtually every major language on earth and is still regularly quoted. The central thesis of the book is that, despite the incommensurability pertaining to the philosophies of the various camps, they continue to act as if their respective stances were all entirely rational. What McIntyre recognised in these conflicting accounts were bits and pieces of an earlier intact moral tradition which had survived after a fashion but was now without any real context. His famous analogy was to a well-known science fiction story, A Canticle to Lebowitz, by Walter Miller.
McIntyre continued this general line of inquiry in several further books, one of which, as already indicated, was the substance of his Gifford Lectures. When he was chosen to give these lectures, his first move was to undertake a detailed study of Lord Gifford and of the general milieu in which he operated – the intellectual climate, so to speak. And that climate, in brief, was the high point of the idea of Progress, a general view dating from the 17th C, which saw in the history of the West, a gradual ascent of human knowledge and human achievement beginning with the primitive savage (still extant in parts of the New World) and reaching its culmination in the well-educated Edinburgh or London gentleman of the late 19th C. Of course, it all came crashing down a few decades later in the mud of Flanders and the ‘monstrous anger of the guns’ but, in the 1880s, there was a good deal of self-congratulation and confidence. Eliot’s Waste Land lay ahead.
To further demonstrate the demise of this 19th C optimism, McIntyre asks us to consider the status of the university lecture in his own time, as against that of the late 19th C. If we think of the Bendigo Philosophical Society as it existed in William Gay’s time, the speaker, merely by virtue of being chosen as the speaker, was assumed as the canonical figure for that subject. There was no question of arguing with the content of the lecture (other than clarification or amplification) since it was assumed to be the end product of rational enquiry, and the latter was the ultimate standard. Today, of course, as I stand here, there will be disagreement not only with my portrayal of McIntyre and his theses, but with the theses themselves. Moreover, that disagreement will not be of a unitary nature but will reflect the heterogeneous philosophical views held by different members of the audience – views which are entirely incommensurate with each other and with that of the speaker. And yet, of course, we go on pretending that we are having a rational debate!
The confidence of these late 19th C savants was epitomised in the 9th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica which appeared around the time of Gifford’s death. This explains why McIntyre uses the word Encyclopedia in his title. Here, gathered in a series of hefty tomes, was an authoritative account of the world and all it contained. It had been Lord Gifford’s earnest hope that God, too, could be considered as a scientific datum, a concept wholly amenable to rational analysis. The same was true of the whole moral order which, he felt sure, could be derived from strictly scientific principles, and did not necessarily require religious beliefs of any kind. Here, McIntyre makes the interesting point that you will search in vain for any word or term in earlier language systems that could be translated as ‘morality’ (as the Victorians construed it). There was no such word. It was an invention of the Enlightenment as a substitute for the intact virtue-based system of traditional Christianity. The most notable attempt to produce a ‘scientific’ account of morality was by Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and, as McIntyre tells us, his fruitless attempt led him to conclude that ‘where he had hoped to find a cosmos, he found only chaos’. In other words, he could find no common ground, no objective data, to reconcile the various extant views on the moral order. It was a chaos.
But, at the very time that the Gifford Lectures were inaugurated, another and very different approach to moral philosophy was being promulgated. In 1887, Nietzsche published On the Genealogy of Morals, and it was a direct attack on the Encyclopedists and all their beliefs. Now, of course, as an Aristotelian, McIntyre cannot really align himself with Nietzsche’s take on ‘the will to power’, but he nonetheless admires his witty and barbed comments and his very readable style. After attempting to read Kant, Nietzsche is a breath of fresh air! Moreover, Nietzsche’s dismissal of the whole Encyclopedia project is not without force. Nietzsche, in effect, thumbs his nose at these so-called ‘rational’ rules of morality. “Why should I believe in the Categorical Imperative”? he says, and, indeed, there is no good answer. Nietzsche puts into question the whole basis of the moral order as conceived by the Victorians and their belief that reason is self-grounding. As McIntyre says: ‘Nietzsche did not advance a new theory against older theories; he proposed an abandonment of theory”.
