Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia 9783110507348, 9783828204423

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Revolutionary Aristotelianism

Ethics, Resistance and Utopia

Edited by Kelvin Knight and Paul Blackledge With contributions from Alex Bavister-Gould Ron Beadle Paul Blackledge Bill Bowring Timothy Chappell Russell Keat Kelvin Knight Marian Kuna

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Christopher Lutz Piotr Machura Alasdair Maclntyre Seiriol Morgan Cary J. Nederman Thomas M. Osborne Jr. Carey Seal Benedict Smith

Lucius & Lucius • Stuttgart

Editors: Dr. Kelvin Knight London Metropolitan University Department of Law, Governance and International Relations London N5 2AD [email protected] Dr. Paul Blackledge Leeds Metropolitan University School of Social Sciences Leeds LSI 3HE [email protected]

This publication is a special edition of Analyse & Kritik 1/08 http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-8282-0442-3 (Lucius & Lucius) © Lucius & Lucius Verlagsgesellschaft mbH Stuttgart 2008 Gerokstr. 51, D-70184 Stuttgart www.luciusverlag.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form (including photocopying or storing or transmitting it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of copyright. Applications for the copyright owner's written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher. Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution.

Druck und Einband: Rosch-Buch, Scheßlitz Printed in Germany

Contents

Editorial

1

Maclntyre's Aristotelianism Carey Seal Maclntyre and the Polis

5

Cary J. Nederman Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians

17

Kelvin Knight After Tradition?: Heidegger or Maclntyre, Aristotle and Marx

33

Maclntyre's Thomism Alex Barrister-Gould The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or 'Against Hindsight')

55

Thomas Osborne Maclntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good

75

Christopher Stephen Lutz From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair Maclntyre's Critique of Modern Ethics

91

Metaethics Marian Kuna Maclntyre's Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics

103

Piotr Machura Maclntyre's Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal

121

Benedict Smith Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World

139

Seiriol Morgan Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On Maclntyre on the Modern Self

157

The Critique of Liberalism and Capitalism Timothy Chappell Utopias and the Art of the Possible

179

Bill Bowring Misunderstanding Maclntyre on Human Rights

205

Paul Blackledge Alasdair Maclntyre's Contribution to Marxism: A Road Not Taken

215

Ron Beadle Why Business Cannot be a Practice

229

Russell Keat Ethics, Markets, and Maclntyre

243

Reply Alasdair Maclntyre What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It

261

Authors

282

Editorial

This special issue is composed of revisions of papers originally presented at a conference on Alasdair Maclntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia, hosted by the Human Rights and Social Justice Research Institute at London Metropolitan University from 29th June to 1st July 2007. In publishing them, Analyse & Kritik demonstrates a continuing interest in Maclntyre's work which began with an important symposium on After Virtue in 1984, 6(1). Now republished in a third edition, After Virtue remains central to the understanding of his work in several of the papers below (Duckworth 2007; as some papers deal with Maclntyre's theoretical development, reference is also made to different editions). As in the earlier symposium, Maclntyre responds in a way that clarifies and extends his past arguments, his present position, and his relation to rival theories of moral, social and political practice. As the title of his response suggests, much more remains to be said on the subjects that are opened here. The first group of papers refer, in ways that Maclntyre commends, to his characterization of his philosophy as part of an 'Aristotelian' tradition of enquiry. The origins of this tradition are illuminatingly located by Carey Seal in the ethos of the Greek polis. Cary Nederman, a leading historian of political thought, carries Aristotelianism into the Middle Ages, demonstrating how the tradition was progressed and democratized through the excision of Aristotle's aristocratic disdain for manual workers. Similarly, Kelvin Knight argues that Maclntyre's further development of the tradition helps it to rebut Heideggerian critique. Maclntyre specifies that his Aristotelianism is 'Thomistic', and this is the subject of the next group of papers. In an interpretation of Maclntyre's own development that he vigorously contests, Alex Bavister-Gould argues that his turn to Thomism represents a break from the argument of After Virtue. Thomas Osborne advances a Thomist defence of modern states against Maclntyre's moral critique of modernity, whereas a robustly Thomist defence of that critique is mounted by Christopher Lutz. The third set of papers begins with another interpretation of Maclntyre's philosophical development from After Virtue onward, in which Marian Kuna explains the continuity in Maclntyre's increasingly explicit acceptance of an Aristotelian metaphysics. A more novel case for the centrality of theoretical philosophy to Maclntyre's practical philosophy is proposed by Piotr Machura. Both Seiriol Morgan and Benedict Smith elicit important clarifications of Maclntyre's philosophical position. Smith does so by comparing his position to that of John McDowell, Morgan by challenging his critique of modern moral agency. Maclntyre's critique of characteristically modern theory and practice is the concern of the final five papers. Timothy Chappell argues that Maclntyre is wrong to reject liberalism's account of radical disagreement, because such disagreement is less peculiar to modernity than Maclntyre contends. Bill Bowring

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Editorial

argues that the bases of many rights in popular struggles for social justice affords grounds for the critique of capitalism, and this is an argument to which MacIntyre accedes with an alacrity that some may find surprising. Paul Blackledge points towards a reengagement with the idea that workers might possess the resources for socialist resistance to capitalism through a preliminary anti-critique of Maclntyre's mature critique of Marxism, in response to which Maclntyre offers an affirmative account of his present relation to the tradition of which he was once a leading British protagonist. A clarificatory paper by Ron Beadle, the leading practitioner of a Maclntyrean empirics, argues that modern corporate management, because it necessarily prioritizes external goods, can never satisfy the criteria for what Maclntyre calls a practice. Finally, Russell Keat proposes market socialism as a third way between the capitalism that Maclntyre opposes and the politics of local community for which he continues to argue. Other papers from the conference are published in a special issue of Philosophy of Management 6(3) (edited by Ron Beadle and by the target of Beadle's critique here, Geoff Moore), and in a book, Virtue and Politics (edited, like this issue, by Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight), including Maclntyre's opening address to the conference. The event has been declared the first conference of an International Society for Maclntyrean Philosophy. The second annual ISMP conference will be at St. Meinrad in Indiana, and future conferences are planned at University College Dublin and ISM University, Vilnius. The kind of interest in Maclntyre's work that has been sustained by Analyse & Kritik looks set to grow.

Kelvin Knight, Paul Blackledge

Maclntyre's Aristotelianism

Analyse k Kritik 30/2008 (© Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart) p. 5-16

Carey Seal

Maclntyre and the Polis

Abstract: This paper traces Alasdair Maclntyre's account of the development of the Greek polis as presented in A Short History of Ethics, After Virtue, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. The paper argues for the centrality of Aristotle's conception of politics as an architectonic art to this account. It explores the foundations of Maclntyre's presentation of moral rationality in Homer and offers the poems of Hesiod as an aid to understanding Maclntyre's view of the post-Homeric crisis in Greek ethics. Aristotle is then invoked to show how Maclntyre represents the polis as a classical response to that crisis.

Accounts of the development and nature of the Greek polis are central to the histories of ethics offered by Alasdair Maclntyre in three of his books: A Short History of Ethics, After Virtue, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. This paper locates the cumulative account that emerges from those books 1 in the larger context of Maclntyre's historical picture of moral tradition and in particular argues for the importance of the Aristotelian conception of politics to understanding the way in which Maclntyre presents the history of Greek ethics in the archaic period. Its contention is that the following passage from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? presents a historical thesis that serves as the organizing spine for Maclntyre's treatment of Greek ethics before, during, and after the rise of the polis: "The only form of community which could provide itself with such a standard [one that could adjudicate among different sorts of excellence] would be one whose members structured their common life in terms of a form of activity whose specific goal was to integrate within itself, so far as possible, all those other forms of activity practiced by its members and so to create and sustain as its specific goal that form of life within which to the greatest possible degree the goods of each practice could be enjoyed as well as those goods which are the external rewards of excellence. The name given by Greeks to this form of activity was 'politics' and the polis was the institution whose concern was, not with this or that particular good, but with 1 It is not my intention to minimize the ways in which Maclntyre's views, including his view of the polis (see Kelvin Knight's remarks 2007, 178-179) have changed over the years. I concentrate here on those features I regard as common to the three accounts.

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Carey Seal human good as such, and not with desert ot achievement in respect of particular practices, but with desert and achievement as such." (Maclntyre 1988, 33-34)

This paper aims to show how Maclntyre builds his history of Greek ethics in such a way as to demonstrate the necessity of the polis for the resolution of the problems posed by the loosening of the social bonds depicted in the Homeric epics. This history falls into three stages: the Homeric (the social world represented in Homer's poems about the heroic past), the archaic, and the classical (the world of the developed polis). The paper traces Maclntyre's historical argument through these stages and examines how he articulates them with one another, with the purpose of showing how these articulations reinforce the conception of the polis's function advanced in the quotation above. Along the way, it considers the threat posed by rival accounts of Homeric ethics to Maclntyre's broader historical claims and proposes that the non-Homeric literature of the archaic period, and the writings of Hesiod in particular, can help us better understand Maclntyre's account of the reasons for the rise of the polis. The striking metaphor that opens After Virtue famously draws a parallel between the moral conditions of modernity and the states of scientific knowledge that might prevail after a catastrophe had wiped out natural science, states in which "those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they [the 'scientists' of the post-catastrophic world] are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably" (1981, 1). The intellectual context that Maclntyre believes is needed to make sense of the concepts deployed in modern moral philosophy is, of course, the account of the virtues provided by Aristotle. Maclntyre makes clear his agreement with the widespread scholarly view that Aristotle's ethical theory is in turn securely founded in the social and political conditions of the Greek polis. "Aristotle," he writes, "takes himself not to be inventing an account of the virtues, but to be articulating an account that is implicit in the thought, utterance and action of an educated Athenian." (147-148) But this commitment to developing and formalizing prephilosophical ethical notions presses us to ask which notions exactly qualify as raw material for this process. Does the "thought, utterance and action of an educated Athenian" of the fourth century form a consistent and unified whole, one whose tacit presuppositions can be elicited from that practice and formulated as moral theory? Maclntyre's comments elsewhere suggest both affirmative and negative answers to that question. On the one hand, he speaks of Aristotle's view of the human being as "rooted in the forms of social life to which the theorists of the classical tradition give expression" (1981, 58-59). The "classical tradition" is here conceived as unitary, and its theorists give philosophical shape to the standards defined by a particular set of social forms. We have to counterpose to this idea of a classical tradition in ethics Maclntyre's statements about the moral diversity of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, which in his account is characterized by widespread controversy that comes about, he writes, both "because one set of virtues is counterposed to another" and "also and perhaps more importantly because rival conceptions of one and the same virtue coexist" (133). In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? he writes that "we

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inherit from the conflicts of the social and cultural order of the Athenian polis a number of mutually incompatible and antagonistic traditions concerning justice and practical rationality" (1988, 13). Classical Athens thus exhibits similarities with Maclntyre's modernity, in which exponents of rival moral traditions futilely dispute ethical questions using a vocabulary whose referents have become multiple and irreconcilable. How far this similarity extends is a question that must be answered in reconciling this picture of democratic Athens with the idea of a classical tradition as the foundation of Aristotelian virtue theory. What distinguishes what we might call the Greek modernity of the "classical tradition" from the radical moral incoherence of post-Enlightenment modernity? An answer to this question must begin with a discussion of the origins of the moral conflict particular to the developed polis, origins that lie, for Maclntyre, in the disintegration of the heroic morality given expression in Homer's poems. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Maclntyre maintains throughout all three of the books under discussion, moral evaluation is inseparable from factual description that employs predicates denoting such qualities as bravery and kingliness. "The alleged logical gulf between fact and appraisal," he writes in the Short History of Ethics, "is not so much one that has been bridged in Homer. It has never been dug. Nor is it clear that there is any ground in which to dig." (Maclntyre 1966, 7) Furthermore, there is for each social role, in the society depicted by Homer, "a clear understanding of what actions are required [... ] A man in heroic society is what he does" (Maclntyre 1981, 122). Moral disagreement, then, is limited to questions about the extent of the particular excellences to be ascribed to an individual, not about the effect of those excellences on our evaluation of him. Furthermore, the list of expected excellences is fixed by the social position of the individual under evaluation. "Morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society," Maclntyre writes (1981, 123). This view of Homeric ethics draws on the work of Moses Finley, whose sociological analysis of the Iliad and Odyssey sought to make apparent the degree to which economic and social relations in the world depicted by the poems constitute a unified whole, within which all moral evaluation takes place (Finley 1954). In this world in which the circulation of goods took the form of gift exchange founded upon relations of kinship and guest-friendship, "the heroic code was complete and unambiguous, so much that neither the poet nor his characters ever had reason to debate it" (Finley 1954, 115). Maclntyre, in his chapter on heroic society in After Virtue, reiterates the Finleyan view thus: "There is only one set of social bonds. Morality as something distinct does not yet exist. Evaluative questions are questions of social fact." (1981, 123) There was indeed, in this conception of Homeric society, discussion of points of fact or tactics, but disagreement about the good there could never be, since no such independent concept could be extricated from the social structure within which all forms of human activity were embedded. So much of Maclntyre's subsequent argument about the polis depends upon this picture of heroic society that it might be worthwhile to examine some of the controversy Finley's views have generated and to test Maclntyre's conclusions about Homeric morality against some passages in the poems that have been foci of resistance to those views. Several areas of investigation suggest themselves. We

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might review junctures at which the heroic standards of evaluation outlined by Finley seem to be superseded by a different code with an entirely different social perspective; Joseph Bryant points out that "the swineherd Eumaeus, Odysseus' loyal servant [... ] though a slave, is given the epithets dios ('divine' or 'godlike') and esthlos ('noble' or 'good') on several occasions (XIV.3; XV.301; XV.558) and is said to lead an agathos bios, a noble or 'good life' (XV.491)" (1996, 482 n.10). This question is muddied by mention of Eumaeus' royal birth (Od. 15.413), but it would be difficult to show how his life as a swineherd involves the heroic excellences for which such descriptions are generally awarded. It was Finley's practice to attribute to interpolation during a later, 'Hesiodic' age those passages in the poems, particularly in the Odyssey, that raise difficulties for his interpretation (see particularly 1978, 44-45 and 97), and such may have been his view of these passages. Finley's view of practical reasoning in Homer, a view central to Maclntyre's use of the poems, has likewise been challenged, most persuasively by Malcolm Schofield (1986), who takes exception to Finley's claim that "never in either the Iliad or the Odyssey is there a rational discussion, a sustained, disciplined consideration of circumstances and their implications, of possible courses of action, their advantages and disadvantages" (Finley 1978, 116). Taking as his text an improvised council of war between Agamemnon, Nestor, Odysseus, and Diomedes (II. 14.27-134), Schofield argues (1986, 246250) that the description negated in Finley's denial matches what the Greek leaders are actually shown to do. It might appear that if Schofield is right about the character of this debate it becomes difficult to sustain Maclntyre's claim in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? that "means-end reasoning in the Homeric poems has, compared with later times and places, a restricted function" so that "in a secondary way they [agents in the poems] derive conclusions about what to do next, but they are able to do so only because they already know independently of their reasoning what action it is that they are required to perform" (Maclntyre 1988, 19). One way to reconcile Schofield's argument with Maclntyre's would be to concentrate on an aspect of the debate to which the former gives little attention, namely the reasons adduced by Agamemnon for his "characteristically disastrous" (Schofield 1986, 249) proposal to save the Greek ships from imminent Trojan threat by putting them out to sea. He introduces this suggestion as follows: "It is no doubt sure to be dear to Zeus of exceeding might that the Achaeans should perish here without renown, away from Argos. For I knew it when he willingly helped the Danaans, and I know now when he exalts them like the blessed gods, and has bound our strength and our hands. Come, let us all obey, as I bid." (II. 14.69-74)2 Agamemnon rests his plan on a particular kind of knowledge claim, a claim to be acquainted with the will of Zeus. Hugh Lloyd-Jones has argued (1971) that this deity's function from the Iliad on is a morally regulative one, in which the 2 The text used of the Iliad is that of T . W . A l l e n (Oxford, 1931). Translations throughout are my own unless otherwise noted.

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god "defends the established order {dike) by punishing mortals whose injustices disturb it" (27). His favor and displeasure, then, are not the simple product of whim, but rather expressions of the all-encompassing divine justice that Maclntyre refers to when he writes that "the use of the word 'dike', both by Homer and by those whom he portrayed, presupposed that the universe had a single fundamental order, an order structuring both nature and society, so that the distinction which we mark by contrasting the natural and the social cannot as yet be expressed" (1988, 14). Agamemnon withdraws his proposal after a heated challenge from Odysseus, who avers that moving the ships to safety will erode morale (II. 14.83-108). He does not directly contradict Agamemnon's claim to know what Zeus intends, but instead refers to the Greek warriors as those "to whom Zeus has given to carry painful wars from youth to old age, until each of us dies" (II. 14.85-87). He thus founds his attack on Agamemnon's plan upon a parallel claim to understand Zeus's decrees. The claim that it is by the will of Zeus that the Greeks toil endlessly in war serves only to neutralize Agamemnon's theological argument, though; Odysseus' positive alternative derives its argumentative propulsion from the statement that removing the ships is a tactical blunder that will issue in the fulfillment of the Trojans' wish that the Greeks be destroyed (14.97-99). This debate, then, is apprehensible both in Schofieldian and in Maclntyrian terms: it is indeed a rational discussion in which various courses of action are weighed against one another, but it is also clear that this means-end reasoning is "restricted" in Maclntyre's sense of not providing an answer to the question "What am I to do?" (Maclntyre 1988, 19). We should note, though, that although the answers to that question do lie securely beyond the scope of the reasoned debate in Book XIV, they are, first, very broad answers indeed ("Yield to the will of Zeus", "Prevent the Trojans from gaining victory") that are not immediately linked to a course of action but rather admit of several plausible means of attainment and, second, are multiple in a way not fully compatible with the heroic code as conceived of by Finley and Maclntyre. The conflict between Agamemnon's alleged knowledge of Zeus's will and Odysseus' reassertion of the heroic imperative to achieve success in battle is, as we have seen, not a direct one, because Odysseus deflects Agamemnon's claim about Zeus with one of his own, but it remains true that the discussion is transacted with reference to two different norms whose hierarchical relation to one another is not clear. How grave an obstacle this multiplicity of ends presents to Maclntyre's historical thesis depends on the outcome of a related question on which Schofield challenges Finley, that of the normative nature of the heroic code by which Homer's chief characters live. Schofield's quarrel here is with Finley's assertion, quoted above, that the heroic code in Homer is "complete and unambiguous" and his related claim, quoted by Maclntyre in his chapter on heroic society in After Virtue (1981, 122) that "the basic values of society were given, predetermined and so were a man's place in the society and the privileges and duties that followed from his status" (Finley 1978, 117). Schofield first notes that euboulia, or the quality of dispensing good counsel, is a heroic virtue in the Iliad, "regarded as a pre-eminent excellence of kings and heroes" (1986, 229). Its practice, that is, falls

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entirely within the scope of the heroic code as defined by Finley. Next Schofield argues that "a commitment to euboulia already imports into the heroic code the possibility of a conflict of values" because "being reasonable must imply being ready to give weight to any considerations which deserve to be given weight. And how can anyone tell which these are until one has thought about them? It is a crucial assumption of and about rationality that one cannot: that there is or may be more to discover than one yet knows" (1986, 237). It is important to note that with this assertion the work of Schofield's argument is done and the examples that follow are strictly superfluous, since the conception of rationality he assumes here is entirely incompatible with Finley's historicist conception of Homeric ethics and, once accepted, forecloses the possibility of preserving that conception. It is also not susceptible of reconciliation with Maclntyre's view that in heroic society "all questions of choice arise within the framework; the framework itself therefore cannot be chosen" (Maclntyre 1981, 126). Let us then examine the set of scenes in the Iliad proposed as an example by Schofield to see what conclusions we can draw about the nature of the rationality at work there. Several times in the Iliad Hector is admonished by his comrade Polydamas, whom the poet credits with the virtue of euboulia when he says that Polydamas "devised good counsel" (II. 18.313). Polydamas twice advises Hector to refrain from battle, the second time (II. 18.254-283) after Achilles has returned to battle. In each case, Schofield points out, "Polydamas' talk is all of advantage and safety and never of honour" (1986, 241). His argument in the council is that the Trojan army can be safe inside the city, but not on the plain where Achilles now poses a renewed menace. His argument thus puts survival above the opportunity to demonstrate heroic virtue in combat. In Finley's conception, prudence is a quality that lies outside the Homeric code and in potential opposition to it. To put prudential considerations above those of heroism is, according to Finley, an ethical failing in the world of the Homeric poems (Finley 1978, 117-118). The counsel of Polydamas is scornfully rejected by Hector and the other Trojans, but after a series of reversals Hector comes to repent of his obstinacy in an extraordinary speech: "Oh alas, if I enter the gates and the walls, Polydamas will be first to lay reproach upon me, he who bade me lead the Trojans towards the city, in the course of this deadly night, when godlike Achilles arose. But I did not obey. Indeed it would have been much better. Now when I have destroyed the host by my recklessness, I am ashamed before the Trojan men and the Trojan women with their flowing robes, lest some man baser than me say, Hector, trusting in his own force, destroyed the host. So they will say: but it was much better, as far as I was concerned, either to go face to face with lethal Achilles or to die myself gloriously in defense of the city." (II. 22.99-110) Hector retrospectively acknowledges the Tightness of Polydamas' counsel; that is, he accords him the virtue of euboulia. It is true that his reasons for doing so are couched in the language of honor, in that they center around Hector's

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expressed fear that he will with justification be spoken ill of by someone of inferior social standing. Schofield argues, though, that we must pay attention to the sources of this imagined disgrace: "losing men could not be a matter of losing face unless human life was regarded as precious in itself' (1986, 243). Hector's standards for assessing his own behavior here, then, take "advantage and safety" rather than honor as their evaluative axis, as do the standards he supposes his fellow Trojans to employ. Unless we believe that Hector and his community have jettisoned the moral framework shown to guide them throughout the poem, we must be prepared to accept Schofield's reversal of Finley's claim that the heroic code is "complete and unambiguous": "if narrowly defined in terms of honour, it is far from complete, but if it is more liberally construed, it is plainly not unambiguous" (Schofield 1986, 239). That is, we either must accept that the heroic code endorses the entertainment of prudential considerations for their own sake, or we must allow that the heroic code does not demand the entire allegiance of the hero or supply an end toward which he should strive in each situation conceivable within his social role, but rather that it can be supplanted by a variety of other considerations, among which the hero chooses on the basis of even broader moral principles not reducible to a heroic code. Schofield's solution is to introduce a distinction derived from Stoic ethics between the'goal' of an action and its 'intended result'. The intended result of warfare is, for Hector, the preservation of Troy, but its goal, the aim of its excellence, is the accumulation of heroic honor (243). This distinction enables Schofield to retain Finley's sociology of Homeric ethics while accounting for those passages, like the speech of Hector quoted above, in which concerns that seem foreign to the morality sketched out by that sociology seem paramount. This way of explaining Homeric morality allows for a dimension of conflict largely unaddressed by Finley, that between goal and intended result. It is this tension, Schofield contends, that imparts to the Iliad its tragic character. We might gauge the extent of Maclntyre's distance from what Schofield calls "the currently popular reading of the Iliad as a tragedy" (245) by the rarity with which Maclntyre uses "tragedy" or its derivatives to describe the poem or its characters in the three books under discussion. 3 His reading of tragedy, typified by his statement that "the Sophoclean self transcends the limitations of social roles and is able to put those roles in question, but it remains accountable to the point of death and accountable precisely for the way in which it handles itself in those conflicts which make the heroic point of view no longer possible" (Maclntyre 1981, 145), locates what is distinctive about the genre in the quality of conflict he ties to the social character of fifth-century Athens and thus is cautious in identifying archaic anticipations of what is genuinely tragic about tragedy. The foregoing is not to suggest that Maclntyre is insensitive to the role played by moral conflict in the Iliad. "There are already in the Iliad", he writes, "tensions between what arete requires and what dike requires" (Maclntyre 1988, 26). Three features of this statement, however, minimize the conflict that Schofield and likeminded readers are anxious to emphasize. The first is the adverb "already", which 3 I am indebted to Alex Bavister-Gould for pointing out to me that this tendency is not absolute; see page 157 of After Virtue.

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paints such conflict as proleptic of a later era rather than integral to the poem itself. The second is its situation in Maclntyre's text after the statement that "the Homeric poems themselves in the various chronological layers represented therein give expression to an ongoing history of conceptual change" (Maclntyre 1988 26). This developmental view has the effect, again, of rendering conflict marginal or accidental, in a manner parallel to Finley's assignment of 'Hesiodic' provenance to passages that seemed to him at odds with the dominant morality of the poems. Third, we should note that the sort of conflict acknowledged here and that treated by Schofleld are quite distinct from one another. For Schofield's concern is not with conflict between arete and dike so much as with conflict interior to the concept of arete itself. He characterizes the disagreement between Hector and Polydamas as between the pursuit of heroic excellence on the one hand and on the other that excellence in good counsel that can, indeed must, test the moral ends of the heroic code against considerations that are entirely extraneous to it. If this sort of clash between moral codes each of which enjoys no secure claim to predominance is, for Maclntyre, foreign to the spirit of the Homeric poems, it is prominent in his subsequent history of Greek ethics. Maclntyre's account supposes, then, a sharp discontinuity between the social and moral world of Homer's poems and the very different world of the Greek polis. The nature of this rift, and the ways in which it serves in Maclntyre's history to generate a need for the institutions of the mature polis, is perhaps best made clear by reference to Hesiod, an author little mentioned in the three books under discussion. His poems, though, can help us fill in for ourselves some of the elisions in the account of the polis those books supply. If we were to extend to encompass Hesiod the main line of Maclntyre's argument in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? about the conflicts basic to the polis, we could note his treatment of the two different sorts of eris, strife, in the Works and Days: "For one [sort of strife] causes evil war and contention to wax, being hard-hearted. No mortal loves her, but they honor grievous Strife under compulsion by the will of the immortals. The other murky Night bore first, and the son of Cronos, seated aloft and dwelling in the ether, placed her in the roots of the earth, and she is much better to men. She rouses even the shiftless man to work. For a man desires to work when he looks upon his neighbor, a rich man who is eager to plough and sow and to place his house in order. Neighbor is envious of neighbor as he vies for wealth. This Strife is good for men." (Op. 14-23)4 We have here a distinction between two kinds of striving, that which consists in the cultivation of genuine excellences and is thus beneficial and that which involves no practices that are ends in themselves, only the attainment of external goods by violence. It is these two sorts of rivalrous zeal, one to shine by standards 4

The text used of the Works and Days is that of Friedrich Solmsen 1970.

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internal to a practice and one to acquire external goods without reference to those standards, that will be canalized during the formation of the polis into the two sorts of cooperation, one aiming at excellence in particular practices and the other at the goods of effectiveness, that Maclntyre identifies as grounding the competing moralities of classical Athens. Controversy about the relative values of these excellences themselves is prominent in Hesiod as well, though. Walter Donlan writes that "Hesiod's notions of ability and success (arete) and of the good man have no reference at all to the heroic conception of these. Arete consists in being a successful farmer; the good man (agathos aner) is one who is capable, efficient, prudent and cooperative within the narrow sphere of the agrarian life" (1980, 33). It is in this gulf between the world of Homer and that of Hesiod 5 that we should locate the origins of the "classical tradition" of which Maclntyre writes, and it is here that we find some clarification of Maclntyre's view of that tradition as simultaneously coherent and riddled by fundamental and irreconcilable disagreement. In Hesiod, arete is transformed from heroic excellence to excellence in a particular art, that of farming. Once the idea of excellence assessed by standards internal to a practice is carried from the pursuit of honor into other pursuits, the way is opened for the profusion of excellences in diverse practices that in Maclntyre's view lies at the center of the classical moral tradition culminating in Aristotle: see, for example, his statement in the 1998 preface to the Short History of Ethics that "whenever such practices as those of the arts and sciences, of such productive and practical activities as those of farming, fishing, and agriculture, of physics laboratories and string quartets and chess clubs, types of activity whose practitioners cannot but recognize the goods internal to them and the virtues and the rules required to achieve those goods, are in a flourishing state, then Aristotelian conceptions of goods, virtues, and rules are regenerated and reembodied in practice" (1998, xviii). We should note at the same time that this generalization from the heroic ideal, in which a single martial way of life defined goodness, to a variety of other excellences raises the question of which of these sorts of excellence, each grounded in a particular social role, defines the best sort of life. We can see this consequence in Hesiod's poems, which are vexed by the question of which kind of life enjoys priority over the others. This concern is most clearly visible in Hesiod's discussion of the power of the Muses in the Theogony: "Whomever of god-nourished kings the daughters of great Zeus honor and see being born, on his tongue they pour sweet dew and honeyed words flow from his mouth. All the people look to him as he settles causes with straight judgments. He who speaks steadily straightaway puts an end deftly even to a great quarrel. For on account of this are kings sensible, because they easily accomplish restitution when the people are deprived of good sense in assembly, winning them over with soft words. They propitiate him as a god with honeyed 5 Without making any judgment as to which poet preceded the other, we can note that for Hesiod the heroic age described by Homer is chronologically prior to that about which he writes, Op. 156-173.

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reverence when he comes upon a struggle, and he stands out among the assembled. Such is the holy gift of the Muses to human beings. For from the Muses and far-shooting Apollo men who are singers and players of the lyre come upon the earth, and kings are from Zeus. But he is blessed, whomever the Muses love. Prom his mouth flows a sweet voice." (Theog. 81-97) 6 "Contrary to tradition", Hermann Frankel writes of this passage, "Hesiod has so far expanded the sphere of the Muses as to embrace the power which governs the words of a wise king who issues just decisions." (1962/1973, 107) The Muses, to whom Hesiod claims a privileged connection (Theog. 22-35), here dispense the gifts not just of poetic inspiration, but also of political flourishing. The arts of government are converted into an auxiliary branch of the verbal arts in which Hesiod claims mastery. Each sort of human excellence, now given the sort of autonomy restricted in heroic morality to the characteristic excellence of the aristocratic warrior, seeks to become not simply autotelic but architectonic as well, to have the contributions made by arts and practices other than its own defined as dependent upon and organized by that art of which it is the realization. Maclntyre writes that by the time of classical Athens "the conception of a virtue has now become strikingly detached from any particular social role" (1981, 132133). Hesiod gives us the opportunity to watch this process of detachment in progress and to observe its wider moral ramifications. This anarchy is the necessary background to Maclntyre's presentation of the moral landscape of the mature classical polis. Rivalry among different arts, irresolvable in their own evaluative terms, is contained by politics, identified by Aristotle as the architectonic master art that organizes the others: "It [the chief good] would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man." (EN 1.1.2, 1094 a26-b7) Maclntyre makes this function of the polis as an arena for the political master art clear when he writes that for the classical Athenian "the milieu in which the virtues are to be exercised and in terms of which they are to be defined is the polis" (1981, 135). The polis contains and regulates the plural virtues and, by giving hierarchical order to their practice, defines a moral order that is coherent but not monolithic. Germane here is Peter McMylor's caution that "Maclntyre's argument is fundamentally misconstrued if it is assumed to rely on upon a 6

The text used of the Theogony

is that of M. L. West 1966.

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seamless organic moral unity lodged in the past" (1994, 39). As we have seen, Maclntyre does indeed construe Homeric morality as something fundamentally very close to that unity, but the classical tradition he invokes incorporates a diverse array of moral views, often radically at odds with one another, and that tradition flourishes in the polis precisely because the invention of politics offers the possibility of reconciling moral diversity and moral order. McMylor goes on to note that for Maclntyre the key point about this tradition and indeed about premodern ethics generally is that "these views were embodied in communities, perhaps competing communities, that within themselves shared a common conception of what the pursuit of the good life was [... ] [W]hat all these forms had in common was an ability to link the individual via a socially defined role with the pursuit of human goods." (1994, 40) Such roles can vary widely in flexibility and in ability to accommodate moral innovation; we have seen that Maclntyre believes the heroic role of Homer's protagonists to be sharply limited in both respects. To the moral structure of the polis, however, his account assigns the capacity to allow for fundamental differences in outlook without collapsing entirely or abdicating its function of connecting the individual to the pursuit of the good. Once we understand the role of politics in organizing autotelic excellences, we can see why Maclntyre lays such great stress on two aspects of Athenian life that seem superficially at odds with one another: on the one hand its heavy use of such agonistic social forms as the popular assembly, the law court, and the tragic stage, in which utterly divergent conceptions of the good are in various ways allowed to make opposed and irreconcilable moral claims on the Athenian citizen, and on the other hand the city's function as "a guardian, a parent, a teacher, even though what is learnt from the city may lead to a questioning of this or that feature of its life" (1981, 133). The centrality of politics to Athenian experience permits the safe flourishing of an entire range of excellences under the organizational penumbra of the city's shared political life. The classical moral tradition Maclntyre seeks to define turns out to be, in the most radical sense, a political tradition, one whose characteristic contradictions can be accommodated only within the sheltering confines of the polis.

Bibliography Bryant, J. M. (1996), Moral Codes and Social Structure in Ancient Greece: A Sociology of Greek Ethics from Homer to the Epicureans and Stoics, Albany/NY Donlan, W. (1980), The Aristocratic Ideal in Ancient Greece: Attitudes of Superiority from Homer to the End of the Fifth Century B.C., Lawrence/Kansas Finley, M.I. (1978), The World of Odysseus (2nd ed. 2002), New York Frankel, H. (1962), Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy: A History of Greek Epic, Lyric, and Prose to the Middle of the Fifth Century, translated by Moses Hadas and James Willis, New York Knight, K. (2007), Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to Maclntyre, London Lloyd-Jones, H. (1971), The Justice of Zeus (2nd ed. 1983), Berkeley Maclntyre, A. (1981), After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame

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— (1998), A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (2 n d ed., 1 s t ed. 1966), Notre Dame McMylor, P. (1994), Alasdair Maclntyre: Critic of Modernity, London. Schofield, M. (1986), Euboulia in the Iliad, in: Classical Quarterly 36, 6-31; Reprinted in: Cairns, D. L. (ed.) (2001), Oxford Readings in Homer's Iliad, Oxford, 220-259

Analyse k Kritik 30/2008 ( © Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart) p. 17-31

Cary J.

Nederman

Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians*

Abstract: In Book 3 of his Politics, and again in Book 7, Aristotle makes explicit his disdain for the banausos (often translated 'mechanic') as an occupation qualified for full civic life. Where modern admirers of Aristotle, such as Alasdair Maclntyre, have taken him at face value concerning this topic and thus felt a need to distance themselves from him, I claim that the grounds that Aristotle offers for the exclusion of banausoi from citizenship are not consistent with other important teachings (found in the eighth book of the Politics as well as in several of his other writings) about the nature of poesis ('productive science', which is the form of knowledge characteristic of the so-called 'mechanical arts'). I further support this claim with reference to the role played by the mechanical arts within the Aristotelian framework of knowledge that one encounters in medieval European thought between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, with particular reference to Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, and Marsiglio of Padua.

0. Introduction One of the greatest challenges facing recent thinkers who wish to recuperate Aristotle's moral and political philosophy for a contemporary audience has been the exceedingly exclusionary, some might say 'elitist', qualifications that he demanded for achieving practical virtue. 1 Women, slaves, barbarians and banausoi (a term often translated 'mechanics') need not apply, according to Aristotle, because their natures and/or occupations disqualify them from full participation in civic affairs. Only free, adult, Greek males of leisure and at least moderate wealth possessed the conditions of life necessary in order to learn and practice the moral virtues and to engage as citizens ruling and being ruled in turn. Given modern predilections for both natural and political equality, and thus for a far more inclusive view of moral and political life, Aristotle's position would not appear to be very congenial to the concerns of current philosophy as well as practice. Consequently, some modern Aristotelians have sought to explain away or diminish the significance of Aristotle's exclusions by ascribing them to cultural * I wish to thank Eugene Garver and Kelvin Knight for their very helpful comments on this paper and useful suggestions for its improvement. 1 A valuable appraisal of the recent revival of Aristotelianism in political theory is offered by Wallach 1992. See also the contributions to Tessitore (ed.) 2002.

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prejudices or blindness that he shared with his times. On this account, there is nothing inherent in Aristotle's own philosophy that warrants or requires exclusion. Hence, what he says concerning the moral and political capacities of free, adult, Greek males of leisure and wealth can be extended to apply equally to all human beings, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or occupation. Alasdair Maclntyre, for one, has adopted a version of this thesis in several of his important books. Discussing the problem at greatest length in Whose Justice ? Which Rationality?, Maclntyre declares that "the claim that in the best kind of polis the distribution of public offices and the honoring of achievement will be in accordance with excellence, that is, with virtue, is independent of any thesis about what kinds of persons are and are not capable of excellence. What Aristotle's invalid arguments direct our attention to is that in the best kind of polis the participation of women or of artisans would require a restructuring of their occupational and social roles of a kind inconceivable to Aristotle himself [...]. What therefore remains so far at least unscathed in Aristotle's account of the best kind of polis is the thesis that a political constitution which is designed to promote the exercise of virtue in political life will need to concern itself with the occupational structure of the polis."2 If Maclntyre is correct, then we should be able to detach Aristotle's theory of distributive justice from his account of the virtues in such fashion as to permit all of his excluded categories of citizens to realize their faculties and capacities in a manner congruent with the moral purposes for which the civic body exists. Where Aristotle (wrongly, Maclntyre contends) presumed that the excellences of women and banausoi were worthless to the ultimate ends of the polis, one may still be a perfectly coherent Aristotelian and subscribe to the view that such groups do indeed contribute to the overall good of the community. This is what I take Maclntyre to mean by his assertion that the polis can and must revalue 'occupational and social roles' in a more inclusive manner. Is Maclntyre right? The question of the status of women has been taken up by various feminist theorists, whose work I do not need to recapitulate here (see Freeland 1998). Likewise, much has been said regarding Aristotle's views on slavery. 3 In the present paper, I propose to concentrate on the question of whether 'mechanics' may be included in the just Aristotelian political order in a way that remains consonant with fundamental features of Aristotle's philosophy. In my view, there is an additional dimension, unnoticed by Maclntyre, to the occupational revaluation of banausoi that he advocates. This factor stems from Aristotle's own organization of the realms and domains of human knowledge. As Maclntyre accurately insists in several of his books, it is necessary to set Aristotle's account of moral and political life in the context of his distinction 2

Maclntyre 1988. See also Maclntyre 1981, 158-160 and Maclntyre 1999, 6-7. For instance Smith 1991,142-155; Frank 2005, 26-32. Eugene Garver very recently shared with me an unpublished paper entitled "Aristotle's Natural Slaves: Incomplete Praxis and Incomplete Human Beings" that does much to unravel the questions surrounding this topic. 3

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between theoretical or contemplative virtue and practical or active virtue (see Maclntyre 1989, 91-93; 1990, 111). Each realm depends upon different forms of knowledge: the former seeks universal first principles for their own sake; the latter aims at particular precepts of action for the sake of something else, namely, eudaimonia. Aristotle believes that both are necessary for full human flourishing, albeit in different ways: he posits an ordering between them, such that the exercise of active virtues is a necessary but subordinate condition for the acquisition of theoretical excellence. As Maclntyre properly acknowledges, the acquisition and use of practical intelligence, phronesis, is a worthy pursuit because it simultaneously confers eudaimonia and makes possible the 'higher' satisfactions afforded by episteme, theoretical inquiry. As Maclntyre concludes, "[although Aristotle does indeed contrast the episteme of universals with the particularity of phronetic concerns, the two are clearly linked." (1989, 93) What Maclntyre, curiously, does not appear to recognize is that Aristotle's division of knowledge throughout his corpus is actually tri-partite: in addition to the theoretical and practical realms of inquiry, Aristotle talks repeatedly and at length about 'productive' science (poesis).4 This is not an insignificant omission, I think, because the 'productive' domain of knowledge is precisely that which guides the activities associated with the 'mechanical arts'. In order to understand adequately the difficulties attendant upon Aristotle's insistence on the 'practical' incompetence, and thus political exclusion, of banausoi, I contend that we must investigate this third classification of the sciences. I hold that Aristotle's attitude in the Politics and elsewhere toward 'mechanics', to the extent that it represents a conventional and uncritical contempt for the manual trades, stands in tension with his systematic organization of human knowledge. If true, this claim supports a far stronger and more compelling reason than Maclntyre imagines to suppose that one may adopt a genuinely Aristotelian stance favoring the inclusion of 'mechanics' into the life of wisdom and hence moral and political virtue. In sum, I identify a conceptual struggle internal to Aristotle's own thought that opens the way to Aristotelian inclusiveness. Nor do I think that this is mere hermeneutical cleverness (some might say 'trickery') on my part. Rather, it is telling that many medieval readers of Aristotle, who were familiar with his general systematization of knowledge well before they had access to the Politics or the Nicomachean Ethics, adopted essentially the same position, jettisoning his exclusion of 'mechanics' from public life on largely the same grounds that I do. In the present paper, then, I first turn to the writings of Aristotle himself in order to examine more carefully his arguments about both the alleged incapacities of banausoi and the nature of the 'productive' sciences in order to highlight the tension that I have located. Thereafter, I investigate some features of the medieval reception of Aristotle by authors who refused the conclusion that the exercise of the mechanical arts is incompatible with the possession of practical intelligence and virtue, and consequently with political engagement. 4 My position in what follows shares some common features with that of Knight 2007, esp. 16-34, although it will become apparent that we disagree on many specifics of interpretation.

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1. Aristotle As I have mentioned already, Aristotle's Politics leaves no doubt that in a wellordered or just regime, the status of citizen would only be accorded to those whose arete (excellence, virtue) qualifies them to participate fully in officeholding and the functions of ruling. He admits that constitutions do indeed vary concerning who is to be admitted into citizenship: democracies including all (or at any rate most) free males born of citizen parentage, oligarchies establishing more stringent limitations on citizenship. But he declares that his concern is not merely to engage in the descriptive enterprise of determining citizenship in a relative sense; he is instead interested in defining 'citizen in the strictest sense', that is, those individuals who are competent to exercise the civic rights associated with judicial and official tasks. 5 While civic excellence is not identical to personal virtue, individuals who possess both—that is, who are both good citizens and good men—will tend to coincide in the best constitutional arrangements (1276bl6-1277b33). For this reason, the citizen can never be a "mechanic," since the menial laborer necessarily lacks the excellence associated with just judgment and wise rule. "It must be admitted that we cannot consider all those to be citizens who are necessary to the existence of the polis [... ] In ancient times, and among some nations, the artisan class were slaves or foreigners, and therefore the majority of them are so now. The best form of polis will not admit them to citizenship; but if they are admitted, then our definition of the excellence of a citizen will not apply to every citizen, or every free man as such, but only those who are freed from necessary services. The necessary people are either slaves who minister to the wants of individuals or mechanics and laborers who are the servants of the community." (1278a2-12.) Aristotle reaffirms this position in his discussion of the ideally best regime in Book 7 of the Politics. There he distinguishes the 'citizens' properly speaking— whom he terms the 'parts' of the polis and who discharge the properly political functions of defense, religious worship, and deliberation—from the 'conditions' of the polis, whose responsibility is to meet its physical needs by engaging in farming, craftsmanship, and commerce. He argues that "since we are speaking here of the best form of government, that is, the one under which the polis will be happiest (and happiness, as said before, cannot exist without excellence or virtue), it clearly follows that in the polis that is best governed and includes only men who are just absolutely, rather than just relative to the principle of the constitution, the citizens must not lead the life of artisans 5 Aristotle, Politics 1275a3- 20. In general, English translations are based on the versions found in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York: Random House 1941, although I have occasionally modified them in consultation with the Greek texts of the works of Aristotle published in the Loeb Classical Library edition.

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or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble and inimical to excellence." (1328b32-41) Thus, in his ideal regime, those who earn their living necessarily possess the status of outsiders within their own community. They would not be the same as slaves or foreigners, in the sense that they could presumably own property and determine the conditions of their own labor; but for all intents and purposes, their status would otherwise not be much different from the unfree and the alien. What justification does Aristotle offer for such exclusion from the community? Two main arguments stand out. First, practitioners of the mechanical arts necessarily lack the free time that he regards to be crucially important for a perfected civic life. "Citizens being compelled to live by their labor have no leisure," he asserts. (1292b26-27) Leisure is required for citizenship both because it permits citizens a full opportunity to participate in all aspects of community activity and because it affords the chance to acquire the moral and intellectual qualities indispensable for wise rule. "Leisure", Aristotle observes, "is necessary both for the development of excellence and the performance of political duties." (1329al-2) The man of leisure, as he says in the Nicomachean Ethics, stands a better chance of obtaining excellence and happiness than does one constantly consumed by daily cares and woes. (NE 1177b4-27) The second rationale for the exclusion of mechanics from citizenship is the incompatibility of the aims of their occupation with the true nature of the polis. Aristotle had famously held that the polis exists not in order simply to preserve the biological lives of its members, but to promote their virtue and happiness; its purpose is not mere life, but a 'choiceworthy' life. "The polis exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only: if life only were the object, slaves and brute animals might form a polis, but they cannot, for they have no share in happiness or in a life based on choice", Aristotle asserts (Politics 1280132-34). The end of the mechanical arts does not measure up to this vaunted goal of 'the good life'; those who work with their hands create at best merely the conditions for a materially adequate existence. Of course, a man must have access to the means of physical life as a pre-requisite to living well, that is, virtuously and happily; the goods of the soul assume at least a modicum of "external" goods (NE 1177a28-31). But those who provide such sustenance are themselves engaged in an enterprise that limits their appreciation of the ultimate excellence that the polis exists to achieve. Their conception of the good life involves the amassing of wealth or gathering of property or enjoying of physical pleasure, rather than the genuine happiness afforded by the practice of the moral and intellectual virtues. The life of mechanics, in sum, decisively disqualifies them from realizing completely their political natures. At one point in the Politics, Aristotle draws an explicit connection between his exclusion of the practitioners of the banausic arts and his conception of knowledge,6 remarking "any task, craft, or branch of learning should be considered vulgar if it renders the body or mind of free people useless for the practices 6

A useful survey is provided by van den Hoven 1996, 81-86, 103-105.