In his lectures, McIntyre spends a good deal of time discussing Nietzsche’s stance and looks for ways in which it might be discredited. This, to me, seems unnecessary. After all, if we were to apply Nietzsche’s approach to moral philosophy, there would be no moral order, merely some milder form of the Dionysiac Frenzy. One thinks of The Bacchae and the women of Thebes tearing apart King Pentheus. The Nietzschean will to power is the direct opposite of The Sermon on the Mount. Its practical consequences were famously laid out for us in the Melian Dialogue from Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian Wars. When the conquered Melians were about to be enslaved or put to the sword, their leaders implored the Athenians to show mercy. Their answer has reverberated down through history:
Of the Gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us; we did but inherit it and will bequeath it to our children. And we know that if you were in the same position as us, would do as we do.
It goes without saying that Thucydides, all that time ago, included this episode because he knew the actions of the Athenians to be wrong.
But I think McIntyre’s purpose here is to have Nietzsche and the post-Nietzscheans (he spends a lot of time dealing with Foucault) standing for the whole movement of relativism in general, so that the debate really centres about whether morality is an objective or a subjective business. This is the nub of McIntyre’s concern and one can discern its lineaments in all of his books, from After Virtue onwards. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is necessary for McIntyre, because his critique of the whole Enlightenment Project brings into question the assumed self-validating nature of human rational enquiry. Reason cannot lift itself up by its own bootstraps, so to speak.
So, McIntyre’s quest now is to look for some other approach which might provide a solid basis for a moral order. This, he argues can be found in that version of the perennial philosophy championed by Aquinas but relying heavily on Plato and Aristotle. This choice too, refers to a development which was concurrent with both the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia and with Nietzsche’s new book. Here he refers to the Encyclical Aeterni patris, put out by Pope Leo XIII in 1897. In this letter, the Pope urges for a return to the Christian philosophy of the high Middle Ages. Here, as I suggested earlier, philosophy is treated as a craft in exactly the same way as other crafts such a cabinet making. In this approach teleology takes pride of place and truth is not simply assumed but worked towards just as an apprentice works towards his or her master-piece. Aquinas’ ‘Questiones’ attempt no more than to promulgate ‘the best argument so far’. However, Like Plato in the Republic and Gorgias, one needs a certain disposition or ontological ‘ground zero’. Reason is not self-grounding as the Encyclopedists supposed. We will return to this later.
But there is another reason attracting McIntyre to the approach taken by Aquinas. Recall that, in the 13th C, medieval scholars trained in the Augustinian tradition, were suddenly confronted with an entirely new an alien philosophy, that of Aristotle, coming to them via the Islamic scholars of that era. Now, they could not simply dismiss it out of court. As C.S. Lewis tells us in The Discarded Image, they were ‘bookish’, by which he means that any written text coming from the past could not simply be ignored or altered to fit in with their own theology and philosophy (something that the Victorian savants of Gifford’s day did with gay abandon – and ignorance). Somehow or other it had to be accommodated on its own terms. This was the great achievement of Aquinas.
What this requires, according to McIntyre, is that one must first fully enter the alien philosophy and attempt to show its shortcomings from within its own resources. At the same time, one’s own philosophy must be able to demonstrate that its solution to that shortcoming is demonstrably better, more reasonable, and more in line with the actual circumstances of a human life. This, perhaps, explains why McIntyre spends so much time discussing the ideas of both the Victorian rationalists and their Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean opponents. He must find, from within their own resources, good reason to discard their ideas.
Now, in the case of the Nietzscheans and post-Nietzscheans, he thinks he has found this in their problematic handling of the identity of the self. The faithful Nietzschean will avoid any possibility of being stereotyped, of being identified with some definite theoretical stance. But, of course, merely by communicating his or her ideas to others, the Nietzschean must use the conventions of language, for starters. There again, merely by defending the Nietzschean position, one has dropped back into the Encyclopedists mode of advancing argument, etc.