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and activities of virtue. That is why the crafts that put the body in a worse condition and work done for wages are called vulgar; for they debase the mind and deprive it of leisure." (Politics 1337al0-ll) This would seem to suggest a more-or-less absolute dividing line between the socalled 'productive' forms of science and the other realms of knowledge. Yet such a complete division is not sustained by discussions elsewhere in his corpus. As I have already mentioned, a number of Aristotle's writings distinguish between 'contemplative' or 'theoretical' or 'speculative' knowledge, on the one hand, and 'practical' and/or 'productive' knowledge, on the other. Although his terminology is not always entirely consistent, his basic insight is evident: 'contemplative' inquiry is devoted to inquiry into pure truth, whereas 'practical' and 'productive' disciplines aim at the correct conduct of activity. Aristotle comments in the Eudemian Ethics that "the theoretical sciences [... ] [such as] astronomy and natural science and geometry have no other end except to get to know and to contemplate the nature of things that are the subjects of the sciences; [by contrast,] the end of the productive sciences is something different from science and knowledge, for example, the end of medicine is health and the end of political science is good order." (EE 1216bll18) As he elaborates in the Metaphysics, "There is a science of nature, and evidently it must be different both from practical and from productive science. For in the case of productive science the principle of movement is in the producer and not in the product, and is either an art or some other faculty. And similarly in practical science the movement is not in the thing done, but rather in the doer. But the science of the natural philosopher deals with the things that have in themselves a principle of movement. It is clear from these facts, then, that natural science must be neither practical nor productive, but theoretical [... ]" (Metaphysics 1064al0-18) 'Productive' and 'practical' sciences seek a good action or a result, rather than knowledge for its own sake; moreover, the source of 'practical' and 'productive' knowledge is the human being himself, while the origin of theoretical knowledge lies rather within nature. (EE 1218bl-8) Thus, the study of the active or human domain was not valuable for its own sake, but for the sake of something else, namely, the improvement of human behavior (and ultimately the attainment of eudaimonia) in moral, public and material spheres. This, in turn, requires the development of a theory of moral psychology designed to teach people to develop characters conducive to the performance of virtuous acts and a conception of statesmanship and legislation aimed at promoting the moral improvement of citizens and inhabitants, as well as a standard of judgment for the value of the products yielded by the mechanical arts.

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While Aristotle says much less about 'productive' knowledge than about the other domains of human science, he nonetheless makes a case for its validity as well as its usefulness and thus treats it as a legitimate branch of human inquiry. In his most extensive discussion of the subject, in the opening chapter of the Metaphysics, he acknowledges the unique role played by 'productive' sciences, in the sense that "actions and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician does not cure man, in some incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other called by some such individual name, who happens to be a man." (Met. 981al6-20) By contrast, theoretical knowledge treats only of universal or general causes and principles. On the one hand, Aristotle regards the theoretical sciences as ultimately superior because they yield superior knowledge of causes and are most akin to divinity. (Met. 982a20-983a23) Hence, "theoretical kinds of knowledge [... ] [partake] more of the nature of wisdom than the productive." (Met. 982b35) Still, on the other hand, Aristotle admits that "if a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured". (Met. 981a20-24) Although Aristotle proposes a clear hierarchy of knowledge, then, he admits that a 'productive' science does demand some knowledge of causes and principles—if only in a particular and applied way in order to achieve a result—and thus has value. For this reason, while he condemns the mindlessness of the manual laborer, he also recognizes that "the master-workers in each craft are more honorable and know in a truer sense and are wiser" precisely because they have acquired a modicum of knowledge about specific causes. (Met. 981a30-32). Moreover, he avers that "he who invented any art whatsoever that went beyond the common perception of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the invention, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest". (Met. 981bl3-16) Aristotle does not dispute this assessment, but instead criticizes those who hold in higher esteem inventions that resulted in recreation in contrast to the crafts that alleviate the necessities of life, the latter of which permit the leisure that is a pre-requisite for advanced theoretical pursuits and contemplation. (Met. 981bl6-24) In sum, Aristotle concedes that 'productive' knowledge not merely produces useful results, but additionally affords us some grasp on the understanding of true causes and principles. In line with Maclntyre's observation about the linkage of 'theoretical' to 'practical' knowledge, the contrast drawn between them and the 'productive' sciences does not entail the failure of the latter to partake of the essential principles constitutive of human knowledge. (Here I disagree with what I take to be the claim of Kelvin Knight that Aristotle sought to detach poesis entirely from both theoria and praxis (Knight 2007, 16)). 'Productive' sciences may be of a lesser order than their 'theoretical' and 'practical' counterparts (just as 'practical' knowledge is subordinated to 'theoretical'), but one might readily conclude that it is impossible for human beings to live a fully flourishing life without some grasp of 'productive' knowledge just as of phronesis and episteme. This impression is reinforced by some of Aristotle's comments in the unfin-

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ished Book 8 of the Politics, where he confronts a tension between 'production' and phronesis implicit in the education of the citizens under the best constitution. As we have seen, Book 7 insists upon a firm distinction in such an ideal polity between its 'parts' and 'conditions', the latter constituting the 'vulgar' mechanical occupations that are excluded from citizenship. In Book 8, Aristotle agonizes about how this separation is to be maintained in matters of instruction which clearly require the acquisition of 'productive' knowledge. He adopts a studied ambivalence concerning such learning: "That children should be taught those useful things that are really necessary, however, is not unclear. But it is evident that they should not be taught all of them, since there is a difference between the tasks of the free and those of the unfree, and that they should share only in such useful things that will not turn them into vulgar craftsmen. [... ] Even in the case of some of the sciences that are suitable for a free person, while it is not unfree to participate in them up to a point, to study them too assiduously or exactly is likely to result in the harm just mentioned." (Politics 1337b3-6, 14-17) These remarks seem to support the position of the Metaphysics that there is some value to the realm of 'productive' knowledge. On the one hand, Aristotle apparently realizes that an education in the practical and theoretical virtues presupposes the acquisition of forms of 'productive' knowledge. On the other hand, he deeply fears that too much knowledge of this sort demeans people and renders them unfit to pursue the 'higher' ends of humanity. His proposed solution—that instruction in 'productive' learning be guided by the goal of enhancing noble leisure, rather than giving pleasure or generating servility—strikes me as somewhat strained and vague. (Politics 1337b211338al3) Aristotle leaves it an open question how much education in the 'productive' sciences is too much, although some is clearly desirable. Aristotle's ambivalence regarding 'productive knowledge' is perhaps even more evident in the discussion of musical instruction that closes off the extant portion of Book 8. He agonizes at length about the reasons why music (by which he means singing and playing instruments, not merely the study of harmony) should be incorporated into the communal curriculum in the best city. He admits that music is neither "necessary for life", nor useful, nor good for the soul; instead, music should be counted among the "leisured pursuits counted as appropriate for free people". (1338al3-25) But, at the same time, encouraging (even requiring) citizens to learn how to play instruments and sing poses the risk of permitting their degeneration into base men, since "musicians are vulgar craftsmen, and [... ] a true man would not perform music unless he were drunk or amusing himself'. (1339b8-9) If the appreciation of music is indeed part of the "leisured life of the free man", would it not be safer and more sensible for citizens to listen to music rather than to perform it? Aristotle responds negatively: a musical education demands hands-on experience, because "if someone takes part in performance himself, it makes a great difference in the development of certain qualities, since it is difficult if not impossible for people to become excellent

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judges of performance if they do not take part in it". (1340b21-24) As is generally the case with his attitude toward "productive" forms of knowledge, Aristotle asserts the validity of acquiring some musical skill precisely because it facilitates a more noble way of life; this end must kept clearly in view. Consequently, he insists that exercise in voice and instruments should be confined to youth: "[...] since one should take part in performance in order to judge, for this reason they should engage in performance while they are young and stop performing when they are older, but be able to judge which melodies are noble and enjoy them in the right way, because of what they learned when they were young." (1340b3439) The case of music illustrates clearly that "productive" knowledge is linked, if subservient, to more elevated human pursuits associated with phronesis and arête. Given this connection, even though Aristotle realizes that there is some merit to the objection "that performing music makes one vulgar" (1340b3940), he still upholds the positive contribution that learning musical performance makes to the characters of the future citizens of the perfectly just community. Of course, he stipulates a specific curriculum in order to ensure that the goal of leisure, rather than the promotion of vulgarity, is achieved. (1341a8-1341bl8) Aristotle certainly fears the consequences of putting "productive" knowledge to the wrong sorts of uses, on the one hand, yet he is loathe to surrender it entirely, in recognition of the foundation it provides for leading a life of noble leisure.7

2. Later Reception It is apparent, then, that Aristotle struggled (somewhat unsatisfactorily) in the Politics with the tension between the value of 'productive' knowledge for human flourishing and the exclusion of the 'mechanical arts' and their practitioners from a full share of moral and political life. If he were consistent in the application of his systematic classification of knowledge, which posits linkages between the three main categories of science, he would perhaps have surrendered the insistence that the practice of arts and crafts associated with 'productive' knowledge is incommensurable with citizenship properly conceived. Failing this, I think that we should conclude that Aristotle neglects to provide compelling philosophical grounds to follow him in his view that the rights and offices of citizenship must be unavailable to 'mechanics' in a just regime. Not only does 'productive' knowledge share some important characteristics with other forms of knowledge, but it affords a precondition for the capacity of human beings to become good and wise. There is nothing about the acquisition of 'productive' knowledge that renders people unqualified for virtue and eudaimonia per se—on Aristotle's own grounds. One reason why I find this thesis plausible is that it seems to have been widely adopted by medieval Latin authors familiar with Aristotle's conception of the ordering of the human sciences, both before and after the translation and transmission of his main writings during the late twelfth and early thirteenth 7 Eugene Garver has suggested to me that echoes of a similar position may be found in Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a29-b4.

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centuries. Even without access to Aristotle's own treatises, there were numerous intermediary sources that propounded the basic Aristotelian scheme, among them Boethius's Commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge and Cassiodorus's Institutes as well as Isidore's Etymologies.8 These works were widely disseminated during the twelfth century, so Aristotle's categorization of the forms of philosophical knowledge formed a common feature of medieval learning. Probably the first thorough use in the twelfth century of the Aristotelian division of the scientific disciplines was made by Hugh of St. Victor (Wieland 1981, 23-25). In his Didascalion, which dates to the late 1120s, Hugh upheld a four-fold division of the sciences into the contemplative, practical, logical and mechanical realms. 9 His analysis of these fields of knowledge is clearly indebted to Aristotle's framework.10 Of particular interest in the present context, Hugh incorporated the practice as well as the theory of the mechanical arts into the realm of human 'wisdom', rendering them thereby worthy to be pursued by human beings. He reasons that earthly wisdom extends to all acts for which "the end and the intention" is "the restoring of our nature's integrity or the relieving of those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject". 11 The former actions are, of course, spiritual and pertain to the condition of the human soul, the goal of which is "to restore in us the likeness of the divine image". The latter type of act concerns the circumstances of the body and "the necessity of this life, which, the more easily it can suffer harm from those things which work to its disadvantage, the more does it require to be cherished and conserved".12 While 'divine' matters may take ultimate priority for Hugh over 'human' ones, he concludes that the necessity imposed upon us by our god-given nature constitutes a dilemma whose remedy deserves to be accorded the name of knowledge (scientia) just as much as the theoretical or practical fields of reason (1.8, 55-56). The purpose of the mechanical arts is to overcome or combat the natural deficiencies of human life. The unique predicament of human beings, then, demands the 'invention' or 'discovery' of the arts, according to Hugh (1.11, 57-58). "Necessity", he observes with reference to the proverb, "is the mother of arts". (1.9, 56) He refuses to disdain the fact the God has left us to our own devices to meet our needs: "A need is something without which we cannot live, and [with which] we would live more happily [... ] For the sake of our needs, the mechanical arts were discovered." (6.14, 152) In turn, because humanity has multiple needs, there must be many different sorts of occupations to meet them. Thus, mechanical knowledge comprises seven arts—fabric-making, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics—of which the initial three pertain to the external protection of the body, while the other four concern internal nourishment 8 See Boethius, Commentaria in Prophyrium, 1.3 (Migne, Patrologia Latina, 64.11—64.12); Cassiodorus, Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors 1937, 2.3.7; and Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, ed. W.M. Lindsay 1911, 2.24.16. 9 Hugh of St. Victor 1961, Didascalicon, Jerome Taylor (trans.), Appendix A, 152-154. I have occasionally corrected the translation when it seemed to depart too greatly from the Latin version of the Didascalicon, ed. Charles H. Buttimer (1933). 10 As has been emphasized by Haren (1992), 112. 11 Hugh, Didascalicon, 1.5, 51-52. 12 Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, 1.7, 54.

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(2.20, 74). The practitioners of each of these arts redress some defect of natural human existence by manufacturing an artificial product in imitation of nature itself: they provide for us what nature does not, yet in a quasi-natural way (1.4, 51). "From nature's example, a better chance for trying things should be provided to man when he comes to devise for himself by his own reasoning those things naturally given to all other animals. Indeed, human reason shines forth much more brilliantly in inventing those very things than ever it would have had man naturally possessed them." (1.9, 56) Hugh thus refutes the accusation that mechanics live contrary to nature because their products are mere 'artifice': "We look with wonder not at nature alone but at the artificer as well." (1.9, 56) Such remarks clearly correlate to the Aristotelian conception of 'productive' knowledge. For Hugh as for Aristotle, the 'productive' sciences contain a measure of wisdom which, if not as venerable as that possessed by the theologian and the philosopher, still possesses inherent worth that demands the respect of humankind. But Hugh does not take the step of concluding that the practitioners of the 'mechanical arts' are thereby disqualified from acquiring the practical and even theoretical forms of knowledge. On the contrary, he stresses to an even greater extent than Aristotle the interdependence of the various classes of knowledge: "the mechanical arts [... ] are altogether ineffective unless supported by knowledge o f ' logic, the practical arts, and the theoretical sciences. (Appendix A, 154) Soon after Hugh wrote, and perhaps under the considerable weight of his influence, we find a large body of literature emerging that addresses the organization of human knowledge generally and that specifically valorizes 'mechanics' and their distinctive form of inquiry (Van den Hoven 1996, 178-200). During the late 1150s, John of Salisbury went so far as to insist that the practitioners of the 'mechanical arts' deserve to be accorded an official status within the body politic and are to be treated with dignity and respect. Without referring directly to the Didascalicon or other Aristotelian-inflected schemes of the sciences, John lists the various mechanical pursuits in some detail, making it clear that he is speaking not just of master artisans but of the full range of what he calls 'the humbler offices'. "Among these are to be counted the husbandmen, who always cleave to the soil, busied themselves about their plough-lands or vineyards or pastures or flower gardens. To these must be added the many species of cloth-making and those mechanical arts that work in wood, iron, bronze, and the different metals; also the menial occupations, and the manifold forms of making a livelihood and sustaining life, or increasing household property, all of which, while they do not pertain to the authority of the governing power, are yet in the highest degree useful and advantageous to the corporate whole of the community." 13 13 John of Salisbury, in: C . C . J . Webb (ed.), Policraticus 2 1909, 6.20. The translations here are based on my English version (Cambridge University Press 1990), 125-126.

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John even claims that the welfare of such 'mechanics' constitutes the very rationale for the government of the king: "That course is to be pursued in all things that is of advantage to the humbler classes, that is, the multitude; for small numbers always yield to great. Truly, the reason for the institution of officials was to the end that subjects might be protected from wrong, and that the republic itself might be 'shod,' as it were, by means of their services." (6.20) Thus, where Aristotle had excluded precisely such mechanical occupations from having a part in the just polis, John places them at the center of the healthy and well-ordered political organism. John recognizes that the body politic requires the "services" provided by practitioners of the "mechanical arts" in order to survive and thrive: "It is they who raise, sustain, and move forward the weight of the entire body. Take away the support of the feet from the strongest body, and it cannot move forward by its own power, but must creep painfully and shamefully by its own hands, or else be moved by means of brute animals." (5.2) Consequently, on the principle of "reciprocity" that informs John's political theory generally (6.20), the other parts of the body owe it to the manual occupations to ensure that they are treated justly and shown due honor as befits their contributions to the common good. This position seems to be consonant with and warranted by the twelfth-century reception of the Aristotelian idea of "productive" knowledge as one among several valid sciences, all of which contribute to an overall human good. It may be surprising to discover that the situation was not radically transformed in the course of the thirteenth century when Aristotle's complete oeuvre (including the Ethics and Politics) had been translated into Latin and circulated widely among Europe's intelligentsia. Of course, some authors did follow Aristotle in insisting upon the exclusion of artisans, farmers and other banausoi from the ranks of citizens. But there was by no means universal agreement about this topic. A survey of the main scholastic commentaries and quaestiones on the Politics dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries demonstrates that the nature of qualifications for citizenship was a matter of wide dispute. 14 My own research into some of the major political theorists of the same era—including Brunetto Laini, Ptolemy of Lucca, and Marsiglio of Padua—likewise indicates a willingness to consider the 'functional' contributions of 'mechanics' to constitute sufficient reason to accord them full status as citizens (Nederman 2002; 2003; 2004). Marsiglio is perhaps the most extreme in this regard. In his Defensor minor, a summary recapitulation and application of the precepts of major treatise, Defensor pads, written around 1340, he unambiguously proposes that 'mechanics' are qualified for active participation in civic life. Addressing the question of who enjoys the proper authority to punish or remove negligent rulers, Marsiglio reasserts the teaching of the Defensor pads that no single part of the community has the rightful power to correct the governor; instead, it is a matter for the whole citizen body to address. He then adds an intriguing qualification: "And I say furthermore that if such correction pertains to some particular part or office of the civic body, then under no circumstances 14

See Dunbabin 1982, 723-737.

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does it pertain to priests, but instead to prudent men (prudentes) or learned teachers, indeed preferably to the workman or craftsmen or the rest of the laborers (mechanicis)." Whereas priests are forbidden to have a hand in political affairs, Marsiglio explains, it is permitted "by human reason or law [... ] for these men to involve themselves in civil or secular affairs."15 The Defensor minors remark confirms, at minimum, that he regarded practitioners of the mechanical arts to be full members of the community, competent to participate in important public decisions such as the punishment of an errant ruler. Marsiglio's wording, moreover, suggests that he may subscribe to an even more expansive view: he hints that those engaged in manual occupations may enjoy special rights or responsibilities in cases of judging and correcting the mistakes of governors. Evidently, given the orientation of his conception of community toward functional inclusion, he believed that practitioners of the 'mechanical arts' possessed a special stake in ensuring the communal good, requiring that they be accorded a citizen status that confers upon them a remarkably large share of authority in the governance of their own communities. In any case, Marsiglio, who is often considered to be the arch-Aristotelian of the fourteenth century, departs explicitly and markedly from Aristotle's evaluation of the political competence of 'mechanics', in line with what appears an established tradition of respect for the value of the knowledge and activity that they bring to the community.

3. Conclusion How widespread was the position adopted by Marsiglio and other scholastic authors concerning the qualifications of 'mechanics' for public life based precisely on the merits of their occupations? It would require a far more extensive survey of the medieval literature than is possible at present to answer this question adequately.16 It seems evident, however, that numerous medieval authors regarded the nature of 'productive' knowledge and its application by various types of manual laborers in a far more positive light than did Aristotle himself. An important reason for this, I surmise, stems from the broad commitment to Aristotle's own plan of organizing and analyzing the sciences, which stood at the 1 5 Marsiglio of Padua, Writings on the Empire: Defensor minor and De translatione Imperii, trans. Cary J. Nederman 1993, 2.7. The Latin edition is to be found in Oeuvres Mineures, ed. Colette Jeudy and Jeannine Quillet, Paris: Éditions de CNRS, 1979. 1 6 Let me mention just two more, and very different, examples of the medieval valorization of the mechanical as important contributions to the communal good. Pierre DuBois in The Recovery of the Holy Land, trans. Walther I. Brandt (New York 1956, 136-138) integrates the study of the mechanical arts quite centrally into his curriculum for the instruction of young men. Moreover, Constant Mews of Monash University has pointed out to me that Johannes de Grocheio's Ars musice, a work of the mid-thirteenth century, contains extensive defense and praise of the so-called musica vulgalis (simple or civil music) on grounds of its moral and political value, and also associates directly this form with the mechanical arts. (Professor Mews is part of a team that is presently editing and translating this treatise.)

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intellectual core of the Middle Ages, especially—but not only—after the emergence of the Arts curriculum during the early thirteenth century. To the extent that Aristotle's arrangement of knowledge incorporates 'production' as one of its dimensions, his exclusion of banausoi from political affairs would have seemed as inexplicable and indefensible to them as it does to us. Of course, the fact that so many medieval authors disagreed with Aristotle on this point does not 'prove' the validity of my claim that a tension exists within his writings in regard to the status of 'productive' knowledge. But such considerable divergence from Aristotle, especially in a world in which commitment to human equality and basic civil rights was far more tenuous then in our own times, is at least suggestive. To conclude, I hope to have offered some compelling reasons to suppose that there are much better reasons than Maclntyre adduces to insist that Aristotle's exclusion of banausoi from access to full political engagement is essentially incorrect. Aristotle's own attitude toward the interconnections between different fields of knowledge affords a sufficient foundation for us to reject his statements in the Politics concerning the necessary incapacity of 'mechanics'. We need not fall back entirely on culturalist or historicist grounds in order to save Aristotle from his errors. Rather, Aristotle himself provides us with the resources for building a more inclusive and egalitarian vision of a political community. In reaching this conclusion, I concur broadly with the spirit of Kelvin Knight's recent book on Aristotelian Philosophy in promoting a 'reformed', even a 'revolutionary', Aristotelianism (Knight 2007, 220-221). I would simply add that I believe we may reasonably look for the grounding of such an Aristotelian renewal in the works Aristotle himself as well as in the medieval reception of his ideas.

Bibliography Dunbabin, J. (1982), The Reception and Interpretation of Aristotle's Politics, in: Kretzmann, N./Kenny, A./Pinborg, J. (eds.) (1982), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge Frank, J. (2005), A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics, Chicago Freeland, C. (ed.) (1998), Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, University Park/PA Harén, M. (1992), Medieval Thought (2nd ed.), Toronto Knight, K. (2007), Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to Maclntyre, Cambridge Maclntyre, A. (1981), After Virtue (2nd ed.), London — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame — (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, Notre Dame — (1999), Rational Dependent Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Chicago Nederman, C. J. (2002), Mechanics and Citizens: The Reception of the Aristotelian Idea of Citizenship in Late Medieval Europe, in: Vivarium 40, 75-102 — (2003), Commercial Society and Republican Government in the Latin Middle Ages: The Economic Dimensions of Brunetto Latini's Republicanism, in: Political Theory 31, 644-663 — (2004), Body Politics: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in the Later Mid-

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die Ages, in: Pensiero Politico Medievale 2, 59-87 Smith, N. (1991), Aristotle's Theory of Natural Slavery, in: Keyt, D./Miller Jr.,F. (eds.), A Companion to Aristotle's Politics, Oxford Tessitore, A. (ed.) (2002), Aristotle and Modern Politics, Notre Dame Van den Hoven, B. (1996), Work in Ancient and Medieval Thought, Amsterdam Wallach, J. R. (1992), Contemporary Aristotelianism, in: Political Theory 20, 613-664 Wieland, G. (1981), Ethica—Scientia Practica, Miinster

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After Tradition?: Heidegger or Maclntyre, Aristotle and Marx*

Abstract: Philosophical tradition has been challenged by those who would have us look to our own practice, and to nothing beyond. In this, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger is followed by the politics of Hannah Arendt, for whom the tradition of political philosophy terminated with Karl Marx's theorization of labour. This challenge has been met by Alasdair Maclntyre, for whom the young Marx's reconceptualization of production as a social activity can inform an Aristotelianism that addresses our shared practices in traditional, teleological terms. Looking to the social nature of our practices orientates us to common goods, to the place of those goods in our own lives, and to their place within political communities. Maclntyre's Thomistic Aristotelian tradition has Heideggerian and other philosophical rivals, but he argues that it represents our best way of theorizing practice.

0. Heidegger and Aristotle Martin Heidegger and his 'postmodernist' followers describe past, Western philosophy as 'the tradition'. Heidegger's project was to rethink the origins of this tradition and to 'destroy' its conceptual scheme (Heidegger 1962, 41-49), so as to uncover phenomenologically what of our elemental way of being has been concealed by a couple millenia of metaphysical dogma. Up until his 'turn' in the early 1930s, and especially prior to the publication of Being and Time (van Buren 1994; Kisiel 1995), the young Heidegger was in continuous engagement with Aristotle, whom he considered the most revealing philosopher of human being's worldliness and temporality. It was largely through reinterpreting Aristotle's texts and terminology t h a t he hoped to discover how one might think differently from the tradition. The concept upon which Heidegger focussed first and most consistently was that of being. His initial motivation was theological, Catholic, and scholastic, although he progressively moved from these concerns toward t h a t of understanding and expressing what being is in terms that are somehow primordial and 'preconceptual'. This concern was with the ontic temporality of what can always become otherwise, rather than with atemporally suspending what 'is' within some conceptual scheme. Aristotle had conceptualized worldly being in terms of * I thank Anton Leist and my interlocutors at the Alasdair Maclntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism conference for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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particular forms, kinds or species, and of substantial individuals as instances of such species. Despite his anti-conceptualism, Heidegger's specific concern was with what it is to be human. Or, rather, his concern was with what it is to be fully and openly aware of one's own being, as a human. One's own being is temporally limited, but is within a world replete with equipment and possibilities. Heidegger's phenomenological preoccupation with our awareness of being might well be characterized as philosophically modern and post-Kantian, but he instead characterized it as preconceptual and pretraditional. The text through which he found himself best able to articulate how tradition had concealed this primordial self-consciousness was Nicomachean Ethics Book Six (Heidegger 2002a, 129-137; 1997, 15-48, 93-118; 2007, 219-230), and this precisely because of its conceptual clarity. Here, Aristotle distinguishes between what tradition calls the intellectual virtues and what Heidegger called ways of (or of being disposed toward) discovering and perceiving entities. Of the five ways, those that need concern us are: sophia, techne, and phronesis. Sophia is the theoretical disposition toward things that are unchanging and unworldly, and techne is the knowledge of how to productively manipulate things that are ready to hand, whereas phronesis is practical insight into one's own being or, that is, the disposition of Dasein toward itself. Aristotle and the tradition have taken us the wrong way in prioritizing sophia over phronesis, and therefore in directing our attention away from our own being and acting. It has been well said that, for Heidegger, "potentiality is to be understood as something disclosed and projected in the element of I can, insofar as it is revealed to me as my possibility", so that "his fundamental ontology is the ontology of action (praxis) and creativity (poiesis)" (Chernjakov 2005, 8, 14; Chernjakov's emphases; Greek transliterated). Human potentiality is not to be understood in terms of the actualization of a singular form. On Heidegger's interpretation, the traditional, teleological paradigm is a theoretical extrapolation from the experience of production, or poiesis, that erroneously conceptualizes the process of material production apart from the human activity, or energeia, of creation. Accordingly (and in accordance with his speculatively philological practice of reducing Aristotle's concepts, and even his neologisms, to their etymological beginnings), Heidegger interpreted Aristotle's term energeia literally, as "at workness" or "being at work" (Heidegger 1995, 188-189, 192-193; Brogan 2005, 130).1 Reversing the traditional prioritization of actuality to potentiality, he argued that "higher than actuality stands possibility" (Heidegger 1962, 63, Heidegger's emphasis; see also e.g. Heidegger 1988, 308; 2007, 231; 1995). His own ontology was opposed to any universalism of forms, even in Aristotle's attenuated sense in which "primary being" is that of substantial individuals and actualization is contingent upon chance and external conditions, but this does not entail that he was opposed to any universalism whatsoever. His concern with the ontic is a 1 Joe Sachs' (1995; 1999) explicitly Heideggerian and anti-Thomistic argument for translating energeia as being-at-work is answered on behalf of Aristotelian tradition by Glen Coughlin (2005, xxvii-xxviii) but apparently ignored by other recent translators (even of Metaphysics Theta). In Knight 2007 I attempt to steer a course though Aristotle's own work in a way that takes bearings from both modes of interpretation.

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concern with the universally fundamental and essential condition of individual human beings. Prom the perspective of Heidegger's most faithful devotees, his genealogical rethinking of the origins of tradition amounts to the deconstruction of its conceptual scheme. As against this, Francisco Gonzalez has recently argued that Heidegger often distorts Aristotle's meaning horribly in accusing Aristotle of a metaphysics of presence that precludes temporality. For example, "Heidegger's interpretation" of "Aristotle's fundamental concept" of energeia "is not only wrong but disastrously wrong" (Gonzalez 2006a, 545) in allowing confusion of human activity with its material products, as are his ontological interpretations of agathon or good "as a way of being [... ] in our existing, not in our acting," and of telos not as "'goal' or 'aim'" or good but as "outermost limit" (Gonzalez 2006b, 131-132; Gonzalez's emphases). On Gonzalez's account, Heidegger's "misinterpretation of Aristotle's fundamental concepts turned him aside too soon from a barely explored road at the beginning of the metaphysical tradition," (Gonzalez 2006a, 558) a road that was blocked by his ontologization of Aristotle's ethics (Gonzalez 2006b, 138). The road down which Gonzalez points would appear to be that which has been named (by Manfred Riedel) 'the rehabilitation of practical philosophy'. This is a road that was opened up by Heidegger's rethinking of tradition's origins in his reinterpretation of Aristotle, but is delineated by Aristotle's conceptual distinctions in, above all, Ethics Six. The road of practical philosophy is that of praxis and phronesis, and is sharply bounded on the one side by theoria and sophia and, on the other, by poiesis and techne. Practical philosophy is unconcerned with ontology, and its concern with production is only that this be subordinated to practice. This road is therefore neither that of Heidegger nor of what he called 'the tradition'. Rather, according to its protagonists, it represents a more authentically Aristotelian tradition, now disclosed from beneath centuries of metaphysical overlay. The best known of these 'neo-Aristotelians' was Hans-Georg Gadamer, who freely admitted his attachments to both Heidegger and tradition and, also, the political incompetence of philosophers. For him, practice meant culture, and ethics derived from ethos. Others understand practice to be more political, and are therefore less ready to associate themselves with Heidegger, whose political blundering was worse than that of any stargazing Greek. One example is Wilhelm Hennis, who attributes his practical philosophy to the influence of Leo Strauss and admits no direct influence from Heidegger whatsoever. Another is Hannah Arendt, who, it can be argued, was at once Heideggerian and Aristotelian (Kisiel 2005, 153-158; Volpi 2007, 45-46; Knight 2008).

1. The Birth and Death of Political Philosophy In 1924, alongside Gadamer, Arendt first listened to Heidegger interpret Nicomachean Ethics Book Six and use it as the medium though which to understand Plato's critique of sophistry in the name of truth (Heidegger 1997). Like

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Gadamer, she took from Heidegger's focus upon Ethics Six what became for her the elemental idea that praxis should be conceptualized in contradistinction to both producing and theorizing. Unlike production, action has nothing to do with causing effects or with means to ends. Rather, it is free, spontaneous and expressively disclosive of the self. After her political disillusionment with Heidegger, and after her subsequent critique of totalitarianism (Arendt 1968a), Arendt made her own project that of establishing the validity of the life of political speech and action in its own terms, apart from any purely philosophical life of the mind. Like Heidegger, she considered that her project required the deconstruction of philosophical tradition. However, the tradition she wished to deconstruct was not defined in terms of its ontological speculation. Rather, it was what she called "the tradition of political philosophy". This tradition was one of philosophers writing about politics, in order to make of political action a means to securing the necessary conditions for their own contemplative theorizing. It began when Plato politicized philosophical tradition in response to the death of Socrates (who the later Arendt characterized as a Sophist), and in the Republic the idea of "the good" ceases to be an object only of contemplation. Instead, it becomes the standard by which to judge, guide and order human affairs (Arendt 1968b, 107115; 2005, 6-13, 25-32). Plato is concerned with action, but his concern is to enclose action within theory and to confuse it with production. This genealogical deconstruction of the traditional "relationship between philosophy and politics" was informed by Heidegger's interpretation of Plato's "parable of the cave",2 but to this interpretation she added that it is "decisive that Plato makes the agathon the highest idea [...] for 'political' reasons" (Arendt/Heidegger 2004, 120-121; Greek transliterated). Arendt's initial judgement of Aristotle was, like Heidegger's, that he continued and elaborated Plato's philosophy. Regarding his veritably teleological idea of something "having its end in itself' as "paradoxical", she contended that he "degrades [... ] everything into a means", that he "introduced in a systematic way the category of means and ends into the sphere of action", and that he understood "praxis in the light of poiesis, his own assertions to the contrary notwithstanding" (Arendt 1953, 6). In The Human Condition she was less antipathetic, conceding that his concept of actuality theorized the characteristically Greek idea that "greatness [... ] lie[s] only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement", adding once again how "paradoxical" is the idea of an "end in itself' but now allowing that, on Aristotle's own account, the "specifically human achievement lies altogether outside the category of means and ends" (Arendt 1958, 206-207). In her very last work she gave his theory of action its teleological due, acknowledging his account of eudaimonia as an end "inherent in human nature" (Arendt 1978, 61-62) and that he differentiated "the productive arts [... ] from the performing arts". Here, she criticized only Aquinas for "neglect [ing] the distinction between poiesis and praxis" that is "crucial for 2 At Arendt 1968b, 291 she specifies the German original of Heidegger 1998 as her source. An extended version is Heidegger 2002b, 17-106. For Gadamer's more nuanced interpretation, see Gadamer 1986, 73-103.

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any theory of action" and, therefore, for ignoring the possibility "that there could be an activity that has its end in itself and therefore can be understood outside the means-end category" (Arendt 1978, 123-124; Arendt's emphasis). It is a peculiarity of Arendt's account of the tradition of political philosophy that—although she says it began with Plato's idea of the good, although she follows Heidegger in saying that the tradition continued with Aristotle, and although she focusses upon Aristotle's teleology of what she calls ends and means—she makes nothing of Aristotle's teleology as a systematic temporalization of the good in terms of actualizable, specific goods, or of his idea that the specifically human good is something rationalizable as an aim. This issue, with which Gadamer attempted to deal directly (Gadamer 1986), is one that she ducks. Instead of talking of the human good, she, like Heidegger, talks only of "achievement" or "accomplishment". When she talks of teleology, she speaks only of "ends"—any ends. A further peculiarity is, therefore, that she writes of Thomas Hobbes not only as the great, early modern opponent of tradition but also as the great, early modern proponent of teleology. She can therefore describe him as the bourgeoisie's greatest ideologist in legitimating both their purposive accumulation of wealth and the sovereign's purposive accumulation of power, in a process that she saw as culminating in totalitarianism (Arendt 1968a, 139-143). Her objection is not the Aristotelian one that wealth and power are only instrumental goods external to the self, to be differentiated from those substantive, 'internal goods' which are the aretai, virtues, or excellences of character, and which are properly regarded as ends in themselves. Rather, her express objection to Hobbes is that action is the realm of contingency, and that therefore one can never with any certainty effect future ends by means of present action. Her underlying objection to Hobbes is, though, more practical: that his idea of a singular sovereignty conflicts with her idea of politics as an irreducible plurality of individual voices and actions. Here she prefers Machiavelli's opposition to tradition in banishing the idea "of the good" from "the public" to "the private sphere of human life" and its replacement by republican virtu, "the excellence with which man answers the opportunities the world opens up before him in the guise of fortuna [... ] where the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end product which outlasts the activity that brought it into existence and becomes independent of it" (Arendt 1968b, 137, 153). If Plato stands at the beginning of Arendt's "tradition of political philosophy", then at its end stands Karl Marx. Arendt had been brought up to respect Marx, and, despite what was done in his name in the twentieth century, she never blamed him for totalitarianism. She understood him as a rebel against the German ideology of Hegelianism, the supposed culmination of philosophical tradition, in his following of Feuerbach's inversion of Hegel's account of the relation of 'man' to 'Idea' and, further, in his account of ideas as epiphenomenal, superstructural predicates of the basic, temporal and historical subject of human 'species being'. However, she later argued that such an inversion of concepts remains within the same conceptual scheme, and she opposed any such 'dialectical' project of combining rationality with actuality as involving the politically dangerous confusion of freedom with necessity. Marx, in combining Hegel's "notion

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of history with the teleological political philosoph[y] o f ' Hobbes (Arendt 1968c, 77), compounds Hobbes's error in extending a teleological conception of action from instrumentally rational actors to "man" as a species. What she regarded as the Marxist idea that history can be intentionally made, she considered even more erroneous than the Hobbesian idea of the state as an artifact. Where Marx broke with tradition, on Arendt's account, was in the radicalism of an ambition that she understood as profoundly philosophical. Marx rebelled not just against the philosophy of Hegel, and not just against the capitalism that Hegel legitimated as rational actuality, but also against the human condition of our very being in the world. This rebellion she understood as radicalizing Plato's introduction of philosophical ideas as standards by which to judge the world of human affairs. Whereas Hegel's dialectic was supposed to synthesize actuality with rationality, necessity with freedom, Marx's was intended to subordinate actuality to reason, to abolish necessity in the cause of freedom, and to bring about the culmination of humanity's 'making' of history in the full actualization of philosophy's traditional ideals of freedom and reason, justice and goodness. Marx's theoretical presumptuousness was informed by what Arendt alleged was his confusion of action with causally productive, end-means 'work' and, also, of the creative freedom of work with what she differentiated as the biological necessity of endless 'labour'. Whereas prior tradition had concealed action beneath theory, Marx concealed the freedom of action within a necessity that was at once historical and biological, just as he hid the political interaction of the plurality of 'men' within the history and 'society' of a unitary humankind. Therefore, even if Marx had been the greatest critic of the commercial society legitimated by Hobbes, he was also, Arendt alleged, the greatest prophet and champion of the twentieth century's mass society of technology and technique, of consumption and labour, in predicting "that the working class will be the only legitimate heir of classical philosophy" (Arendt 1968d, 21). Her primary interest in Marx, as in Plato and Hobbes, was in him as a political thinker. She often listed him alongside Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as a destroyer of tradition, but it is Marx who had a political impact upon the twentieth century by attempting to pose an alternative to tradition in replacing ontology with history and politics with society. What politics should consist in for Arendt was never very clear. Her political ideal was that of action for its own sake and speech for the sake of persuasion, but insofar as persuasion is undertaken for any further goal then both it and action lose their authenticity. Her institutional ideal was that of the creation and federation of local councils (see especially Arendt 1965, final chapter), but this ideal seldom informed what she wrote of politics because of her grounding in Heidegger's ontology of action. For her, as for him, "higher than actuality stands possibility", but on her account action for the sake of mundane goals has aggregated historically into an apolitical 'society'. It is this rise of society (like the rise of technology, for the later Heidegger) that has, at base, eliminated both politics and tradition, and it is this historical process of which she considered Marx the greatest prophet. Just as Aristotle is crucial to the tradition on the account of Heidegger, so too

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is he on that of Arendt. Rather as Heidegger uses Aristotle to create an image of 'primordial' Greek ideas of being which he then alleges were concealed by means of Aristotle's conceptual scheme, Arendt uses him to present an impression of action and politics which she alleges he contravened and undermined. The reduction of politics to economics culminated with Marx but was begun by Aristotle, who introduced the idea of 'rule' from the oikos to the polis. Describing rule in terms of authority, and denying any idea of a specifically human good which might legitimate that authority, Arendt presented authority as amoral domination and, therefore, presented Aristotle's authoritarianism as a radicalization of Plato's concealment of Greek freedom. Again, for Arendt, as for Heidegger, Aquinas is even more guilty than Aristotle of concealing the primordiality of Greek "politikon" with the obfuscation of Latin "socialis" (Arendt 1958, 23). The basic objection of Heidegger and Arendt to philosophical tradition was that it causes us to look away from our own being and acting, and that it is this being and acting which should be the focus of our concern. The later Heidegger's critique of the tradition of 'ontotheology' was that it subordinates our being to that of 'God', and this critique may be understood as developing a line of thought that began with Feuerbach and passed through Nietzsche. Arendt's critique of the tradition of political philosophy was that it subordinates action to 'good' and politics to 'society'. For both of them, we should therefore look beneath and before the tradition. But what they deny, Alasdair Maclntyre affirms.

2. Maclntyre and Aristotle Maclntyre's After Virtue answers the Heideggerian challenge to tradition. He describes the book as "a study in moral theory", and his express antagonist is Nietzsche, who challenged morality, not Heidegger, who ignored moral theory as derivative from ontology. When he wrote the book, Maclntyre had not adequately thought through the implications for the history of philosophy of his newly found commitment to tradition. Therefore, like Heidegger, he wrote of "the tradition" in the singular. Morally, it was "the tradition of the virtues". Philosophically, it was "Aristotelian". Like Heidegger, he regards Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as foundational for later tradition, but, unlike Heidegger, he attributes that status to the entire text and not just to Book Six. Virtue he therefore understands as an essential concept for an Aristotelian moral theory. Even more central is the concept of good. Elsewhere, I have emphasized the influence of Gadamer on Maclntyre's initial turn to Aristotelianism. What should here be added is the underlying influence of Catholic, scholastic and Thomist tradition. Heidegger's own early ontotheology derived from this tradition, and he spent his life attempting to escape it. Maclntyre was not thrown into this tradition as was Heidegger, but his philosophical engagement with it began in 1947, at the same time as his engagement with Marxism and, initially through Sartre, with Heideggerianism. His A Short History of Ethics began by tracing the genealogy of the concepts of good and virtue, but it was not until After Virtue that he was able to articulate these

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concepts in elaborating a moral theory. That he was able to do so owed far less to Gadamer than to Thomism. Although, like German neo-Aristotelians, the tradition that After Virtue purported to rehabilitate was one of practical philosophy, the concept of good that defined Maclntyre's Aristotelianism was one that identified it as a telos. Here, Maclntyre's Aristotelianism was already thoroughly Thomistic and unHeideggerian. Gadamer had accepted the idea of the good as a telos or end in the sense of an intentional goal but, even in After Virtue, Maclntyre intended something more ontological and natural. Heidegger and Arendt both consigned any such idea to the tradition. For them, any specification of human potential as natural is a limitation of possibility. In After Virtue, Maclntyre, like Arendt, described teleology in terms of 'means' and 'ends'. Unlike Arendt, he accepted the idea of an end in itself and, also, (following an English tradition of interpreting Ethics Six; Knight 2007, 135-136) that virtue is a 'constitutive' or 'internal means' to the end of the specifically human good. As Maclntyre puts it, following moral rules and cultivating such excellences of character as courage, truthfulness, temperance and justice is what progresses us from our 'untutored' state to the human end or telos of rational self-fulfilment. Whereas the wealth, health and suchlike that Aristotle called 'external goods' are means to the human telos insofar as they enable us to cultivate our internal good, the virtues or excellences are constituents of that good, so that exercising the virtues forms us into the kinds of being we have the natural potential to become. On this account, to look to the good is to look to one's own being, and to act morally is to act for one's own good. Conceived neither as an external standard nor as an end in itself but as a means to such an end, morality might be justified in a way that meets the Nietzschean challenge. What is novel about After Virtue is not its famous rejection of Aristotle's 'metaphysical biology' but its proposition that some new teleological justification of morality must be elaborated in its place. What the book substitutes for 'metaphysical biology' is social theory, suggesting that every moral philosophy "presupposes a sociology" (Maclntyre 2007, 23). Sociology here substitutes for ontology, in a way that is profoundly anti-Nietzschean, anti-Heideggerian, and anti-Arendtian, although what Maclntyre intends is not the idea of society as a historical totality proposed by Hegel or Marx. Rather, he extends the idea of the good as the telos of an individual actor to an idea of goods as tele of what he describes as shared, social practices. This concept of 'practices' is new to the Aristotelian tradition, and Maclntyre makes no attempt to equate it with either traditional' energeiai' or 'praxeis'. To call practices human energeiai would be to imply that each is universally predicable of any fully formed human being, whereas Maclntyre's practices are far more contingent and particularistic than this. The thought that Aristotelian ethics is 'particularistic' has been popularized by Martha Nussbaum, John McDowell, Terence Irwin and others. Their stress upon the contingency of actions and the ethical limits of rule-following, and therefore upon the need for phronesis or practical judgement, certainly shares much with Arendt. It also shares something with what the early Heidegger said of phronesis, and even with what he

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made of phronesis in elaborating his idea of Dasein. And it also certainly shares much with what Maclntyre says of Aristotle and of ethics. But what Maclntyre says of practices is particularistic in a further sense. Practices are not like individual praxeis or actions, and are not at all like events. On the contrary, they are ongoing sources of rules and standards by which actions are guided and judged. In this, they are more like traditions. What they are most like in Aristotelian terms are technai, productive crafts, and Maclntyre often says that to become a practitioner is "to learn as an apprentice learns" (e.g. Maclntyre 1990a). Such practices include scientific and other theoretical disciplines aiming at universal truths. Evidently, Maclntyre's idea of practices contravenes what the likes of Arendt and Gadamer regard as crucial conceptual distinctions. Maclntyre illustrates practices' particularity by reference to the phenomenology of colour and the practice of painting. The ability to distinguish black from white might be considered a universal aptitude of anyone with sight, but Maclntyre cites Vincent van Gogh's ability to discriminate between the many shades of both black and white in the paintings of Franz Hals. He cites van Gogh as "someone who had learned to see, really to see colors", and (following Adolf Reinach) cites such learning as an example of "the phenomenological way of seeing". The capacity "to recognize minute sameness and difference in color" might be universal, but its "development and exercise" is particular to those "engaged in attending to the same phenomena" as were Hals and van Gogh in the "cooperative activity" of painting. It is those who have learned to paint who can "confirm" or "disconfirm" an individual's judgement about colour. (Maclntyre 2006a, 20; Maclntyre's emphasis) This practical particularity is only implied in Maclntyre's account of the phenomenologically impersonal way of seeing, but he spells it out in detail when he cites van Gogh on Hals elsewhere in elaborating his account of practices (Maclntyre 2006b). As Maclntyre says in After Virtue, every practice has goods particular and "internal" to it that its participants accept as ends for them to pursue and actualize, and these goods are of two kinds. "There is first of all the excellence of the products, both the excellence in performance by" such practitioners as portrait painters and the excellence of, for example, each portrait produced. Secondly, there is the "good of a certain kind of life", such as the life of a painter. (Maclntyre 2007, 189-190) This second kind of good internal to a practice is important for the narrative unity and intelligibility of lives, a central aspect of a life that is lived well being the individual's progress in achieving excellence within the practices in which she engages. Productive crafts are paradigmatic in that they aim at some end separate from the practitioner herself, so that it is by subordinating her untutored desires to a shared idea of a good that an individual learns to acknowledge the authority of impersonal standards of excellence. It is through emulating what Maclntyre calls such "objective" standards (Maclntyre 1993) that individuals learn to better themselves, making themselves accountable to others with whom they share those standards established in actualizing some common good that is itself irreducible to their untutored desires. Such internal goods and tele Maclntyre contrasts with those goals of power and money for which Arendt attacks what she calls Hobbes' 'ideological' con-

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ception of action. Power and money are, Maclntyre specifies, 'goods external to practices'. This distinction between goods internal and external to practices enables him to oppose both Hobbes and any claim that action should aim at no good apart from the actor. Hobbes is mistaken in proposing that the accumulation of such external goods as power and money is rightly pursued for its own sake, or for the mere satisfaction of untutored desires. Nonetheless, power and money are goods and are, therefore, worth pursuing, but only as efficacious means in pursuit of goods internal to social practices or in enabling individuals to cultivate those goods internal to themselves as human beings. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Maclntyre elaborates a second conceptual distinction between kinds of good. Power and money are not only goods 'external' to human beings and to social practices; they are also 'goods of effectiveness'. This expression neatly and positively encapsulates what is good about power and money, as well as what is good about skills that might be regarded as internal to human beings. Such goods of effectiveness Maclntyre juxtaposes to goods of excellence. Again, a point of this conceptual distinction is to indicate a hierarchy of goods. Goods of excellence (like goods internal to practices) are superlative goods in themselves, whereas goods of effectiveness (like goods external to practices) are good in a way that is more conditional and derivative. Goods of excellence appear to be of two kinds. First, there are goods of excellence that are internal to human beings as such; that is, as naturally interdependent animals capable of independent practical reasoning. These are the specifically moral virtues, understood in a way that is Aristotelian in a Thomistic and fully traditional sense. What might be differentiated as a second kind of good of excellence pertains to those standards of what Maclntyre has already called 'excellence in performance'. These standards Maclntyre now characterizes, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, as a kind of good internal not so much to shared practices but to individuals as practitioners. They are objective standards that it is good for human subjects to emulate and achieve in their own actions, even though this objectivity is something particular to the practice. They are not simply skills, which, with Aristotle, Maclntyre says can be exercised or not, and can be exercised to effect either good or bad ends. Rather, we might say, they are skilful actions performed in accordance with particular, shared, practical standards of goodness. It is in emulating the standards so far established within a practice that an actor advances his or her own excellence as a practitioner, and, in pursuing the good internal to a practice, she is habituated not only into the skills particular to that practice but also into the moral virtues necessary to sustain and progress any such practice. In this way, practices are the schools of the virtues. Both kinds of good of excellence—of individual human beings as such, and of individuals as practitioners—are internal to human beings as actors, but the second kind again refers to social practices of producing and theorizing. In this, to repeat, Maclntyre's conceptual distinctions cut across those that Arendt and other post-Heideggerian practical philosophers regard as fundamentally Aristotelian. In After Virtue, Maclntyre proposes his sociology of practices as the pre-

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supposition of a 'narrative' and teleological conception of the self, in which the person's desires are educated and her actions unified through her quest for the good life. This good is not stipulated at the start of her life but something that, insofar as her life is coherently recountable and intelligible, she progressively understands as she advances toward her goals, so that she can explain how she advanced from who she was to who she is, and to what future condition she intends to progress. Insofar as one's life is ideologically ordered, one may understand the place of particular goods within it by reference to its good as a whole. Some of what Maclntyre says of practices might be thought redolent of some of what is said by Heidegger. If so, the great difference that must be appreciated is that Heidegger celebrates practice or practices that are prereflective and preconceptual. To conceptualize practice he regards as inauthentic, as directing us away from practice's 'everydayness'. In contrast, although Maclntyre acknowledges that practices often comprise something like a Heideggerian background to fully conscious intentionality and action, he thinks that practices and practitioners benefit from explicating shared goals and standards. Moreover, the conservative rationale of Heidegger and other theorists of practice's tacitness is, on Maclntyre's account, now rendered untenable. This is because practices are now not concealed by philosophical tradition but are, he argues, suppressed by state and corporate institutions. To this, Heideggerians are theoretically blind. This is why Maclntyre works to reconceptualize practice.

3. Maclntyre and Marx Maclntyre "remain[s] deeply indebted to Marx's critique of the economic, social, and cultural order of capitalism" (Maclntyre 2007, xvi), and what is seldom appreciated of his arguments that moral philosophy requires social theory and that rival rationalities conflict is their debt to Marx. In neither of these respects does Marx share anything with Heidegger. Nonetheless, as Arendt's attention to the young, Feuerbachian Marx should remind us, Marx did share something with Heidegger. Marx, too, thought that human beings should not look to some alien ideal of good or god, that such ideas are reifications of human attributes and activities, and that the elemental human activity is production. Maclntyre agrees with Marx's critique of Feuerbach. For Feuerbach, human beings are alienated from their own activity because they fallaciously project their powers on to some merely theoretical being (Wartofsky 1977, especially 328-340). For Marx, in contrast, human beings are alienated from their productive practice because the social structure they inhabit really does take ownership and control of that activity away from them. For Feuerbach, as for Heidegger, we should reform our consciousness by looking to our own being and acting. For Marx, as for Maclntyre, we need to change our shared social actuality, because social actuality necessarily conditions individual consciousness. In this, sociological sense, Maclntyre may be regarded as a materialist critic of Heidegger's German ideology.

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The possessively individualist conception of the self that was promoted by Hobbes and condemned by Arendt is explained by Marx. For Marx, the self is naturally social but ideas predicable of the self are socially and historically constituted. Capitalist society promotes a privatized idea of the good of commodity acquisition that is necessary to the needs of market capital accumulation and is legitimated by liberalism. Maclntyre agrees here with Marx, and his critique of the instrumentalist justification of action therefore exceeds that of Heideggerians. He adds that a possessive conception of the self can never offer an adequately comprehensive idea of the human good, because liberalism's idea of a good that is privatized is also of goods that are incommensurable and, therefore, of a self that is compartmentalized in its pursuit of such goods. Maclntyre extends his critique of instrumentalism in juxtaposing practices to 'institutions'. What he intends by this term is, paradigmatically, capitalist and managerial corporations, as well as capitalism's bureaucratic state. Institutions, he says, "form a single causal order" with the practices they organize, and yet are also in constant tension with them (Maclntyre 2007, 194). If practices aim at particular or internal goods, then institutions aim at the acquisition and distribution of such external goods as money, power and status. Practices need external goods, as do individuals, but, just as the good life for an individual depends on her subordination of external to internal goods rather than her accumulation of external goods for their own sake, so too does the good of practices—and therefore of individuals as practitioners—require that money, power and authority be organized for the sake of goods internal to practices rather than substituted for their pursuit. A teleological ordering of social relations would subordinate institutions to practices, and the reification of capital as something to be subserved by human beings is only one expression of the contrary manipulation of ordinary actors' shared practices by managerial institutions. It is Marx's reduction of all social relations to those of production, and therefore of all contemporary power to that of capital, that made it easy for Stalinists to present what Maclntyre calls 'state capitalism' (and what Arendt called 'totalitarianism') as if it were 'socialism'. Like Arendt, Maclntyre understands Marx as attempting to break from Hegel's philosophy but nonetheless as continuing to operate within Hegel's conceptual scheme. In this, he contests Louis Althusser's claim that Marx shifted through "an epistemological break" to the paradigm "of a new theoretical science" (Maclntyre 1991, 603), even if he concurs with Althusser in rejecting Lukacsian historicism (albeit on different grounds than those of Althusser's "generalizing scientism"; Maclntyre 1976, 158). "It was", he says, "an Hegelian mistake to envisage history as the self-realization of the Idea" (Maclntyre 1998b, 134), and it remains a mistake to envisage history as the self-realization of our speciesessence. Hegel imputes a universal and teleological rationality to history and, therefore, to the actuality of capitalist 'civil society' as a 'system of needs', and Marx retains this imputation. It is to this extent, only, that there is plausibility in Arendt's characterization of Marx as the past prophet of present capitalism. Although Maclntyre shares much of her critique of society insofar as this is understood as the civil society of capitalism, his account of practices, like Marx's

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account of production, demonstrates that social relations extend far earlier and deeper than modern institutions. Although he, like Marx, socializes teleology (and although he acknowledges that "it was an Hegelian insight to understand history as partially the realization of a series of ideas"; 1998b, 134), Maclntyre does not historicize it. He has never imputed to capitalism the degree of systemic rationality that Marx concedes. What he takes from Marx's economics—which is now more than he did (Maclntyre 2006c, 152)—is only the labour theory of value and of exploitation, and therefore the reality of social conflict, and not everything else that Marx proposes follows from his theory of value in exchange. As for liberalism, he acknowledges its rationality whilst asserting that it is mistaken. In rethinking Marx's premisses, the most Maclntyre concedes to liberalism is that its "mistake [is] embodied in institutionalized social life" (Maclntyre 1998a, 229), that its rationality is indeed actualized in capitalism and in its sovereign, bureaucratic nation-state. Maclntyre regards the Theses on Feuerbach as the culmination of Marx's philosophy, pointing in the direction of a road down which Marx did not go but along which Maclntyre proposes we proceed in order to transcend "the standpoint of civil society" (Maclntyre 1998a, 224, 234). This is not the road of "theory divorced from practice", which is "characteristic of civil society", but of "a particular kind of practice, practice informed by a particular kind of theory rooted in that same practice" (Maclntyre 1998a, 225, 230). What he means here by "a particular kind of practice" is what in After Virtue he called practices. These he here "stand[s] in sharp contrast to the practical life of civil society". Despite acknowledging that something very like his own idea of practices is implied by Marx's Hegelian reference to " objective activity", Maclntyre insists that "it is a contrast best expressed in Aristotelian rather than in Hegelian terms" (Maclntyre 1998a, 225; Maclntyre's emphasis). As evidence, he points to Lancastrian and Silesian weavers of Marx's time. "What made the practice of the[se] hand-loom weavers revolutionary" was their own "mode of life", which gave them a conception "of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance" to capitalism, to "proletarianization", and to all of the alienation, exploitation and demoralization that this entails (Maclntyre 1998a, 232). They were able to "transform themselves and educate themselves through their own self transformative activity", and their militant defence of this shared practice in resistance to the pressure of capitalist exchange relations was such that it was "entitled to be called 'revolutionary' " (Maclntyre 1998a, 231, referring to "the first and third theses"). Marx, Maclntyre suggests, was prevented from seeing this by his Hegelian historicism, which obliged him to view capitalism as progressive. On a post-Heideggerian understanding, Aristotelianism is defined precisely by its divorce of theory from practice and of practice from production. What Maclntyre here intends by "Aristotelian [... ] terms" is therefore something that contrasts sharply with not only the theory and practice of capitalist civil society but also the theories of practice proposed by Arendt and Gadamer. In controverting the standpoint of capitalism, Maclntyre's Aristotelianism also contravenes the distinctions that are characteristic of such neo-Aristotelian practical philosophy. An Aristotelian theory of social practice that is rooted in the very activities that

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it theorizes—including both productive crafts and theoretical disciplines—is a specific kind of Aristotelianism, and what is most striking is Maclntyre's claim that this "Aristotelian" theory is already latent within a wide range of shared practices. Ordinary "practices have an Aristotelian structure", he says, adding that what we "have already learned" as ordinary actors may be "informed and enriched by philosophical theory" (Maclntyre 1998c, 151). Maclntyre is no relativist. He is therefore happy to equate the Hegelian terminology of "objective activity" with what he presents as the Aristotelian terminology of "practices". To this extent, he is still agreeing with Marx when he says that "to regard individuals as distinct and apart from their social relationships is a mistake of theory" that is "embodied in institutionalized social life", so that under capitalism there is "a contradiction" whereby "human beings are generally deprived of a true understanding of themselves and their relationships" (Maclntyre 1998a, 228-229). Indeed, to this extent he even agrees with Althusser's "understanding of capitalism as a set of structures that inescapably function in and through modes of dissimulation" (Maclntyre 1991a, 604) but fail to express the totality of social relations. On this account, practices can escape capitalism's instrumental rationality and enjoy a relative autonomy from capitalist structures, even if handloom weavers were defeated in their collective attempt to make their own history. Instead of taking Maclntyre's Aristotelian road after writing the Theses, Marx neglected their implication that "objective standards of goodness, Tightness and virtue" might be "articulated within practices" (Maclntyre 1998a, 233). Marx therefore never developed the idea that "individuals discover in the ends of [a] practice goods common to all who engage in it [... ] which they can make their own only by allowing their participation in the activity to effect a transformation in the desires which they initially brought with them to the activity", whereby "there comes about a 'coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of [the] human activity of self-changing'" (Maclntyre 1998a, 225-226, quoting the third thesis). Goods that are concealed by capitalism are revealed through participation in such cooperative practices. Marx did not take Maclntyre's Aristotelian road because, in attempting to break from Hegel's philosophy, he prematurely abandoned all philosophical enquiry. Instead of looking for examples of alternative practice and rationality (as he had in 1844; Marx 1975, 365; Maclntyre 1998d, 46-47), he retained the Hegelian idea of history as the source of a universal truth apprehensible only by those initiated into the correct theory. He therefore allowed what became the Marxist tradition to take the erroneous methodological road of "the ideology of bureaucratic authority" and "managerial expertise" (Maclntyre 1998e; 1973; 2007, 74-108). Against this, Maclntyre argues that, in shared practice, the highest kind of knowledge is that which is commonly recognized as such by actors themselves, which includes knowledge of goods, skills, and objectively valid reasoning. It is, in part, because he himself retained an Hegelian epistemology that Marx's successors so often fell into the error against which he had warned in his third Thesis; that of regarding "human beings in two incompatible ways, on the

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one hand as products of objective social and natural circumstances and on the other as rational agents". By understanding themselves in the latter way and others in the former, twentieth-century Marxists frequently "cast themselves in the role of educator" and those others in that of "the passive recipients of what they as managers effect [ed]" (Maclntyre 1998a, 231). It is for this reason that Maclntyre judges that "Marxism was self-defeated and we too, Marxists and exMarxists and post-Marxists of various kinds, were the agents of our own defeats", so that it is now necessary "first to understand this and then to start out all over again" (234). By "start [ing] out all over again", Maclntyre presumably intends something less than that which was attempted in Heidegger's return to Aristotle but something more than simply embracing Marx's negative critique of capitalism and its institutions. Although he says that his critique of Marx's premature abandonment of philosophy "presuppose[s] the truth of Carol Gould's account of Marx's ontology of individuals-in-relation", or of human beings as social and not just political animals, it is unlikely that he would endorse what Gould calls Marx's "depart [ure] from Aristotle" in "hold[ing] that individuals create [their] nature in their activity" and that "this eventuates in a conception of a changing and developing essence" of human being (Maclntyre 1998a, 225; Gould 1978, 34). Rather, he would insist that our nature remains essentially the same but that it includes a potentiality to actualize our internal good that depends upon external goods and conditions, and that these conditions are material, intellectual, institutional, social, and historical. Here, Marx's principal point about humanity's social nature is that includes a potentiality to change our common conditions. The most important point that Maclntyre takes from Marx is that such conditions can either facilitate or alienate human beings from their own practice, from what Aristotle called their energeia or being-at-work. Capitalism constitutes much more than a simple absence of the necessary conditions. Rather, to adapt Arendt's terms, capitalism reduces work to impersonal labour whereas work should be understood and ordered as goal-orientated action. In Maclntyre's terms, capitalist civil society therefore constitutes an institutionalized mistake.

4. Rival Traditions For Heidegger, it is impossible to philosophize entirely apart from tradition. Therefore, on his influential account, it is important to return constantly to the Greek origins of philosophical tradition as revealed in Aristotle's texts, so as to subvert later dogma. As Gonzalez indicates, Heidegger hereby opened up a road which, even though he did not take it himself, has been gone down by numerous philosophers of praxis, including Arendt. What Gonzalez says of Heidegger, Maclntyre says of Marx: that he opened up a philosophical road which he himself did not take, but which we should. Although this road is also that of an Aristotelian concept of practice, it is nonetheless a different road. It is constituted by that same Thomistic tradition which Heidegger and Arendt accuse of concealing and forgetting being and acting.

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In response, Maclntyre argues that Aquinas himself rethought Aristotelianism's first principles in a way that greatly progressed it as a tradition (Maclntyre 1988) and subverted institutionalized powers (Maclntyre 2006d). To the names of Aristotle and Aquinas, he has now conjoined that of Marx (Maclntyre 2006e, x-xi). This is not because Marx himself progressed Aristotelian tradition but because he opened up a sociological road down which Aristotelians, including both Maclntyre and others (Maclntyre 2001), have since attempted to progress their tradition's understanding of action. Maclntyre agrees with Heidegger that it is impossible to philosophize apart from tradition. This is one reason why he, too, returns to the Greeks, but the way in which he does so evinces the very different conclusions he draws from the concept of tradition which, in After Virtue, he says presupposes that of social practices. Like Nietzsche, he has often traced tradition back beyond philosophy through to what is revealed of its social origins by Homer. He has done this because he thinks that moral concepts of good and virtue predate specifically philosophical ideas and, also, that, conceived as a distinct activity, philosophy is itself a social practice. On Maclntyre's account, Greek philosophers soon divided into two rival traditions in reflecting upon social order and activity. One tradition began with Socrates and Plato, and culminated, in the ancient world, with Aristotle. This tradition explained action and order ideologically, in terms of goods that are somehow prior to individuals' initial desires. This priority was explained ontologically, both by Aristotle and Aquinas. Prom After Virtue onwards, Maclntyre makes sense of this ontological prioritization sociologically. Goods exist prior to individuals' desires because goods are constituted socially and historically, in practices. The rival tradition understood social order and activity in an instrumentalist way, according to which it is entirely reducible to the present aims and interests of individuals. This tradition began with the Sophists and includes Hobbes. On Maclntyre's account, then, most of those who Arendt counts as opponents of tradition are, rather, proponents of a rival tradition. Their thought does not, as she argued, spring from ever new beginnings but from an historically sustained conceptual scheme. Maclntyre's mature concept of rival traditions owes little to Heidegger's account of the tradition. We have already noted that Maclntyre's concept of his tradition of Thomistic Aristotelianism is premissed in the tradition's prior reflection upon itself, and also noted that Heidegger's concept of tradition derives from the same source, but we must add that Maclntyre's idea of rival traditions owes more to Marx's critique of ideology. Accordingly, for Maclntyre, traditions represent not just inherited theories but also practical struggles over the control and direction of human activity. Therefore, "debate and conflict as to the best forms of practice have to be debate and conflict between rival institutions and not merely between rival theories" (Maclntyre 1990b, 360). For Maclntyre, Aristotelianism's greatest strength is that its teleological theory represents the rationality of practitioners pursuing shared goods, so that even where its rival enjoys hegemony it is possible for what he calls a prephilosophically Aristotelian

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rationality to subsist. Conversely, Aristotelianism's rival draws strength where no line is drawn between morality and manipulation, between goods of excellence and of effectiveness, or between goods internal and external to practices. Here, power and money dominate practice, practitioners are alienated, and norms are compartmentalized. Conflict between these two rival traditions is inevitable. As Maclntyre said in After Virtue, "the function of the virtues" is often to enable practitioners to defend their practices. He has often referred since to 'the goods of conflict". Rather than say that resistance to oppression is accompanied by "burdened virtues" (Tessman 2005), he encourages us to appreciate the good in that which we already share, practice and need to defend. In the terms of another recent virtue theorist, he might say that virtue is "being for the good" (Adams 2006). If one agrees with Maclntyre's proposition that there exists a plurality of philosophical and political traditions, then it is clear that Heidegger does not belong to that which Maclntyre now specifies as Thomistic Aristotelianism. This is clear from Heidegger's project of theoretical deconstruction, but it should also be clear from what I have so far only referred to as his political blunder. Heidegger's enthusiastic participation, as university rector, in National Socialism's totalitarian project of Gleichschaltung amply demonstrates the dangers which motivate Maclntyre's differentiation of practices from institutions. Arendt, like Gadamer, famously excused Heidegger's blunder as proof only of the political incompetence of philosophy (a view which even Hennis now shares), but for Maclntyre there is far more to such a mistake. Institutionally, it represents the veritably 'political' incompetence of a centralized state that pretends to substitute for local community. Philosophically, it represents the incompetence of a fundamental ontology of action that is not informed by an understanding of social relations and practices. The philosophical road down which Maclntyre points differs from that taken by post-Heideggerians in what I have called the particularism of his account of social practices. Aristotle brought Plato's abstractly universalized idea of the good down to earth by mediating between it and individual entities with his account of particular natural kinds, each of which has a specific kind of good to actualize. What Maclntyre does in After Virtue is repeat the logic of this exercise with his own account of social practices. In this, he supplements what we might call the tradition's natural ontology (including, now, a Thomistic ontology of natural law) with a social ontology. This ontology, like that elaborated by Aristotle, is teleological. Maclntyre's political argument is that the human good can be actualized through ethically educative pursuit of the good internal to particular practices, and that an Aristotelian politics directs such practices to the common good of a local community. It is when understood in terms of some social kind and its internal good— such as the practice of painting, or philosophy, or handloom weaving, or family life—that many actions are most intelligible to actors and observers. In the context of such particular social practices, actions are subject to objective standards of judgement in a way condemned by Arendt but commended as moral by Maclntyre. Prom this veritably teleological perspective, Heidegger and Arendt

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require correction, as did Plato. Arendt's 'action' and Heidegger's 'Dasein' are intended to conceptualize an infinity of individual cases but, in consequence, they are formal universals lacking any determinate content. Such content is allowed by Maclntyre's account of social practices. The road down which he points is therefore not one in which theory is conducted in the abstractly universal way condemned by Arendt and practised by Heidegger, and perhaps also practised, in effect, by all post-Heideggerian practical philosophers. Philosophy might progress as an academically institutionalized and compartmentalized practice but, if the world is to be changed for the better rather than merely interpreted, then the pursuit of wisdom has to be understood in the terms of other practices besides. What needs to be revealed is neither being nor action as such; rather, it is the goods internal to our shared practices. These goods are concealed by structures of wealth, status and power, which, in turn, are concealed by legitimatory traditions. In unmasking these structures, it is Marx who has been far more effective than any subsequent German philosopher. Therefore, in answering challenges to Thomistic Aristotelianism, Maclntyre takes inspiration from Marx in theorizing both the sociality of practice and the social effects of theory. Maclntyre does not suppose that such reflection upon theory requires abandoning past progress. The discovery of truth sometimes comprises the uncovering of institutionalized or theoretical mistakes but, within a fallible tradition that is in good order, truth is best conceptualized as a goal to be progressively actualized. Nonetheless, as Aquinas demonstrated, further progress toward a tradition's final end sometimes requires rethinking its first principles. If Maclntyre's account of the sociality of final ends entails such rethinking, then so be it.

Bibliography Adams, R. M. (2006), A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good, Oxford Arendt, H. (1953), Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought, pari five, The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress — (1958), The Human Condition, Chicago — (1965), On Revolution, New York — (1968a), The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York — (1968b), What is Authority?, in: Arendt, H., Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York, 91-141, 289-294 — (1968c), The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern, in: Arendt, H., Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York, 41-90, 284-289 — (1968d), Tradition and the Modern Age, in: Arendt, H., Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York, 17-40, 284 — (1978), Wiling, in: McCarthy, M. (ed.), The Life of the Mind 2, New York — (2005), The Promise of Politics, Kohn, J. (ed.), New York —/M. Heidegger (2004), Letters, 1925-1975, Ludz, U. (ed.), Shields, A. (trans.), Orlando Brogan, W. A. (2005) Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being, New York Chernjakov, A. (2005), Ontology of Human Action (Aristotle's Eth. Nic.Vl and Hei-

After Tradition?:

Heidegger or Maclntyre,

Aristotle

and Marx

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degger's Commentaries), in: Topos 11, 5-15 (http://www.ehu-international.org/ topos/zine/2005/2/chernjakov.pdf) Coughlin, G. (2005), Introduction, in: Aristotle, Physics, Or Natural Healing, South Bend, ix-xxxi Gadamer, H.-G. (1986), The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, Smith, P. C. (trans.), New Haven Gonzalez, F . J . (2006a), Whose Metaphysics of Presence? Heidegger's Interpretation of Energeia and Dunamis in Aristotle, in: The Southern Journal of Philosophy 54, 533-568 — (2006b), Beyond or Beneath Good and Evil?: Heidegger's Purification of Aristotle's Ethics, in: Hyland, D. A./Manoussakis, J. P. (eds.), Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, Bloomington, 127-156 Gould, C. C. (1978), Marx's Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx's Social Theory of Reality, Cambridge/MA Heidegger, H. (1962), Being and Time, Macquarrie, J./Robinson, E. (trans.), Oxford — (1988), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Hofstadter, A. (trans.), Bloomington (2 n d ed.) — (1995), Aristotle's Metaphysics 9 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, Brogan, W./Warnek, P. (trans.), Bloomington — (1997), Plato's Sophist, Rojcewicz, R./Schuwer, A. (trans.), Bloomington — (1998), Plato's Doctrine of Truth, T. Sheehan (trans.), in: Heidegger, M., Pathmarks, McNeill, W. (ed.), Cambridge, 155-182 — (2002a), Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation, van Buren, J. (trans.), in: Heidegger, M., Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to 'Being and Time' and Beyond, van Buren, J. (ed.), Albany, 111-145 — (2002b), The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, Sadler, T. (trans.), London — (2007), Being-There and Being-True According to Aristotle, B. F. Bowles (trans.), in: Heidegger, M., Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings 1910-1927, Kisiel, T./Sheehan, T. (eds.), Evanston Kisiel, T. (1995), The Genesis of Heidegger's 'Being and Time', Berkeley — (2005), Rhetorical Protopolitics in Heidegger and Arendt, in: Gross, D. M./Kemmann, A. (eds.), Heidegger and Rhetoric, New York, 131-160 Knight, K. (ed.) (1998), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge — (2007), Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to Maclntyre, Cambridge — (2008), Hannah Arendt's Heideggerian Aristotelianism, in: Topos 19 (http://www. ehu-international.org/topos/zine/2008/2/knight .pdf) Maclntyre, A. (1973), Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution, in: Comparative Politics 5(3), 321-342 — (1976), Causality and History, in: J. Manninen/R. Tuomela (eds.), Essays on Explanation and Understanding: Studies in the Foundations of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dordrecht, 137-158 — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame — (1990a), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, Notre Dame — (1990b), The Privatization of Good: An Inaugural Lecture, in: The Review of Politics 52(2), 344-361 — (1991a), Review of Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of

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the Scientists and Other Essays, in: Isis 82(3), 603-604 — (1991b), Community, Law, and the Idiom and Rhetoric of Rights, in: Listening: Journal of Reason and Culture 26, 96-110 — (1993), The Objectivity of Good, Caton — (1998a), The 'Theses on Feuerbach': A Road Not Taken, in: Knight, K. (ed.), 223-234 — (1998b), Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure, in: Knight, K. (ed.), 136-152 — (1998c), Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods, in: Knight, K. (ed.), 223-234 — (1998d), Notes from the Moral Wilderness, in: Knight, K. (ed.), 223-234 — (1998e), Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority, in: Knight, K. (ed.), 223-234 — (1999), Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, London — (2001), Review of James Daly, Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment, in: American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 15, 629-633 — (2005), Who Needs to Learn from Whom: A Partially Autobiographical Reflection on Contemporary Academic Philosophy and One Particular Thomist Tradition, unpublished manuscript — (2006a), Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, London — (2006b), Colors, Cultures, and Practices, in: Maclntyre, A., The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays 1, Cambridge, 24-51 — (2006c), Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995, in: Maclntyre, A.,Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge, 145-158 — (2006d), Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas, in: A. Maclntyre, Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge, 41-63 — (2006e), Preface, in: Maclntyre, A.,Selected Essays 2\ Ethics and Politics, Cambridge, vii-xi — (2007), After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame (3 r d ed.) Marx, K. (1975), Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in: New Left Review (ed.), Early Writings, Livingstone, R./Benton, G. (trans.), Harmondsworth, 279-400 Sachs, J. (1995), Introduction, in: Aristotle's Physics: A Guided Study, Sachs, J. (trans.), New Brunswick, 1-30 — (1999), Introduction, English Glossary, in: Aristotle's Metaphysics, Sachs, J. (trans.), Santa Fe, xi-xlii, xlix-lx Tessman, L. (2005), Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles, Oxford van Buren, J. (1994), The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, Bloomington Villa, D.R. (1996), Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, Princeton Volpi, F. (2007), In Whose Name?: Heidegger and 'Practical Philosophy', Keane, N. (trans.), in: European Journal of Political Theory 6(1), 31-51 Wartofsky, M. W. (1977), Feuerbach, Cambridge

Maclntyre's Thomism

Analyse & Kritik 30/2008 ( © Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart) p. 55-74

Alex

Bavister-Gould

The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or 'Against Hindsight')*

Abstract: The paper questions the extent to which Maclntyre's current ethical and political outlook should be traced to a project begun in After Virtue. It is argued that, instead, a critical break comes in 1985 with his adoption of a 'Thomistic Aristotelian' standpoint. After Virtue's 'positive thesis', by contrast, is a distinct position in Maclntyre's intellectual journey, and the standpoint of After Virtue embodies substantial commitments not only in conflict with, but antithetical to, Maclntyre's later worldview—mostly clearly illustrated in the contrasting positions on moral conflict and tragedy.

0. Introduction In a n interview given in 1991 Alasdair M a c l n t y r e remarked t h a t "[fjrom 1977 onwards I have b e e n e n g a g e d in a single project t o which After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry are central" (Knight 1998, 269). O n this account, t h e crucial point at which M a c l n tyre's current v i e w emerges is 1977; t h e year in which, working o n t h e final draft of After Virtue, M a c l n t y r e h a d c o m e t o identify "in m a i n outline the framework and central t h e s e s of m y subsequent enquiries" (Knight 1998, 2 6 8 ) . 1 T h i s characterisation 2 is perhaps t h e m o s t familiar v i e w t o seasoned readers of M a c l n t y r e ' s work (and t h e e n o r m o u s critical literature it has generated): t h e ' A f t e r Virtue project' is an ongoing enquiry in which subsequent b o o k s are sequels t o After Virtue. In t h e introduction t o t h e n e w l y published Ethics

and Politics,

however,

* I would like to thank everyone at the recent conference "Alasdair Maclntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia" for their helpful comments. I thank also everyone at the York Political Theory workshop who read and commented on an earlier draft of this paper. I wish to extend particular thanks to Sue Mendus and Tim Stanton, who have read and commented on several drafts and provided invaluable advice and encouragement. I plead the usual responsibility for the inadequacies that remain. 1 In "Prologue to the Third Edition, After Virtue after a quarter of a century", published just after this paper was originally given, Maclntyre re-iterates his commitment to approximately this position. He writes: "I have as yet found no reason for abandoning the major contentions of After Virtue [... ] although I have learned a great deal and supplemented and revised my thesis and arguments accordingly" (Maclntyre 2007, vii). 2 With the publication date of the first edition of After Virtue 1981 likely substituted for 1977, the year Maclntyre finished the final draft.

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Maclntyre states that 1985 is the earliest published date of an included essay because it marks the year he recognised his philosophical convictions as "those of a Thomistic Aristotelian, something that had initially surprised [him]" (Maclntyre 2006b, vii). Every essay selected gives expression to this standpoint, ranging across a number of subjects in morality and politics. The strong implication is that 1985, the year Maclntyre recognised his "intentions and commitments" (Maclntyre 2006b, xi) as those of a Thomistic Aristotelian, should be regarded as marking the beginning of his present and ongoing enquiries. To do so, however, risks making the status of After Virtue unclear. One might seek to reconcile the two positions by simply identifying a shift of 'emphasis': the move from Aristotle to Aquinas, or the repudiation of After Virtue's insistence that an account of the virtues may not presuppose a metaphysical biology, are minor refinements or modifications in Maclntyre's overall project. On such an account, 1985 simply marks the point at which previous 'errors', particularly with regard to Thomism, have been ironed out. In what follows, I argue that to do so would be a serious mistake, and a failure to appreciate the dramatic nature of Maclntyre's change of heart in 1985 obscures not only his current position, but also, and crucially, the unique position outlined in After

Virtue.

Through an examination of the relevant texts, I shall develop two claims. Firstly, I question Maclntyre's own account from 1991 that After Virtue and post-1985 work shares the same 'framework and central theses'. In so doing, I argue that although 1977 marks an important date in one key respect, it is 1985 that marks another of no less (and perhaps far more) significance. Secondly, I provide support for the first claim by showing that After Virtue's 'positive thesis' is a distinct position in Maclntyre's intellectual journey, and the 'standpoint' of After Virtue embodies substantial commitments not only in conflict with, but antithetical to, Maclntyre's later Thomist Aristotelianism—most clearly illustrated in the contrasting positions on moral conflict and tragedy. A defence of this second claim, in particular, necessarily involves a good deal of textual comparison, but an initial pointer might be found in Maclntyre's admission that the conversion to Thomism was 'surprising' to him. The juxtaposition of the two positions will point to several important reasons why Maclntyre, and his readers, had very good reason to be surprised in 1985. But I begin with the importance of 1977. 1. T o w a r d s

After

Virtue

In the original preface to After Virtue, Maclntyre explains that the book's central thesis emerges from a period of reflection upon both the inadequacies of his own earlier work in moral philosophy and from "a growing dissatisfaction with the conception of 'moral philosophy' as an independent and isolable area of enquiry" (Maclntyre 1981, ix). As is clear from his earliest work, Maclntyre has always understood moral philosophy in relation to history, sociology and anthropology, an understanding which revealed the existence of a variety of moral

The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or 'Against Hindsight')

57

practices, beliefs and conceptual schemes even as in doing so it put Maclntyre directly at odds with the then dominant academic practice of ruminating upon the concepts of morality ("Oxford armchair style" as Maclntyre puts it). It is also clear that Maclntyre has maintained a fairly constant belief that the moral, social and political condition of modernity is seriously degenerate in a variety of ways.3 However, in the early 1970s Maclntyre began to have doubts about the possibility both of adequately defending this negative judgement, and of moving beyond it. As Maclntyre recently said: reflecting upon Against the Selfimages of the Age (Maclntyre 1971)—a collection of essays bringing together fourteen years of work evaluating and rejecting a number of then prominent ideological positions, whether psychoanalytic, Christian or Marxist, about human nature, history and politics—made him "painfully aware of how relatively little had been accomplished in that book" (Maclntyre 2006a, vii). Maclntyre was unable to move beyond its essentially negative conclusions because he could not adequately diagnose the "conceptual and historical roots of our moral and political condition" (vii). Abandoning his early 'piecemeal' approach as inadequate, Maclntyre tore up the manuscript for a book on moral philosophy he had been writing (viii). The realisation that prompted the kind of argument that eventuated in After Virtue struck Maclntyre some time between his emigration to the United States in 1971 and 1977. During this period—a "period of sometimes painfully self-critical reflection" (Knight 1998, 268)—he came to see that every previous attempt to evaluate various moral beliefs, practices and concepts, and to trace their rise and fall, committed him unavoidably to the adoption of some or other distinctive evaluative standpoint. As he says, again in the preface to After Virtue: "I seemed to be asserting that the nature of moral community and moral judgement in distinctively modern societies was such that it was no longer possible to appeal to moral criteria in a way that had been possible in other times and places—and that this was a moral calamity! But to what could I be appealing, if my own analysis was correct?" (Maclntyre 2007, ix) The important 1977 essay "Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science" represents Maclntyre's 'eureka moment'. Drawing on Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science, he came to understand the inadequacy of his previous enquiries as inherent in the terms within which he had been trying to work. Rejecting these terms pushed Maclntyre towards the central thesis of After Virtue: that the moral and political dilemmas of the modern world are adequately explicable only from the point of view of an older 'Aristotelian' tradition, for they are in fact the consequence of the displacement and fragmentation of that tradition. Such a claim could be vindicated through "intelligible dramatic narratives which can claim historical truth" (Maclntyre 2006a, 22). To the argument Maclntyre makes in After Virtue there are three aspects. 3

Jeffrey Stout, for example, identifies Maclntyre's central concerns since A Short History of Ethics (1967) as arising from the difficulty of finding an adequate 'point of view' from which to advance essentially the same rejection of liberal individualism (Stout 1989; see also Stout 1988).

Alex

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The first is a claim that the language of morality in the modern world is in a state of grave disorder (Maclntyre 2007, 2); the second is that understanding this disorder requires a narrative history of the decline and fall of the language of morality; the third is that this narrative will be "informed by standards" and will not, therefore, be "an evaluatively neutral chronicle" (3). The form of the narrative of the whole of After Virtue presupposes "standards of achievement and failure, of order and disorder" (3) and these standards are those informed by the older 'Aristotelian' tradition. It is this third aspect of the argument of After Virtue that constitutes the most significant departure from Maclntyre's previous work. It is quite true, therefore, that 1977 marks a decisive shift in Maclntyre's thought. The realisation that any vindicatory historical narrative will be written explicitly from a particular standpoint carries over into all of Maclntyre's later work, which is written from just such a standpoint. However, just because this is so it becomes crucially important to identify the precise character of the standpoint from which the narrative is written. It is my claim that once we do this, we notice that the differences between the 'Aristotelian' tradition in the case of After Virtue, and the Thomist tradition in the case of post-1985 work, are difference of kind, not merely differences of degree. It is to these differences that I now turn.

2. The Standpoint of After

Virtue

In order to draw a meaningful contrast between two positions which (I claim) are different, we shall obviously have to be clear on each position. About Maclntyre's Thomist position it is easier to be clear. As well as the account of the Thomist tradition given in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (and, with refinements, in Three Rival Versions) there are several important papers in which Maclntyre clarifies the philosophical structure and commitments arising from a Thomist account of the moral life. In After Virtue things are less straight forward. Whilst it is true that a good deal of the 'positive' account is contained in chapters fourteen and fifteen ("The Nature of the Virtues", and "The Virtues, the Unity of a Life, and the Concept of a Tradition"), reading these in abstraction from the historical narrative can obscure several important elements of Maclntyre's overall account. In order to get clear about that account, I do not propose to focus, as others have done, on the relative merits of 'practice', 'narrative unity of a life' and 'tradition'. Instead, I aim to reconstruct the development of several key elements of the overall standpoint (not just the three-fold scheme) through an explication of their bases in the historical narrative. I hope that two points will emerge. Firstly, that at three crucial stages Maclntyre draws upon resources in the history, and presents them as both integral to the tradition and a 'virtue' of that tradition, but then later (post-1985) recasts those same resources as either peripheral, incomplete, or mistaken from the point of view of the Thomist tradition. Secondly, the approach Maclntyre takes in After Virtue, in pursuing the expansive concept of the tradition of the virtues, is

The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or 'Against

Hindsight')

59

to draw upon parts of the tradition from several historical eras. This has at least two further implications. One is that an account of the virtues given at one time may be subject to correction by the insights of a preceding or subsequent era. Another is that the tradition is 'built up', so to speak, from different elements in the narrative. The approach in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is quite different. There, the historical narrative is presented such that the Thomist position, which receives its definitive statement in the writings of Aquinas, is to be defended and vindicated as a whole. Thus, in After Virtue the 'positive' position is much more a case of assembly, of drawing on various elements in a long history in order to reconstruct a core conception of the virtues; whereas in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and beyond the goal is to vindicate and articulate a concrete tradition against rivals past and present. In After Virtue, Maclntyre often refers to his account of the virtues—his reconstruction of what he also calls a 'core conception of the virtues'—as an expression of the 'Aristotelian' tradition. However, this label is liable to mislead, because as Maclntyre also makes clear this core conception is "a complex concept, different parts of which derive from different stages in the development of the tradition [... ] the concept itself in some sense embodies the history of which it is the outcome" (Maclntyre 2007, 186). Although this tradition of the virtues receives a crucial statement in Aristotle's work, it is far older than Aristotle and persists beyond him to the present day. Aristotle, though a central figure, is treated not as an individual theorist but "as the representative of a long tradition, as someone who articulates what a number of predecessors and successors also articulate with varying degrees of success" (146). Furthermore, as I shall show in due course, Maclntyre's reconstruction of a core conception of the virtues embodies substantial commitments antithetical to an Aristotelian view in a number of ways; and it is partly from the early, pre-Aristotelian, tradition, and partly from more 'modern' ideas, that these elements are drawn. The search for a core conception in After Virtue begins in Homeric Greece, and it is this first crucial period that supplies the resources for the first stage of Maclntyre's account: the practice. In heroic societies a man is what he does. In such a society a man knows who he is by knowing his given role in a welldefined and highly determinate system of roles and statuses. In knowing this he knows also what he owes4 and what is owed to him. "By performing actions of a particular kind in a particular situation a man gives warrant for judgement upon his virtues and vices; for the virtues just are those qualities which sustain a free man in his role and which manifest themselves in those actions which his role requires." (127) What is a virtue and what is not is determined easily, and the unity of the notion of a virtue resides in the concept of that which enables a man to discharge his role. To cut a long (and important) story short, the Homeric hero's world, on Maclntyre's account, can be conceived of as something like a world organized only around practices: that is, what one ought to do is governed entirely by the role one plays in the particular practice within which one is engaged (and the virtues are qualities of character that allow one to discharge, and pursue 4

There is "no clear distinction between 'ought' and 'owe'", Maclntyre 1985, 122.