Now this part of McIntyre’s argument I find quite difficult to follow and I make no apologies for my lack of intellectual power. I will say, however, that even at its simplest, McIntyre’s prose is extraordinarily difficult to follow much of the time. Some of his sentences run for half a paragraph or so and are replete with clauses, sub- clauses, and sub-sub- clauses. All this with a minimum of commas and semi-colons! On is reminded of what Wittgenstein said of someone’s prose – ‘like dancing in treacle’.
When it comes to the Encyclopedists, McIntyre’s task is much simpler. Their assumption of the universality of what they take to be rational enquiry is completely misguided. Even their confidence in the ‘hard data’ of the physical sciences and the subsequent ‘laws’ flowing from them (which they took as their model of the idea of progress) would soon be called into question by the likes of Thomas Kuhn.
One of McIntyre’s approaches here is quite novel and deserves some comment. He notes the extraordinary interest taken by the late 19th C savants in the taboo practices of the Polynesians. Drawing heavily on the work of Franz Steiner, he supposes that their interest is due in no small part to their own set of taboos centred about etiquette and ‘morality’. They, of course, saw the ‘primitive’ taboo system of the Polynesians as some sort of embryonic system of ‘true morality’ which had come to full maturity in their own time.
In fact, soon after contact with European civilisation, the real significance of the taboo (which was a positive and not a negative constraint), was lost to the Polynesians themselves and continued on without any real referent. In precisely the same way, McIntyre argues, the late 19th C Encyclopedists held to fragments of a once unified concept and supposed this to be their ‘rational’ moral system. That unified concept, of course, was the theological and philosophical formulation of the high Middle Ages, exemplified in Aquinas. This had been destroyed by the forebears of the Encyclopedists, beginning with late medieval nominalism, Descartes, and finally, the Reformers. One could sum it up in four words “the destruction of metaphysics’.
We must now return to McIntyre’s schema for viable moral order based on his reading of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. He notes that in this system, two ideas are paramount. The first is that one must have some point of departure, some ontological given. This is not entirely spelt out by the early Greeks (although they do hint at it), but it is spelt out by Aquinas. Here, rather obviously, it is the Christian Revelation. That, we might say, is the warrant for Truth. Of course, in other traditions (McIntyre’s ‘stories’) the warrant will be different (but perhaps not at the highest level – I cannot here discuss the view of people like Schuon).
The second necessary feature is that of the Tradition itself – the carefully accumulated store of knowledge, endlessly added to and improved but never entirely perfected. As I remarked earlier, the Summa of Aquinas was a series of statements, objections and answers which were always open ended. It is the best account so far, just as the cabinet maker might say “this is my best chair so far”. What matters is that there is a goal toward which I am oriented, a set of rules which will help me to get to that goal. Moreover, I have had the benefit of a teacher, one who can lead me to consider not “my best chair’, but ‘the best possible chair’. And here it is critically important to delineate between my best (which may not be anything like the real best) and ‘the best possible’. For my conception of the best chair could well be in error. To reach the truth, you must be part of a story.
After delivering his lectures, first in the UK then in America, McIntyre sat down to write his book. He noted that, in the process of delivering the lectures, the audience, though polite, not only could not agree with much of what he proposed but could not agree amongst themselves as to what he should have said. Even more telling, the audience in the UK had an entirely different set of objections to those in the USA. Here was proof (if any of such was needed) of the dire state of decay in which philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, now finds itself.
This state of affairs is reflected in the very choice of Gifford lecturers over the years. Anyone who cares to look at the list will observe that the subject matter runs the whole gamut of possible philosophical positions, and often has only the remotest connection to Lord Gifford’s enterprise.
McIntyre died in 2025. Up until a few years before then he was still giving lectures. I confess that I admire the man, not so much for what he believes, but for his lifelong commitment to answering his own question :”How should I live”? That quest has led him to places where he would, in his earlier days, rather not go had his overriding quest for answers not compelled him. One might say that in embracing Thomism he was forced to his knees by the sheer weight of his intellect.
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