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excellence in discharging, this role). The Homeric hero can only frame purposes at all within the framework of rules and precepts, and any question of choice arises only within the framework; for the framework itself cannot be chosen. Because morality and social structure are one and the same in heroic society (123), in the vocabulary available to Homer's characters there is "no way for them to view their own culture and society as if from the outside" (125). The point, of course, is that a conception of virtue cast solely in terms of practices will always be insufficient for us now; for anyone not living as a Homeric character, a life informed by a conception of virtue derived solely from practices would be pervaded by constant conflict. Such a life would be continuously fractured by criterionless choices, because the acknowledgement of one allegiance over the rest would be arbitrary, and would entail the renunciation of conflicting but no more or less important allegiances. According to Maclntyre, it is Homer who, in a sense, first raises questions as to the good of a practice itself, and thus establishes the need to move beyond the moral horizon of one's roles in the pursuit of new ends and conceptions of ends. What is crucial, however, is that Maclntyre retains in his account the central importance of the link between roles and virtue that he derives from our Homeric inheritance. It is thus a historical, as well as a conceptual, conclusion that the notion of a practice to which this part of the history corresponds can be an initial, if partial, account of the core conception of the virtues (201). The 'Aristotelian' contribution to the tradition of the virtues emerges from within the society which replaced the heroic society: the classical polis. Here the roles a person has, and their connexion to the virtues, continue to be a central condition of the social order; but in contrast to Homeric society these roles do not constitute the moral horizon of those who perform them. The specification of the virtues in the classical polis, and in particular the relationship between virtues, incorporated the scrutiny of different roles—it required specification in terms of the good for man. Aristotle (appearing at this key point in the history) gives the basic structure which expresses this specification (a scheme which survives from the classical world through the European Middle Ages until finally it is displaced by the Enlightenment project). This scheme is one within which there is a fundamental contrast between "man-as-he-happens-to-be", and "man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-ie/os" (52). Through ethics we understand how to move from the former to the latter; precepts enjoining the virtues (and prohibiting the vices) instruct us how to realise our telos (52). It is through this three-fold teleological structure that the good for man is to be pursued and may be achieved. Man, in this scheme, is a 'functional' concept; the concept of a 'man' cannot be defined independently from the concept of a 'good man', because the criterion of someone's being a 'man' and being a 'good man' are not independent from each other (just as 'soldier' stood to 'good soldier', and 'king' to 'good king', in Homer). In Aristotle's own account, ethics is conceived of as a "science", which "presupposes his metaphysical biology" (162): human beings have a specific nature like all other species, such that we have certain aims and goals and we "move by nature towards a specific telos" (148). This part of

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Aristotle Maclntyre completely rejects at the time of writing After Virtue. This rejection invites an alternative account of the telos of man. This alternative account is to be partly found in the pre-Aristotelian standpoint (which, as we have seen, supplies the core conception of the virtues with the key concept of the practice); and it is found also in the tragic poetry in classical Athens. This turn to epic and tragedy (in preference to Aristotelian metaphysics) is motivated by a further crucial dissatisfaction Maclntyre has with the sort of account of the virtues Aristotle gives. Aristotle, Maclntyre says, delivers a view of moral unity. The problem, however, is that "Aristotle [... ] simply offers too simple and too unified a view of the complexities of human good. If we look at the realities of Athenian society, let alone of Greek society as a whole or the rest of the ancient world, what we in fact find is a recognition of a diversity of values, of conflicts between goods, of the virtues not forming a simple, coherent, hierarchical unity." (157)5 Maclntyre's turn back to epic and tragedy is an attempt to find in that part of the tradition of the virtues resources to correct this (mistaken) tendency toward exaggerating moral coherence and unity and to preserve that part of Aristotle's own account which may not require it. So, for example, Maclntyre says that "on the unity of the virtues what [Aristotle] has to argue about the detailed variety in interrelationships between different virtues and vices does not seem to warrant anything like his own strong conclusion about the unity and inseparability of all the virtues in the character of the good man" (157). In fact, Maclntyre argues, it is from Plato that Aristotle inherits a "hostility to and denial of conflict either within the life of the individual good man or in that of the good city" (157). Conflict is evil, and "[c]ivil war is the worst of all evils". Because of this inheritance, "[f]or Aristotle, as for Plato, the good life for man is itself single and unitary, compounded by a hierarchy of goods" (157) Conflict is "the result of either flaws of character in individuals or of unintelligent political arrangements" (157). What this denies, in part, is the "Homeric insight that tragic conflict is the essential human condition—the tragic hero on Aristotle's view fails because of his own flaw, not because the human condition is sometimes irremediably tragic" (157). It is clear that at the time of writing After Virtue Maclntyre sides with Homer (and, as we shall see, the tragedians) in this respect, and adopts a view which recognises the centrality of tragic conflict in the human condition. 6 He 5 Maclntyre makes this criticism by introducing it as one which "[a] spokesman for the modern liberal view [... ] might argue with a good deal of cogency" and with which, he says, it is "perhaps [...] difficult to disagree" (Maclntyre 2007, 156-157). The modern liberal view Maclntyre has in mind is probably Isaiah Berlin's. The influence of Berlin, and Maclntyre's ambivalent relationship to his thought, is a fascinating undercurrent in After Virtue. Berlin is cited as the most "systematic and the most cogent" defender of the view that in the modern world there is not one 'vision of the world', but "a multiplicity of visions deriving from [an] irreducible plurality of values" (109). In a slightly different role again, he is used in several places as a 'modern' view to which Maclntyre can juxtapose his view of tragedy and the necessity of virtue to which the possibility of true tragedy gives rise. It is not clear, however, whether Maclntyre's view in After Virtue differs from Berlin as much as he may have suggested, see also Galston 1991, 72-75. 6 This belief in the centrality of tragedy in the human condition I have cast in terms of a

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believes, more generally and connectedly, that an understanding of the centrality of conflict in human life is a "source of human learning about and one important milieu of human practice of the virtues" (163) because "it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are" (164). Maclntyre further defends this conception by turning once again not to philosophy, but this time to the great rivals of Plato and Aristotle: the tragedians. As we have already noted, the conception of a virtue, in Athens, became detached from that of a particular social role to become a question of good for a man (132-133). Yet significantly it was the tragedians, not the philosophers, who recognised the truth of conflict that this generates. Homeric values—the claims of kinship—survived in substantial form in fifth-century Athens, but conflict arose because these Homeric values of kin-loyalty no longer defined the moral horizon as they did for Homer's characters (132). So, for example, "Neoptolemus confronts Philoctetes in Sophocles' play in a way very different from that in which his father confronted Agamemnon in the Iliad. In Homer the question of honor is the question of what is due to a king; in Sophocles the question of honor has become the question of what is due to a man." (133) In Sophocles, 'Homer's insight' is echoed in the tragedian response to the conflicts over the right conception of virtue, and the insights of tragedy are also retained in Maclntyre's reconstruction of a core conception of the virtues. Maclntyre stresses that his account of the virtues is formulated in terms of the multiplicity of goods, and as such it allows "for the possibility of tragic conflict" (201). Sophocles (especially in the Antigone and the Philoctetes) explores such rival allegiances to incompatible goods (conflicts that can be within a single person, as it was for Neoptolemus, as much as between them (179), as it was for Antigone and Creon) and in so doing confronts us with the possibility that the possession of one virtue can exclude the possession of some other virtue; that two genuine virtues can be temporarily at war with one another; and that the exercise of the virtue of doing what is required of one role can conflict with the exercise of other virtues (142). Sophocles shows that there are "crucial conflicts in which different virtues appear as making rival and incompatible claims upon us. But our situation is tragic in that we have to recognise the authority of both claims. There is an objective moral order, but our perceptions of it are such that we cannot bring rival moral truths into complete harmony with each other [... ] [yet] to choose does not exempt me from the authority of the claim which I chose to go against." (143) This view of the world—that tragic conflicts between virtues, between claims, are possible—is a fundamental component of Maclntyre's core conception of the virtues. It is present, as we have seen, in much of what he draws from the earliest part of the tradition of the virtues, and it a view he defends against the most prominent figures in that tradition. worldview. I think that this is a survival into After Virtue of a view Maclntyre held throughout the '70s up until his adoption of the Thomist Aristotelian standpoint. One example, from the early '70s, illustrates the point nicely. In his review of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Maclntyre said: "[w]e do not live in a universe of great moral coherence. Rawls' demand for overall coherence and homogeneity perhaps wins logical elegance at the cost of sacrificing our grasp of the tragic character of moral reality." (Maclntyre 1972, 334)

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Recall that Maclntyre has rejected Aristotle's use of metaphysical biology in finding an account of the telos of man. Instead, Maclntyre turns to an earlier part of the tradition of the virtues, and this is additionally justified, he says, because "[t]he use of 'man' as a functional concept is far older than Aristotle and it does not initially derive from Aristotle's metaphysical biology. It is rooted in the forms of social life to which the theorists of the classical tradition give expression. For according to this tradition to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God." (58-59) Furthermore, Aristotle stands accused not only of lacking a convincing account of telos, but of lacking any sense of "the specifically historical" (147). This second problem not only "debars Aristotle from recognising his own thought as part of a tradition, it also severely limits what he can say about narrative" (147). So it is both because of the need to furnish his account with an alternative telos for man, and because of his desire to integrate the defensible part of Aristotle with "the kind of thesis about the relationship between virtues and forms of narrative which [Maclntyre argues] is present in epic and tragic writers" (147) that he turns to Homer and the tragedians. The conjunction of the importance of one's role and the importance of narrative gives rise to the second stage of Maclntyre's core conception: the narrative unity of a life. The second stage of Maclntyre's reconstruction expresses the need to give an account of the good for man; a problem which itself corresponds to the conflicts we noted in classical Athens. A vital feature of such an account will, Maclntyre argues, be the ability to account for the unity of a virtue in a whole life. As we have seen, Maclntyre has rejected Aristotelian metaphysical biology as the source of such an account; instead, he pursues an understanding of the narrative of a life conceived of as a unity; "which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end" (205). "I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death." (217) The status of this distinctive attempt to account for the unity of a virtue (and thus, a central part of the answer to the question "what is the good for man") is unique to After Virtue. It is also, in contrast to the insights gleaned from epic and tragedy, in part an explicitly 'modern' view7; and it too, again in contrast with the Aristotelian metaphysical demand, can allow for the possibility of conflict and tragedy of a particular sort. Maclntyre's view in After Virtue is that narrative is in fact basic and essential for the characterisation of human actions (208); for "man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal" (216). Intelligibility in human transactions requires narrative, for we cannot "characterize behavior independently of intentions, and we cannot characterize intentions independently of the settings which make those intentions intelligible both to agents themselves and to others" (206). Furthermore, we allocate human transactions— conversations, battles, games—to genres just as we do literary narratives. Using such words as 'tragic', or 'comic' is "not marginal to such evaluations" (211). It is very much to the point to enquire to which genre a life belongs, or the history 7

It draws on, for example, the work of Hardy 1968.

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of a life belongs, because to do so is to ask what "account of their history will be both true and intelligible" (213). Life is an "enacted dramatic narrative" within which characters are also authors (215). Lived narratives naturally have a teleological character, for "[w]e live out our lives, both individually and in our relationships with each other, in the light of certain conceptions of a possible shared future" (215). But this teleology coexists with constrained unpredictability, for "like characters in a fictional narrative we do not know what will happen next [... ] it is always that case that there are constraints on how the story can continue and that within those constraints there are indefinitely many ways that it can continue" (216).8 The move from this teleology to the narrative unity of a life is achieved by asking, of a life, "what is good for me?", and to answer that question (as we have noted) one must know "what is the good for man?" A moral life is unified as a narrative quest for this good.9 The good life conceived of as a quest in this way (where relevant virtues include not only those that sustain practices, but those enabling people to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions, encountered on their quest) admits the possibility of tragedy as built into one's predicament in a way Aristotle (and certainly Aquinas) did not; for one cannot always know if one will encounter tragedy, and one is constrained by in a tragic situation if it does. Each individual quest for the good is conducted by persons who are differently circumstanced; but also by those who are "bearers of a particular social identity; so the good for me has to be 'the good for one who inhabits these roles" (Maclntyre 1985, 220). The individual's quest for his or her good is conducted, and is defined, within the "traditions of which the individual's life is a part, and this is true of those goods which are internal to practices and of the goods of a single life" (222). Traditions begin as one's social identity—the historically understood 'roles' I have (son or daughter, cousin or uncle, citizen of this or that city, member of this or that guild, profession, clan, tribe, or city). One's moral life has a starting point, it has, "debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations" (220, all examples Maclntyre's) that transcend the self. "I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognise it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition." (221) A tradition is the history of a practice or practices, a history through which a practice or practices is transmitted and reshaped. These histories in turn must exist within larger 'social traditions' (221). There is a particular danger here of projecting back onto the closing chapters 8 An important part of this 'constrained unpredictability' derives from the fact that one narrative can be embedded in another, and one person may be a character in a number of narratives at once (Maclntyre 2007, 213-214). 9 In a quest, one has to have a partial conception of the object of the quest, but it is not the search for something clearly characterised, "as miners search for gold or geologists for oil" (Maclntyre 2007, 219). A quest is always "an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge" (219). Thus, the good in a life and its relationship to the object of the quest has the same simultaneous means/ends relationship that virtues have within practices; and this explains Maclntyre's otherwise puzzling conclusion that "the good life for man is the life spent seeking the good life for man" (219).

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of After Virtue Maclntyre's later notion of tradition. In After Virtue the notion had not yet acquired the meaning Maclntyre would subsequently impart to it. Whilst tradition is the final context for the three-part core conception of the virtues, and embodies the shared quest for the goods of life; in an important sense the notion is also minimally conceived of as a source of rationally underdetermined authority 10 that puts the inevitable conflicts between incommensurable goods being pursued within that tradition to 'creative' use in pursuing the good of that tradition. This conception of tradition, and the role it plays in the account, is very different to the notion of a rationally constituted tradition of enquiry that Maclntyre develops in later work. Let me now draw together the various strands of the positive account we have examined. In After Virtue, "the conception of good has to be expounded in terms of such notions as those of a practice, of the narrative unity of a human life and of a moral tradition [ . . . ] and with them the only grounds for the authority of laws and virtues" (258, my emphasis). This three part grounding of the authority of laws and virtues must account for the existence, at each stage, of "rival and contingently incompatible goods which make claims to our practical allegiance [... ] [and] some determinate conception of the goods of life for man" (221).

Maclntyre's conception of the good life conceived of as a quest (in which relevant virtues include not only those that sustain practices, but those that enable people to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions, encountered on their quest and within the moral tradition through which they collectively pursue common goods) implies in its own terms the ever-present possibility of tragedy. As he says, "(q]uests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned or dissipated into distractions and human lives may in all these ways also fail" (219). Of course, many of these failures might stem from inadequate virtue on the part of individuals (or traditions), but not all failures can be traced to this source. As we saw in Maclntyre's disagreement with Aristotle, "what constitutes [... ] tragic opposition and conflict is the conflict of good with good embodied in their encounter prior to and independent of any individual characteristics" (163). In a tragic choice between rival goods, " both of the alternative courses of action which confront the individual have to be recognised as leading to some authentic and substantial good. By choosing one I do nothing to diminish or derogate from the claim upon me of the other; and therefore, whatever I do, I shall have left undone what I ought to have done." (224) Maclntyre's core conception of the virtues is the expression of a worldview which holds that tragic dilemmas are possible, and because they are possible 1 0 In a Postscript to "Social Science Methodology as Ideology", first published in 1979, Maclntyre introduces the idea of the 'social tradition' specifically in order to counter the implication that he endorses "a Heraclitean view of social life in which conflict, rivalry and strife are the fundamental features of the social universe" (Knight 1998, 67). "The most important social conflicts occur within traditions as well as between them [ . . . ] Such conflicts are conflicts between the various incommensurable goods which men within a particular tradition may pursue. A viable tradition is one which holds together conflicting social, political and even metaphysical claims in a creative way." (Knight 1998, 67) Crucially, here, "[t]he activities which inform a tradition are always rationally underdetermined" (67, my emphasis).

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the virtues have an additional point and purpose. This is because there are different ways to live through a tragic confrontation of good with good (224). Independently of the choice between the alternatives that the tragic protagonist makes (a choice in which there is, ex hypothesi, "no right choice to make"), they may perform their moral task "better or worse". The tragic protagonist "may behave heroically or unheroically, generously or ungenerously, gracefully or gracelessly, prudently or imprudently" (224). And, as we have seen, the virtues are essentially tied to the practices, roles, and the tradition of which the individual is the bearer; so to perform the task better or worse "will be to do both what is better for him or her qua individual and qua parent or child or qua citizen or member of a profession, or perhaps qua some or all of these" (224). What is better or worse "depends upon the character of that intelligible narrative which provides X's life with its unity" (225); so without the virtues, and crucially without the central notion of the narrative order of a human life, we shall not attain the understanding necessary to live through tragic conflicts. But if we do have the virtues, even in situations "defined by the necessity of tragic, dilemmatic choice", virtuous agents will still be able "to pursue both their own good and the good of the tradition of which they are the bearers" (223).

3. Aquinas in After

Virtue

Having set out the key features of the distinctive position pursued in After Virtue, we are now in a position to consider the relationship between this view and those of Aquinas. Aquinas, as we know, becomes the central figure around which all of Maclntyre's later philosophy revolves in one way or another; but in After Virtue, just like Kant, Aquinas is given short shrift, and his contribution is dismissed in three pages (Kant gets nearly four). However, it is also true that specifically in the case of Aquinas, Maclntyre has explicitly recanted his judgement in After Virtue. In the introduction to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Maclntyre explains that he has come to recognise "more than one error in After Virtue, although not in any of its main contentions. I now, for example, think that my earlier criticism of Aquinas' theses on the unity of the virtues was simply mistaken and due in part to a misreading of Aquinas." (Maclntyre 1988, x) Perhaps, therefore, the discussion of Aquinas in After Virtue is explicable merely as a case of error subsequently amended. In fact, as the discussion of the paper has so far indicated, Aquinas' position on the unity of the virtues must be dismissed from the point of view of the narrative of After Virtue. This is due not to a mistaken reading but to an accurate reading from the standpoint of After Virtue. The account of the virtues which I have so far presented is, at its core, incompatible with Aquinas' account of the unity of virtues in particular and his moral theological structure in general, and this explains why Maclntyre felt it necessary to dismiss Aquinas so quickly. Drawing on the tradition of the virtues that he develops in After Virtue (and the criticisms of Aristotle that we have already noted), Maclntyre raises two questions about Aquinas' treatment of the virtues; the first about his overall

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approach—his "classificatory scheme"—the second, following on from this, about his consequent denial of the possibility of moral conflict. In the first case, the criticism of Aquinas is used to illustrate a central feature of Maclntyre's social teleological reconstruction of the virtues: that the account must allow for a significant degree of 'open-endedness' as regards both the acquisition of, and our understanding of the relationship between, the virtues. We must be wary of Aquinas' approach precisely because there is "necessarily a kind of empirical untidiness in the way that our knowledge of the virtues is ordered, more particularly in respect of how the practice of each relates to the practice of all the others" (Maclntyre 2007, 178). Furthermore, we cannot accept the theoretical backing for Aquinas' scheme, Maclntyre thinks, because one part is "a reiteration of Aristotelian cosmology and the other is specifically Christian and theological" (179). Finally, Aquinas claims that "if we encounter genuine moral conflict, it is always because of some previous wrong action of our own." But, as we would expect in After Virtue, Maclntyre cannot accept this conclusion. "Clearly", he says, "this is one source of conflict. But will it cover Antigone and Creon, Odysseus and Philoctetes, or even Oedipus? Will it cover Henry II and Thomas Becket?" (179) Maclntyre thinks not, in After Virtue, and this in itself is reason to doubt Aquinas' account. Clearly the time has come to turn to the Aquinas of Maclntyre's later writings. We shall see that because Maclntyre has changed the standpoint from which Aquinas' thought is evaluated, what had previously appeared as a fault now appears as a virtue of his account. Thus, it is Aquinas' unique genius to be able to synthesize Aristotelian metaphysics and Augustinian theology; a synthesis in whose fecundity and intellectual power Maclntyre locates the rational superiority of the Thomist tradition over all other traditions with which it has come into conflict. This rational superiority is justified in no small part by the unity of the overall Thomist scheme; a rational unity which renders the notion of a genuine moral conflict not the fault of the agent not only impossible, but absurd.

4. Aquinas after '85 I shall try to set out, in a necessarily truncated way, a picture of what Maclntyre takes to be the defensible Thomist position with regard to the virtues, natural law, and the relationship between natural law and practical rationality. Most importantly, Thomism is a unified scheme, so that the position Maclntyre espouses as regards moral conflict is itself derived from an overall teleological framework of unitary understanding and enquiry. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Maclntyre emphasizes that "Aquinas' work of philosophical and theological construction is systematic, in a way and to a degree which surpasses even Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. It is therefore important when one treats of Aquinas' developed views on particular topics or issues [... ] not to abstract these in piecemeal fashion and treat them in too great isolation from the context supplied by his overall point of view and method." (Maclntyre 1988, 164)

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"Aquinas' work," Maclntyre argues "is informed by an overriding unity of purpose, expressed both in his conception of the ultimate unity of good and in the way he writes about it" (166). As Maclntyre makes clear in "First Principles, Final Ends", the structure of the Thomist account presupposes an understanding of the universe "in terms of certain determinate, fixed and unalterable ends" (Maclntyre 2006a, 146), our apprehension of which is informed by an understanding of our progress towards our telos—"an understanding completed by an apprehension of first principles" (145). All enquiry, whether philosophical or moral, "aspires to and is intelligible only in terms of its aspiration to finality, comprehensiveness, and unity of explanation and understanding" (158). 11 Upon the achievement of this finality, rational justification within a 'perfected' science is "a matter of demonstrating how derivative truths follow from the first truths of that particular science [... ] and the justification of the principles of a subordinate science will be similarly demonstrative." (Maclntyre 1988, 173) The goal is a final and complete understanding, and because of this "[f]irst principles themselves will be dialectically justifiable; their evidentness consists in their recognizability, in the light of such dialectic, as concerning what is the case per se" (173). The principles governing the moral life are the principles of natural law, and the principles of natural law are identified through an understanding of practical reason. Confrontation with the natural law is, in fact, "inescapable for anyone who persists in the enquiry as to what his or her good is—and anyone who does not so persist will of course thereby have put him or herself in the wrong" (Maclntyre 1988, 180). Practical human activity is always informed by different sorts of inclinatio ['directedness']: the inclinatio of each person qua being towards self-preservation; the inclinatio of each person qua animal toward the bearing and educating of children to participate in the various forms of human life; and the inclinatio of each person qua rational and social being toward the pursuit of the goods of knowledge and above all the knowledge of God (174). Furthermore, and importantly, these inclinationes are ordered (so that, for example, we subordinate our inclinatio toward self-preservation "if the lives of our children or the security of our community are gravely threatened" (174)). Given these inclinationes, each individual is confronted with the practical need to answer such questions as: How am I to achieve the goods set before me? Which is it best for me to try to achieve now? Is it really a good or does it only seem so to me? Aquinas held t h a t there are right and wrong ways of answering these questions, and though each person has "a capacity for giving the right answers, [... ] this capacity has to be elicited". Crucially, what is involved in eliciting the right answer is "the discovery of principles, formulated with varying 11 This view is unavoidably theological; for it follows that "for each distinctive form of achieved understanding [...] there is a set of first principles [.. . Jwhich provide premises for demonstrative arguments and which specify the ultimate causal agencies [... ] for that science [...] [IJnsofar as the perfected sciences are themselves hierarchically organized, the most fundamental of sciences will specify that in terms of which everything that can be understood is to be understood. And this [...] we call God." (Maclntyre 2006a, 157)

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degrees of explicitness in different cases, which will guide one." (174) These are the principles of natural law. The first (or fundamental) principles of natural law all "give expression to the first principle of practical reason: that good is to be done and pursued and evil is to be avoided" (Maclntyre 2006b, 64). As human beings, there are three sorts of good to be pursued: the good of physical nature (the preservation of our lives and health from the dangers that threaten our continued existence); the good belonging to our animal nature (which include the good of sexuality and of educating and caring for our children); and the goods belonging to our nature as rational animals (the goods of knowledge—of nature and of God, and the goods of social life informed by the precepts of reason) (64). Corresponding to these different goods to be pursued there are several distinct precepts of natural law, "each a precept of reason directed to our common good that enjoins the achievement of one or more of these shared human goods or forbids what endangers that achievement" (64). So, for example, the precepts of natural law include: "[n]ever take an innocent life or inflict gratuitous harm; respect the property of others; shun ignorance and cultivate understanding; do not lie" (64). These precepts that give expression to the first principle of practical reason are the primary precepts of natural law. They are known noninferentially, and are not derived from any more ultimate precept. They are one and the same for everybody; they are "unchanging and unchangeable"; they "are known to be what they are by all human beings insofar as they are rational"; and "knowledge of them cannot be abolished from the human heart" (Maclntyre 2006b, 65). Furthermore, because the principles of natural law are precepts of reason the Thomist is committed to the position that to violate them commits one to incoherence (64). In order to explain why this is so, we must understand two important concepts in Aquinas' account of practical rationality, which bear directly on our consideration of After Virtue's rejection of Aquinas' denial of the genuine moral dilemma: synderesis and conscientia. Synderesis is "the natural disposition exhibited in our most basic apprehension of [the precepts of natural law] which we do not comprehend as a result of enquiry if only because a knowledge of their truth is already presupposed in all practical activity" (Maclntyre 1988, 184-185). It should be understood, Maclntyre says, as "a particular potentiality of reason" (185). Synderesis is "infallible" (185). Any moral or practical judgment which is false, which mistakes the good for bad, will always turn out to be derivative and not an expression of synderesis. Conscientia refers to the capacities necessary to apply the fundamental principles of natural law to a particular situation; both to deduce more specific principles from the fundamental principles, and deriving from both sets of principles practical judgments about what is to be done. Conscientia, unlike synderesis, can be in error (185). This may be because "its judgment was deduced from a true premise or from a set of true premises conjoined with a false premise, which happened in this case to yield a false conclusion, or because its judgment was derived from true premises by fallacious reasoning" (185). Although there are cases where conscientia cannot err, these are cases where the deduction from the true principles affirmed by synderesis is so immediate that there is no room

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for error. 12 However, in all but these sorts of cases, "our apprehension of basic true practical judgments as true does not involve that we understand what is involved in the living out of those judgments in the specifications and particularities of practical life. By coming to understand this we gradually enlarge our understanding of the fundamental judgments and of the entire system which they partially constitute." (185) According to Maclntyre, Aquinas held that because of the possibility of error in conscientia, there are, "even for those who do not avert their attention from the primary precepts of natural law, radical possibilities of error, error which can assume tragic dimensions" (185). So it may seem that in fact Maclntyre finds in Aquinas that which he previously identified as lacking: an account of the tragic. To see why this is not so (not in the sense of 'tragic' presented in the early account) we must consider both what Maclntyre says in Whose Justice and the further clarification of his position in "Moral Dilemmas". There are two sorts of cases that are relevant here. The first is generated by the relationship between conscientia and synderesis as presented in Whose Justice, and the second the question of the irresolvable dilemma as discussed in "Moral Dilemmas". In the former case, an agent can be in a dilemma even if he or she is unable to recognize it as such; in the second, the agent sees themselves as involved in an irresolvable dilemma. In both cases, the key is the possibility of error in the relationship between the fundamental principles of natural law and the secondary principles and practical action of the agent. As Maclntyre says in Whose Justice, Aquinas held that conscientia binds and that it can be in error (185). Since this is so it must be possible that it be true of someone both that they ought to do such and such as enjoined by conscientia and that they ought not to do the same thing because it is wrong (being expressly forbidden by natural law). But it would seem that Aquinas is committed thereby to asserting a contradiction, which is held to be absurd. The solution, Maclntyre explains, is to distinguish between the two 'oughts' in question. Someone "is bound per se to do what conscientia enjoins when it judges truly, but only per accidens to do what conscientia judges falsely" (186). There is no contradiction because "of the person who judges what he or she ought to do on the basis of a false deliverance of conscientia it is true that he or she is bound and ought to act in such and such a way per accidens, but not true that he or she is bound and ought to act per se" (186). This is in direct contrast to the position we noted in After Virtue. It is important to note that in this case "Aquinas is not", Maclntyre says, "prescribing a way of recognizing and so eliminating dilemmas, but only explaining how someone may be in what is objectively a dilemma precisely because it is unrecognized" (186, my emphasis). Paradoxically, this case of dilemma is a case where an agent believes that they are obliged to do such and such, but are in fact obliged not to do the same thing. The apparent dilemma is one which is unrecognized. But it seems clear that to such a person Maclntyre does assign 12

Maclntyre's example is the move from "God is to be loved by everyone" (a fundamental precept of natural law) to "God is to be loved by me" (Maclntyre 1988, 185).

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the error that can be described as having "tragic dimensions", but the tragedy, if there, is the result only of an error by the agent in question. Aquinas' view requires, Maclntyre says, that someone who has accepted as true a false deliverance of conscientia must have admitted into their set of moral beliefs and judgments a contradiction. This must be so because a false judgment of conscientia will be inconsistent with synderesis—which is infallible. Because from a contradiction anything whatsoever follows, "[s]uch a person will therefore be liable to find him or herself affirming what he or she cannot fail to recognize as contradictory assertions, even if their original source is by its very nature [... ] unrecognized" (186). And, Maclntyre says, this is often the case with "persons who confront the dilemmas constitutive of tragedy" (186). For Aquinas, the dilemmas of tragedy "will always rest upon an underlying mistake, [though] nothing in Aquinas' view precludes it being the case that recognizing this may be for the moment out of the question" (186-187, my emphasis). A more familiar sort of dilemma (at least for contemporary philosophy) is discussed in "Moral Dilemmas". These are cases in which it seems to the person that they are caught in a situation in which there is no right choice to make. Maclntyre distinguishes between three types of situation: the first arising for someone who has assumed the responsibilities of more than one social role and discovers that discharging the responsibilities of one role will prevent them discharging the responsibilities of the other; the second involving apparent conflicts between alternative ideals of character; and the third involving the potential failure of someone to do what is generally required of generally accepted norms for human beings as such (Maclntyre 2006b, 86-87). In each of these cases, it may seem to the agent that there is no right choice to make, because whatever they choose they will do wrong: that they are caught in an irresolvable dilemma, or, to use Aquinas' terminology, they seem to be perplexus simpliciter. If we recall the discussion of After Virtue once again, certain conflicts are there deemed tragic because of their irresolvability. As we have seen, Maclntyre had argued forcefully that "what constitutes [... ] tragic opposition and conflict is the conflict of good with good embodied [in an] encounter prior to and independent of any individual characteristics" (Maclntyre 1985, 163). In a tragic choice, " both of the alternative courses of action which confront the individual have to be recognised as leading to some authentic and substantial good. By choosing one I do nothing to diminish or derogate from the claim upon me of the other; and therefore, whatever I do, I shall have left undone what I ought to have done." (224) Furthermore, there are situations where the possession of one virtue can exclude the possession of some other virtue; where two genuine virtues can be temporarily at war with one another; and where the exercise of the virtue of doing what is required of one role can conflict with the exercise of other virtues (142). Post-1985 however, Maclntyre follows Aquinas in denying that anybody is ever perplexus simpliciter (Maclntyre 2006b, 98) in any of these ways. Instead, he holds that those who appear to themselves as being perplexus simpliciter are in fact perplexus secundum quid: "perplexed [... ] but only relative to some factor, identification of which will be the key to resolving the dilemma" (99). One may

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appear to be in an irresolvable dilemma, "but one always has to remind oneself [...] that this cannot really be so" (99, my emphasis). In "Moral Dilemmas", Maclntyre proceeds to explain how each dilemma is resolvable; and in each case, the dilemma is resolved with reference to the overriding moral commitment present in each case (100), the moral commitment which corresponds to the overriding authority of the natural law. This denial of the possibility of genuine dilemmas indicates in the clearest way the fundamental change Maclntyre's position. Connectedly, the particular significance of tragedy, central in the positive account given in After Virtue, is now diminished.The Aristotelian and Thomist insistence that tragedy occurs only as the result of error on the part of the protagonist is reinstated. The unrecognized dilemma (arising from the erroneous conscientia) is now identified at the heart of the unfolding action of tragedy: "Neoptolemus' acceptance of Odysseus' unjust plan to defraud Philoctetes" for example (Maclntyre 1988, 187). In After Virtue, by contrast, the tragedy in the Philocetes was identified in the tragic conflict between Neoptolemus' role as hero and the requirements of the virtue of justice, both requirements carrying an authority of their own; now his 'error' is plain in the light of considerations arising from the overriding status of natural law. In general, moreover, such "[l]iterary examples", so important to the account in After Virtue, "might be suggestive, but no more than this" (Maclntyre 2006b, 94). Tragedy, in fiction and life, is viewed from the standpoint of a unifying Thomist metaphysics; so that the position Maclntyre defended against both Aquinas and Aristotle in After Virtue must now be rejected. It must be rejected not because, as a matter of fact, Aquinas held a different interpretation of the tragedies in question, and not because Maclntyre 'misread' Aquinas. Rather, the whole structure of Aquinas' thought necessitates the conclusion that tragedies that do not involve error on the part of the agent are impossible. Because of this structure, Aquinas cannot allow that it is, "not human sinfulness, but the nature of things or the divine will which generates tragedy" (Maclntyre 1988, 187).

5. Conclusion Maclntyre concludes "Moral Dilemmas" with the observation that although any theory of the Thomistic kind must be committed to the denial of the genuine moral dilemma, "it is equally clear that from any standpoint committed to the occurrence of irresolvable dilemmas... these conclusions would provide insufficient reason for the rejection of any such theory and of its moral precepts". This is because "[¡Judgments about the occurrence and nature of moral dilemmas are [... ] not independent of either moral or theoretical standpoints" (Maclntyre 2006b, 100). As we have seen, After Virtue is a distinct standpoint which is committed to the possibility of the occurrence of the tragic moral dilemma. If this is so, then on Maclntyre's own argument the Thomist position outlined later is insufficient to overturn After Virtue's central commitments. The adoption of a different set of commitments in 1985 certainly was a 'surprising' move.

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Advancing such a conclusion is not a mere matter of Maclntyrean bookkeeping. One of the most interesting things about the positive project in After Virtue is the extent to which it may be seen as a direct and personal response to a deep crisis of faith Maclntyre suffered in the early 1970s. To a significant degree, Maclntyre's enquiries in the ten years preceding After Virtue may be seen as an attempt to come to terms with the apparent unavailability of moral truth and authority given the 'death of God'. 13 If in 1985, and from the standpoint of Thomism, it seemed that reports of His death had been greatly exaggerated, in 1977, and from the standpoint of an exhausted atheism, After Virtue constituted a last ditch attempt to claw back some semblance of moral truth in the modernity he found (and still finds) so degenerate. 14 The positive argument takes the form that it does because of the collapse of earlier certainties in Maclntyre's thought, and it is unique just because it draws on resources from epic, tragedy and narrative conceptions of selfhood later rendered peripheral, incomplete, or mistaken. From the standpoint of the author of After Virtue, the adoption of Thomism is as much an absurd impossibility as a return to Barthist Protestant faith or communist party membership. This, I think, makes the argument of After Virtue of continuing and independent interest. It is more and other than a 'dry-run' for Whose Justice? and its sequels, and it opens possibilities that others, if not Maclntyre himself, might yet and fruitfully explore.

Bibliography Galston, W. (1991), Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State, Cambridge Hardy, B. (1968), Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach Through Narrative, in: Novel 2, 5 - 1 4 Knight, K. (ed.) (1998), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge Lutz, C. S. (2004), Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair Maclntyre, Oxford Maclntyre, A . C . (1967), A Short History of Ethics, London 13

though this may refer, of course, both to the discovery that there is no God and never has been, or to the worry that in modernity we seem to have killed Him. 14 The argument in After Virtue to a large extent represents an account of how Maclntyre saw the world in the absence of Christian belief. The re-adoption of Christianity is the discovery of an account that again makes sense, as he sees it in 1985, of the "belief in Christianity [he] thought [he] had" (Knight 1998, 257; see also Lutz 2004, 7-29 in particular). We can have no real idea how this might have been for Maclntyre, but I suggest that a clue may be found toward the end of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. "[One characterisation of someone's coming to inhabit a particular tradition is that of] a person for whom what an encounter with some particular tradition [... ] [does is provide] an occasion for self-recognition and selfknowledge [... ] Upon encountering a coherent presentation of one particular tradition [... ] such a person will often experience a shock of recognition: this is not only [... ] what I now take to be true but in some measure what I have always taken to be true. What such a person has been presented with is a scheme of overall belief within which many, if not all, of his or her particular established beliefs fall into place." (Maclntyre 1988, 394) Two points emerge from this. Firstly, this sounds like a 'conversion'—which incidentally fits rather neatly with admission that 1985 discovery was 'surprising' to Maclntyre. Secondly, it is made quite clear that not all established beliefs will survive. It has been an aim of this paper to draw out just those beliefs that don't make it into the post-1985 standpoint.

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— (1971), Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy, London — (1972), Justice: A New Theory and Some Old Questions, in: Boston Law Review 52, 330-334 — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame — (2006a), The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays 1, Cambridge — (2006b). Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge — (2007), After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3 r d ed.), London Nagel, T. (1995), Other Minds: Critical Essays: 1969-94, Oxford Nussbaum, M. (1989), Recoiling from Reason, in: The New York Review of Books 36-41 Stout, J. (1988), Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents, Boston — (1989), Homeward Bound: Maclntyre on Liberal Society and the History of Ethics, in: The Journal of Religion 69(2), 220-232

Analyse & Kritik 30/2008 (© Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart) p. 75-90

Thomas Osborne

Maclntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good*

Abstract: Alasdair Maclntyre's criticism of contemporary politics rests in large part on the way in which the political communities of advanced modernity do not recognize common goals and practices. I shall argue that although Maclntyre explicitly recognizes the influence of Jacques Maritain on his own thought, Maclntyre's own views are incompatible not only with Maritain's attempt to develop a Thomistic theory which is compatible with liberal democracy, but also relies on a view of the individual as a part which is related to the whole in a way that is incompatible with Maritain's understanding of the spiritual individual or person.

0. Introduction Alasdair Maclntyre criticizes the new natural law theory of Germain Grisez and John Finnis in part by arguing that these thinkers neglect the traditional Thomistic emphasis that human beings are naturally sociable and consequently directed by the natural law to the common good (Maclntyre 2000, 108-109). This criticism of Grisez and Finnis is standard and has been developed by several philosophers (Fortin 1982; Hittinger 1987; Dewan 1996). Maclntyre's own version of this criticism is distinctive in that he appeals to the way in which Jacques Maritain presents the Thomistic view even though Maritain is regarded by many as someone who neglects the role of the common good in Thomistic political philosophy. In this paper I shall attempt to situate Maclntyre in the context of Thomist debates over the common good and show that some of Maclntyre's own arguments for the importance of the common good draw out a weakness in Maritain's account, namely that Maritain does not sufficiently address the distinction between incomplete and complete communities. I will also argue that this weakness is present even in Maclntyre's account, although he provides the arguments whereby the weakness can be identified. Finally, I will argue that Maclntyre more clearly than Maritain recognizes the problems inherent in contemporary accounts of the common good but perhaps overemphasizes the failure of the contemporary nation-state to provide an institutional framework in which this common good can be achieved.

* Special thanks to Mary Elizabeth Osborne, Aric Anderson, and so many of those who participated in the conference and discussions.

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1. Maclntyre in the Context of Earlier Thomists on the Common Good: Maritain and De Koninck Why does Maclntyre appeal to Maritain's understanding of the common good? In the middle of the last century, Jacques Maritain attempted to develop a Thomistic political theory which would be compatible with liberal democracy (Maritain 1947; 1951). In general, Maclntyre and Maritain seem incompatible at least insofar as they give apparently incompatible accounts of the relationship between the common good and human rights (Wallace 1999). Maclntyre probably cites Maritain because of the way in which Maritain argues against the standard liberal account of the common good. Maritain attempts to support liberal democracy with an alternative understanding of the political common good which is substantive and in the Thomistic tradition. He tries to show the compatibility between the Thomistic tradition and aspects of liberal political practice by arguing that for Thomas Aquinas the individual has priority over the state. Maritain's argument partially rests on a distinction between material individuals and persons. Material individuals can be part of a whole. For example, an individual leaf is part of a tree, and a wolf is part of a pack. In both cases there is a different use of "part", but in neither case is the part a spiritual individual, or a person, whose good is superior to that of the whole. Maritain argues that human beings are such persons who are superior to every whole, including that which is the political community. Maritain (1947, 63) quotes Thomas Aquinas (Aquinas S.T., 1-2.21.4): "Man is not ordained to the body political according to all that he is and has." Unlike wolves or leaves, humans are not merely parts of the universe but instead persons who are directly ordered to God and not entirely ordered to any community. Maritain moves from the premise that humans are persons to the conclusion that each human has an individual good which is superior to that of any whole. Maclntyre is indebted to Maritain's account, perhaps because of the way in which Maritain argues that the common good is not merely an aggregate of individual goods. Maclntyre (2000, 115) cites a passage in which Maritain (1947, 45-56) makes just this point. Moreover, his citation ends just before the passage in which Maritain (1947, 57) claims that the citizen who sacrifices himself for the political common good loves his own soul more than he loves the common good. Nevertheless, Maclntyre seems to be sympathetic to this aspect of Maritain's approach. For instance, in Dependant Rational Animals (1999, 109) he argues that even though there is no conflict between the individual and common good, "[...] the good of each political individual is more than the common good". Maritain's precise understanding of the relationship between the individual and common good was never clear. But one view that can be fairly attributed to him is that the person has priority over the common good. Fr. Eschmann (1945) defended this position as that of Maritain. This view was attacked by Charles De Koninck (1943, 1945) as inconsistent with Thomas Aquinas' thought. Like Maritain, De Koninck emphasizes that the human being is a person who is directly ordered to God. But De Koninck draws our attention to the fact that for Thomas God is the common good of the universe. Consequently, De Koninck

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interprets differently the text from Thomas which Maritain quotes. According to De Koninck, Thomas is saying that humans are only partially ordered to the political common good because the political common good is not the ultimate end of human beings. The ultimate end is God, who is the common good of the universe. The citizen is only partially ordered to the common good because there is a further common good. The common good of the political community is not the ultimate end of human life, but neither is it incomplete in the way that the common good of a family or trade group is. In other words, the political common good is not the best and highest because there is a higher common good, not a higher individual good. It seems to me that De Koninck has the better of the argument as a historical and textual matter. But that is not the end of it. Maritain defends the contemporary liberal nation-state against totalitarian alternatives, while recognizing deficiencies within the liberal understanding of the common good as an aggregate of individual goods. Consequently, he provides an alternative account of the common good which he thinks is compatible with liberal democracy, is distinct from liberal notions of the common good, and is an alternative to totalitarian views whereby the common good of the contemporary nation-state is simply speaking superior to that of the individual. In contrast, De Koninck defends a more accurate Thomistic understanding of the common good's supremacy, but he does not so clearly recognize the problem and danger of confusing the political common good with the goals and institutions of the contemporary nation-state. De Koninck is correct to emphasize that there needs to be a complete community whose good is superior to the individual, but he does not indicate what form this complete community should take in a contemporary context. Why is this dispute between De Koninck and Maritain important for situating Maclntyre's political thought? Even though he seems to adhere to Maritain's position about the supremacy of the individual good, Maclntyre's criticism of the contemporary nation-state provides additional reasons to reject Maritain's position, while attune to the problems which De Koninck overlooked. Maclntyre uses Maritain's account of the common good in order to provide an alternative to the account given by the new natural law theory. He similarly criticizes the contemporary nation state for failing to attend to the common good in a way that is consistent with Maritain's worries about totalitarianism. Although his discussion is similar to Maritain's in that it does not fully address the distinction between complete and incomplete communities, he argues that there must be some political forum which performs two functions which on a traditional Thomistic reading usually belong only to the complete community. First, it should order human practices to the good life as a whole. Second, it should be able to claim allegiance and even self-sacrifice from its citizens. These two issues in some way point to De Koninck's position, which is that there is a need for a complete community which can fulfill these functions because its common good is greater than the individual goods of its citizens. It seems to me that these arguments help to show both why De Koninck's view is correct and also show why it is so difficult to apply his theory to contemporary institutions. What sort of common good is required by Maclntyre? It seems to me that

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among his many criticisms of the contemporary nation-state, there are two that most clearly set conditions for a better understanding of the common good. First, Maclntyre (1996, 303; 2006, 163) argues that the contemporary nationstate requires for its survival that there be police and soldiers who are willing to die for it. Nevertheless, since the nation-state presents and justifies itself as a kind of utility company which provides material benefits for its members, this image does not present the soldier or policeman with something to die for. Consequently, unlike the contemporary nation-state, the political community must be able to justify that its citizens be willing to sacrifice themselves and even die for the common good. Second, Maclntyre (1998, 120-135; 2006, 182-185) argues that the contemporary nation-state must put value on different kinds of practices and indeed on human life. For instance, the establishment of safety regulations entails some cost. Bureaucratic managers often set the cost and choose between different cost-benefit options. But the nation-state also claims to be neutral about the value of different ways of life and even the value of human life. Consequently, unlike the contemporary nation-state, the political community must be able to order different practices and consider their worth as constitutive of different ways of life. He does not argue that the nation-state does not attempt to justify self-sacrifice or in fact show preferences for some activities over others. The argument is that the nation-state does these activities even though by its very nature it is unsuited for them. Maclntyre suggests that the political common good can only be achieved in different local communities which are ordered among each other as distinct social wholes (1998, 246-252; 1999, 108-109, 134-135). Such a community would be distinct from the nation-state even though it will have to use the nation-state and even at times side with it in conflicts. He is thinking of (Maclntyre 1999, 134) "[...] workplaces, schools, parishes, trade union branches, adult education classes, and the like". He is not clear on how the different common goods and activities of these communities should be organized or the extent to which they would require self-sacrifice. He mentions that politics is the art of integrating the various practices, but he does not say much about what the political unit is or who the political authorities are. One way of distinguishing between the different common goods is by distinguishing between the common goods of incomplete and complete communities. Although neither of Maclntyre's claims about the political common good directly entail that the common good is simply speaking greater than the good of each political individual, Thomas' explanation of them does. Following Aristotle (Politics 1.2.1252a34-1253a39), he thinks that the political unit is a complete community with a common good which is greater than that of its members (Aquinas Sent.libri Politicorum, A73-A80). Aristotle and Thomas contrast these complete communities with local communities which are not self-sufficient, such as households and villages. This self-sufficiency helps to create a political community which is concerned not with particular practices, but with the good life as a whole. The political community's concern with living well makes it into a commu-

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nity whose common good is greater than the individual or private good of its members. Thomas claims that the individual dies for this political community because he recognizes that such a community's common good is better and should be loved more than his own good (Osborne 2005, 73-94). Moreover, the political community has authority to regulate and coerce human action because it is a complete community and is not a family or a faction. In the thirteenthcentury, Thomas adopted the common description of the moral virtues as "political virtues" because he shared the then widely-held belief that the life of virtue is the natural goal of the political unit (Lottin 1949, 103-115). For Aristotle, this complete community was the Greek polis. But, thanks to Maclntyre, we can ask: What other historical forms can such communities take? What distinctive powers does a complete community have?

2. Complete and Incomplete Communities According to Aristotle and Thomas, since the goal of political life is living well, the political community has authority which does not reside in any particular community. Thomas (S.T., 1-2.90.2; 91.1) emphasizes that only the leader of the political community can makes laws; other authorities, such as fathers, merely admonish. Moreover, only the political community can use deadly force. This role of the political community is interconnected with the self-sacrifice of its soldiers and public figures. Presumably Thomas had in mind kingdoms, citystates, and empires or perhaps parts of empires. What form could it take in the present day? This difficulty in identifying the political unit was addressed by Francis Vitoria, who is important for our purposes because he attempted to apply the Aristotelian and Thomistic view to the developing states of the sixteenth century. Vitoria more or less straightforwardly follows Thomas and Aristotle by distinguishing between incomplete communities and the political community. For example, he repeats Thomas' point that the commands of fathers are not in themselves binding as laws although he adds that they can be made binding by civil law (Vitoria 1991, 43-44, 158). But recognition of the public authority depends more on the practical issue of whether an authority in fact possesses coercive force. For instance, Vitoria (1991, 18) argues that the family is not a complete community because by itself it cannot resist violent attack. Thomas and Aristotle seem to focus more on the connection between living well and the resources provided by the complete community. Nevertheless, Vitoria is correct to emphasize that no community is self-sufficient if it cannot defend itself. The issue of defense for both Vitoria (1991, 297) and Thomas (S. T., 2.2.40.1) is connected with the use of coercive force and indeed capital punishment within the community. For instance, the argument that war may be waged justly only by a political authority is connected to the argument that the political authority can justly put someone to death. A private individual cannot wage war or punish criminals. He cannot justly intend another's death precisely because he does not have political authority. He can admonish but his admonishments, unlike laws, do not have coercive force. In contrast, the leaders of the complete community

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have authority over what is necessary for a good life, and consequently they can defend it from internal and external enemies. Vitoria (1991, 299-302) discusses more clearly than Thomas does that there can be difficulty in determining what a complete community is. He (1991, 42) states that the marks of a complete community are the possession of its own legal system, policies, and authorities. Nevertheless, a community may be dependent in some respects on a larger community and still possess the customary right to wage war. Vitoria's emphasis is mostly on custom. For instance, he (1991, 42) argues that a tyrant's laws bind because the community consents to the unjust leader. This view seems to me at least on the surface to depart from Thomas (S.T., 1.2.92.2) in that Vitoria emphasizes that those who have power are legitimate authorities. His focus on custom raises difficult questions about whether tyrants, oligarchs, and mobs can exercise legitimate political authority. Nevertheless, it also allows him to apply the earlier theory to his own political context. One interesting feature of Vitoria's theory is that he suggests that the individual complete communities can also be considered part of that commonwealth which is the whole world. Unlike Aristotle, he (1991, 40) allows for more than one complete political common good. Is custom sufficient for identifying a complete community? In a passage cited by Maclntyre, Maritain (1947, 48-49) suggests that there may never have been any complete community as described by Aristotle and Thomas. Moreover, he notes that the contemporary nation is much less such a community than pre-modern political communities were. He seems to think that human history is moving from smaller common goods to the wider common good of human civilization. Whereas Vitoria seems to think that the whole world is a larger complete community which does not take away the completeness of the smaller communities, Maritain is unclear about how the smaller communities relate to this wider community. He does not describe what institutional forms are required for the flourishing of this wider common good. He recognizes that different societies are more connected than they were at one time, but also that there are still deep divisions between them. It seems to me that his difficulty also results from his recognition of two paradoxical facts, namely that the complete community is essential for politics and that the contemporary nation-state cannot take the place of this complete community. As mentioned earlier, Maclntyre draws attention to the fact that the contemporary nation-state cannot justify its ordering of activities and its demand for the self-sacrifice of some citizens. Consequently, although the nation-state has taken on the role of the complete community with respect to coercion and war, it does not seem to be the same as a complete community in the Aristotelian or Thomistic sense. Even if custom was once a good guide for identifying complete communities, it may no longer be. Maclntyre shows the difficulty of politics in the present social order. He suggests that the common good should in some sense be reduced to the common goods of various local communities. We have seen two of his arguments for the position that the nation-state cannot fill the role which was played by the polis. I shall use the rest of this paper to argue that these same criticisms show that the local communities which he mentions

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cannot fulfill this necessary role because they are incomplete and cannot provide the classical conception of the political common good. Maclntyre's "workplaces, schools, parishes" and the like cannot deliver the political common good because they do not order the lesser common goods to producing a greater common good and cannot justify the coercion that is necessary in the political arena.

3. Communities and Practices Perhaps Maclntyre's primary criticism of the contemporary social order is that it does not provide a favorable environment for those practices which constitute a good life. In particular, he states that the nation-state claims to be neutral about practices while at the same time it privileges one set of practices over another (Maclntyre 1998, 237-239; 2006, 160-166; Murphy 2003, 160-166). On his account, the practice of politics is to order the other practices with an eye to the human good. In the contemporary context, this political practice must be done in the context of the local community. I shall argue that the local communities which he mentions are not much more fit to order diverse practices than the contemporary nation-state is. He agrees with Aristotle that some acts are done for their own sake and may be consequently constitutive of the agent's ultimate end. Both Aristotle and Maclntyre describe intellectual enquiry and contemplation as an activity which can be done for its own sake. But there is an important distinction between Maclntyre's understanding of practices and Aristotle's account of human action. Maclntyre writes: "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." (1984, 187) Maclntyre extends the notion of practice to include more activities than Aristotle would (Knight 2007, 154-159; Maclntyre 2006, 34). For instance, although Maclntyre states that bricklaying and planting are not practices, he holds that architecture and farming are. He thinks that although such productive and agricultural practices are related to goods which are external to them, they also have internal goods. For instance, there is a difference between constructing a house well and making money through home construction. Similarly, there is a difference between cultivating a piece of land and making as much money as possible from the cultivation of land. On Maclntyre's account, what might otherwise be described as servile and merely useful activities are practices if they are constitutive of a certain kind of life. He does not argue that such practices have only internal goods. But for his account to hold, these practices must at least have internal goods. This

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distinction between internal and external goods then allows one to distinguish between the product's excellence and that of the agent. The product's excellence is judged as an exterior good and the agent's excellence is judged in accordance with the internal good. These criteria are not identical. For instance, an excellent chess player may lose a game of chess, and a poor chess player may once play a brilliant game. Perhaps more interestingly, a good builder or farmer may be a failure at making money. This distinction between the two kinds of excellence is similar to Aristotle's distinction (Nicomachean Ethics, 2.4.1105a21-b5) between virtue and art, in that the former is judged by the agent's goodness whereas the latter is judged by the product. But Aristotle seems to think of artistic and virtuous activities as distinct. At least one may read him after this fashion, and it fits in with his position that certain arts are not suitable for citizens. In contrast, Maclntyre draws our attention to the different kinds of goodness which may belong to one and the same practice. Maclntyre emphasizes that in the contemporary nation-state there is a usually masked conflict between alternative practices. For instance, the politics of the contemporary state considers family farms not as providing the basis for a way of life but rather as a means of production. Consequently, debates over farming become technocratic; but deciding policies in this fashion the nationstate implicitly assumes that farming is not a practice which should itself be valued. The liberal nation-state is ideologically incapable of considering different alternative ways of life. Similarly, different parts of the contemporary state assign different values to human life. For instance, a certain number of accidental automobile deaths is considered to be an adequate tradeoff for the use of automobiles. But in another context, juries can award large amounts of money for an individual accidental death. In still another context, a certain amount of respect is given to the family of the dead soldier or police officer. Maclntyre writes (2006, 184), "[a]nd so in each particular context in which different possible courses of action which have potentially fatal consequences for some person or set of persons are evaluated, practical reasoning and decision-making will be guided by different norms." The respective government agencies must set some value on human life if they are to follow their model of rationality. Nevertheless, the value is arbitrary since there is no overarching goal or good by which these different values can be decided. It is important to recognize that the arbitrariness of the nation-state's decisions is not the ordinary arbitrariness which is present in nearly every determination of human law. For instance, there is usually arbitrariness whenever a particular community assigns a punishment to a crime, since the punishment could usually in reason be a little more or a little less. In general, there are often different means to the same end, and the political authority must decide in favor of one rather than another. Maclntyre's concern is that there is a deeper arbitrariness which includes not just the means but also the goals which are constituted by the practices and to which the practices are directed. Maclntyre holds that the polis could integrate the various practices because there was no incompatibility between individual and civic virtue. The difficulty for his interpretation is that it is unclear how Aristotle holds together the pursuit

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of moral and intellectual virtue. Maclntyre (1988, 103-104, 142-143) claims that the polis aims at some non-political goals, among which is contemplation. But if contemplation is non-political, how is it possible to justify the pursuit of political virtue over contemplation? At least in certain exceptional circumstances an agent would need to make this choice. For instance, in a difficult war any citizen should contribute to the war effort if possible, even if it means that he cannot develop intellectual virtue. Although Aristotle does not have difficulty in explaining how the moral virtues are subordinated to the polis, it is not clear how and whether the intellectual virtues can be so subordinated. In short, the conflict between the different practices remains problematic even for a political authority which recognizes a substantive common good. Although Aristotle's position on this issue has been interpreted in many ways, Thomas Aquinas (S. T., 1-2.66.3) holds that moral virtue makes someone good simply speaking, whereas intellectual virtue makes him good only in a certain way. Consequently, the moral virtues have a certain priority in the face of a conflict. His position emphasizes the importance of the political community. Moreover, it explains why there is no conflict between the virtues themselves. The moral virtues perfect someone as a part of that whole which is a complete community. In turn, the goal of this complete community is the combined virtuous activity of its members. It seems to me that Maclntyre's approach neglects the distinction between art and virtue and also weakens the tie between moral virtue and the complete community. For example, Thomas would regard fishing or farming as arts which can be practiced virtuously. The virtue of justice is often exercised through the performance of productive arts. The political community orders these arts and makes possible the virtuous activity of its citizens. Each art and activity is viewed in light of its participation in the complete community's common good. In contrast, although Maclntyre suggests that every individual is a part of different wholes which are ordered among themselves, he does not explain what this order is or why one common good would be preferable to another. It is not difficult to imagine cases in which the individual's different roles conflict with each other. For example, a member of a fishing crew might win or find some money. If he does so, it may be appropriate for him to buy needed equipment for his boat. But he may also owe money to debtors or need it for military action. In addition, his parents may be poor and need money for food. In such a case the individual must possess the virtue of prudence in order to distinguish between the different incompatible acts which are available to him. Moreover, this virtue must be practiced in the context of his political community's customs and laws. Fishing well or looking after his parents contributes to his well-being only insofar as he fulfills this role as part of the complete community. The subordinate roles can be coordinated only if the individual has one wider role which includes the others. Maclntyre uses the incommensurability of different goods and practices to argue for the inadequacy of the contemporary nation-state. But if there is no complete community then there will still be an incommensurability of practices. He (1999, 134; see also Maclntyre 1998, 248; Knight 2007, 183-186) suggests

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that contemporary politics should be practiced in the context of local communities such as "workplaces, schools, parishes, sports clubs, trade union branches, adult education classes, and the like". However, none of these local communities is concerned with the good life as a whole. Unless there is some complete community, the local community's weakness in ordering practices is similar to that of the contemporary nation-state.

4. Death and the Political Order The concern of the complete community for living well is connected with the ability of the political community to justify that its members risk their lives for its preservation. Thomas assumes that the good citizen is willing to die for the political common good because the common good of the complete community is, simply speaking, greater than the good of an individual member. Because Maclntyre argues that the contemporary liberal nation-state cannot justify such self-sacrifice, it seems likely that his argument would be based on the inability of the liberal nation-state to use the priority of its common good as a justification. However, he does not clearly follow this approach. Although his diagnosis of the problem shows an inconsistency in the rhetoric of contemporary politics, his own solution faces similar difficulties. In at least two places (1996, 303; 2006, 163) Maclntyre compares dying for the political community with dying for the telephone company. The argument is that although the liberal nation-state may at times use the rhetoric of older political communities, in reality it justifies its authority by supplying services with the taxes which it raises. The problem is that its services may justify the payment of taxes, but they cannot justify the sacrifice of one's own life. There are no services which could pay for such self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, in order to provide such services the nation-state must rely on police officers, firemen, and soldiers. In order to perform their jobs well, members of these professions must at times risk death and even die. Consequently, the liberal nation-state uses the rhetoric of patriotic self-sacrifice which had meaning in an earlier context. Therefore the nation-state's rhetoric is divided between what it presents as its rational justification and what it requires for self-preservation. If the nation-state did not engage in the rhetoric, it would cease to exist. But it cannot provide a rational justification for self-sacrifice. There is therefore a built-in inconsistency in the very preservation of the contemporary nation-state (see also Maclntyre 1984, 18-20). Maclntyre describes how this difficulty has been and can be resolved. First, he appeals to traditional communities in which there was no division between the individual good and the common good. He (2006, 163) states that in such communities, "[...] caring for the common good, even to the point of being willing to die for it, was no other than caring for what was good about oneself'. Second, he appeals to a wider conception of one's own good which includes dependants and one's future disabled self. In this context he writes (1999, 143), "Those who perform such tasks on behalf of the community are asked by the community to be prepared, if necessary, to risk their lives, but to ask this can

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only be justified, if those who accept this risk can be confident that they, if disabled, or their dependants, if they die, will receive adequate care." The second point develops the first insofar as it appeals to a community in which the dominant mode of rationality is not rational self-interest but instead includes the mutual giving and receiving of goods. The strength of Maclntyre's approach is that the model of mutual giving and receiving can be applied to a variety of local communities. Its weakness is that it does not recognize the importance of a complete community which orders and directs the practices of these communities. There seems to be a parallel in his treatment of the polis and his treatment of these communities. In Maclntyre's view, it seems that self-sacrifice is similarly justified in both contexts because both kinds of communities include the individual's good within the common good. The parallel between the two kinds of community is plausible because there are many cases in which an individual is willing to die for another member of his family, his partners in work, and even for friends. Such self-sacrifice for the good of another does not require that the other's good be preferred to one's own. Indeed, Thomas (S. T., 2-2.26.5) argues that self-sacrifice in this context is merely an example of having a greater love for the spiritual or perhaps even bodily good of one's neighbor over one's own bodily good, and that fundamentally one cannot love the spiritual good of one's neighbor more than that of oneself. Consequently, Maclntyre's treatment of self-sacrifice both corresponds to its existence in local communities and can be theoretically explained on Thomistic grounds without having to posit a greater love for one's neighbor over oneself. The mere willingness to die does not by itself indicate the subordination of one's own good to a greater good. The weakness of Maclntyre's account can be seen in his departure from Thomas, who argues that even self-sacrifice for another individual is ultimately explicable in terms of the subordination of both persons to a wider common good. In the case of charity, one individual can prefer another's bodily good to his own bodily good because they both either in fact or in principle prefer God as a common good to themselves. Another person is loved through charity insofar as he is loved for the sake of God as a shared or shareable supernatural common good. Similarly, Thomas holds that self-sacrifice for the political community is justified because the individual's good is subordinated to the common good of the political community. An individual is ordered to the political community as a part is ordered to the whole. It seems to me that Maclntyre's neglect of the complete community's common good leads to a misunderstanding of practical reasoning which is also present in Maritain. Both Maritain and Maclntyre emphasize that there is no real conflict between the individual and the common good. Nevertheless, both suggest that we enter the moral life through deliberating about our own good. Maclntyre (2000, 109) writes that he is moving beyond Maritain by stating that to learn the natural law "is to inquire of ourselves and of each other 'What is my good? What is our common good?'" In this passage and similar passages (1998, 145; 2006, 35) he may merely be placing deliberation about the individual good on par with the common good. But this view seems similar to Maritain's position

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(1942, 66-85) that the first moral movement is about what is good for me and then perhaps only implicitly proceeds to God. Lawrence Dewan (1996) has criticized Maritain for not recognizing that the very beginning of the moral life is based on a natural inclination for a good which is greater than that of the individual. Although Dewan discusses Maritain in a theological context, it seems to me that his criticism would also hold in the political realm. To begin with one's individual good already assumes too much. It is at least arguable that we first experience ourselves as parts of a wider moral order and act in the context of goods which are greater than our own. Although both Maritain and Maclntyre criticize contemporary individualism, they do not leave behind the individualistic claim that moral reasoning begins with an enquiry into one's own good. A resolution of this issue would require more work in moral psychology. We would have to ask: What good can we will? What does it mean to will another's good? What does it mean to will another's good more than one's own? It seems to me that many contemporary discussions are influenced by theories of the will which have their roots in late medieval and contemporary philosophy, and which are themselves highly unlikely. But for the purposes of this paper we need only indicate that both Maritain and Maclntyre use parts of Thomas' political philosophy and yet do not appeal to his theory that there is a natural inclination to will the common good more than one's own individual good. The difficulties which Maclntyre raises involve self-sacrifice, but an equally serious and related set of difficulties involve coercion and the willingness to punish and even kill others for the common good. This latter difficulty brings into sharper relief the difference between complete and incomplete communities. In our impoverished contemporary context, it may be hard to explain but it is still not difficult to understand how a parent may be willing to die for the wellbeing of her child, or that a soldier may choose death for the preservation of the nation-state. But suppose that someone murders the child. Who can exact justice? Both Thomas and Vitoria hold that the individual has no coercive authority over another individual. If a parent kills his child's murderer, then the killing is vengeance, whereas if the representative of the community does so, then the killing is an act of justice. Maclntyre discusses several kinds of local communities, but none of them obviously should have coercive force. For instance, if two fishing crews are in conflict, they should both submit to the authority of the judge. Otherwise justice would belong to the more ruthless and stronger fishing crew. If two families disagree over a property line, there must be some higher authority to resolve the issue. Otherwise, the disagreement may be settled through a feud. It seems to me that Maclntyre's view makes it difficult to distinguish between revenge and justice. But this distinction appears to be a natural part of human political life, since it is based on the distinction between the just exercise of authority and violence. At any rate, the distinction is made in very diverse political contexts by Aristotle, Thomas, and Vitoria. The justification of coercive force within a community is connected to the justification of such force in the relations between communities. Maclntyre does

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recognize that members of local communities will have to participate in conflicts between nation-states, but he does not indicate how this participation would occur. Should an individual fishing crew decide whether to sign up in a war against totalitarian aggression? Should such deliberation be assigned to a sports club or the members of a factory? Thomas and Vitoria use the fact that the public authority can legitimately execute criminals to argue that the public authority can legitimately use deadly force against external enemies. An individual citizen may be injured by another complete community, but this injury does not justify a private war against that community. Moreover, a complete community must be able to force its citizens to engage in war on its behalf. Self-sacrifice for the common good is something that can be required of individuals by the community. Except in exceptional circumstances, it is hard to imagine how Maclntyre's local communities could justify such coercion. Each of his local communities is concerned with a particular set of practices. In contrast, because the complete community is concerned with the good life as a whole, it would have the authority to regulate and even coerce its members' activities. Although Maclntyre is correct that the liberal nation-state cannot justify self-sacrifice on the part of its soldiers and police, it seems to me that it similarly cannot justify the coercive practices of these public officials. Contemporary debates over capital punishment nicely indicate this problem. In general, capital punishment is criticized or defended as a kind of vengeance on the part of the victims rather than as an exercise of justice by the public authority. Different positions on capital punishment in this context are based on different positions concerning whether revenge is justified (Long 1999). The distinction between private vengeance and public justice is blurred precisely because the liberal nation-state can pretend to be indifferent on many moral issues. Although capital punishment highlights the problem, there is a similar difficulty with every exercise of coercive force. No community can exist unless someone is willing to capture and even kill others for its preservation. The police could not exercise their authority if at some point there were not the threat of deadly force at least in the apprehension of criminals. The liberal nation-state claims such authority even though it cannot justify it. Although Maclntyre is correct to indicate that the liberal nation-state cannot justify the sacrifice of its member's lives, he does not draw out the problems inherent in justifying coercion. But such coercion is equally necessary and provides another example of how the liberal nation-state for its very preservation must rely on rhetoric which it cannot justify. More importantly, although he emphasizes how individual local communities can instantiate a common good, he does not state why these local communities can have coercive force. He consequently does not indicate how the practice of politics can be instantiated in such communities. The difficulty is that he does not recognize that a complete community has an authority which can never be possessed by the local communities which he mentions. The difference is between practices of different groups within a community and living a good life is a whole. The issue of self-

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sacrifice belongs to the more important distinction between the common goods of incomplete communities and that of a complete community.

5. Concluding Remarks: Just How Bad Are Incoherent Nation-States? To the best of my knowledge, the application of the Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of the complete community to a contemporary context has not been successfully carried out in any detail. To their credit, both Maritain and Maclntyre raise difficulties which shed light on this problem. Both recognize the historical character of political institutions, and both refuse to identify the complete community with the boundaries of the contemporary nation-state. Maritain's treatment of this issue may be undermined by his concern to develop a philosophy which is opposed to twentieth-century totalitarianisms. Although he recognizes the inadequacy of contemporary accounts of the common good, he does not provide a successful alternative account. Instead, he limits the common good to the temporal realm and in contrast to the Thomistic tradition he argues that human beings are not fully parts of that whole which is the political community. More helpfully, he recognizes that there is a historical problem in that even the Greek polis probably could not fulfill the function which Aristotle wishes to assign to the complete community. Moreover, he shows that philosophers should be concerned to some extent with the community of all persons on not just particular political or ethnic communities. Nevertheless, he seems to think of the nation-state as not being inherently problematic, but rather as providing a partial instantiation of those institutions which further the common good. According to Maclntyre, there is an inherent flaw in contemporary political institutions as such. On account of its size, the contemporary nation-state cannot allow for the communal decision-making and training in virtue which is required for a successful local community. Moreover, he points to an inconsistency between contemporary political rhetoric and practice. The liberal nation-state cannot order practices and justify self-sacrifice precisely because it presents itself as being in large part neutral with respect to competing ways of life. This putative neutrality has its roots in modern political philosophy and contemporary bureaucratic practice. At least part of the difference between Maclntyre and Maritain may result from the different theories to which the two figures are opposed. Maritain is concerned with providing a philosophical foundation for liberal democracy as opposed to totalitarianism, whereas Maclntyre wishes to unmask the pretensions of liberal democracies. I have argued that Maclntyre in part points to a difficulty which is caused by a contemporary failure to distinguish between complete and incomplete communities. In particular, Maclntyre's critique of liberal democracy shows that there is a need for a complete community which has the authority to order practices and justify self-sacrifice. Although Maritain recognizes that the concept of a complete community is important to political thought, he does not see how it is problematic. He avoids the problems by in part adopting contemporary in-

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dividualism and arguing that historically speaking the complete community has taken many forms. In contrast, Maclntyre appeals to the Greek polis and tries to assign its function to a variety of local communities such as trade unions, schools, and sports clubs. It seems to me that although he correctly sees the need for a complete community such as the polis, these local communities cannot now fulfill its directive and coercive functions. The inability of such local communities to do so is not a feature of local communities as such, but it does seem to be a feature of the way that they must exist in the culture of advanced modernity. Consequently, it may be impossible to reconstitute local politics and even to establish republican governments which allow for significant political participation by the citizens. I am not denying that small republics provide a better environment for human flourishing. But in the culture of advanced modernity we may have to settle for an impoverished political context. Even though Maclntyre (Maclntyre 1998, 237) may be largely correct that "Politically the societies of advanced Western modernity are oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies", it could be that Maclntyre's republican and at times seemingly Utopian views blind him to the importance of the contemporary nation-state and its institutions. We should note that the present liberal democracies are not instances in which bad regimes are disguised as good ones, but those in which bad regimes are disguised as incoherent ones. Moreover, as Maclntyre recognizes, states in Western modernity are difficult to characterize because there is an arbitrariness in the very possession and exercise of power. The oligarchs are not entirely in control because there is a sense in which no one has control (Maclntyre 1970, 79-81). Unlike Maritain, Maclntyre describes this problem well by noting the incoherence in the very idea of the liberal nationstate and the relationship between rational justification and its exercise of power. But his recognition of the disparity between contemporary political practice and rhetoric may lead to a too easy dismissal of contemporary institutions. Does the contemporary nation-state perform functions which indicate that it is a defective but complete community? Vitoria's identification of the complete community as one which exercises coercive authority does not allow us to recognize which institutions are just and legitimate. Nevertheless, he brings out the fact that, regardless of the rhetoric, each large community needs such institutions. Although these institutions may not express the true justification for their functions and may contain inherent inconsistencies, their role in administering justice and preserving some order may in fact fulfill many roles of the complete community and consequently deserve their citizens' allegiance. Maclntyre's criticism of the liberal nation-state shows the need for further conceptual and empirical work in political philosophy. First, what role do our political institutions in fact play? We cannot answer this question merely by appealing to contemporary political rhetoric, but we need both to look at how these institutions operate and to compare them to their historical counterparts. Second, to what extent can injustice be compatible with a just regime, and if a regime is unjust, to what extent may it have authority and deserve allegiance? These two questions need to be addressed if we are to give an adequate account of what is

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right or wrong with contemporary institutions, and if we are to decide whether and how we can repair or replace them.

Bibliography Dewan, L. (1996), Natural Law and the First Act of Freedom: Maritain Revisited, in: Etudes Maritainiennes/Maritain Studies 12, 3-32 — (2000), St. Thomas, John Finnis and the Political Good, in: The Thomist 64, 227-374 Eschmann, I. Th. (1945), In Defense of Jacques Maritain, in: The Modern Schoolman 22, 183-208 Fortin, E. (1982), The New Rights Theory and Natural Law, in: Review of Politics 44, 590-612 Hittinger, R. (1987), A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory, Notre Dame Knight, K. (2007), Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre, Cambridge De Köninck, C. (1943), De la primauté de la bien commun contre les personalistes, Québec — (1945), In Defense of St. Thomas: A Reply to Father Eschmann's Attack on the Supremacy of the Common Good, in: Laval théologique et philosophique 1(2), 9-109 Long, S. (1999), Evangelium Vitae, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Death Penalty, in: The Thomist 63(4), 511-552 Lottin, O. (1949), Psychologie et morale au xiie et xiiie siècles 3, Louvain Maclntyre, A. (1970), Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic, New York — (1984a), After Virtue (2nd ed.), Notre Dame — (1984b), Is Patriotism a Virtue? The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame — (1991), Community, Law and the Rhetoric of Rights, in Listening 26, 96-110 — (1998), The Maclntyre Reader, Knight, K. (ed.), Notre Dame — (1996), A Partial Response to My Critics, in: Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.), After Maclntyre, Notre Dame, 283-304 — (1999), Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Chicago — (2000), Theories of Natural Law in the Culture of Advanced Modernity, in: Common Truths: New Perspectives on Natural Law, Wilmington, DC, 91-115 — (2006), Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge Maritain, J. (1942), The Range of Reason, New York — (1947), La personne et le bien commun, Paris — (1951), Man and the State, Chicago McMylor, P. (1994), Alasdair Maclntyre: Critic of Modernity, London Murphy, M. (2003), Maclntyre's Political Philosophy, in: Alasdair Maclntyre, Cambridge, 152-175 Aquinas, T. (1882-), Sententia libri politicorum, in: Leonine Commission (ed.), Opera Omnia 48, Rome — (1882-), Summa Theologiae, in: Leonine Commission (ed.), Opera Omnia Rome De Vitoria, F. (1991), Pagden, A./Lawrance, J. (ed. and trans.), Political Writings, Cambridge Wallace, D. (1999), Jacques Maritain and Alasdair Maclntyre: The Person, the Common Good and Human Rights, in: The Failure of Modernism: The Cartesian Legacy and Contemporary Pluralism, Washington/DC., 127-140

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Christopher Stephen Lutz

From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair Maclntyre's Critique of Modern Ethics

Abstract:The purpose of this essay is to connect the 'Disquieting Suggestion' at the beginning of After Virtue to a broader picture of Alasdair Maclntyre's critique of modern moral philosophy. The essay begins with Maclntyre's fictional scientific catastrophe, and uses four passages from the text of After Virtue to identify the analogous real philosophical catastrophe. The essay relates the resulting critique of modern moral philosophy to Maclntyre's concern for recognizing the social practices of morality as human actions in "Notes from the Moral Wilderness". The essay concludes by considering the implications of Maclntyre's philosophy for the study of history, realism, and tradition.

0. Introduction One question that can lead a person into the history of philosophy and ethics is, "How did we get here from there?" This question demands immediate attention to two other questions: what is 'here'? and what was 'there' ? Alasdair Maclntyre's After Virtue offers answers to all three of these questions. According to After Virtue, 'here' is a culture in which discussions of morality—both academic and popular—tend to be incoherent, and strangely disconnected from discussions of practical wisdom; 'there' was a culture in which discussions of human action were at the same time both moral and practical; and the process that brings us 'here from there' centers around the cultural turn from teleological practical reasoning to voluntarist moral reasoning. This process is dramatically summarized in the opening chapter of After Virtue with its 'Disquieting Suggestion' t h a t our moral culture bears the consequences of an unrecognized catastrophe t h a t has led to the culture of emotivism. The precise meaning and reference of t h a t story is not always clear to its readers; nevertheless, the attentive reader can recognize and reconstruct the events of the analogous philosophical catastrophe through a careful reading of the book, and the reader who realizes that the catastrophe is not just a broad metaphor holds a powerful tool for the interpretation of Alasdair Maclntyre's critique of modernity.

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1. The 'Disquieting Suggestion' After Virtue begins with 'A Disquieting Suggestion': "Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists." (Maclntye 1985, 1) Maclntyre tells us that after some passage of time, 'enlightened people' pick up the pieces, a collection of fragments of descriptions lacking any of the comprehensive theories that constitute the research programs of the sciences as we know them. These enlightened people would believe that they were doing science again but, in fact, they would not be, and they have no way of recognizing that they were not. Were they, like us, to have the rational resources of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, and existentialism, Maclntyre says they would remain incapable of recognizing their own condition, because none of these approaches would help them to recognize the differences between the pieces of scientific knowledge that they hold and memorize, and the practice of science as it had been before its destruction. This is an interesting story, it is fascinating to imagine what might pass for science in such a culture, but the real 'Disquieting Suggestion' itself soon follows: "The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived." (2) The point of Maclntyre's story is that an event occurred in our past that suspended the rational investigation of morality, and that modern efforts in moral philosophy are nothing but faulty attempts using broken tools to resuscitate a study that had once been dead. This is an amazing claim, and Professor Maclntyre anticipates the obvious complaint, writing, "Yet our history lies open to view, so it will be said, and no record of any such catastrophe survives." (3) In response, he presents another striking supposition: "Suppose it were the case that the catastrophe of which my hypothesis speaks had occurred before, or largely before, the founding of academic history, so that the moral and other evaluative presuppositions of academic history derived from the forms of the disorder

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which it [i.e., the catastrophe] brought about. [...] For the forms of the academic curriculum would turn out to be among the symptoms of the disaster whose occurrence the curriculum does not acknowledge." (4) In other words, modern history does not record the catastrophe because the catastrophe is invisible to it, because modern history is itself one of the fruits of the catastrophe. The 'Disquieting Suggestion' comes down to this: even though any professional philosopher can recount the history of philosophy, at least in broad strokes, from Thales to Derrida, there is a catastrophic event hidden from view within that history, the effects of which render modern efforts at moral philosophy incoherent at best, but this event and its effects are invisible to the modern academy, even as we suffer their consequences. Maclntyre writes: "One way of stating part of the hypothesis is precisely to assert that we are in a condition which almost nobody recognizes and which perhaps nobody at all can recognize fully." (4) It is, Maclntyre acknowledges, an implausible theory, but its very implausibility he takes to be evidence that it might be true. The 'Disquieting Suggestion' is a difficult passage for several reasons, including the fact that the historical narrative that unfolds through the rest of the book does not openly identify any events in our history with the calamities, the riots, or the Know-Nothing movement described in that opening paragraph. What, then, is the catastrophe?

2. Recognizing the Catastrophe To find the catastrophe in the text, we must begin by returning to chapter one to find out what kind of thing we are looking for. Professor Maclntyre writes: "We shall have to look not for a few brief striking events whose character is incontestably clear, but for a much longer, more complex and less easily identified process and one which by its very nature is open to rival interpretation." (3) The catastrophe is not any singular event; it is a series of events stretched out over several centuries; and it is not recorded as a catastrophe because it is not typically interpreted as such. In all likelihood it is familiar to us, but is ordinarily seen as a great achievement, or at least as a positive development. Where, then, do we see such a process described in After Virtue? There are four places where Professor Maclntyre indicates most clearly what he takes the catastrophe of the 'Disquieting Suggestion' to be. The first place is in chapter four. After describing the incoherence of moral language in our postcatastrophe culture of emotivism in chapters two and three, Maclntyre turns in chapter four to a discussion of the predecessor to the culture of emotivism, namely the culture of the enlightenment. But here Maclntyre begins by drawing a very peculiar picture of the enlightenment. It is not the French enlightenment

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of Rousseau and Voltaire, but a specifically Anglo-Scottish-German enlightenment of Hume, Smith, and Kant; and Maclntyre gives very specific reasons for drawing this peculiar picture: "What the French lacked was threefold: a secularized Protestant background, an educated class which linked the servants of government, the clergy, and the lay thinkers in a single reading public, and a newly alive type of university exemplified in Konigsburg in the east and in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the west. [... ] Hence what we are dealing with is a culture that is primarily Northern European. Spaniards, Italians, and the Gaelic and Slavonicspeaking peoples do not belong to it." (37) In short, what gives birth to the culture of emotivism in After Virtue is the enlightenment as it played out in the Protestant countries of northern Europe. This might be taken—mistakenly—to identify the catastrophe with the Protestant Reformation, but it certainly does indicate that the Protestant Reformation is an episode in the process that constitutes the catastrophe. Maclntyre clarifies the identity of the catastrophe in a second place, in chapter five: "Suppose that the arguments of Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume, Smith and the like fail because of certain shared characteristics deriving from their highly specific shared historical background. [... ] Whence did they inherit these shared beliefs? Obviously from their shared Christian past compared with which the divergences between Kant's and Kierkegaard's Lutheran, Hume's Presbyterian, and Diderot's Jansenist-influenced Catholic background are relatively unimportant." (51) The focus here is on the peculiarities of the theologies of Luther, Calvin, and Jansen; all three were theological voluntarists, that is, all three posited the divine will as the primary principle of existence. Where Thomas Aquinas, in his synthesis of Christian Neo-Platonism and Aristotelian hylomorphism, always maintained the priority of the intellect in creation, 1 theological voluntarists asserted the priority of the divine will, and this had far reaching consequences for philosophy and theology. So after summarizing some points of agreement among medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers who shared an Aristotelian view of nature and reason Maclntyre writes: "This large area of agreement does not however survive when Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism—and their immediate late medieval predecessors—appear on the scene. For they embody a new conception of reason." (53) 1

See T h o m a s Aquinas, De Potentia

Dei, q. 3, a. 15, 3 r d argument.

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Maclntyre's catastrophe is not the Protestant Reformation, nor is it Protestantism combined with Jansenism, rather it is the whole process of that turn from natural teleology to theological voluntarism and nominalism—the foundation of which is typically attributed to William of Ockham—that lead to the voluntarist theologies of Luther, Calvin, and Jansen. This identification of the catastrophe is confirmed in a third place in After Virtue, when Maclntyre sketches twelfth century Christian efforts to work out the apparent conflicts between the philosophical tradition that honored the moral excellence of the cardinal virtues, and the Christian theological tradition that mandated obedience to the divine law. This gets at the real difference between classical and contemporary notions of morality. If I were to formulate the moral question that Aristotle answers in the Nicomachean Ethics, it would be, "How can I become the kind of a person who has the practical wisdom to recognize what is good and best to do and who also has the moral freedom to act on that judgment?" Thus understood, ethics is about developing a rich, natural understanding of living well. This ceases to be the case when morality is reduced to rule-following. Here Maclntyre looks to Peter Abelard's Ethics and finds an approach to ethics that centers on questions about obedience and sin. In this kind of morality, Maclntyre writes: "Everything turns on the character of the interior act of the will. Character therefore, the arena of virtues and vices, simply becomes one more circumstance, external to will. The true arena of morality is that of the will and of the will alone." (168) For Abelard, the central human question, and the central question of his Ethics is about salvation and damnation: what constitutes sin? In his Ethics, Abelard identifies consent, which we list among the acts of the will,2 as the essential character of sin, distinguishing it both from vicious dispositions to sin and from other acts that either precede consent or follow upon it (Abelard 1973, 188-202). The reduction of morality to consent to obey impoverishes ethics and opens the door to the rejection of nature as a source of moral norms. Morality as a rich understanding of living well is replaced by morality as a meeting of two wills, and all other factors begin to fall into the periphery. This medieval emphasis on the act of the will is not just the product of biblical interpretation; Maclntyre notes that it is also the fruit of the Stoic tradition. Stoicism reduces virtue from a complex account of the functioning of the powers of the soul to a singular perfection of the will, and Stoicism abandons the teleological notion of moral excellence as the perfection of the rational and appetitive powers of the free agent, affirming instead only the unconditional goodness of the will that obeys moral law (Maclntyre 1985, 168-169). Intellectually, then, voluntarism seems to be the outcome of the Christian and Stoic traditions, but there is another factor that brings Stoicism to prominence from time to time, namely political change. When radical political change 2 Thomas Aquinas lists consent among the acts of the will; in After describes it as the act of the will.

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overturns shared conceptions of the common good, one is left with a culture in which morality appears to demand real personal sacrifice for no other end than obedience to the law. Looking back to the collapse of community life that originally led to Stoicism, Maclntyre writes: "any intelligible relationship between the virtues and law would disappear. There would be no genuine shared common goods; the only goods would be the goods of individuals. And the pursuit of any private good, being often and necessarily in these circumstances liable to clash with the goods of others, would appear to be at odds with the requirements of the moral law. Hence if I adhere to the law, I will have to suppress the private self. The point of the law cannot be the achievement of some good beyond the law; for there now appears to be no such good." (170) The political circumstances that brought about Stoicism in the first place are not unique in history, and so Maclntyre proposes that similar circumstances are likely to bring about recurrences in Stoicism whenever they arise. The identification of the catastrophe with the turn to voluntarism and nominalism is confirmed again in a fourth place in After Virtue: "I have suggested that a great part of modern morality is intelligible only as a set of fragmented survivals from that [Aristotelian] tradition, and indeed that the inability of modern moral philosophers to carry through their projects of analysis and justification is closely connected with the fact that the concepts with which they work are a combination of fragmented survivals and implausible modern inventions." (257) The rejection of the Aristotelian tradition with its natural teleology and the transition to voluntarist morality is the philosophical event that corresponds to the destruction of science in the 'Disquieting Suggestion'. The events of that historical process are familiar to us, whether we are moderns, post-moderns, or Thomists. We are familiar with the medieval rediscovery of Aristotle, and its rejection; we know about the Black Death and the other complex circumstances that brought medieval culture into decline; we know about the Renaissance and the Reformation; and we know about the secularization that came with the Enlightenment. The difference Maclntyre is proposing is one of interpretation: While these events are commonly read as the history of progress toward individual freedom, they are also moments in the history of the turn to voluntarism that gave birth to the modern culture of emotivism that tyrannizes those traditional moral communities that it does not dissolve.3 3 This summarizes a point Maclntyre made in an interview first published in Italy in 1991. See Borradori 1994.

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3. Moral Action and Human Action The outcome of the rejection of Aristotelian natural teleology in ethics was the establishment of a morality in which obedience to moral norms can be conceived only as an end in itself. The voluntarism of Luther, Calvin, and Jansen made their accounts of moral norms, like their accounts of reward and punishment, essentially arbitrary. Kant's rejection of the moral worth of heteronomy 4 gives voluntarist morality a new philosophical expression, but does not change its character. Mills affirmation that the "readiness" to serve "the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own [... ] is the highest virtue that can be found in man" 5 sounds noble, but turns out to be only another recurrence of the stoic denial of the private self in a social arena that lacks shared conceptions of the common good. Taken together, the emphasis on law, the rejection of teleology, and the denial of the private self establish an approach to morality and moral action in which both morality and moral action become unintelligible, for moral action, thus conceived, cannot be accounted for as human action. This is a problem in modern moral philosophy that Maclntyre had already been working on for nearly twenty years when he wrote After Virtue. In "Notes from the Moral Wilderness II", Maclntyre wrote: "We make both individual deeds and social practices intelligible as human actions by showing how they connect with characteristically human desires, needs and the like. Where we cannot do this, we treat the unintelligible piece of behavior as a symptom, a survival, or a superstition." (in: Knight (ed.) 1998, 41) Human action is so inherently teleological that the normal human response to actions that do not seem to make sense is to ask "what are you doing?" and "why are you doing that?" To disconnect freedom and obedience from salvation, as Luther, Calvin, and Jansen do, to propose that morality is pursued without an end in view, as Kant does, or to affirm that readiness to act in ways that serve the pleasure of others through utter self-destruction is a sign of moral excellence, as Mill does, is to make it impossible to answer these normal human questions in any satisfying way. The answers leave the questions unanswered. Every human act worthy of the name is pursued for an end, and sound practical rules are nothing but wise counsels, directing the complex web of human actions toward the common good. But when the common good is no longer understood, the rules survive only as social habits, as material survivals of a culture that is formally lost. When European explorers encountered these kinds of unintelligible moral habits among Polynesian people they took these taboo rules to be a sign of primitiveness, but as Alasdair Maclntyre pointed out, first in "Notes from the Moral Wilderness",and again in at least four subsequent works6 4

See Immanuel Kant, Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 2. 6 See "Notes from the Moral Wilderness II"; "Some More About 'Ought'" in: Maclntyre 1971, 166-167; 1977, 30-31; 1985, 111-113; 1990a, 27-28, 178-189. 5

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what they had failed to recognize when they made that harsh judgment was that their own moral rules had already become social habits of the same kind. Maclntyre's critique of modernity has two main points: The first is that modernity, has lost its capacity to understand the real practical wisdom of its traditional morality, and has formulated an approach to moral thinking that is unintelligible, unjustifiable, and ultimately arbitrary. The second is that morality, formulated in this modern fashion, can be used, and has been used, as a tool for social manipulation (Maclntyre 1985, 110). Late modernity, what Maclntyre has called "the culture of emotivism" is an essentially manipulative culture. It does not seek the truth about morality because it has systematically cut itself off from the intellectual resources required to express moral truth, much less to seek it. Consequently, modern moral discourse ceases to be anything but a manipulative tool. Maclntyre writes: "What is the key to the social content of emotivism? It is the fact that emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. [... ] If emotivism is true this distinction is illusory. [... ] The sole reality of distinctively moral discourse is the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preference and choices of another with its own. Others are always means, never ends." (23-24) These are the main themes of Maclntyre's critique of modernity 7 , and they help to frame up the positive project that has followed upon it.

4. Moving Forward: History, Realism, and Tradition Maclntyre's critique of modernity, summarized in the metaphor of the catastrophe, is a valuable resource for the contemporary philosopher. Maclntyre's critique of modernity focuses on ideological blindness and lack of self-knowledge, exposing the pretensions of those modern thinkers who claim a tradition-independent approach to the truth. Consequently Maclntyre's critique challenges the contemporary philosopher to investigate three things: history, realism, and tradition. First, by questioning the modern academic historian's understanding of modern history, Maclntyre is challenging the contemporary philosopher to recognize and question the interpretative preconceptions of modern history.8 Second, Maclntyre's criticism of modern voluntarism and nominalism indicates the shortcomings of non-realist approaches to philosophy. Maclntyre's later 7 Those who are familiar with Elizabeth Anscombe's essay, "Modern Moral Philosophy" 1957 will recognize the parallels between that work and Maclntyre's approach to ethics. Maclntyre cited that work in "Hume on 'Is' and 'Ought"' and acknowledged his debt to—as well as his difference from—Anscombe, After Virtue 1985, 53. 8 In "An Interview for Cogito" (1991) Maclntyre said: "Any adequate narrative of my life would have to emphasize a radical change in it around 1971. [...] In that same period, after 1971, I had occasion to rethink the problems of rational theology, taking seriously the possibility that the history of modern secularization can only be written adequately from the standpoint of Christian theism, rather than vice versa."

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Thomistic work, particularly Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990a) and his Aquinas Lecture (1990c), show the promise of realism for any investigation of our world t h a t does seek truth. Finally, the plight of the fictional pseudo-scientists in Maclntyre's story indicates something about the fragility of a tradition and the possibility of losing large portions of the tradition-dependent substantive rationality of a community, thus it challenges contemporary philosophers to work diligently to comprehend their own traditions, even as they seek to transcend the limitations of those traditions while doing the work of philosophy within a limited human perspective.

Bibliography Abelard, P. (1973), McCallum, R. (trans.), Ethics: or Know Thyself, in: James, A./Walsh, J. (ed.), Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Indianapolis Anscombe, E. (1958), Modern Moral Philosophy, in: Philosophy 33, 1-19 Borradori, G. (1994), Nietzsche or Aristotle, in: The American Philosopher, Chicago Knight, K. (ed.) (1998), The Maclntyre Reader, Notre Dame Maclntyre, A. (1959), Notes from the Moral Wilderness II, in: New Reasoner 8, 89-98 (reprinted in: Knight, K. (ed.) 1998, 41-49) — (1959b), Hume on 'is' and 'ought', in: Philosophical Review 68, 451-468 (Reprinted in: 1971, 109-124) — (1971), Against the Self-images of the Age, London — (1977), Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Conception of Human Nature? in: Knowledge, Value and Belief, H.Tristan Engelhardt Jr., H. T./Callahan, D. (eds.), (Hastings-on-the-Hudson; Hastings Center) — (1985), After Virtue (2 nd ed.), London — (1990a), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, London — (1990b), Cogito interview should be (1991), see below. — (1990c), First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues. The Aquinas Lecture, 1990. Miwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1990; revised and expanded in Alasdair Maclntyre The Tasks of Philosophy, Cambridge, 2006, 143178 — (1991), An Interview With Alasdair Maclntyre, in: Cogito, 5 (1991), 67-73. Reprinted in: (1) The Maclntyre Reader, Knight, K. (ed.), 267-275; (2) The Philosophers in Conversation: The Cogito Interviews, Pyle (ed.), (London/New York 1999), 75-84

Metaethics

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Marian Kuna

Maclntyre's Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics*

Abstract: Maclntyre is a major defender of the resurgence of the Aristotelian approach in ethical and political theory. He considers Aristotelianism not only a feasible, but also an intellectually superior alternative to most contemporary dominant ideologies, and to liberalism in particular. There is, however, an important and instructive modification to his view of what is admissible from Aristotle that should be accounted for. The paper traces Maclntyre's search for a defensible restatement of the Aristotelian ethics and examines in particular his changing attitude to metaphysics as the basis for ethics within his project. Different stages of the development to his proposed Aristotelian alternative are analyzed and evaluated. The paper tries to show that despite the fact that Maclntyre initially repudiated Aristotle's metaphysical biology, nevertheless his account has always been (implicitly or explicitly) metaphysical.

0. Introduction There has been a revival of interest in Aristotelian ethics.1 Alasdair Maclntyre is one of the most prominent contemporary advocates of Aristotle and thus the * I am greatly indebted to the Nanovic Institute for European Studies of the Notre Dame University, IN, USA for hosting me as a visiting fellow January through May 2006. I would like to express my special thanks to the institute's director Prof. James McAdams for his kind hospitality. This research visit undoubtedly provided me with invaluable time and very favourable conditions for critically reconsidering the argument of this paper. I would like to extend my gratitude also to Dr. Daniel Mclnerny of Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture for his enriching comments on the previous version of this paper. Of course, I take full responsibility for the flaws that remain. 1 We have witnessed the revival of a whole variety of normative ethical thinking, such as neo-consequentialism, neo-deontology, contractarianism, and the like in the second half of the last century in ethical theory. Different versions of neo-Aristotelianism have also been advanced. There are various reasons why philosophers turn their attention in their search for a sound moral theory to virtue theories of the past and to Aristotle in particular. The following three reasons for this turn to moral theorizing within the framework of a virtue theory were advanced: first, an increasingly widespread feeling of a moral crisis in our society; second, increase of our historical consciousnesses; and finally, the fact that modern moral theories were considered as incomplete. See Kotva 1996, 5-12. The nature of modern virtue ethics, its place among the two other dominant approaches in contemporary normative theory (deontology and consequentialism) as well as its similarities and dissimilarities with the two are instructively presented by D. Solomon. See Solomon 1995. There is also a book in Slovak by Dagmar Smrekova and Zuzana Palovicova that traces this development in the area of English and French moral philosophy published under the title Dobro a cnost'. Eticka tradicia

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answer to the question of the limits to his rehabilitation of the Stagirite may prove far-reaching in its implications for current moral thought. This paper's objective is to examine Maclntyre's search for a defensible Aristotelian ethics. So the main question here is not what can be considered an adequate formulation of the most fundamental ethical thought of Aristotle, 2 but rather the question how Maclntyre conceived the answer to this question. I believe that this task would require (among other things) showing how and why Maclntyre arrived at a tradition-based virtue ethics. This may be best understood when his analysis and critique of modernity and modern morality, along with his own moral theory, are examined. Maclntyre's mature position on the issue in question needs also be taken into consideration. Therefore I will proceed in my article as follows. First, I will explain the core of Maclntyre's original meta-ethical argument—his understanding of the history of modern ethics. This part provides the background important for the proper understanding of his proposed alternative to modern moral theories. Maclntyre's analysis of the failure of the Enlightenment project of justifying morality is also considered. After that, I will describe the initial formulation of his moral theory—an Aristotelian virtue ethics, which is said to be able to remedy the ills of our condition. Thirdly, I will reconstruct briefly Maclntyre's further development of the notion of tradition. This development represents his increasingly positive attitude towards a distinctively Aristotelian metaphysics. Finally, I will put Maclntyre's major theses in context of his overall philosophical project and consider the role of metaphysics in his neo-Aristotelian restatement. I will conclude by stating that despite the fact that Maclntyre initially repudiated Aristotle's metaphysical biology his account has nevertheless always been (implicitly or explicitly) metaphysical.

1. Maclntyre's Reading of Modernity Maclntyre's analysis expresses his deep dissatisfaction with modernity on the theoretical as well as the practical level. He starts with the claim that contemporary moral disagreement is tied to the fact that our language of morality is in a "state of grave disorder" (Maclntyre 1985, 2). Modern culture, then, is one where any sound (and traditional) comprehension of morality is almost completely lost. 3 Moreover, he claims that we live in the culture in which there seems to be "no rational way of securing moral agreement" (Maclntyre 1985, a sufiasnost' [The Good and Virtue. The Ethical Tradition and the Present, the title translation: m.k.], Smrekova/PaloviCova 2003. 2 It is clear that to do so would require identifying what can justifiably be considered the "most fundamental ethical thought of Aristotle". For the moment it is essential to bear in mind that this question as well as the question of what Maclntyre believes is the most defensible version of Aristotelian ethics must be clearly distinguished from the question of the defensibility of Aristotelianism itself that goes beyond the scope of this paper. 3 Maclntyre does not claim that currently there is no moral theory or morality, but rather that the nature of contemporary moral disagreement creates an impression that there can be no rational way of arriving at agreement on the most fundamental moral issues.

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6). 4 Emotivism—claiming that "all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character"—is said to be the basic feature of the culture we inhabit (Maclntyre 1985, 11-12). 5 Maclntyre rejects emotivism as false. 6 Rather he suggests the following historical narrative of modern ethics. 7 Modern ethics starts with the rejection of the Aristotelian physical and metaphysical conceptual framework. This is very important, as Aristotle developed a comprehensive worldview in which all spheres of human experience are covered in a single interconnected system. It is the system where physics and metaphysics are united into one overall scheme alongside politics and ethics. Moreover, within this scheme the metaphysical analysis of human nature is inseparable from ethics. 8 However, once the modern science of Galileo and Newton discredited Aristotelian physics, Aristotelian teleological explanatory framework was replaced by a mechanistic view of nature in which there is no place for natural ends, and so the rest of the Aristotelian scheme could not remain unaffected either. 9 The Aristotelian final cause appeared to this new physics, predominantly concerned only with measurable aspects of physical reality, only as an outmoded relic of the past (Maclntyre 1985, 50-61, 81, 83). Therefore, the coexistence of non-teleological physics and teleological ethics became a serious problem. Modern thinkers realized this and attempted to secure the content and form of traditional morality. Maclntyre calls their attempts "the Enlightenment project of justifying morality" (Maclntyre 1985, 36). 10 He claims not only that this project failed, but also that it had to fail, and he explains why. Maclntyre starts with the explanation of Aristotle's ethical scheme. It consisted of three key elements. 11 First, there was some picture of 'man-as-he-happens-to-be'; second, 4 Maclntyre provides three examples of interminability of our disagreement over certain moral issues. First, the question of abortion; second, the question of just war; finally, the question of social justice, Maclntyre 1985, 6-7. 5 It is not only that the opinion that no rational way of securing moral agreement is available is prevailing, but even more, people's modes of behaviour presuppose the truth of emotivism, Maclntyre 1985, 22. 6 Maclntyre's argument for the inadequacy of emotivism as an ethical theory as well as an explanation of the nature of our moral disagreement can be found in his Short History of Ethics (see Maclntyre 1988, 257-69) and in After Virtue (see Maclntyre 1985, 11-35) in particular. 7 While in Short History of Ethics and in After Virtue Maclntyre speaks of the history of ethics, he later on recognized that it is more proper to speak of the history of Western ethics. Thus in my description of Maclntyre's story I also understand the issue this way. 8 Not every Aristotelian scholar, however, will accept this. Timothy Roche, for instance, argues for the autonomy of ethics within Aristotle's overall scheme (see Roche 1988). I will say more about Roche's arguments in the final section of this paper. 9 Though Maclntyre seems to be right in his description of the effects of the rejection of Aristotelian physics on the Aristotelian teleology, it is not that clear that the modern thinkers were completely right in assuming the devastating implications for this teleology. 10 Some authors, e. g. Charles Larmore, have objected to Maclntyre's effort to present the Enlightenment thought as a homogeneous movement whose representatives believed that morality is an autonomous source of value, Larmore 1987, 31. 11 Larmore objects to Maclntyre's ascribing this tripartite scheme to Aristotle, for Larmore argues that the exercise of virtue was not instrumental and to be added to happiness, but rather

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some picture of 'man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature', and finally, some ethical precepts (rules). These precepts were to enable man to come from the state of untutored human nature to the state where human beings achieve their proper excellence. This process is the process of actualization of human potentialities towards a peculiarly human telos. If a person is to realize his/her essential nature, s/he has to possess various virtues (dispositions) and avoid vices, which prevent him/her from achieving his/her true end -telos (Maclntyre 1985, 52-53). In this teleological scheme each of the three elements not only refers to the other two, but it is also intelligible only with reference to them. 12 Once the modern mechanistic science does not, and even cannot, understand physical movement and change in terms of the actualization of object's potentiality toward its final cause, 'human objects' cannot be seen as aspiring to achieve their final causes either. The three elements of a coherent ethical scheme were disconnected, and what remained was some notion of human beings, as they happen to be in fact. No notion of human beings as they would be if they achieved their essential nature was available any longer. That is why the last element of the scheme—ethical rules—came to appear arbitrary. For the context being radically modified they cannot have the function of enabling human beings to achieve their telos (53, 62). Consequently, once the traditional justification of virtues and ethical rules is impossible, modern philosophers were supposed to meet the demand for their justification. Maclntyre mentions two of the most influential, but both equally unsuccessful, attempts to provide such a justification: utilitarianism and Kantianism. Whereas the former tried to devise a new teleology, identifying the natural telos of human beings with the prospect of maximum pleasure and the absence of pain, the latter tried to demonstrate that moral rules have a categorical character and authority grounded in the very nature of practical reason (62). Maclntyre holds that their failure is rooted in their starting points. For these two approaches both started from an inconsistent mixture of inherited fragments of pre-modern views. In the absence of any normative conception of human nature these two philosophies could only build their ethical theories on fictions; utilitarianism on desires, Kantianism on pure rationality (257). This peculiarly modern ethical enterprise resulted in the discovery of the individual—the modern self understood as a moral atom (61). Maclntyre claims that the failure of the Enlightenment project has brought about the muddle in our moral theory and practice and praises Nietzsche who radically unmasked all these modern moralities as having no real foundations (113). Therefore, Maclntyre suggests that after Nietzsche we can only choose it was essential for happiness. And though Larmore does not fail to notice that Maclntyre acknowledges this, he nevertheless considers Maclntyre's formulation "needlessly roundabout" (Larmore 1987, 33). I believe that there is something true in Larmore's point, but I do not think it has any fatal consequences for Maclntyre's argument. 12 In addition Maclntyre stresses the point that it was not solely the new science which destroyed this scheme; but the new conception of reason developed within Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism, in the late Middle Ages, also made this scheme vulnerable and prepared it for being rejected, Maclntyre 1985, 53-54.

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either to follow him in his non-rationalistic ethics of will-to-power or go back to the Aristotelian scheme (Maclntyre 1985, 118). Maclntyre advocates the latter option, in which moral meaning is provided by a normative conception of human nature, as immune to Nietzsche's critique. This is because Maclntyre believes that some form of revived Aristotelianism is capable of providing a rationally defensible moral standpoint (Maclntyre 1985, 256-259). 13 Therefore, it is Maclntyre's version of Aristotelianism to which I will now turn.

2. The Initial Formulation of the Aristotelian Alternative: Practice, Virtue and Tradition Maclntyre's Aristotelian restatement requires (like any other Aristotelian restatement) at least two initial steps. First, to identify what it is in Aristotle's account of morality that is of constant value. Second, to modify or reject those elements of the system which cannot withstand rational criticism. 14 Now I will examine what Maclntyre thinks is to be accepted and what is to be rejected from Aristotle. Maclntyre holds that Aristotle's overall moral scheme and his account of practical reasoning in particular are correct (Maclntyre 1985, 146-164). However, he does not accept some important elements of Aristotle's scheme. As the most controversial of them is seen Aristotle's metaphysical biology (taken as a fundamental background for his ethics) and it is condemned as false and rejected (58, 163, 196). 15 He further claims that some different and more adequate account of telos must be elaborated and that it is to be based on a different teleological account that will replace this sort of (false) biological foundation, namely 13

I believe that this point deserves some attention, for it may be read in at least two ways. It may mean either that the neo-Aristotelianism can be a rational position among some other reasonable conceptions of the good life we experience in the contemporary pluralist moral world or that it is the rational conception of morality and of the good life. Whereas the former could be easily accepted (or even welcomed by many liberals), the latter, which I believe is what Maclntyre has in mind and what Aristotle would argue for, presents the view that goes against the very heart of the liberal creed. 14 So far I have been talking of Maclntyre's restatement as if Aristotle was the only inspiration of his thought. However, it is important to bear in mind that whereas the hero of After Virtue is Aristotle, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions it is Aquinas who is seen as the culmination of the Aristotelian tradition. Moreover, Larmore argues interestingly that rather than Aristotle it is Sophocles who is the hero of After Virtue. This is because of Sophocles's recognition of the fact that moral conflicts are rationally interminable, which is something Aristotle does not and Maclntyre does firmly believe, Larmore 1987, 38. 15 It is argued that Maclntyre's rejection of Aristotle's metaphysics is due to Maclntyre's belief that it cannot properly apprehend radical social conflict as a fundamental aspect of modern society, Knight 1998, 10. Two further problematic aspects of Aristotle thought. First, Aristotle's ethics, in Aristotle's own account inseparably tied with the structure of the polis, must be formulated in a way to fit our world with no city-states. Secondly, Aristotle's belief that a world inhabited only by good persons would be the world without a tragic hero is also rejected. For Maclntyre holds that this involves the incorrect claim that a tragic situation is a mere consequence of a flaw in practical intelligence resulting from inadequate possession or exercise of the virtues, Maclntyre 1985, 162-163.

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a socially teleological account (163, 197). This is again in line with Maclntyre's strongly held view that "a moral philosophy [... ] characteristically presupposes a sociology" (23) and so by the very same logic Maclntyre's approach "requires historically informed but somehow teleological sociology [... ]" (Knight 1998, 10). This way Maclntyre believes his standpoint to be not only generally Aristotelian, but—due to his work of revision—also one that strengthens the case for Aristotelianism (Maclntyre 1985, 197). This is, by and large, Maclntyre's starting point of his revisited Aristotelianism. 16 Maclntyre tries to preserve what he considers to be the sound core of Aristotle's moral theory, so as to enable us to solve the problems of modernity. His account is formulated through three related stages. First, the level of practice; second, the level of the narrative order of a single human life; and finally, the level of a moral tradition. Each latter stage presupposes the previous one but not vice versa (187). The level of practice is the basic level for understanding of morality and exercise of the virtues. It is because an Aristotelian always understands one's excellence with reference to and in the context of some particular type of human activity or practice. Practice is the background for the definition of virtues, and is defined as "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." (187) What is essential about every particular practice is the fact that it provides persons involved in it with an opportunity to achieve goods internal to this particular practice. Maclntyre calls those goods internal because they can only be specified in terms of and achieved by experience in a given practice (188). There are also some external goods (money, power, fame, and the like) which, unlike internal goods, are attached to the practices only contingently.17 Having defined "practice" and distinguished between two sorts of goods Maclntyre can proceed to the definition of a virtue; it is "an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to prac16

However, Maclntyre also uses for his restatement some of Aquinas's, broadly medieval, ideas which enriched the Aristotelian tradition. First, Aristotle's belief that achieving human happiness—eudaimonia—can be prevented by external misfortune is modified, so that unless we accomplice with evil we cannot be excluded from achieving the human good. Second, the essential historicity of medieval imagination - the man as being essentially in via—needs virtues, for they are "those qualities which enable men to survive evils on their historical journey", Maclntyre 1985, 175-176. 17 Whereas the amount of the external goods is relatively limited, and their possession by someone means that fewer are available to others, the amount of internal goods is practically unlimited, Maclntyre 1985, 190.

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tices and the lack of which effectively prevent us from achieving any such goods" (191). Virtues are at the very heart of moral life, for they enable persons to achieve the internal goods of a society's various practices. Since there are many kinds of practice, each of them with its own peculiar goods, there must also be some way to order these various goods into a coherent scheme of one's life. Maclntyre offers his solution in the next stage. That stage is the level of the narrative order of a single human life. On this level, to provide one's life with its proper unity is to envisage one's life as having a unity, which is "the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life" (218). The question "What is good for me?" is closely connected with the question "What is good for man?" (218). For, Maclntyre argues, if we take into account what all the answers to the former have in common, we ask the latter question. One's effort to answer these two questions provides one's life with a unity, which is "the unity of a narrative quest" (219). Maclntyre, having said this, proceeds to his provisional definition of the good life for man. It is "the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is" (219). 18 However, since human beings cannot do this in isolation, as independent atoms, there are also some wider contexts, within which they find their place and derive their identity. These contexts—moral traditions—constitute Maclntyre's third stage. So Maclntyre, having provided one's life with its narrative unity, proceeds to the final stage—the level of a moral tradition. 19 The context of a tradition provides everyone with her starting point. Our starting points are always given in advance, for everyone is a bearer of a particular social identity within the tradition she was born into. Every person derives his/her identity from the community to which s/he belongs. The importance of a tradition for one's identity is clear from Maclntyre's claim that "I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualistic mode, is to deform my present relationships" (221). However, it is important to stress that the importance of a moral tradition in one's life does not imply, for Maclntyre, that one is obliged to accept all the moral limitations of one's community. For everyone is involved in a process of transforming these limitations (221). I have tried in this section to offer an exposition of Maclntyre's initial Aristotelian alternative to modernity as elaborated in After Virtue. The rationale 18 Larmore reads this formulation (allowing a pluralistic perspective) as Maclntyre's concession to moral pluralism, for one of the features of Aristotle's ethics he has striven to revive was its monistic character (that it is the conception of the good life). He explains Maclntyre's inconsistency as his allegiance to modernity, Larmore 1987, 37. However, if one sees the further development of Maclntyre's argument, particularly in his later work (see 1988; 1990; 1990/1998), Larmore's conclusion may be rejected. This is because Maclntyre's argument in his later work is closely tied to a distinctively Aristotelian/Thomist metaphysics which allows him a significantly less pluralistic picture of the good life for man. 19 For a detailed discussion of Maclntyre's distinctive notion of tradition and the evaluation of its various, e.g. relativistic, implications it is possible to consult my article "Maclntyre on Tradition, Rationality, and Relativism", Kuna 2005.

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behind his restatement (described in the first section and supplemented in this one) helps us in understanding its distinctive character. One of its most important features is its anti-metaphysical fashion. In other words the fact that teleology necessary for any version of Aristotelianism is in Maclntyre's restatement fully furnished by a sort of sociology. As this aspect may prove extremely controversial and interesting I will pay attention to it in the context of my examination of Maclntyre's Aristotelianism in the final section of this paper. 20 Even though Maclntyre is probably most frequently associated with his After Virtue, it may be important to emphasize that this book itself represents only an initial stage in his formulation of Aristotelianism. 21 For it has been revised, amended, and at points seriously elaborated upon mainly in his following several subsequent books Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals. Therefore, I will now turn to these moments of Maclntyre's development towards a formulation of the most defensible version of Aristotelian ethics.

3. Tradition, Rational Enquiry, and Metaphysics Some basic contours of Maclntyre's initial Aristotelian alternative to modern ethics were delineated in the previous section. We have seen that he offered "a reformulation of Aristotelian virtue ethics in which participation in a tradition plays a role analogous to that played by Aristotle's metaphysical biology [... ]" (Porter 2003, 38). While its general structure and content presents itself as undoubtedly Aristotelian, one of its most striking features is Maclntyre's resort to sociology that was to replace Aristotle's metaphysics. However, Maclntyre gradually mitigated and eventually completely abandoned his original hostility to Aristotle's metaphysical framework for ethics, and so this section is meant to briefly trace and reconstruct this development. Both Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, the sequels to After Virtue, seem to fulfill what was then a not yet completed task of providing a systematic account of the rationality presupposed by its arguments (Maclntyre 1985, 260). Maclntyre indeed provides the reader with this kind of account in these two books and the notion of tradition not only plays a very important role, but increasingly different than before. 22 While 2 0 The reason why this issue should be examined is the fact that one can see Aristotle as a viable alternative to both modernity and Nietzsche, and still object to Maclntyre's Aristotelian restatement. This seems to be the case with Deborah Achtenberg. I suggest that her illuminating reading of After Virtue helps us to understand Maclntyre's internal development in his overall project, Achtenberg 1992. 2 1 It is also true that his defense of Aristotelian ethics has after the publication of After Virtue taken the form of the defense of the ethics as developed within the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition. What this latter notion means for Maclntyre I explain in my article Maclntyre on Tradition, Rationality, and Relativism, Kuna 2005, 263-266. 2 2 It is important to bear in mind, as Jean Porter points out, that of this key notion in Maclntyre's project "he never defines the term [... j nor does he situate his account of tradition in the context of other recent discussions", Porter 2003, 38. This fact, I believe, causes some obstacles to any interpreter of Maclntyre's ethical theory.

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in the initial formulation of "tradition" the notion referred mainly to its moral, social and generally cultural dimensions, providing the fundamental background to the life of the individual (his/her ordering of different kinds of practice one is engaged in, as well as providing an ultimate justification for the virtues defined and defended within each particular practice), now it is narrowed down and reserved to something like a tradition of intellectual enquiry (Maclntyre 1988, 349-369; 1990, 82-148). So this modified and developed version of the notion of tradition takes now the form of the claim that rationality and so also every theoretical enquiry is "tradition-constituted". The idea is well stated when Maclntyre claims that "there is no other way to engage in the formulation, elaboration, rational justification, and criticism of accounts of practical rationality and justice except from within some one particular tradition in conversation, cooperation, and conflict with those who inhabit the same tradition. There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other." (Maclntyre 1988, 350) This radical statement illustrates well Maclntyre's departure from the notion of tradition as mere social and also moral phenomenon towards something conceived of as a methodologically and thematically focused form of rational (theoretical) investigation. Tradition provides everyone engaged in an enquiry of this sort with a framework for his or her reasoning both theoretical and practical. However, it develops gradually over time, because "[t]he rationality of a tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive enquiry is in key and essential part a matter of the kind of progress which it makes through a number of well-defined types of stage. Every such form of enquiry begins in and from some conditions of pure historical contingency, from the beliefs, institutions and practices of some particular community which constitute a given." (354) This means that even though rationality is always and necessarily in its beginnings a matter of mere contingency it may and it often does develop into a highly sophisticated and theoretically complex phenomenon that is best understood as fundamentally dependent upon its historically and communally contingent starting points, even when it reaches a point of a relative independence from its own points of departure. "Tradition" in this form does not cease to provide the notion of virtue with the background against which it is understood, explained, and defended. In other words "what had initially been suggested a moral concept, a part of the necessary framework for developing the idea of virtue, has now been transformed into an epistemic and linguistic concept, which plays a central role in explicating the meaning of truth and rationality" (Porter 2003, 50). In Maclntyre's two sequels to After Virtue it is instructive to notice that as he modifies/develops his notion of tradition into a form of intellectual investigation he also simultaneously shows his increasing sympathy to the classical

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metaphysical tradition as best exemplified for him in the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas in particular (Maclntyre 1988, 167-182; 1990/1998, 127-148). However, Maclntyre's most determined acceptance and apology of the Aristotelian/Thomist metaphysics as he puts it most baldly can be found in his 1990 Aquinas Lecture "First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues" (Maclntyre 1990/1998). It is in the course of the lecture that Maclntyre develops his understanding of the role of first principles (of metaphysics) in the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition of enquiry. He claims their immunity to criticism usually directed against epistemological first principles - this way, it is possible to argue, he secures an important element of this tradition's metaphysics (Maclntyre 1990/1998, 174-175). Maclntyre also stresses the teleological nature of the Thomist conception of enquiry and so also teleological nature of rationality 181-182). I cannot pursue this question here in greater detail to cover his subtle arguments and challenge to contemporary philosophy from the perspective of the Aristotelian/Thomist metaphysics, but I believe it is possible to observe Maclntyre's increasing confidence in the Aristotelian metaphysical framework, which at a first sight seems to be inconsistent with his original pessimism concerning its viability. However, it is not just that Maclntyre reduces his reservation to Aristotle's metaphysics, he revises some of his central objections to it. We have seen that the main target in After Virtue was Aristotle's metaphysical biology, and given this, it seems essential to take into account his recantation and clarification of the objection he put forward in his last major book, Dependent Rational Animals, the position he adopted twenty-eight years after the publication of After Virtue (Maclntyre 1999).23 Maclntyre states there explicitly that "although there is indeed good reason to repudiate important elements in Aristotle's biology, I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible" (Maclntyre 1999, x). This is an extremely significant conclusion and it is equally "significant that in this book, the concept of tradition plays almost no role, in contrast to each of his other major works following After Virtue" (Porter 2003, 43). At the end of this exposition it seems there are several radical changes to Maclntyre's ethics. The nature and extent of the change should not be exaggerated, however, for it is also possible to argue that Maclntyre "throughout his career [... ] has shown an openness to a robust naturalism in ethics [... ]" (Solomon 2003, 114). It is his last major book that seems to heavily support this claim (Maclntyre 1999). We have seen in this section that Maclntyre's understanding of what a viable version of Aristotelian ethics is like, has developed over the years. He not only modified his key notion of tradition first developed in After Virtue to refer primarily to a social and moral context for moral life into a version of rational enquiry, but his attitude towards a distinctively Aristotelian metaphysics has changed too. Thus from the perspective of late Maclntyre it is not Aristotle's metaphysical biology that is considered false and in need of rejection if a sound Aristotelian ethics is to be formulated, but only the mistakes of his biology that 23 I refer here to the first edition of After Virtue that was published in 1981, even though I work throughout the article with the second edition of the book published in 1985.

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must be discarded. These developments must be taken into consideration when the question of the adequacy of his Aristotelian restatement is evaluated, the task to which I now turn.

4. Maclntyre's Aristotelian Ethics and the Ethics of Aristotle Before a concluding assessment concerning the role of metaphysics in Maclntyre's neo-Aristotelian ethics is suggested two things needs to be done. First, as Maclntyre's starting points so his proposed solutions must be put in context. This seems to require consideration his version of virtue ethics against a broader scholarly debate concerning Aristotle's ethical methodology and the viability of Aristotelianism as such. Second, my reconstruction of Maclntyre's restatement in the previous two sections traced the development of an originally anti-metaphysical Aristotelian ethics of After Virtue into his acceptance of a full-blown Aristotelian/Thomist ethics in his later works. Thus, Maclntyre's restatement should be interpreted within the context of the overall development of his broader project. Let me start with the first point. We have seen in the previous section that in After Virtue Maclntyre felt a serious unease with Aristotle's metaphysical foundation of his ethics (namely because of the foundation of teleology on a false metaphysical biology). Thus, since he strongly rejected Aristotle's 'metaphysical biology' as false, it is possible to track several important assumptions Maclntyre seems to hold. He believes the following: 1. Aristotle's ethics rests on a false metaphysical biology, 2. his teleology is objectionable on the basis of its grounding in this mistaken metaphysics, 3. the teleology necessary for an Aristotelian ethics can be attained in a nonmetaphysical manner. Is he, however, justified in holding these assumptions? If it is possible to show that he is not, some further consequences may follow. However, before I offer an answer to this question, let me briefly sketch different interpretative approaches towards the foundational question of Aristotle's ethics. First, there is a scholarly disagreement concerning the question of whether Aristotle based his ethics on his metaphysics. If he did not,24 then the question of viability (or correctness) of his metaphysics becomes irrelevant to the issue in question. 25 If, however, Aristotle did in fact base his ethics on his metaphysics, then at least two possible avenues of advocacy of his ethics are available. This is because we may accept the metaphysical foundation of his ethics, but still argue: 24

This is the position advocated by Timothy Roche, Roche 1988. This is not, of course, to provide the compelling argument for the Aristotelian ethics, but only to make room for such an argument. The next step required consists in showing that Aristotle's ethical methodology is defensible and his substantive ethical claims are justifiable. 25

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either that the most problematic parts of Aristotle's metaphysics are not fatal to his ethics 2 6 or that Aristotle's false metaphysical foundation is fatal to his ethics, but can be substituted by some different (namely sociological) account of teleology. 27 Let me say more in detail about each of these positions. They can be put as follows, Aristotle's ethics is A. not founded on his metaphysics, B. founded on his metaphysics, but: 1. the essential elements of his metaphysics are not fatal to his ethics, 2. his false metaphysical biology is fatal to his ethics, but can be substituted by sociological teleology. The first position (A) is forcefully defended by Timothy Roche. Against Terrence Irwin, he argues that a purely autonomous dialectic is the only method Aristotle uses in his ethics. He questions Irwin's contentions concerning Aristotle's need to appeal outside his ethics to justify his ethical principles, as well as textual evidence supporting the metaphysical foundation hypothesis (Roche 1988, 49). Roche offers textual evidence supporting his claim that Aristotle's doctrine of the autonomy of different branches of philosophical knowledge does apply also to his ethics (Roche 1988, 54). This does not rule out, however, the use of metaphysical propositions in dialectical reasoning in ethics, for such a proposition is authoritative not because it is metaphysical, but because it is one of important and respected beliefs (endoxa) (Roche 1988, 55). Then, the most Roche is willing to accept is that Aristotle can support his ethical argument by his metaphysics, but denies that he actually does (Roche 1988, 59). 2 8 The second position (B) in both its forms brings us considerably closer to Maclntyre's own position/s. Now, whereas B . l is quite optimistic about the degree of the sound core in Aristotle's metaphysics, or at least about its part relevant for his ethics, B.2 does not share this optimism and prefer to save the Aristotelian ethics by a different means than those made available by Aristotle's metaphysics. Let me begin with the latter position (B.2) first, as it is one espoused by Maclntyre in After Virtue. We have seen, in the second section, that Maclntyre was carefully avoiding an appeal to the metaphysical notion of human nature or the metaphysical account of human telos. He suggested an alternative to the "false" metaphysical biology, which is related to the narrative aspect of human beings and pervasive social and contextual character of human life. Maclntyre is probably correct in stressing this as a matter of fact, but it is still not entirely 2 6 This is the position of Deborah Achtenberg (Achtenberg 1992) and late Maclntyre, Maclntyre 1988; 1990; 1990/1998. 2 7 Early Maclntyre of After Virtue. 2 8 Roche argues that Aristotle does not need to appeal outside his ethics in justifying Aristotle's first principles of ethics. And though Roche's argument is well balanced the whole point of argument between him and Irwin seems to be on whether Aristotle might or might not appeal to some of his metaphysical and psychological views to defend his ethical claims.

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clear whether this is the way to avoid (at least implicit 29 ) metaphysics. Further, if this is the case, there may arise the question of whether what was lost in his anti-metaphysical enterprise is not in fact of a greater value than what he really gained. This question may prove important, because Maclntyre's inability to provide a non-metaphysical account of teleology 30 (the issue to which I will turn now) seems to suggest the superiority of a distinctively metaphysical reading of Aristotle's arguments in Ethics.31 The arguments for this conclusion are part of position B.l to which I will turn now. The B.l position has been advocated by Deborah Achtenberg (Achtenberg 1992). She argues (and I find her arguments quite compelling) that Maclntyre's three assumptions, listed in the beginning of this section, are all wrong. For Achtenberg argues that Aristotle's ethics does not rest on false metaphysics. Interestingly enough, not only does she claim, against Maclntyre of After Virtue, that Aristotle's ethics "does not rest on an erroneous metaphysics [... ] [but also that] [... ] Maclntyre's proposed alternative to Aristotle's ethics [... ] rests on the same metaphysical presuppositions that Aristotle's does" (Achtenberg 1992, 317-318). This means that at least three moments deserve our attention here. First, what are the reasons for Maclntyre's rejection of Aristotle's metaphysically grounded moral theory? Second, given his arguments is Maclntyre fully justified in this rejection? Finally, is Maclntyre's Aristotelian ethics in fact not as metaphysical in its nature as Aristotle's? Maclntyre's main reasons for his rejection of Aristotle's metaphysical foundational strategy in ethics are as follows. The core of his criticism, as we have already seen, is related to the notion of "metaphysical biology" on which, he argues, Aristotle based his ethics - the decision seen as neither necessary nor fortunate. 32 It was unnecessary, Maclntyre believes, since "the use of 'man' as a functional concept [so fundamental for any version of Aristotelian ethics, m.k.] is far older than Aristotle and it does not initially derive from Aristotle's metaphysical biology. It is rooted in the forms of social life to which the theorists of the classical tradition give expression [... ] [and in which] [... ] to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose [... ]" (Maclntyre 1985, 58-59). 33 This move was not fortunate, because it is problematic to assume (as Maclntyre believes Aristotle did) that "human beings, like the members of all other species, 29 B y an "implicit metaphysics" I am going to mean the fact that some (e.g. ethical) position meets the criteria to be justifiably called metaphysical or metaphysically founded either without being aware of it or in spite of proclaiming the opposite. 30 This is the claim I am going to defend in what follows using the arguments developed by Deborah Achtenberg (see Achtenberg 1992). I will also point to the development of Maclntyre's own position on the issue in question in his later works. 31 This is so, of course, provided that the A. position is shown inadequate, which is the claim which is not established yet, as it would require a close textual examination of Aristotle's work. 32 Maclntyre's notion of "metaphysical biology" can be found at several places in After Virtue (see Maclntyre 1985, 58, 148, 196). 33 It is probably the realization of this possibility that helps to understand why and how Maclntyre arrived at a sociological version of teleology.

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have a specific nature; and that nature is such that they have certain goals, such that they move by nature towards a specific telos" (148). Here Maclntyre's objection would be something like the claim that "Aristotle's ethics [... ] presupposes aspects of his teleology that have long since been rejected [... ] [and to claim that] [... ] living beings move by nature to their telos [... ] is perhaps the most objectionable component of [... ] [his] biology" (Achtenberg 1992, 324). However, does Aristotle's ethics really suffer from these flaws? If not, Maclntyre's critique of Aristotle would probably loose a lot of its initial plausibility. To answer the question raised at the end of the previous paragraph it is possible to argue, as Deborah Achtenberg does, by offering a textual support for her claim, that Aristotle did not believe that "human beings move by nature towards a specific telos" (325). This is because, eudaimonia—a peculiarly human telos—is attained via virtuous activity and virtue is not by nature, though neither against it; so she concludes that Maclntyre (in the passage cited in the paragraph above) misrepresented Aristotle's initial paragraph in Ethics on this crucial point (325). For Aristotle did not claim that human beings move by nature to what is good, but rather to what they believe is good (326). Saying this Achtenberg does not claim that Aristotle's ethics is completely unproblematic, she rather claims that "the belief that living beings move by nature towards telos. [that is the] [... ] most objectionable part of his teleology is irrelevant to his ethics, and thus is no cause for us to want to revise it" (327). Thus, if the argument of this section is correct Maclntyre's opposition to Aristotle's metaphysical biology seems to be an expression of misinterpretation and seems to suggest that Aristotle's ethics is not vulnerable on the grounds of its metaphysical background. However, Achtenberg does not claim just that Aristotle's ethics is immune to criticism of this sort, she extends her critique of Maclntyre, claiming that his Aristotelian ethics is in fact as metaphysical as was Aristotle's or, as she puts it, Maclntyre's ethics "has every metaphysical commitment that he imputes to Aristotle" (335). How does she justify this startling idea? She points to several moments of Maclntyre's supposedly non-metaphysical, but allegedly teleological account of ethics. She concentrates on the issue of how human beings make sense of their lives. She notes that the unity to human life is in After Virtue provided by a narrative and concludes that it is problematic if meant as an entirely nonmetaphysical approach and suggests several reasons why this is the case (336). First, she reminds us of Aristotle's understanding of man as a rational animal and claims a substantial interchangeability between the notion of rationality and intentionality. Then, she points to the fact that in Maclntyre's account human beings are seen primarily as intentional/conversional actors. What unites the accounts of the these two thinkers is the notion of "logos" (that again unites the notions of rationality to intentionality and/or conversation). Moreover, Maclntyre's definition of virtue as an acquired human quality, which if possessed and exercised by an individual, allows him/her to achieve those goods that are internal to various complex activities s/he is engaged in. Achtenberg rightly points to the fact that an exercisable quality "is at least a capacity and possibly disposition", and so this definition is clearly metaphysical as it "requires some account of potentiality and act, that is, of capacities or dispositions and their

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exercise" (337). Finally, there is an analogy/agreement between Aristotle and Maclntyre on the issue of human telos. "Here Maclntyre and Aristotle follow the same procedure. Each gives human being a specific nature, distinguished by action with logos, and then derives their understanding of the human telos from it. For Aristotle it is the activity in accordance with ethical or intellectual virtue; for Maclntyre it is a life unified by enacted narrative" (337). The previous paragraphs have shown, I believe, what reasons led Maclntyre to reject Aristotle's metaphysically founded ethics. I think Achtenberg's argument that his rejection was caused by a misinterpretation of some relevant Aristotle's claims by Maclntyre is quite compelling. However, the argument has not just been that Maclntyre was not justified in that respect, but also that his Aristotelian ethics seems to be in fact as metaphysical as that of Aristotle. This seems to suggest that Maclntyre has not succeeded, despite all his effort, in formulating a non-metaphysical account of ethics with a substantial plausibility. At this point we can return to Maclntyre's anti-metaphysical assumptions. For, once these two claims are established, they prove the first two 34 of the three assumptions presented at the beginning of this section mistaken. This means that Aristotle's ethics does not rest on a false metaphysical biology, or at least Maclntyre did not prove it does; and Aristotle's teleology is not objectionable on the basis of its grounding in an erroneous metaphysics. The last assumption 35 also seems to be highly contestable. Why? Taking these two conclusions seriously, Maclntyre's last assumption—the possibility of Aristotelian ethics attained in a non-metaphysical fashion—seems to be extremely vulnerable. The argument here is not that it is impossible to do so. However, given the fact that a leading proponent of the Aristotelian ethics has not been able to do so—against his explicit intentions—seems to be very telling. I think we should ask the question: what conclusions are to be drawn from the falsity of Maclntyre's anti-metaphysical assumptions. Should we conclude that Maclntyre failed to offer an alternative to modern ethics on the one hand, and to Nietzsche's proposal on the other? I do not think so. Why? I suggest that we should read Maclntyre's claims in the context of his overall project, within which he not only accepted Aristotelian ethics, but also abandoned his own anti-metaphysical claims. I depicted his development towards a robust Aristotelian/Thomist metaphysics in the previous section. Therefore, I think it is possible to formulate two important moments here. First, we have seen that already in After Virtue Maclntyre was much less non-metaphysical than he wanted and claimed to be. Second, given the discussion above I suggest that Maclntyre's turn to metaphysics should not be viewed as a radical move, but rather a shift of emphasis, in which the 'implicit' metaphysical basis of his ethics has been made 'explicit'. I believe that this reading not only makes the role of

34 The first of these two assumptions was the claim that Aristotle's ethics rests on a false metaphysical biology, and the second was the claim that Aristotle's teleology is objectionable on the basis of its grounding in this mistaken metaphysics. 35 The claim that the teleology necessary for an Aristotelian ethics can be attained in a non-metaphysical manner.

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metaphysics in Maclntyre's project more intelligible, but it also strengthens his case for an Aristotelian moral theory. 36 So far so good; it appears that Maclntyre's Aristotelian restatement makes most sense if taken as an expression of the B.l position. However, this is not the same as to show that this is the position that best preserves what is of constant value in Aristotle's moral philosophy. I think that Maclntyre's own inability to 'walk' unproblematically the non-metaphysical path (the B.2 position) in reviving the Aristotelian ethics seems to suggest that the only possible alternative to B.l left is something like the A position. In other words, it is possible to ask the question of whether the metaphysical reading of Aristotle's methodology is ultimately more convincing than the one which sees a purely autonomous dialectical method as the only means used by Aristotle to defend his ethical project. Though this is an important question, I cannot pursue it here further. This is because the main concern of this article is not what is the most faithful version of Aristotelian ethics, but rather the question of what Maclntyre considers it to be—and all this from the perspective of the role of metaphysics in Maclntyre's project. The thrust of this paper was an examination of Maclntyre's restatement of Aristotelian ethics. I went through various developmental stages of his restatement paying a particular attention to Maclntyre's attitude to the question of metaphysical foundation of Aristotle's ethics. After that, I briefly situated his restatement within a broader scholarly debate concerning the nature and method of Aristotle's ethics and evaluated various relevant arguments. We have seen that in his search for a defensible restatement of the Aristotelian ethics Maclntyre changed his initial negative attitude to metaphysics as a basis for ethics within his Aristotelian project. Despite the fact that Maclntyre initially repudiated Aristotle's metaphysical biology it appears that his account has nevertheless always been (implicitly or explicitly) metaphysical.

Bibliography Achtenberg, D. (1992), On the Metaphysical Presuppositions of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, in: The Journal of Value Inquiry 26, 317-340 Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.) (1994), After Maclntyre, Cambridge Knight, K. (ed.) (1998), The Maclntyre Reader, Notre Dame Kotva, J. (1996), The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics, Washington/DC Kuna, M. (2005), Maclntyre on Tradition, Rationality, and Relativism, in: Res Publica. Journal for Social and Legal Philosophy 11(3), 251-272 Larmore, Ch. (1987), Patterns of Moral Complexity, Cambridge Maclntyre, A. (1985), After Virtue, Notre Dame — (1967/1998), Short History of Ethics, London — (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, Notre Dame 36 There is sometimes the impression that Maclntyre's anti-metaphysical account contradicts his later metaphysical and Thomist position. It is possible to claim that Maclntyre is in After Virtue committed to an implicit metaphysics. This interpretation fits also Knight's view that "while Maclntyre's ideas have changed considerably over the years, his central concerns have remained the same" (Knight 1998, 1).

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— (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame — (1990/1998), First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues, in: Knight, K. (ed.), The Maclntyre Reader, Notre Dame, 171-201 Porter, J. (2003), Tradition in the Recent Work of Alasdair Maclntyre, in: Murphy, M. C. (ed.) Alasdair Maclntyre, Cambridge, 38-69 Roche, T. (1988), On the Alleged Metaphysical Foundation of Aristotle's Ethics', in: Ancient Philosophy 8, 49-62 Smrekova, D./Palovicova, Z. (2003), Dobro a cnost'. Eticka tradicia a sucasnost', Bratislava Solomon, D. (2003), Maclntyre and Contemporary Moral Philosophy, in: Murphy, M.C. (ed.), Alasdair Maclntyre, Cambridge, 114-151 — (1995), Normative Ethical Theories, in: Reich, W. T. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Bioethics, New York, 736-747

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Machura

Maclntyre's Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal

Abstract: The question I address in the paper is "What is the ideal of Maclntyre's moral philosophy? What is the telos of human nature?" Considering Maclntyre's critique of modern culture, politics and philosophy, anti-intellectualism emerges as the main reason for his refutation of these values. So is it a reason for moral and political distortion that leads to the interpassivity of the modern self. Taking into account Maclntyre's idea of characters I pinpoint the character of the philosopher as a moral ideal of Maclntyre's thought. For it is not only intellectual activity within any practice that enables us to develop our distinctively human nature but also philosophy that is the highest form of that kind of activity. Prom this point of view, it is crucial to grasp philosophy as a required way of life and the craft that enables us to be moral and political agents.

0. Introduction The question I address in the present paper is "What is the ideal of Maclntyre's moral philosophy? What is the telos of human nature?" If Maclntyre's critique of modernity is something more than just a form of resentment, what should we recognize as the core of the critique? And finally—can we find in Maclntyre's thought some kind of a basis for both political and personal solutions that would overcome the poverty of the modern self? I shall argue that we should point to intellectualism as a primary constituent of the basis. My argument is threefold: I start with some general remarks about the idea of moral ideals and personal examples and, simultaneously, with a presentation of Maclntyre's concept of character. Then using that concept I will pinpoint the common basis of Maclntyre's critique of modernity. And finally I will present the idea of the moral example (the ideal) which emerges form Maclntyre's conception.

1. Moral Ideals as Forms of Moral Consciousness The fundamental query that I think needs to be raised is: "Why should we reconsider moral ideals?" It seems, as Susan Wolf notes, that "a moral theory that does not contain the seeds of an all-consuming ideal of moral sainthood thus seems to place false and unnatural limits on our opportunity to do moral good

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and our potential to deserve moral praise" (Wolf 1982, 433) and it does so, we can add, to our descriptive and normative possibilities in ethics. An analysis of human acting which confines its classification to the wrong/right distinction only seems to be too narrow, not only because it passes over what is between these two judgements but also because it does not take into account heroic actions. As J.O.Urmson claims, there are, however, at least five reasons for which what he calls "a moral code" should distinguish between basic norms and 'higher flights of morality' (Urmson 1958, 211-214). First, taking into account the impoverishment of moral life in which neither saints nor heroes can show up, he emphasizes those crucial matters "in which compliance with the demands of morality by all is indispensable" (211). Second, due to this distinction, a difference between fundamental and supererogatory actions emerges to the extent that it becomes possible to justly enforce the basic social norms. Third, as Urmson says: "a moral code, if it is to be a code, must be formulable, and if it is to be a code to be observed it must be formulable in rules of manageable complexity" (212). Those rules should be easy to interpret for an ordinary person. We can also add that it is one of the reasons for which the personal example is the most common form of the presentation of 'higher flights of morality'. Fourth, this distinction should be introduced so that one will know which norms are required to be obeyed and which norms are only expected to be obeyed. And fifth, this distinction enables us to formulate an encouragement to perform the best possible action which is not necessarily derived from the norms that restrict us. It is important to notice that Urmson searches for the meaning of the terms "saint" and "hero" in some especially desirable forms of conduct. These forms, however, cannot be considered in separation from a person's character. For the category of supererogatory actions does not describe any particular kind of action, but only some isolated actions which transcend the norm. For that reason this category of actions is usless for normative ethics. If we want then to find any space for the 'higher flights of morality' in normative ethics, we should invoke to the idea of essential perfection. It is not an objective of mine to analyse this conception in detail. 1 It is crucial, however, to notice, as Felix Adler did, that the idea of moral perfection, that is, of the ideal, can appear in moral thinking in two fundamental ways. First, it takes the form of "the idea of a non-existent thing, or state or being, or mode of conduct regarded as worthy of being realised" (Adler 1910, 387). This is how we imagine ideal happiness or ideal justice. Second, "we may think of ideal as an object in which the desired perfection, whatever it be, is realized already" (Adler 1910, 387). In other words, we can analyse either the nature of some particular value in its entirety or fulfilment of the moral code typical of a particular community or normative conception, embodied in an all-consuming example. Jesus is an example of this kind of ideal which represents the fulfilment of Christianity. It is crucial, however, to add to this two further points. First, our mode of enquiry must be able to take into account both basic norms which an ordinary imperfect human can obey in everyday life and heroic deeds which characterize 1

See e.g. Aristotle's definition of perfection in Metaphysics

6, 16.

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Urmson's (1958) 'higher flights of morality'. Impossibility to distinguish between these two levels of the 'moral code' must lead to an overbearing fanatic vision of morality or to a significant decrease in moral demands. Without specifying the uppermost limit to our requirements, we are not able to say what must be done. Second, what follows from the above is that an idea of that kind must include an anthropological conception of incomplete and imperfect human nature. It is not just a coincidence that the idea of the moral ideals and examples in some way goes back to ancient moral philosophy, especially to the Aristotelian moral ideas. Maclntyre's Aristotelianism meets both these criteria. Not only does he acknowledge the 'fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature', but he also claims that, in order to make a transition from the former to the letter, an individual needs standards of excellence (and its examples) which should be provided by ethics. It is crucial then to consider the idea of character as a interpretative key to both Maclntyre's critique of modernity and his own conception. What is a character? Maclntyre, while introducing this idea, refers to the dramatic tradition which makes use of "a set of stock of characters immediately recognizable to the audience" and "to understand them is to be provided with means of interpreting the behaviour of actors who play them" (Maclntyre 1984, 27). Characters are thus role-models of special significance for community members, as they embody the moral code of particular community. Incidentally Maclntyre does not explain the method of character's selection. Is this selection connected only with the tradition of a particular community, or—as e.g. Max Scheler (who offers a totally different perspective than that of Maclntyre) claims—there are some fixed types of those models, defined by the set of fundamental values shaped by the life of every human community (see Scheler 1987)? Characters represents the morality of the community and they are, as Maclntyre puts it, "masks worn by moral philosophies" (Maclntyre 1984, 28). Social significance of characters lays in their rechanneling moral views and actions of community members. For characters are not only objects of regard for the community members, but also they furnish them "with a cultural and moral ideal" (Maclntyre 1984, 29) defining simultaneously the content of the idea of morality shared by a particular community. In this sense, characters provide community members with an incentive to develop in a direction contingent on the moral scheme accepted by the community. They do not embody the perfection but, as Maclntyre claims, they embody the conflict as to the content of a particular character, and so, that is to say, as to the content of the idea of perfected human life. How can an individual get in touch with a character? In order to account for this, Maclntyre's conception of practice should be recalled. He defines practice as "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are

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Practice is then a form of craft (techne), an art, taken as a form of ars liberalis. It comes into being not as a part of an individual-made sphere of co-operation with others, but it is determined independently of that individual. It is a way of establishing the relation between an individual's particular personality and background and their social and cultural environment (Umwelt). The involvement in practice is thus a moment of transcending the sphere of individuality and so is it a moment of establishing the relation with the social setting (206-207). It is important to take note of at least three features of the idea of practice (craft). First, its aim is good which can be understood in at least three ways. Second, it comprises standards of excellence. Third, the structure of action within the practice is, in fact, a hermeneutical circle and, as such, it constitutes a general model for all human intellectual activity. Let me start from the very end. To enter into practice is to accept its historically determined norms and standards of excellence. But it does not mean that we should reduce our activity to the automatic application of its rules (Maclntyre 1988, 31; see also Maclntyre 1999, 93). For the aim of learning practice is not only to acquire some competence typical of this particular practice, but also to become its independent creative participant. For that purpose an authority inherent to this practice must not only show others how to become an apprentice in this practice, but also how to reinterpret the goal of the practice itself. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry Maclntyre says that to become an apprentice is to transform one's personality (Maclntyre 1990, 60-61). To become an apprentice is not only to act according to some external criteria independent of us, but also to give up, at least to some extent, our personal autonomy and allow ourselves to be in some part determined by the community and history of the practice. In this way the fundamental relationship between the authority and the apprentice shows up. The general function of the authority is to indicate and legitimize norms and rules defining particular practice and to introduce an individual to that practice. On the other hand, the relationship with the authority thus defined is also a moment of connecting practical thinking (associated with particular craft) with the wider cultural context. For neither practice nor ethos can exist alone, but they are defined (at least to some extent), and their status is determined, by the tradition of a particular community. It is for that purpose that Maclntyre, while analysing the character, points out some moral restrictions placed by the character on the personality of an individual who has this particular social role (Maclntyre 1984, 27). There is no difference between learning the technical part of practice and being introduced to its ethos which is determined by the tradition of a community. It is thus the authority who provides the grasp of the tradition and links isolated actions into a coherent

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and intelligible whole by referring them to the wider context of the community. What makes the character unique as a type of a moral authority is that it is a social role representative of the whole cultural context. For, as Maclntyre says in Three Rival Versions: "By accepting authority [... ] one acquires a teacher who both introduces one to certain texts and educates one in becoming a sort of person capable of reading those texts with understanding, texts in which such a person discovers the story of him or herself, including the story of how he or she was transformed into a reader of these texts. This story of oneself is embedded in the story of the world, an overall narrative within which all other narratives find their place. That history is a movement towards the truth becoming manifest, a movement towards intelligibility. But in the course of discovering the intelligibility of the order of things, we also discover why at different stages greater or lesser degrees of unintelligibility remain. And in learning this we learn that authoritative testimony, to point us forward from where we are now, can never in our present bodily life be dispensed with. So continuous authority receives its justification as indispensable to continuing progress, the narrative of which we first learned how to recount from that authority and the truth of which is confirmed by our further progress, including that progress made by means of dialectical enquiry." (Maclntyre 1990, 92) The result of this is not only the historical changeability of characters but also conflict that lies in the very heart of their essence. This conflict concerns the real essence of a particular character (Maclntyre 1984, 30) but it is also the conflict with which the individual is faced because of the tension between the ties of the tradition and the demands of modernity and, at the same time, between different interpretations of the character. For every individual, with their own background, interprets the demands of the character in a slightly different way. It is also, so to say, a moment of one's individualization whereby the person, while interpreting the demands of the tradition-based character, adjusts them to modernity. Thus, the character is unique in its openness. It is open to the variety of interpretative contexts and practices, as well as to reinterpretation due to changes possible in the nature of practice or in the social environment. That is why incorporating the individual's thinking into the social and cultural life of the community must be recognized as the main goal and the basic good of this kind of education. What is more, the good that we gain while being involved in some practice is not only a specific practical goal of the craft, but also the narrative and intelligible order of our lives that we thus acquire. For paradigms of perfection, as Macintyre remarks, are not only exemplifications of the best standards reached so far but, in the first place, they are the guidelines for further development (Maclntyre 1990, 65-66). That statement enables us to define the good which we acquire due to practice and contact with the relevant authority. First, only good internal to practice and connected with the standards of perfection may be

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pointed out as the real goal of activity within the practice. External good, which can be acquired in different ways is, in Maclntyre's view, genuine good which makes the identification of practice qua practice and personal development of the person involved in it impossible. Finally, general good reached by the individual who identifies their personality by the system of social roles connected with practice is the narrative unity of their life. It is the narrative unity that makes the person's life and action intelligible not only to others but also to themselves. It is done in that way because the way in which the individual learns how to became an independent subject of the practice is also a way in which they learn how to become an independent subject as such. It is the authority that embodies and shows the apprentice what it means to be a person in a particular community and what the idea of the common life is.

2. What is Wrong With A Public Life? Let us consider now Maclntyre's critique of modern culture, starting with an analysis of three characters typical of modern culture: Rich Aesthete, Manager and Therapist. The essence of the critique of these characters comes down to two things. The moral culture which they represent is the culture of unencumbered self, whose will and preferences are not regulated in any socially accepted way. Because of this the world and social environment seem to them "nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences" (Maclntyre 1984, 25), that is, an area of action free of any moral judgements as they are covered up by 'professional' jargon (see Ballard 2000, 9), as in the case of Rich Aesthete or Therapist. What is more, nobody is responsible for that kind of actions, as there is no source of responsibility. Second, in Therapist's actions, as well as in those of Manager, the difference between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations is blurred. The key role of Manager as a central character emerges from the combination of these two features. Lawlessness and unencumberency of Aesthete's actions become 'professionalised' here. Private, so to say, preferences of the individual are elevated to a fundamental mechanism of the organization of social life. Effectiveness taken unilaterally as the only criterion for Manager's actions does not allow formulating the question about the good, which could be the aim of practice managed by him. From this point of view, as well as from that of Therapist, the question about such good is, in fact, ridiculous. The situation of Manager is, as a matter of fact, symptomatic: he cannot justify the premises of his own actions and nor can he question the rationale behind his own goals. Hence, Maclntyre claims, the difference between the authority of Manager and his power is erased. The power, being effective, legitimises itself and, as such, is given authority. Subsequently, in absence of any other criteria except for effectiveness, the power shifts into the hands of the most effective person. In this sense an expert of a bureaucratic organization, that is Manager, legitimises himself. This situation brings us to the problem of political subjecthood. For if Maclntyre's view on bureaucracy is true, the state based on such a view must take

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the power as its subject. Prom this point of view, the 'democratic institutions' are, first of all, bureaucratic institutions and the democracy appears to be a façade. True expression of preferences, interests and good of the citizens is not what we can be sure to find behind it. The state organised by the standards of modern bureaucracy is governed according to the rules of mutually contradictory inclinations, in which a reflection on how to realise the real needs of citizens has been displaced with the power of money. In Maclntyre's own words: "although most citizens share, although to greatly varying extents, in such public goods as those of a minimally secure order, the distribution of goods by government in no way reflects a common mind arrived at through widespread shared deliberation governed by norms of rational enquiry" (Maclntyre 1999, 131). For that purpose the individual is able to achieve their goods only by letting bureaucracy take control over them, yet in this way they slip into, as Slavoy Zizek calls it, interpassivity (see Zizek 1997). Interpassivity of the political self, as seen by Maclntyre, should be understood as laying the burden of political activity onto the institutions of power. How this mechanism works is very elusive. For there is still, on the one hand, the facade of the democratically-run public order with the demos retained as the subject of the politics, but, on the other hand, both the spectrum of acceptable views and forms of their expression are restricted (because of the very narrow spectrum of political representation, as in the United States, and some political views labelled as incompatible with the 'common sense'). That is why Maclntyre's critique of modernity is directed not only against the bureaucratic state, but also against liberal 'common sense' and 'professionalism' in social sciences. The modern interpassive self is the subject in politics only occasionally. They cannot change it for the social environment in which they live cannot furnish him with the background for an alternative vision of the social and political status quo. The modern self is faced with the following choice: liberalism and emotivism which prevent them from formulating any view of themselves that would include their social background and temporal dimension of existence, versus the unconsciousness of the Volk which generates not only a similarly interpassive relation to the institutions of power, but also interferes with their developing their capabilities of practical and theoretical reasoning. In both cases it is a 'professional expert' appointed by the institution of power who is the real political agent. Even if the good is the declared goal of the expertise management, its formulation cannot be clear in the public discourse. This is why Maclntyre calls modern politics the theatre of illusions in which money and rhetorical skills are the most important tools of power (Maclntyre 1984, 76-77). This situation, Maclntyre claims, is the result of the changes not only in politics but also in the shared conception of the society. The construal of the 'individual' as the unencumbered self independent of their social environment has caused 'the blending of languages' which results in the impossibility of individuals reaching a consensus in the debates on individual and common good. The famous call to construct new communities "within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages" (Mac-

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Intyre 1984, 263) from the very end of After Virtue should be understood as an appeal to reconsider our political agency. Importantly, form this point of view, we cannot draw dividing lines between the political, social and intellectual (or educational) dimensions of the agency. For if we want to describe the poverty of the modern self, we have to notice that it cannot find any antidote for its interpassivity in the education system. Both modern philosophy, especially the western analytical philosophy, as Maclntyre claims, and the most common type of the western university are organised according to the intellectual and moral standards embodied by Manager. Philosophy has lost its status of the master-craft thereby becoming a problem for itself while fragmentation and 'scientific' demands of philosophical analysis discourage rather than encourage an intellectual quest for the sense of life and good. Along the same lines, the university as an institution whose function is to manufacture qualified professionals does not allow for the search of self-knowledge or the ability of discussion with others (Maclntyre 1990, 7-8). As a result, due to Maclntyre's diagnosis, the man turns out to be deprived of his subjecthood and his ability to realize his essential nature can be questioned. For what modern culture misses is the fundamental intellectual character of human beings which enables us to exercise the powers of practical reasoning and reflection that makes it possible for us to make crucial decisions about our lives (see Maclntyre 1990, 175).

3. Politics, Virtues and Intellectualism What then, contrary to the situation described above, should the well-ordered self be like? What is the essential nature that we should realize in our lives? The subjecthood of man is organised in two dimensions—biological and cultural. In Dependent Rational Animals Maclntyre approaches (at least to some extent) evolutionary psychology (see e.g. Tomasello 1999) in that he points out that we cannot think of human agency and the relation of the individual to the tradition without taking the fundamental biological dimension of our existence into account. The fundamental dimension of the existence is determined by the vital dependency for we need others just to survive, especially at the very early stage of our lives. The well ordered community renders it possible for man to not only obtain one's goals and realize one's desires but also to realize their human capabilities. It is crucial to consider what Maclntyre calls 'distinctively human' possibilities and capabilities which should be developed in the network of communal help starting at the stage of parental care. Witness, however, that this consideration is possible only within an Aristotelian perspective but not within any postEnlightenment one. The cognitive resources of Aristotelianism allow us to realize that in modern, post-Enlightenment culture we lose the possibility to exercise our intellectual and reflective abilities, that is, our distinctively human nature and distinctively human way of life. For the man in full bloom is, as Maclntyre calls it, an 'independent practical

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reasoner'. We become such reasoners by exercising our rationality in the framework of language and culture. During the socialization process it is not that the individual is 'given' the ability to use language nor are they 'forced' into the framework of a particular tradition. Their primary animal capabilities evolve in the context of this tradition, instead. This is why Maclntyre emphasizes the significance of socialization. To learn a language is to learn the modes of understanding the world typical of a particular culture. For language, as Maclntyre maintains, is not only a medium of communication but also a mode of structuring the world and as such it is not impartial. While describing the environment, man simultaneously builds a system of senses and values, that is, a culture which is their natural environment. Maclntyre claims that the roots of language go back to the ability to achieve good (Maclntyre 1999, 25). Language should be, most of all, understood as a medium of communication of intentional states and emotions. The cognition of these states is an "interpretative knowledge", a practical ability derived from social relations. The knowledge of emotions and plans is derived from responsive sympathy and empathy "elicited through action and interaction and without these we could not, as we often do, impute to those others the kind of reasons for their actions that, by making their actions intelligible to us to respond to them in ways that they too can find intelligible" (14). In the community while learning a language we recognize the ways of action typical of the cultural code of this community and we acquire the ability to relate to the other members of the community and, thereby, to understand them. The development of intellectual traditions within the framework provided by a language, established narrative forms and practical rationality is based on this distinctively human element of our nature. Similarly, it is also due to being introduced to a particular cultural code that we can come to control our emotions. To learn how to do this and how to make them intelligible to others is an important component of moral education that is possible only within the framework provided by the community. Maclntyre calls emotions "norm-governed" (Maclntyre 1988, 76) for the forms of their expression are strictly connected with the set of norms typical of a particular community and with the rules and standards of rationality determined by a particular culture. Also, it is during socialization taken as the introduction to the culture of a particular community that the individual is provided with the intellectual tool of acquiring self-knowledge. For, as stressed by Maclntyre, we learn a language by being introduced to the set of texts which determine the paradigms of expressions typical of this language (382-383). At the same time, we are introduced to the set of texts which describe or, more precisely, illustrate the way of understanding human life in this tradition. It is only through the construal of our life as a unity that we can find sense in it and recapitulate and judge our deeds (Maclntyre 1984, 218-219). It is impossible to understand a human out of the context of the history of their life. Only after considering life as a unity of the quest for good can we judge whether the life was successful or not. What is specifically meant here is a possibility of such a quest without specifying a priori any particular good. For, as Macintyre claims, "a quest is always an education both as to

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the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge", which makes him further argue that 'the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man" (Maclntyre 1984, 219). Maclntyre approximates here to the construal of human life from the perspective of the hermeneutical circle. For if it is not our decision to enter a particular narrative and it is not us who determine our starting point but it is socialization and primal education that establish those conditions and forms. It is the possibility of a reflective understanding of our own life that promotes a 'transcendental analysis' of our self-knowledge and renders us able to move towards our true telos. But what, in fact, are we looking for? Maclntyre as accepts the Aristotelian vision of the end of human life. Accordingly what we are looking for is the happiness, eudaimonia. It is in Short History of Ethics that Maclntyre pays attention to the intellectual character of eudaimonia in Aristotle (Maclntyre 1998b, 57-58). In After Virtue he broadens this interpretation and connects the meaning of this term with good fortune, which makes him claim, that "what constitutes the good for man is a complete human life at its best" (Maclntyre 1984, 149). Maclntyre's positions are thus close to Aristotle's. Still, it is interesting to note that in Whose justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Version he is barely interested in this concept. It is not till Dependent Rational Animals that he formulates the idea of flourishing as a way of understanding eudaimonia. The basic dimension of human good is thus determined by its biological nature. This basis is then structured by providing an outlet for the forms of expressions of emotions and taking control over them. The distinctively human attitude is thus to distance oneself from one's emotions and to be able to take over intellectual control (Maclntyre 1999, 69 and 105-106). As Maclntyre claims: "what is for human beings to flourish does of course vary from context to context, but in every context it is as someone exercises in a relevant way the capabilities of an independent practical reasoner that her or his potentialities for flourishing in a specifically human way are developed. So if we want to understand how it is to be good for humans to live, we need to know what it is to be excellent as an independent practical reasoner, that is, what the virtues of independent practical reasoner are." (Maclntyre 1999, 77) In Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structures Maclntyre links practical rationality with actions and says that "to learn to be rational is to be initiated into and trained in the habits of action and judgement which dispose one to be so moved. So also to be rational as a member of a particular social order is to participate in some particular community in the relevant ways and to be moved by the acknowledged or to be acknowledged good reasons of that particular social order." (Maclntyre 1998d, 121) We gain this kind of rationality through the reflection on the principles of our actions and actions of others. It is then in some part an empirical element of our personality derived from the practical knowledge of interpersonal relationships. We are gradually brought to this kind of rationality form the very beginning of our lives. To introduce some distance between the self and its emotions so that it could analyse the emotions

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is a key element of this education. It is also a prerequisite for assessing reasons for action (Maclntyre 1999, 68-69). The practical rationality thus conceived provides the basis of our moral life. It is the possibility of reasoning, distancing oneself and analysing one's passions and motives that makes their evaluation and hierarchization possible. In Dependent Rational Animals Maclntyre argues that it takes the ability to come up with alternative solutions for the future. Hence the conclusion that practical reasoning is a syllogism (Maclntyre 1984, 161-162; Maclntyre 1988, 129-130, 139-140). Notice that it follows that the moral decisions are, in fact, a matter of knowledge. It is also of crucial importance that Maclntyre equates the major (initial) premise of that syllogism with the good which is the goal of action. But where is the idea of such good taken from? The individual's reasoning and their quest for good is based on the idea of good given through the standards of practice and social relations in which the individual is involved. It is in this context that the intellectual character of the quest, which, for Maclntyre, is the sense of human life, becomes obvious. Every man organises his life in the way which is determined by this person's possibilities, capabilities, received education and aspirations as well as the possibilities offered by a particular tradition. Real life defines good for, as Maclntyre claims, "the grasp of the concept of human flourishing to which reasoner appeals had to itself to be acquired in the course of practical experience" (Maclntyre 1999, 113). Outside of practice, there is no possibility to define the horizon within which the idea of flourishing (and happiness) could appear. Nevertheless, it is only a conscious life that may lead to the formulation of such an idea. This statement refers to Aristotle's concept of the contemplative life as the best way to human goal. Maclntyre seems to agree with this concept for, as I noticed above, Maclntyre's idea of practice does, in fact, reach beyond itself and, as a result, the individual can finally ask the question about their good qua a human being. In Dependent Rational Animals Maclntyre writes: "those quantities of mind and character that enable someone both to recognize the relevant goods and to use the relevant skills in achieving them are the excellences, the virtues, that distinguish or should distinguish teacher from apprentice or student" (Maclntyre 1999, 92). It is because of the virtues, as classified by Aristotle, that we can not only control our practice by force of habit, but also to assess our goals correctly. The virtues can be gained only in the course of practice as it is practice that determines our status within the community (it furnishes us with social role). That is why, as Maclntyre claims, learning virtues is not only a moral education but by learning them we also learn how to play our social roles correctly (88-89). Virtues should then be understood as "those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing selfknowledge and increasing knowledge of the good" (Maclntyre 1984, 219). They are a mediator between human nature and the good (Maclntyre 1999, 159). For

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it is natural human temper that lies in the heart of the virtues but if they are practiced rightly than they can furnish us with the ideas of good that extend beyond the biological dimension of human nature. What is more, the criterion for the correctness of their practice is certified by the harmony between the animal and cultural dimensions of human nature. It appears then that the idea of virtues, as in the case of the ideas of practice and the moral example, extends beyond the sphere of praxis. The reflective character of virtues emphasizes the rational aspect of human nature while the answer to the question of what is the proper virtuous deed exceeds the provisional character of a one-time solution. That is why Maclntyre says that "it is for the sake of achieving this letter good [the good of a human as such—P. M.] that we practice the virtues and we do so by making choices about means to achieve that end [... ] Such choices demand judgments and the exercise of the virtues requires therefore a capacity to judge and to do the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way. The exercise of such judgement is not routinizable application of rules" (Maclntyre 1984, 150). That is why the fundamental role is played by the virtue of practical wisdom, phronesis, the concept of which is strictly connected with the distinction into two kinds of knowledge: a practical knowledge (phronesis) and a theoretical knowledge (sofia). In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Maclntyre points out that the function of phronesis is to apply the general statements (truths) concerning the good of a person qua human to the particular person and situation (Maclntyre 1988, 115-116). It is then a kind of an interpretative knowledge, intermediate between 'professional' intellectual activity (philosophy) and everyday practice. It is then crucial to notice that, in the light of the above statements, it is clear that Maclntyre takes phronesis as a virtue that not only determines the person's right conduct, but also makes the intellectual (reflective, philosophical) way of life possible. The individual's aspiration to become phronemos enables them to achieve sofia. Accordingly, Maclntyre claims that every moral conduct is determined by the first philosophical premises which for the particular community members are the first principles embodied in the tradition of the community. What is more, in On Not Having the Last Word he points out that the difference between "different types of interpretative practice" can be grasped only after being introduced into the exercise of this practice (Maclntyre 2002, 165). It is only in this context that the sense of Maclntyre's statement that "hermeneutics [... ] is a subdiscipline of ethics" (169) is clear, for without making the initial decisions concerning the ways of establishing cognitive possibilities and the knowledge of modes of human acting, it is impossible to build moral philosophy. But every recognition of such a possibility is already determined by cultural presuppositions prior to the individual's consciousness. That is to say, the circular character of hermeneutical cognition determines the character of the relationship between the first premises of thought, its object and the possibilities of the application of its results. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Maclntyre writes: "the deliberative task of rational construction is [... ] one which is-

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sues in an hierarchical ordering of means to their ends, in which the ultimate end is specified in a formulation which provides the first principle or principles from which are deduced statements of those subordinate ends which are means to the ultimate end. What is an ordered hierarchy of 'for the sake of' relations leading to the arche is also a deductive hierarchy descending from the arche. It is only of course by invoking additional premises, independently supported, that deliberation can arrive at an end product in which the particular types of circumstance of this particular agent can be understood to make it the case that for him to pursue the good and the best involves the here-and-now pursuit of this highly specific good. And [... ] one of the marks of phronesis is that someone is able to identify just which circumstances are relevant and therefore which premises must be utilized in the deliberative construction." (Maclntyre 1988, 132) This kind of reasoning is apparently circular. The first premises must be known to make the practical reasoning possible. Maclntyre agrees with Aristotle that it is a syllogism (129-130). But how can the first premises be known if they simultaneously appear to be the conclusion of this syllogism? In answer to this question we must take note of Maclntyre's partial dependency on Gadamer. For if it is the cultural heritage of the community embodied in the tradition that is a source of the moral content reflected by the individuals, it follows that the arche of reasoning must also be the arche of the tradition. Maclntyre generally accepts Gadamer's stance on this point (Maclntyre 2002, 170-171). What we can understand is language, but it is understood in a Gadamerian way, i.e. as a distinctively human environment (Umwelt). The unique character of conscious human life rests on the fact that the possibility of transcending the everyday experience towards the episteme is facilitated by language. Reflection on the resources of language understood as reflection on the cultural heritage that determines the self is conducted in this particular language. To make an attempt to find one's own identity is to make an attempt to find its general principles. This means that phronetic reasoning taken as a move towards the individual's self-consciousness must include theoretical reflection on those principles (archai) (Maclntyre 1998a, 171-175). Maclntyre notices that the first principles thus understood can be conceived only within a particular intellectual scheme. We use its contents as a self-evident argument supported by language norms. That is why, in Maclntyre's view, the epistemological stand is always first-person. But from his point of view, based on the Aristotelian and Thomistic ideas, it is the third-person objective perspective that we should try to reach. We can achieve this perspective by realizing the modes of our cognition. "My mind or rather my soul is only one among many and its own knowledge of my self qua soul has to be integrated into general account of souls and their teleology" (176). For when we make an analysis of a particular problem we must start with the starting point of our tradition, but then we can subject our consciousness to some kind of 'transcendental analysis'

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(or better—hermeneutical analysis) which faces us with the enclosed character of our enquiry. For the object of such an enquiry is in some way primarily recognized within the intellectual scheme within which we enquire. Enquiring from the standpoint of a particular intellectual scheme, the self in the first place recognises the structure of this scheme. Thus practical reasoning appears as the only introduction to theoretical enquiry which is essential for finding the solution to practical problems. As Maclntyre claims: "the telos/'finis of any type of systematic activity is [... ] that end internal to activity of that specific kind, for the sake of which and in the direction of which activity is carried forward" (182). The difference between practical and theoretical philosophy is thus the difference in the goal, which is the action for practical and cognition for theoretical philosophy. The structure of the two kinds of philosophy is the same while the goals are connected with each other. This makes Maclntyre claim that "achieved understanding is the theoretical goal of the practical activity of enquiry" (183). For every intellectual activity must be confronted with theoretical problems. The goal of such a theoretical enquiry being achieved, we can go back to its practical application. The goal of intellectual activity should be then taken as clarifying. Philosophy is a type of enquiry which transcends the particularities of human activity and is itself involved in its starting point, but it is also this point that makes any rational enquiry possible. For, as Maclntyre claims, in both practical and theoretical enquiry the goal is also "the telos of moral enquiry, which is excellence in the achievement not only of adequate theoretical understanding of the specifically human good, but also of the practical embodiment of that understanding in the life of the particular enquirer" (Maclntyre 1990, 62-63). It is crucial for my interpretation of Maclntyre's thought to stress his view of philosophy as the way of life which is facilitated by phronesis (see Maclntyre 1998a, 189). It is clear now why philosophy thus seen must be taken as enquiry in the history of culture, due to which it is possible not only to account for a particular situation but also to find its cause, to identify its relation with the broader cultural context and, by the analysis on the level of metaphysics, to set criteria for assessing similar problems. An important part of such philosophy must be the spinning of narratives, both individual and communal, and their intellectual analysis. That is why Maclntyre accepts Aristotle's claim that the person interested in myths is already a philosopher (193). To recognize one's own history as a part of a broader narrative is an important part of tradition-based enquiry in both practical and theoretical dimensions. For I cannot stake claims to the truth of my statements independently of the history of my enquiries and independently of the history of intellectual scheme within which I speak and the society of which I am a member. The claims to the truth may then be approached only with warranted assertibility. Maclntyre calls philosophy seen along such lines craft (techne). It is, of course, craft understood as ars liberalis or the practice in the sense of Maclntyre. It is then a kind of intellectual craft whose structure is similar to every other kind of craft (Maclntyre 1990, 61). In both cases an apprentice to the craft has to learn to tell the difference between what is good and best for them at

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their level and in general, and to judge their mistakes in applying standards considered best in particular craft. The ability of such a judgement must be derived not only form the practical reasoning (phronesis) but also, as we are to discover the objective nature of particular practice, from theoretical enquiry. Every craft (practice) demands the knowledge of its tradition, the ability of its critical analysis and the possibility of applying its heritage. In philosophy as well as in every other craft, the apprentice has to learn to recognize their own weaknesses which limit their heading for the telos of the craft and to recognize the virtues, which they should exercise in the course of achieving the goal of the craft (61-62). Thus, there is no significant difference between moral and scientific thinking. Without proper conduct, the individual is not able to recognize their true good and, as a consequence, they are not able to flourish. So philosophy thus construed is the techne of self-knowledge which can transcend our particular point of view. What is more, when philosophy is understood as a techne of 'moral enquiry', it can be exercised not only as a kind of science but also as philosophy which important part is its practical application. In 'master-craft' thus conceived the existential consequences of the enquiry's results cannot be separated from the results themselves. It is reflection that permits right and successful action and these two dimensions are strictly connected (62). For the techne of philosophy appears the most important human practice which enables man to live a proper life and to move towards both personal and essential goods. Philosophy is then a 'spiritual guide'. It is human practice that crowns all human intellectual activities. If my interpretation of Maclntyre's philosophy is correct, it is possible now to pinpoint an ideal that represents it. I consider the character of the Philosopher to be such an ideal. The two levels of thought mentioned above converge when it comes to their goal. For, as Maclntyre claims: "to live a practically well-ordered life is to embody the universal concepts which we comprehend and justify in (moral) enquires in the particularities of our individual lives. So the moral life is the life of embodied moral enquiry and those individuals who live out the moral life as farmers, or fishermen, or furniture makers embody more or less adequately in those lives, devoted in the key parts to their own crafts, what may often not be recognized as a theory, the product of the theorist's very different craft, but which nevertheless is one. And the particularities of such lives in a variety of significant ways embody and continue the traditions, moral, religious, and intellectual, of such communities as those of family, the city, the clan, and the nation. Thus political narratives of success or failure in the making and sustaining of such communities are also inescapably narratives of embodied moral enquiry, itself successful or unsuccessful." (80) In this context it becomes apparent why in Dependent Rational Animals Maclntyre calls man 'the reasoner'. Man is taken as a rational being, and the exercise

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of their reflective capabilities is crucial for them to develop not only within the practices that they undertake but also by identifying themselves within the network of the practices as a human. What is more, in Maclntyre's view, these two moments cannot be separated. Being involved in the relationship with the tradition and authority connected with some practice makes the individual open to the contact with the social and cultural heritage and gives them a possibility to establish their identity and to define their goals. These possibilities are, nevertheless, preceded by the reflective abilities of the individual of both practical reasoning and theoretical enquiry. Practical reasoning is thus only a beginning of the exercise of the individual's intellectual possibilities which should be exercised by every single man and woman as much as it is possible for him or her to became a philosopher, i.e. the searcher of wisdom which can be taken as the knowledge of good a la Socrates. On the other hand in some parts of Three Rival Versions Maclntyre, while describing the person involved in 'moral enquiry' taken as a curricular discipline, uses the term 'enquirer' and concentrates on this person's duties as a scientist. For there can be no distinction between practical reasoning of particular people and the 'professional' philosophical enquiry. Being introduced to the network of practices, the individual recognizes the teleological scheme of understanding which is best described, in Maclntyre's opinion, in Nicomachean Ethics. Simultaneously, philosophy can be either a part of social life (and in antiquity it was a central element—see Maclntyre 1984, 36-37; Maclntyre 1988, 247) or a professionalized academic activity in which case it excludes itself from this life and becomes part of a curriculum of an unknown purpose (Macintyre 1990, 168). In search of identity, the individual learns how to use its reflective capabilities in the way typical of classical philosophy (Maclntyre 1998c, 140). In trying to understand their own good as well as the ultimate human good, the individual is faced with the necessity to acquire at least the basics of philosophical skills. But to exercise the capabilities of practical reasoning, the plain person needs the teacher, i.e. the authority who can introduce them to the proper ways of thought and continuously inspire them to develop their intellectual skills. Philosophy thus, from Maclntyre's point of view, must be rooted in the everyday routine of the community to the degree that not only academic philosophers are the subject of the moral discourse. For Maclntyre's goal, if my interpretation of his work is correct, is to reformulate the culture in the way in which every single individual will be aware of the necessity of intellectual activity in their life. For that purpose the Philosopher must be conceived as a central character. As the character they must embody the interpretative conflict concerning not only the status and goals of philosophy, but also, and in the first place, concerning the goal of human activity and the best ways of achieving it. As a character the Philosopher is something more than a social role of an academic researcher. They represent Maclntyre's vision of the human as an intellectual being. As a character the Philosopher should be taken as a 'measure' of communal life. But as such they are also a role model for 'professional' philosophers. The Philosopher as an embodiment of reflectiveness thus understood must then be the return to the ancient idea of the wisdom searcher. But this character

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is based on the social role of the 'professional' philosopher undertaking 'moral enquiry'. The mode of establishing their status within the community and in which the results of their work are transferred to the community is an indicator of the relationship of the society to the sphere of scientific research. In this character the efforts to understand (clarify) our own identity, the claims to the truth and applications of the results are joined. The Philosopher seen in this way cannot be a 'holy man' who knows the objective truth, but rather a master in a master-craft, a guide in a quest for the good and unity of life, but also a member of the community, not an 'independent expert' (as the Therapist and the Manager are). The Philosopher's efforts to clarify the world (biological as well as social and cultural) involve in some part the continuous reminding of the historical character of every cognition and claim to the truth. This kind of spiritual (intellectual) guidance does not consist in making others move towards the ends defined a priori, but rather in encouraging them to exercise theirs abilities to reason and initiate the discourse with the heritage of a given tradition as well as with others. In this sense the Philosopher, unlike the Manager and the Therapist, tries to establish non-manipulative social relations within the community. Socrates, that is to say, is the paradigm of such a character. The first step for individuals involved in 'moral enquiry' at the level of both academic and everyday reflection is a conversion of the individual's personality to the position of an apprentice in one of practices (crafts), for "unless we already have within ourselves the potentiality for moving towards and achieving the relevant theoretical and practical conclusions we shall be unable to learn. But we also need a teacher to enable us to actualize that potentiality." (Maclntyre 1990, 63) The basis of the philosophical conduct at both levels is the acknowledgement of our ignorance and the virtue of modesty connected with it. Starting with modesty, 'virtues of acknowledged dependence' can be derived to tie the individual consciously with the particular community. Those virtues (as well as the virtue of justice) to some extent constitute phronesis which concerns both the ability of just assessment of a situation and self-knowledge. The character of the Philosopher is especially important in this context, as it is by reflecting its content that the individual can assess their own actions as well as successes or failures in developing their intellectual capabilities. The aim of the Philosopher's work is to teach or rather promote a theoretical way of life, according to Aristotle's teaching. The personal virtue of the individual lies in intellectual perfection and contemplation. The Philosopher as a character is not an 'ideal' in the meaning of perfected man but rather an object of social identification and the model of a social change. For that purpose it should be considered, just as the exemplars of wisdom in ancient philosophical school were, an object of contemplation and debate, the exemplar which should encourage personal development. It is crucial to notice that this development has to have important social and political consequences. Only from this point of view, I think, can we understand the importance of the family and university as the key institutions of the state, as Maclntyre sees it, and the stress he puts

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on the necessity of the role played by the educated public in the well ordered community (Maclntyre 1987). What Maclntyre wants us to remember, from this point of view, is that the only cure for the poverty of modern agency is the radical turn towards conscious subjecthood based on the intellectual, reflective capabilities of man. Maclntyre's conception of the state, the state that respects the autonomy of the individual and puts stress upon their political subjecthood, should be rooted in the society in which individuals can not only express their opinions but also take part in the institutions of power as much as possible. In this way Maclntyre's radical intellectualism focused on the character of the Philosopher turns out to be the remedy for the interpassivity of modernity.

Bibliography Adler, F. (1910), The Moral Ideal, in: The International Journal of Ethics 20(4), 387-394 Ballard, B. W. (2000), Understanding Maclntyre, Lanham-New York-Oxford Maclntyre, A. (1984), After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (2nd edition), Notre Dame — (1987), The Idea of an Educated Public, in: 1985, Haydon, G. (ed.), Education and Values. The Richard Peters Lectures delivered in the Institute of Education, London — (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame — (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Being Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1998, Notre Dame — (1998a), First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues, in: K. Knight (ed.). The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge — (1998b), A Short History of Ethics. A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (2 nd edition), London-New York — (1998c), Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods, in: Knight, K. (ed.), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge — (1998d), Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structures, in: Knight, K. (ed.), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge — (1999), Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need The Virtues, London — (2002), On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debts to Gadamer, in: Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Malpas, J./von Arnswald, U./Kretscher, J. (eds.), Boston Scheler, M. (1987), Exemplars of Persons and Leaders, in: Scheler, M.,Persons and Self-Value: Three Essays, Dordrecht-Boston-Lancaster, 127-198 Tomasello, M. (1999), The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Cambridge Urmson, J. O. (1958), Saints and Heroes, in: Melden, A.J. (ed.), Essays in Moral Philosophy, Washington, 198-216 Wolf, S. (1982), Moral Saints, in: The Journal of Philosophy 79(8), 419-439 Zizek, S. (1997), The Plague of Fantasies, London

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Benedict Smith

Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World

Abstract: Maclntyre shares with others, such as John McDowell, a broad commitment in moral epistemology to the centrality of tradition and both regard forms of enculturation as conditions of moral knowledge. Although Maclntyre is critical of the thought that moral reasons are available only to those whose experience of the world is conceptually articulated, he is sympathetic to the idea that the development of subjectivity involves the capacity to appreciate external moral demands. This paper critically examines some aspects of Maclntyre's account of how knowledge is related to tradition, and suggests ways in which the formation of moral subjectivity involves the ability to experience the world.

0. Introduction The nature of contemporary moral subjectivity and how it is characterised by ethical theory is, for Alasdair Maclntyre, problematic. According to Maclntyre's critique, a set of modern difficulties stands in the way of recognizing and realizing forms of life most appropriate for human beings. These difficulties are partly the result of political structures which undermine the integrity of human subjectivity, social organizations and interpersonal relations. In addition, ways of understanding the nature of moral personhood provided by dominant trends in ethical theory generally fail to help create or even conceive of a world in which human beings can flourish. Maclntyre looks to the status and role of tradition and practice as ways of explaining the difficulties and as providing the resources to overcome them. Human subjectivity, for Maclntyre, cannot be made intelligible let alone be analysed independently from embodiment in tradition. What I am interested in here is the relation between a commitment to the centrality of tradition and forms of enculturation into practices, and the possibility of these being not only consistent with but constitutively connected to experience and knowledge of the external world. This is a significant set of connections because whilst practice might be naturally construed as connected to our side of a mind/world distinction, the world at least according to powerful presuppositions of contemporary philosophy is stubbornly resistant to the historical and cultural activities of human beings. That is, although it is obvious that human activity has a great impact on the world, philosophical conceptions of how human thought stands to reality assume that the nature of the world is external to our

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conceptions of it. The objective world when considered as human-independent and the source of truths and knowledge, remains unaffected by the contingent and relatively local goings-on of human practices. The point here might be interpreted in quasi-political terms according to which the world is neutral, objective and disinterested, whereas human practice is partisan, subjective and expresses the peculiarities of culture-specific norms and ideals. Maclntyre's account of tradition and practice is wide-ranging and complex. His critique of competing accounts of how forms of rationality are expressed through those moral dimensions of subjectivity leaves under-explored how it is that creatures, whose natural-rational development includes a growing command of the place and force of reasons, could be answerable in their thoughts and deeds to the world. So one of the guiding themes here is the relation between internal critical thought and the possibility of commitment and judgement, and the external world in light of which our thoughts and actions fail or succeed. Clarifying the nature of 'external' and 'internal' here is important, and Maclntyre's technical appropriation of these and closely related concepts helps to focus the dialectic in a relatively narrow way. Nevertheless, Maclntyre's deployment of these terms does not simply rest on stipulative definitions and so critical appraisal of them can advance by drawing on related and sometimes conflicting accounts of what is constituted and implied by tradition and practice. A 'practice', at least according to After Virtue (Maclntyre 1985), is a socially established activity which has goods internal to it, standards of excellence partially definitive of it, and through which human capacities to excel and to reflect upon the nature of the practice are extended (187). So whilst planting turnips is not a practice in this sense, farming in contrast does count as a practice. Tradition, for Maclntyre, refers to (at least) the context within which modes of thought and reasoning are made possible and enacted with determinate form (222). Further, when a tradition is functioning well it represents a kind of 'continuity of conflict' with regard to candidate bearers of that tradition. A farm, say, as bearer of a tradition, will embody a form of critical attitude about what farming is and what it ought to be (222). One of the valuable lessons of Maclntyre's philosophical attitude is to help us be suspicious of the attempt to reduce complex social phenomena in the name of conceptual economy, and to render in theoretical terms what can only be adequately understood and discussed in practical historical terms. Part of the general attraction of this attitude, to my mind, is the conception of philosophical activity which it suggests as well as of the objects of philosophical inquiry it identifies. Human thought and action are historically situated and given form and content, at least partly, through embodiment. The concepts available to us are also provided by history in this broad sense and, as Maclntyre has famously suggested, lost to or concealed by history too. We could add that the importance of history is also expressed at a more local level; an individual achieves command of the world through their dynamic embodiment and through processes of formation, can achieve rational sensitivity to the external world. Maclntyre and John McDowell share certain insights about the philosophical significance of the historical embodiment of human subjectivity. McDowell

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conceives tradition as, amongst other things, the historically situated locus of "wisdom about what is a reason for what" (McDowell 1996, 126). The idea that tradition provides normative structures which make intelligible the actions and thoughts of its members need not be understood as merely backward-looking in some sense. Traditional knowledge, in a wider and more helpful sense, includes the ability to appreciate what is a moral reason for what in a way that may not just repeat previous judgements. A more tolerant and philosophically significant sense of tradition in this context includes how agents achieve competence and expertise which find expression in new ways and in the face of new circumstances.

1. Rationality and Bildung Human thought and action are subject to forms of constraint. Some of these forms can be understood with reference to, say, the natural conditions under which biological life could evolve and the limitations on life, thought and action that such conditions impose. Other forms of constraint are by contrast rational. This sort of constraint purports to ground the sense in which meaningful thoughts and actions are made intelligible and subject to critique in light of standards that are connected to rational features of embodied practice, such as involvement in dialogical exchange expressed through the general practice of giving and asking for reasons. Broadly speaking, these standards are those in light of which we fail or succeed in getting things more or less right in our lives. So, minimally, there are normative or rational standards according to which we think and do things in better or worse ways. McDowell's Mind and World (McDowell 1996) attempts to diagnose and effect a dissolution of an apparently irresolvable tension between competing accounts of how thought and action are subject to rational constraint. McDowell diagnoses the relevant ways in which the competing accounts fail and, amongst other things, suggests that the substantive set of assumptions about the nature of experience and of subjectivity which generate the competing accounts are optional although deeply entrenched in the philosophical tradition. McDowell suggests that an account of what it is for a human being to come to maturity is connected to initiation into conceptual capacities, and that such initiation involves a growing responsiveness to rational demands which include the rational demands specific to moral subjectivity. This involves a process of "having one's eyes opened to reasons at large" through the moulding of character, and is a generalized account of the picture of natural-rational development which underpins Aristotle's account of ethical formation (McDowell 1996, 84). This process is best captured, McDowell thinks, by iBildung\ The Bildung model of experience and thought emphasises the place of initiation into ways of seeing, understanding and knowledge, which involve the deployment and development of conceptual capacities. To this extent the status and role of extant culture (broadly understood) is central; without such a condition no education or formation is possible. David Wiggins writes that the chief aim of a Bildung account of awareness is to point: "to point at a thing in a

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way that will make [... ] [someone] [... ] see something, make him see that the thing is there and then, by virtue of [... ] grasping the actuality, make him grasp its possibility" (Wiggins 1996, 254). The idea here is that through a culturally formed perspective certain forms of awareness and modes of discovery are made available to agents. These modal features of Bildung are important for making sense of how we can achieve awareness of what might be and not only of what is. It is notable that the more one emphasizes the constitutive role of education or cultural initiation in articulating the success-conditions for a relevant class of assertions, then the strength of a realist conception of those conditions tends to be inversely proportional. Part of the Bildung model of awareness and knowledge challenges this tendency and is one version of the thought that possession of subjectivity, achieved at least in part through processes of cultural formation, does not for that reason preclude realism about the constraint in light of which thoughts and actions can be critically appraised. Bildung affords agents with capacities and conceptions of ways to go on in the relevant practices or discourses by inducting them into those actual ways in which things, as a matter of fact, are. Although there is a sense of transition from the actual ways in which things are to the ways in which they could be, we need not think of this transition as some leap of thought that involves radical content-shifts which track distinct metaphysical realms. What it is to be inducted into a practice is (partly) to become equipped to appreciate ways of developing that practice. Thinking about and acting in light of 'the way things are' is in an inseparable relation to thinking about the ways things might be. Overall, the co-operation here between actuality and possibility and between participation in and answerability to a practice gives expression to the demand, felt acutely by Maclntyre as I read him, that engaging in critical reflection or enjoying a perspective of critical distance must not be peeled-off from the content or from the form of life about which we are reflecting. Yet at the same time the rational resources brought to bear in episodes of such reflection are content- and context-independent in some sense. The distance opened between the activity of reflection and that which is reflected upon is made possible by, amongst other things, the capacity to appreciate reasons. The ability to appreciate what is a reason for what (and to do so correctly) can be understood as a wider instance of a process of specifically ethical formation. It is relevant in this context because of the relation between the role of education and the onset of conceptual and practical competence and expertise. It is worth emphasising the apparently different ways in which Maclntyre and McDowell stand with regard to the deliverances of Bildung. Central to McDowell's picture here is that it is through Bildung that we can come to enjoy knowledge of the external world. Although Maclntyre lays a similar stress on the role of education and tradition, broadly understood, there is a problematic episode which he claims to have identified in the broad naturalism in which McDowell sets his framework of the rational development of theoretical and practical wisdom. In short, part of Maclntyre's complaint is that the conceptualism of McDowell's Bildung model cannot recognize the rational capacities of non-concept-using animals. Sensitivity to reasons manifests itself in the capacity to appreciate theoretical

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reasons for belief and practical reasons for action. Whilst the content of the reasons here differs, the capacity to be sensitive to reasons in general is a rational sensitivity of which awareness and knowledge of both theoretical and practical reasons are instances. Sensitivity to reasons is common to the theoretical and practical spheres but it would be misleading to think that this capacity is passive. Although it might be natural to suppose that a form of sensitivity is connected to receptivity toward circumstances, properties and states of affairs, a conception of what constitutes rational sensitivity might also involve the capacity to say something—at least in principle—about the reasons involved and thus engage epistemic considerations that would provide justification for a subject claiming that there is a reason to think that p or that here is a reason to 4>. This broad demand for articulation could be construed in metaphysical terms according to which S is not genuinely sensitive to a reason if he cannot, in principle, appeal to any of the features or conditions which provide warrant for claiming that here is a reason. So the possibility of articulation is part of what it is for S to be sensitive to a reason. Articulability is part of the metaphysics of rational sensitivity. Articulability might also have a moral dimension in so far as S is under some deontic constraint to lay out the shape of his thinking and practical orientations; failure or refusal to do so might signal a deficient form of rational sensitivity, or at least that S has no licence to claim that he is genuinely sensitive to the reason. Although this sense of articulability is considered a basic condition of responsible moral judgement and action, it should not endanger the significance of immediate states of awareness with moral content. An important question is how direct awareness of moral reasons is related to the articulability requirement. Some agents, perhaps only those who have undergone the relevant processes of training and habituation, immediately appreciate reasons and that what such processes of training provide is an ability which ranges over the theoretical and practical domains. Kelvin Knight construes McDowell's appeal to the role of tradition as expertise-conferring as an example of the attempt to provide a unified conception of what it takes to perceive moral values as well as perceive non-moral features (Knight 2007, 204). We might say that Bildung is required in both of these cases and this reminds us that if moral knowledge presents particularly awkward theoretical issues, then this might indicate at least an implicit attachment to an abstracted account of subjectivity. Bildung emphasises that perspective is required for knowledge. Regarding the so-called natural world as something more basic and foundational in comparison to the derivative world of values is not a conception that we get, as it were, for free. The thought that awareness of reality is an achievement whose realization is dependent on enculturation can seem philosophically mysterious and morally objectionable. But the understanding of reality which pictures it as indifferent to human subjectivity and radically external to our thoughts, beliefs, desires, attitudes, and other states of mind, is abstracted or derived from a more primordial sense of being in the world characterised by socially grounded attachments and commitments.

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2. Reasons and Realism One way to cast the immediacy of moral awareness is as a form of perceptual access to the rational aspects of the world and a related conception of how one stands with regard to it. An Aristotelian might claim that these dimensions are constitutively interdependent when considered on the level of rational thought and action. I understand Aristotle and others such as Maclntyre to encourage a picture of moral reflection that draws attention to the co-operation between subjectivity and world for the possibility of rational thought and action, although the commitments about the status of the world require clarification. So when one expression of the articulability requirement holds that a thinker is under some obligation to reveal the warrant for a belief or an action, another dimension involves the intersubjective nature of rational sensitivity; a subject is rationally competent in the relevant sense or is a candidate for enjoying knowledge when he is party to a socially constituted practice of giving and asking for reasons. I do not mean here that the social aspect marks an ontologically distinctive domain of thought and action such that it can coherently function in the absence of the world or of reality-directed thought. There is a form of interdependence between the vertical sensitivities needed for and expressed in world-bearing thought and action, and a horizontal aspect to the intersubjective complex of giving and asking for reasons. In Dependent Rational Animals (Maclntyre 1999) Maclntyre claims that a relevantly developed capacity to appreciate 'acknowledged dependence' can be a form of non-inferential rational awareness. It is a way of appreciating reasons which, in one sense, exhausts the justification for thinking or acting in a certain way. This is a point usually interpreted to be epistemological although, I think, it is also metaphysical. Maclntyre stresses that the theoretical and practical justification constitutive of non-inferential awareness of this kind precludes not only any hypothetical demand for the reasons that would support a thought or action, but also that such a demand could offend against our moral sensibilities (158). So there is interdependence between the nature of the context in terms of providing a justification and the configurations of a subject who has achieved, at least more or less, a standing with regard to the immediate deliverances of the world. To ask for the reasons why one ought to in contexts of confrontation with dependence in the sense Maclntyre has in mind is itself a moral failing. Sometimes asking 'why?' is a form of moral immaturity. Central to Maclntyre's thought in Dependent Rational Animals is a concern to clarify the moral relation between human and non-human animals. There is an overall resistance to the thought that there is a radically distinctive capacity which underpins the ability to think in terms of ethics and is available only to those who have mastered concepts. Maclntyre attempts to utilise a form of broad naturalism within which to situate the transitions in thought that mark the distinction between non-rational animal thought and human subjectivity. There is a difference between these ways of existing, but there is a relation between them too. It is this relation which Maclntyre thinks is in danger of being rendered 'unintelligible' if the conditions of mature human rationality are not in

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some sense present or, perhaps, immanent in non-mature human creatures and other non-human animals (60). So despite McDowell's insistence that "we need to see ourselves as animals whose natural being is permeated with rationality" (McDowell 1996, 85), Maclntyre regards the apparent autonomy of rationality as indicating a form of unwarranted denigration of the rational capacities of non-human creatures. Non-linguistic, non-concept-using creatures respond to the world and to other creatures on the basis of their classifications and interpretations, and can make and correct mistakes and in so doing enjoy a form of rationality (Maclntyre 1999, 60-61). In Dependent Rational Animals Maclntyre expresses dissatisfaction with what he sees as a bifurcated naturalism in McDowell. McDowell thinks that infants and other non-speaking (non concept-using) creatures exist in a relevantly nonrational manner - reasons as such are not available to them. These creatures are subject to the forces constitutive of 'first nature' and the actions of these creatures are typically responses to biological forces beyond any control, decision, or reasoning in general. McDowell excludes non-concept-possessing creatures from that realm of nature whose constituents are able to adopt a stance of critical reflection on the world and its deliverances. One way to provide an account of what enables such critical orientation is to invoke the idea of reason; one dimension to the possession of rational capacities is indicated by an ability to withdraw from the immediate deliverances of experience and be able to make up one's mind as to whether the world is as it appears to be. The nature of his withdrawal is not immediately obvious. Stepping-back from the relevant content might be interpreted as part of adopting an agnostic attitude about that content; that is, a state reached of bracketing the content in such a way so as to effect a critical appraisal of its meaning and implications. A subsequent commitment may then be entered as to whether or not the content adequately represents what it purports to be of. To open a space of appraisal in this way requires the possession of rationality and thus the ability to make free and responsible judgements. Gadamer defends a robust conception of the ability to withdraw from experience. For Gadamer, the possibility of a 'rising freedom' from the environment (as opposed to 'the world') requires language: "Unlike all other living creatures, man's relationship to the world is characterized by freedom from environment. This freedom implies the linguistic constitution of the world. Both belong together. To rise above the pressure of what impinges on us from the world means to have language and to have 'world'." (Gadamer 2004, 441) This model of freedom and its conditions denies that non-language-using animals possess an ability to think and act responsibly. The capacity for free and responsible thought is distinctive of humans and, at least according to McDowell, thoroughly natural. It is part of our "second nature" (McDowell 1996, 84) that we become enculturated with a sensitivity to reasons in the world and that distinctive of mature human thought is the ability to think in terms of reasons as such. Whilst an infant may act for reasons, they cannot enjoy thinking about

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reasons as such. So, amongst other things, Bildung makes possible world-bearing thought and action and is essentially connected to the conceptually grounded powers of freedom from pressure in the Gadamerian sense and so is connected to the ability to think in terms of reasons qua reasons. The critical distance made available by exercising the capacity for judgement could imply that any subsequent commitment requires explicit acts of deliberation. For Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus this commits Maclntyre to a form of intellectualism about forms of competence in practice, and this in turn imposes an irreconcilable dualism about the ways in which competence in practice emerge (Dreyfus/Dreyfus 1991, 239). This is significant because it is related to a dualism which Maclntyre thinks undermines McDowell's account of the relation between first- and second-nature, and how mature rationality could possibly emerge from a way of existing exhausted by biological determination. For Maclntyre, it is McDowell's conceptualist prejudice that makes philosophically obscure and potentially morally questionable the relation between the relevant orders of nature. That is, the attempt to provide the appropriate sort of naturalistic account of subjective development renders mysterious how non-concept-using natural creatures get to be concept-using natural creatures. Those who share Maclntyre's concerns here are likely to see McDowell's distinction between 'first' and 'second' nature as inflating the problem. According to Knight "Maclntyre's ethics is now informed by a robust philosophical realism" (Knight 2007, 201). Whilst it may be the case that the specific content of intra-cultural practices and norms for evaluation are contingent and local, the understandings made available by inhabitation of local practices are constrained, ultimately, by formal features of human nature. This is the case with, say, colour concepts and linguistic practice which are related to biological makeup that enables but does not determine the range of social uses to which the specific linguistic practice is put (Maclntyre 2006, 43). So there might be a realism about the natural constraints to which human thought and discourse is subject but the realism in question is also connected to the social. This puts into question the realist platitude that there is a way the world is 'anyway' to which our thought is answerable. Although it may be tempting to understand the natural constraint in question here to be 'there anyway' it does not seem possible to construe the socially grounded form of realism in this way. Along with Maclntyre's apparent commitment to 'robust realism' Knight also claims that McDowell "wishes to reconceptualize a robust philosophical realism" (Knight 2007, 205). That is "[t]o reconcile 'is' and 'ought', world and mind [...] neither epistemologically nor within any architectonic theory but therapeutically [... ]" (205).1 By reconditioning Aristotle's account of the metaphysics of subjectivity we can take seriously the thought that the world is a normative world and that we know about it through experience, whilst not undercutting our right to the understanding made available to us by the natural sciences.

1

McDowell has described his own stance as "anti-anti-realism" (McDowell 1998, viii).

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3. Particularity and Tradition The forms of rational sensitivity and the dimensions along which these sensitivities are inhabited and available for criticism are candidates for answering the demand for constraint on thought and action. This constraint must be rational constraint; that is, a constraint that is reasonable in the sense of being reasons-providing and as such is internally connected to forms of a justification requirement. There may be pressure with regard to the order of priority here in terms of whether the world-bearing rational sensitivity undergirds the social dimension. This sort of pressure, though, is likely to be motivated by a deeper inclination towards forms of foundationalism. One powerful version of foundationalism in the present sense is the status and role accorded to moral principles without which, it can seem, the moral thinker is not only lost in terms of her orientation to the world and to other folks but irresponsible in so far as she has failed to form her beliefs in light of moral principles with the requisite level of transparency and universality. Resistance to the foundationalism of a principles model is sometimes expressed by appealing to the non-inferential character of moral awareness. In moral epistemology the idiom of 'seeing' and 'grasping' is popular for writers who want to stress the immediate or direct character of our moral knowledge. Versions of this idea might be motivated by reflecting on the phenomenology of such episodes where seeing that a person is in urgent need is a form of non-inferential awareness. Emphasizing the immediacy of some of our moral knowledge suggests, according to 'moral particularists', that principles are unnecessary for competent moral thought. Under one interpretation particularism encourages us to attend to the details of individual cases without the need for principles to guide our ethical thought and reasoning. Moral knowledge and expertise in judgement will be grounded not in recognition and manipulation of principles, but in appreciation of the unique salience irreducibly embedded in context. It seems as though Maclntyre shares some core particularist commitments. It is possible to identify two very broad schools of particularism, one that turns on metaphysical considerations about the nature of reasons, and another which emerges from reflections about the nature of moral knowledge and subjectivity. A standing objection to some expressions of this first form of particularism is its apparent failure to provide a persuasive account of moral competence or agency across a range of cases. According to the particularism of Jonathan Dancy "[t]here is nothing that one brings to [a] new situation other than a contentless ability to discern what matters where it matters" (Dancy 1993, 50). More recently Dancy suggests that this ability involves our capacity to make judgements (Dancy 2004, 144). It is not clear the extent to which the appeal to judgment is ultimately an advance here, but central to Dancy's approach is the thought that the relevant capacity or ability requires actualization over time. The 'contentless ability' is a product of moral education (Dancy 1993, 50). A pressing issue for the sort of particularism in view is whether it can provide a compelling account of how such education and formation over time can furnish agents with an ability which

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is grounded in that education although not determined by it or condemned to merely repeat its lessons. Maclntyre appreciates that a moral epistemology which rests on principles is not on its own sufficiently convincing, and he also denies that we ought to restrict our attention only to the particularities of circumstance. In After Virtue Maclntyre claims that human subjectivity requires the range of substantive and particular contexts provided by membership of communities. Nevertheless, it is by negotiating between particularity and universality that moral subjectivity develops in a distinctively multidimensional sense: "Without [... ] moral particularities to begin from there would never be anywhere to begin; but it is in moving forward from such particularity that the search for the good, for the universal, consists." (Maclntyre 1985, 221) But: "When men and women identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily with and too completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually behave worse than they would otherwise do." (221) So the particular and the universal are interdependent and agents need to maintain the importance of both. Historical embodiment is a condition of human subjectivity. Maclntyre claims that as well as being "born with a past" we are inducted into practices which "always have histories" (221) and which are intimately related to the nature of the present and the future. There is a certain form of realism about tradition such that as an embodied historical subject, an agent is the bearer of a tradition whether they like it or not and whether they recognise it or not (221). As Maclntyre explicitly points out in After Virtue tradition is not a mode of shelter from or a form of rejection of reason but its condition and, through active and critical participation, the limits of what have previously been made thinkable by that tradition can be overcome. What I want to emphasise here is how the forms of participation can furnish agents with the ability to achieve the kind of non-inferential rational awareness of dependence which Maclntyre discusses in Dependent Rational Animals. Maclntyre emphasises that the virtue relevant to expressing practical reasoning manifests in a capacity for judgement rather than in an ability to manufacture particular inferences on the basis of prior knowledge of universals. Judgement in this sense is a way of knowing how to select from a stack of maxims and knowing how to apply them in particular contexts (223). It is worth noting, however, that there are still processes of selection which Maclntyre thinks are needed for the operation of judgement. The selections made by a morally sensitive person are not arbitrary although neither are they rule-governed in a mechanistic way. Learning how to make these sorts of judgements is part of what it is to engage in a tradition, and it is mistaken to think that all learning is the learning of rules which determine successful or unsuccessful judgements about a given

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subject-matter. In addition perhaps acts of selection in this sense conflict with the apparently non-inferential modes of awareness achieved by those who can immediately see that a person is in need of help. It does not seem entirely right to think that in these situations a person selects from a stack of maxims. However, it is also worth remembering that partly constitutive of moral sensitivity and the capacity for moral judgement is the ability to open a critical distance between the object of judgement and the range of features which would warrant that judgement, or perhaps provide reason to withhold it or to form a different judgement. Rational participation in a tradition includes the range of possible stances of criticism that could be adopted with respect to the nature of the tradition, and the ability to participate in a critical way is perhaps a broader instance of the critical distance opened by reflection on the conditions of judgement in individual circumstances. There is a co-operation, then, between forms of noninferential awareness of moral saliences and the critical distance which can be effected at the level of individual agents. Furthermore, it is likely that there is a co-operation between the ability to critically reflect on one's own episodes of judgement and participation in a tradition. It seems to me as though the particular and the general are co-operative in any adequate understanding of the place of reflection and deliberation either about the here and now, or about the shape of one's life as a whole. Some think that holding on to both these forms of perspective is crucial for the possibility of making moral and political progress. For instance, Martha Nussbaum claims that knowing when to adopt a so-called theoretical perspective can itself help to mobilize the conceptual resources to make things better. Her example is the progression in thought and culture from a state where the idea of 'marital rape' was a form of conceptual confusion. Here, crucial reconceptualizations of the status and role of persons within the bond of marriage were made available precisely through adopting a theoretical perspective (Nussbaum 2000, 249). Detached and theoretical approaches to moral aspects are interdependent with the uncritical, untheorized (often expert) patterns of thought and action exhibited by members of a community. So an important question here is not whether it is the theoretical or the practical sphere which is more basic, but about the reasons why we ought to adopt a certain perspective and not a different one in a given circumstance. 2

4. Actuality and Perspective Maclntyre would sympathize with an understanding of the place of rules according to which they are deeply connected to moral subjectivity. Appreciating the importance of rules does not, however, imply that contextual details or particu2 The point here is relevant to the particular/universal negotiation. One issue is whether, as a matter of fact, humans actually do perform this sort of negotiation in the processes of developing moral subjectivity. Another (although related) issue is whether the negotiation is performed in better or worse ways. Whilst in some contexts it is important to take a very localised and particular perspective, other times it is important to adopt a more general perspective. Knowing which to adopt is a skill that, presumably, can be transmitted and exercised through participation in a culture.

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lar sensitivities are of secondary importance, and the existence of rules and their role in constraining moral thought and action is not incompatible with broadly particularist inclinations. The issue is not one about whether or not there are rules, but about the way in which their origins and normative authority is conceived. Contemporary particularism finds support in Aristotelian lessons about the insufficiency of bare rule-following to provide an adequate account of what moral knowledge consists in or of how guidance in practical matters is offered or achieved. Maclntyre writes that "Rule-following will often be involved in knowing how to respond rightly, but no rule or set of rules by itself ever determines how to respond rightly [... ] [kjnowing how to act virtuously always involves more than rule-following." (Maclntyre 1999, 93) But Maclntyre's interest in the metaphysics of rules and by implication human subjectivity is also directed at undermining a politically significant misunderstanding of rules. For example, as in cases where the rules have become subordinated to or made to serve power (103). In such circumstances human beings become merely subject to rules rather than as partly responsible for their existence and normative jurisdiction. A calculative conception of rules and their place in moral thought and reasoning is inappropriate as the basis upon which we can assess the nature of a human life. The capacity to reach a judgement about the nature of one's life as a whole, or near enough as a whole, is distinctive about being minded in a way like other mature humans. This is not just a point about the sheer complexity of submitting the variety of features to a rule-governed analysis; it is about the nature of life as a whole. Reflective attention directed toward one's life in this way involves a sensitivity toward the history of one's life not as a static series of past events but as a dynamic history which informs the present and the future (Maclntyre 1985, 221). In Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle discusses the transition of thought between 'the fact' and 'the reason', or between 'the that' and 'the because', as part of the attempt to clarify the good for man. His interest there is in identifying the starting point for reflection and he suggests that we must start with what is evident to us: 'the that'. Nevertheless, reflection on what is evident to us does not then take the range of 'thats' and construct some unifying conception of how they fit together, but is more a process of revealing the rational relations that are immanent. Maclntyre's insistence that subjectivity emerges from within a tradition suggests that what is revealed as the rational relations that constitute 'the because' is implicit in what is evident to us as the starting point of reflection. Thinking in terms of the because or of the reason is valuable because it can foster an understanding of how one's apparently discrete episodes of knowledge that, say, 'this action is called for here' are related; action resulting from discrete episodes of knowledge can then be regarded by agents as manifesting in practice a "coherent scheme for a life" (McDowell 1995, 213). The transition between the that and the because does not require an external standpoint from which the scheme of a life can be evaluated. The world initially shows up as value-laden and considering the world as devoid of meaning and lacking normative structures takes intellectual effort and, although crucial

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for the success of certain projects, is neither epistemologically more basic nor metaphysically more authentic as a way of conceiving the world. Part of Maclntyre's realist ambitions is the thought that we can be confronted with moral reasons that exist in a subject-independent sense and which have rational purchase on the thoughts and actions of human beings. But the possibility that an individual is able to exercise a sensitivity toward moral reasons is grounded in shared commitments and implicit structures of normativity; it is only from within a determinate mode of life which is shaped by socially organised structures of commitments that contexts of moral salience show up. Sincerity of reflection, for example, is not measurable with reference to the distance at which our prior commitments are held. In other words, genuine reflective moments do not presuppose a radical separation between the reflecting agent and those prior commitments and schemes of value which constitute moral subjectivity. The idea that gaining access to how the world really is requires an ahistorical and abstracted conception of the world unfettered by the human perspective, is connected to the thought that reflecting on whether or not 'this is a reason to requires bracketing just those things which constitute moral subjectivity and rational activity, thus suspending the very conditions of moral reflection itself. "Rational enquiry about my practical beliefs, relationships, and commitments is [... ] not something that I undertake by attempting to separate myself from the whole set of my beliefs, relationships, and commitments and to view them from some external standpoint. It is something that we undertake from within our shared mode of practice." (Maclntyre 1999, 157) Rational enquiry as such, for Maclntyre, is essentially social and we could add that the interpersonal conditions essential to engaging in rational enquiry are likewise central to the possibility of achieving sensitivity to those moral circumstances that demand action from us; that is, moral experience of the world. McDowell claims that it is only from within an ethical outlook that reasons are visible for an agent, and that the rational force of moral demands come in to view only through those ways of reflecting to which thinking in terms of moral demands is central; "one can reflect only from the midst of the way of thinking one is reflecting about" (McDowell 1996, 81). This is supposed to be a relatively general account of reflection and thinking. Maclntyre's insistence that rationality is not something possessed or exercised in isolation from history, or in isolation from others, is combined with the claim that engagement in the relevant ways of thinking and doing that constitute practices in the technical sense include a critical stance with regard to the nature of that practice. In a related way McDowell claims that any way of thinking is under a standing obligation to critically reflect on the standards it takes itself to be governed by (McDowell 1996, 81). For Maclntyre the critical stance affords a way of blocking unquestioning acceptance of convention. Critical reflection from within our shared mode of practice involves seeking out "what the strongest and soundest objections are to this or that particular belief or concept that have up to this point been taken for granted" (Maclntyre 1999, 157). Undertaking this task does not require adopting an

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external standpoint. Submitting one's own ethical outlook to reflective criticism is a defeasible method of correcting mistakes in it. Even if the particular beliefs and concepts under question survive critical scrutiny, errors and prejudice can nevertheless remain. Both Maclntyre and McDowell emphasise that ethical thinking qua rational activity is never 'complete' and they emphasise this partly because they share a sense of the importance of history and the impossibility of a vindication of ethical thought from outside of ethical thought. It is natural, nowadays at least, to think that tradition-centred accounts of moral knowledge face a challenge of how to account for progress. Crudely, the thought is that contemplation of the way things are will never deliver knowledge of the way things ought to be. The Humean attitude here is one that Maclntyre has done much to subvert. But avoiding Hume's law should not imply that we retreat in the opposite direction and identify the is with the ought. Whatever progress is to be made it seems misguided to think that we can identify in which direction to move and know how to get there from here by regarding the data from an external perspective. Although we may with Maclntyre want to defend a form of realism, it need not be the case that this must invoke the idea of a reality standing over against subjectivity. A dynamic form of realism is, like mature moral subjectivity, immanently critical. Moral experience of the world is made possible through initiation into those standing practices which constitute part of the world into which we are initiated. A commitment to a moral realism can be expressed through conceiving the relevant reality as available to participants of practices and traditions. A command of the way things are, our initial pre-philosophical acquaintance with the 'facts' or with 'the that', must already be capable of providing the critical resources to effect change. We need to acknowledge that actual initiation into actual practices is crucial for moral knowledge and reasoning. Nevertheless, as Sabina Lovibond suggests: "we can simultaneously insist that nothing more than this is needed in order to render intelligible our ability to see the morally compelling qualities of a way of life never yet realised in practice—or conversely, the morally unacceptable features of a way of life that currently exists [... ] what we shall think of ourselves as having come to perceive is an objective reason for seeking to bring about a change in the material, or institutional, basis of our moral world. Yet the possibility of that perception must indeed derive from our earlier induction into the moral world as currently constituted. The language (or, more broadly, the system of meaningful behaviour), mastery of which constitutes us as participants in consensual morality, must itself provide the apparatus we need for the purposes of critical thinking about moral questions." (Lovibond 1983, 197) Maclntyre gives central place to the intersubjective starting-point for human being in the world and for rational enquiry. The actual conditions which we are initiated into and participate in do not stand outside subjectivity although they stand outside of any given subject. It is possible to acknowledge the sense in which there is a domain of rational requirements which are subject-independent,

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whilst simultaneously being committed to the idea that the domain of such requirements is constitutively connected to human subjectivity. Maclntyre's account could be advanced by attending to our experience of the world as well as to the conditions for rational enquiry. It is notable that the resources to encourage this advance are not in opposition to Maclntyre's perspective. Attention directed toward our experience of the world can, potentially, provide a supplement to an emphasis on the intersubjective structures that condition our relationships and forms of understanding. Maclntyre and McDowell regard forms of enculturation as necessary for moral knowledge but whereas McDowell attempts to combine this with an account of our experience of the world, Maclntyre does not—at least explicitly. This can be explained in part by drawing attention to the different senses of tradition which are invoked yet central to both accounts, and to those that they reflect and inspire, is the conviction that moral questions cannot be examined independently from the historical conditions that in part generate such questions, and which help to shape the range of possible responses to them. Among the features that distinguish the respective accounts is the way which McDowell's emphasis on tradition is related to his empiricist aspirations. In order to save a coherent account of how thought is rationally constrained by the world the deliverances of experience must be rational and, in turn, the rational capacities which are actualised in sensory experience are, in part, the product of immersion in a tradition. The insistence on the place of tradition in an account of our experience of the world is supposed to protect against the idea that rationality can be exercised in a radically individualistic way (McDowell 1996, 98-99). Individualism here is to be avoided not just because it can conflict with understanding traditions as social phenomena, but because it threatens to undermine rational thought as such and in particular the idea that reason is needed to experience the world. McDowell's sense of tradition is intrinsically related to an account of our relatedness to the external world. Maclntyre stresses the plurality of traditions and their interrelations and oppositions as competing forms of rational activity and thought (Maclntyre 1988) and is less concerned to detail how tradition is related to experience of the world. Maclntyre's insistence that we must avoid understanding traditions as insulated from challenge or opposition is right but the conditions which make possible adequate responsiveness to challenges need not exclude our awareness of moral reality. McDowell claims that in favourable cases a tradition must "include an honest responsiveness to reflective criticism" (McDowell 1996, 99) and that each generation which inherits a tradition is under a standing obligation to engage in critical reflection (126). Maclntyre might not disagree that reflective and critical capacities are intrinsic to what it is to participate in a tradition, but the apparently one-dimensional understanding of 'tradition' in McDowell's account departs clearly from the pluralist framework defended by Maclntyre. Although Maclntyre rejects McDowell's conceptualism about rational awareness the types of moral understanding and knowledge that Maclntyre examines in Dependent Rational Animals, for example, could be fruitfully explored by drawing on how tradition enables rationality and rational enquiry and also how it enables experience.

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5. Concluding Remarks Maclntyre's critique of contemporary moral subjectivity and contemporary moral theorizing is radical partly because of its ambitions. Central to the framework offered in the attempt to expose the deleterious nature of modern capitalism is a set of distinctively 'un-homely' feelings which allegedly characterise the modern agent; feelings such as a sense of the irreconcilability of the logical form in which moral and political discourse is articulated with the relevant metaphysical conditions that would vindicate this form. By adumbrating the natural condition of human subjectivity and its internal relation to the possession and exercise of virtue, Maclntyre suggests a disruptive form of naturalism. The appeal to the background structures of normativity that underpin our naturalrational development—the sort of development brought into view by the Bildung model—is potentially subversive in the sense that it can illuminate and challenge the threats to moral subjectivity posed by modernity. 3 Both Maclntyre and McDowell face a challenge to provide an account of how our thoughts and actions are answerable to rational constraints that are external to a subject but not external to subjectivity. Maclntyre criticises what he takes to be McDowell's requirement that the availability of moral reasons is conditional on the possession and command of concepts. This threatens to make the moral domain too independent of the natural-historical development in which humans and non-human creatures are involved. Reconciling the idea that tradition is required for moral subjectivity with the thought that this subjectivity is rationally constrained by the world is a difficult task, but one that would have important ethical and political consequences. Whilst Maclntyre and McDowell differ in important ways, their respective accounts of the place of tradition shed light on the possibility of reconceptualizing our relation to tradition and our relation to the world. Central here is how the resources to enable such reconceptualizations are immanent if not explicit in the actual conditions in which moral subjectivity is now placed.4

Bibliography Dancy, J. (1993), Moral Reasons, Oxford — (2004), Ethics Without Principles, Oxford Dreyfus, H./Dreyfus, S. (1991), Towards a Phenomenology of Ethical Expertise, in: Human Studies 14, 229-250 Gadamer, H-G. (2004), Truth and Method, London Hooker, B . / M . Little (eds.) (2000), Moral Particularism, Oxford Knight, K. (2007), Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to Maclntyre, Cambridge 3

This 'subversive naturalism' is suggested and discussed by Lovibond 2006. A version of this paper was delivered at the 'Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance, Utopia' conference in June 2007, at London Metropolitan University. Many thanks to the organizers and to all those participants who made it such a stimulating event. In particular, I am very grateful for conversations with Seiriol Morgan and to Kelvin Knight who provided extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft. 4

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Lovibond, S. (1983), Realism and Imagination in Ethics, Oxford — (2006), Practical Reason and its Animal Precursors, in: European Journal of Philosophy 14(2), 262-273 Maclntyre, A. (1985), After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Indiana — (1999), Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, London — (2006), Colors, Cultures, and Practices, in: The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1, Cambridge, 24-51 McDowell, J. (1995), Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotle's Ethics, in: Heinaman, R. (ed.), Aristotle and Moral Realism, San Francisco, 201-218 — (1996), Mind and World, Cambridge/MA — (1998), Mind, Value and Reality, Cambridge/MA Nussbaum, M. (2000), Why Practice Needs Ethical Theory, in: Moral Particularism, Hooker, B./Little, M. (eds.), 227-255. Wiggins, D. (1996), Replies, in: Identity, Truth and Value: Essays for David Wiggins, Oxford

Analyse & Kritik 30/2008 (© Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart) p. 157-175 Seiriol

Morgan

Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On Maclntyre on the Modern Self

Abstract: This paper focuses on Alasdair Maclntyre's critique of the modern self, arguing that we are not as bereft of the resources to engage in rational thought about value as he makes out. I claim that Maclntyre's argument presumes that philosophy has a much greater power to shape individuals and cultures than it in fact has. In particular, he greatly exaggerates the extent to which the character of the modern self has been an effect of the philosophical views of the self that have been influential during the period, leading him to be overly pessimistic about its nature and powers. Finally, I argue that Maclntyre has provided us with no strong reason for thinking that a moral tradition structured by modern values could not be viable.

0. After

Virtue: Thesis and Reception

Certain curious works of philosophy face an unusual problem, of how to account for the success of their own reception. It seems to me that After Virtue is amongst them. 1 For it is clearly undeniable that the book struck a definite chord with its audience, so much so t h a t it remains extremely influential over twenty-five years after its publication, and that many of its readers found its pessimistic theses to be an eloquent and persuasive statement of the modern condition. But the worry is that precisely this positive reception casts doubt upon the t r u t h of some of its central claims. If modernity so comprehensively robs those whose selfhood it structures of the resources needed to grasp and articulate its failings, how come so many of those same people were able to recognise the value of a book which does just t h a t , and indeed to welcome it with such enthusiasm? One might be inclined to think this criticism a cheap shot. It must certainly be very irritating to be targeted by such an argument. Just imagine: you have what you consider to be a compelling and challenging vision of the nature of our society, and the lives we live within it, and then you are told by some critic that the picture must be a distortion, just because you can articulate it. But it is usually irritating to have one's flights of fantasy curtailed, so a mere psychological * I'd like to thank the participants at the June 2007 Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance, Utopia conference at London Metropolitan University, at which this paper was first delivered, and Kelvin Knight in particular, for advice and encouragement. I'm also grateful to the Philosophy Department at the University of Bristol and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for jointly funding a period of research leave during which I worked on this article. 1 Maclntyre 1985. Unless otherwise noted, all page references in the text are to this work.

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unwillingness to accept such a line of argument would in no way undermine it, as I'm sure Maclntyre would acknowledge. And it is also noteworthy that this is an argumentative strategy that Maclntyre himself has made use of, in his notorious critique of Marcuse:

"The central oddity of One Dimensional Man is perhaps that it should have been written at all. For if its thesis were true, then we should have to ask how the book came to have been written and we would certainly have to inquire whether it would find any readers. Or rather, to the extent that the book does find readers, to that extent Marcuse's thesis does not hold." (Maclntyre 1970, 70)

What's more, in a strange tempting of fate, the first edition of After Virtue itself predicted its own deadborn fall from the press, at least beyond a small circle of like-minded iconoclasts (Maclntyre 1981, 4-5). Surely then it is legitimate to ask why this did not happen, and what we should conclude from this perhaps unexpected result. In my view the issue of After Virtue's reception does raise a genuine question, and one which Maclntyre has not yet adequately addressed. One of the aims of this paper is to suggest why he faces it. This will be a corollary of the main aim of the paper, which is to draw out and critique the account of the self that Maclntyre offers in After Virtue, an account which underlies both his trenchant attack on modernity, and his suggested positive programme for overcoming the modern condition (or at least, the positive possibilities for doing so that he hints at). In what follows I am going to take issue with this critique of modernity, and contest his characterisation of the modern self. I would not want to deny that Maclntyre has helped us make some very important advances in moral and political philosophy, and that much of his critique of modernity hits the mark. But in my view his more radical conclusions are overstated, in particular his claim about the need to subvert the whole enterprise and return to pre-Enlightenment modes of evaluative thought. Nor are modern individuals as bereft of the resources to engage in rational thought about value as Maclntyre makes out. We aren't the emotivist selves he says we are, in any of the senses in which that could be understood. As far as a general philosophical conception of selfhood goes, I agree in large measure with Maclntyre about the conditions required to give a self a substantial 'identity', or 'depth', and also that this is a necessary condition for rational moral thought to take place. But the direction of my reasoning is the reverse of his. Maclntyre argues that the modern self essentially lacks the necessary grounding for such conditions, and as a result it can be no more than a 'ghostly' insubstantial entity (1982). By contrast, I deny that we are such entities, and so conclude that we must share in these conditions in at least some measure, despite being the products of the modern world.

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1. The Enlightenment Project and the Erosion of Selfhood Maclntyre begins After Virtue by advancing a 'disquieting suggestion', that our current situation with respect to morality is analogous to that we would be facing with respect to scientific knowledge, should some sort of catastrophic societal breakdown disrupt the teaching and learning of the sciences for several generations (1-2). After such a catastrophe, fragments and survivals would mean that people would still be aware of central scientific concepts, such as charge, electron, relativity, and so on, and might try to use them in their discourse about the world. But they could only be used at best in an impoverished fashion, because they are largely meaningless outside the background frameworks which give them sense, frameworks which ex hypothesi are no longer available to these post-apocalypse people. According to Maclntyre, our moral discourse now is similarly fragmented, with the result that current moral discourse and argument has a similarly incoherent character. This idea—that a moral concept can carry the appearance of sense, and yet in fact lack it, due to the destruction of the background framework which is required to provide it—is not original to Maclntyre, having been earlier advanced with respect to moral obligation by Elizabeth Anscombe. Anscombe argued that the notion of obligation requires for its sense a lawgiver to whom one is obligated, and hence a background theological framework which has largely disappeared in the modern world, at least in any form upon which significant numbers of people can agree. Consequently it has lost its original sense and its contemporary use is confused, she argued (1958, 5-6). Maclntyre's more radical suggestion is that this is the case for the bulk of moral concepts used and arguments advanced in the modern age. The result has been moral cacophony. Whatever their avowed opinions, people in the modern world behave in public and private as if emotivism were true. Emotivism is the metaethical position in moral philosophy that claims that moral judgements are expressions of personal and ultimately arbitrary emotion, and so at root are not amenable to rational defence or criticism. As a claim about the meaning of moral utterances, as proposed by the original emotivists, the position is palpably absurd, as Maclntyre points out; however, as a claim about the use of moral utterance in the contemporary world it is spot on, he argues (12-14). No-one ever wins any moral argument, at least by rational means. Since the characteristic modern moral concepts of 'rights' and 'utility' are both fictions (70), they are useless for converging upon rational moral progress, and those appealing to them do no more than simply hurl their claims at one another. Certain older concepts which are survivals from discarded schemes are still appealed to in moral argument, but they are various and disconnected and frequently also incommensurable, so their legitimacy is easily just rejected by those for whom the conclusions are uncongenial. As a consequence the characteristic 'moral scene' of modernity is interminable disagreement, combined with ongoing protest, since although no-one can rationally win moral arguments, no-one can lose one either, so those whose views are marginalised politically, by the power or weight of numbers of the opposition, feel their opinions to be merely repressed and not

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defeated. Unsurprisingly then, indignation is the corresponding characteristic moral sentiment of modernity. So people in the modern world inhabit what might aptly be called an emotivist culture. And that culture correspondingly shapes the nature of the individuals that inhabit it, so that selfhood in the modern world adopts a distinctive character. Unsurprisingly Maclntyre's description of the emotivist self is a deeply pessimistic and unattractive one. On his account the central distinguishing feature of the selves of modernity is precisely our lack of essential features of any substance; our sheer ghostly insubstantiality is what defines us. Since it lacks any essential features, no goals or ties or social roles are necessary for any emotivist self to be the self that it is. And lacking as it does any such necessary ends, the only thing for it to be in itself is the bare power to assess and adopt them as it sees fit. As Maclntyre puts it, the emotivist self is "in and for itself nothing" (32). Consequently it cannot possess a rational history, and so cannot have any substantial unity over time (33). Indeed, these may all be ways of saying the same thing. To be sure, people appear to pursue extended projects and temporally integrated goals. But for the emotivist self, what looks like rational continuity can be no more than contingent reaffirmation or extension of preference, since there are no authoritative grounds beyond its own individual choice that constrain the course of life it must adopt; whatever its goals and projects in the past, the only ties they can have on the self come through its decision to continue in them in the present and into the future. As Maclntyre notes, some modern philosophers have celebrated this condition as the essence of a robust freedom which is required for us to be self-governing agents (31). But Maclntyre's portrayal of the agent in this condition suggests that this kind of freedom is not worth having, if it can even be described as freedom and agency at all upon reflection. There is a thus a deep sense of alienation associated with the picture of the modern self that Maclntyre provides us with, as the flimsiness of its commitments attach a certain meaninglessness even to its successes. Success for an emotivist self can only be to achieve the satisfaction of contingent ungrounded preference, or to occupy some social role in a manner judged to be effective. Since neither of these has any rational grounding, each could equally well be different and none the worse for that, and this injects an alienating arbitrariness into the heart of the modern individual's life. One might feel like asking: what is it about us that makes us like this? Various modern philosophers give answers, alluding to the ultimate impotence of human reason in the practical sphere, the inescapable vertigo that human freedom brings with it, and so on. But Maclntyre thinks that the right way to phrase the question is rather to ask "How did we get like this?", since he holds of course that the emotivist selves of late modernity have the character they do because of the effects of a historical process, a process that must be understood as one of relentless decline. The essentials of his historical narrative are as follows. On Maclntyre's account of it, ethics had a clear place within premodern thought, as part of a teleological conception of human nature first articulated by the Greek classical tradition (52-53). This conception had three elements: human nature, human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos, and ethics as the bridge from

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one to the other. As the classical tradition became fused with Christianity in the medieval period a new conception of ethics, as obedience to divine command, was introduced. This did not transform the substance of the scheme, however, since the notion of the human telos—now conceived of in supernatural as well as natural terms—is equally at home within Christian theology as it was in ancient ethics, and the precepts of divine law and those rules which must be followed in order for a human being to be able to achieve his good were held to be one and the same. Two intellectual currents arose at the end of the Middle Ages which between them shattered the firm foundations that ethics had enjoyed within ancient thought and the medieval synthesis (53-54). The first was Protestant Christianity, which undercut the classical tradition's confidence in the power of reason to direct human beings towards the good. According to Luther, Calvin and others, the fall of man crippled our rational capacities, so that in our state of original sin it is simply directed by our passions, for good or evil. Indeed, in the absence of assistance in the form of divine grace, such direction inevitably will be for evil, so the only hope for a human being is faith, and complete personal submission to the revealed divine will. So whilst retaining a teleological conception of human nature, Protestantism insisted that this nature is in no way amenable to rational enquiry. The second was the rise of modern science, as Aristotle's metaphysically-based teleological account of the natural processes of physics was attacked and ultimately totally defeated by the mechanistic accounts of Galileo, Descartes, Newton and their followers. In the face of that victory in the natural sciences, the notion of teleology as such was widely held to be discredited. This of course struck at the foundations of classical and medieval thought about ethics. It was also easy for even those later rejecting Protestantism's pessimistic fideism to inadvertently retain a conception of the powers of reason which had been shaped by its agenda, as did Hume, and even Kant to some degree. This compounded antagonism to the classical tradition. So for these and other reasons it appeared clear to philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the classical tradition's understanding of the foundations of ethics had to be abandoned. And so they were faced with the task of providing a new one, since without significant exception they had no disagreement with the bulk of the moral precepts their societies had inherited from their Christian culture, such as those forbidding murder, theft and the like. Having expelled teleology of any kind from their list of respectable notions, and correspondingly lacking any substantive conception of practical rationality, these philosophers were unable to avail themselves of the idea of teleologically realised human nature, and consequently were obliged to attempt to derive the various obligations from human nature as such. This was the Enlightenment project in moral philosophy. Various attempts were made, appealing to shared sympathetic passions, the formal features of rational decision-making, the psychology of happiness, and so on. All these attempts failed. Sentimentalists found themselves unable to explain why someone even partially lacking a sympathetic temperament should be bound by moral rules; rationalists like Kant couldn't explain why abstract reason pre-

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eludes self-eentredness, or even gives the rules determinate content. Whilst the particular inadequacies of individual versions of the project were revealed in the course of internecine conflict, there is a general historical explanation why they were all doomed. The very idea of trying to derive such precepts from human nature as such would have struck ancient and medieval philosophers as confused, because the moral strictures were precisely supposed to be at odds with 'untutored' human nature, as they would have described it; instead, living the ethical life is the way for a human being to transform that nature into one in which the human telos is realised. Consequently, the Enlightenment project as such was bound to fail, since it involved attempting to reconcile two things that had been "expressly designed to be discrepant with each other" (55). Moral philosophy in the Enlightenment's wake tried to revive notions of teleology and categorical law, in utilitarianism and deontology respectively; so concepts such as 'utility' and 'natural right' were introduced into moral discourse. These however are illegitimate children; for the original notions relied for their sense upon a shared picture of the world and humanity's place within it which the modern world has rejected. Lacking the background frameworks required to make these kind of concepts intelligible, their later simulacra can have no determinate referents, and so can be no more than moral fictions, and as such their use can only serve to mask some other interest of those who make use of them, characteristically both from the audience, and the speaker as well. Whilst other thinkers struggled, usually without fully realising it, the much more acute philosopher Nietzsche clearly perceived the exhaustion of the whole project. Concluding that no attempt to derive morality from any aspect of human nature succeeds, and taking the Enlightenment project to be the legitimate successor of the classical tradition, he rejects the idea that morality can have any rational justification. At the same time he takes himself to expose every moral demand as a groundless assertion of arbitrary individual will wearing the mask of objectivity, something sufficiently at odds with the moral outlook's self-conception that it cannot survive recognition of it. Hence he concludes that those clear-sighted individuals with the courage to confront this shocking truth should abandon morality altogether. Meanwhile, as philosophy's failures multiplied, moral discourse underwent a slow but ultimately comprehensive fragmentation, with the dire consequences outlined at the beginning of this section. In Maclntyre's view the whole process has been a largely unmitigated disaster, and the so-called advances of modernity have been anything but. The pursuit of freedom and the fetishisation of the individual have led us instead to nihilism. Whilst he is occasionally willing to ascribe some worth to modern values and institutions (e.g. 1988, 104-105), his more consistent inclination has been to reject the evaluative thrust of the whole epoch as a mistake. For instance, he can be seen explicitly advocating the defence of a "premodern view of morals and politics", and describing the Enlightenment project as a mistake "that should never have been attempted in the first place" (118), and these seem to represent his fundamental outlook. This is why the core of After Virtue poses the stark and unnerving choice, "Aristotle or Nietzsche?". In Maclntyre's view the individualistic assumptions at the root of modernity's

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attempt to replace premodern modes of moral thought inevitably lead in the direction of Nietzsche's amoral affirmation of the personal will; in this at least Nietzsche was right. If nihilism is to be avoided, then, the revival of premodern conceptions of selfhood and morality are essential.

2. The Self-Conception of Modernity, and its Bankruptcy This narrative will be very familiar to anyone immersed in Maclntyre's work; of course, I will need to take issue with it in order to resist his hypotheses about modern culture and the modern self. I aim to do so in two complementary ways. First, I will try to show that, insofar as I agree they actually obtained, the conditions Maclntyre identifies were not sufficient to bring about the kind of impoverishment in the self's substance and powers that he maintains has occurred. Second, I will have to say something about how substantial selfhood has in fact been maintained, since it is unclear that any default assumption of substantiality is warranted. By way of a preliminary observation, one important but insufficiently remarked aspect of Maclntyre's history is the central role he thinks philosophy is playing in all this. He is quite explicit that central events in the genesis of emotivist culture were events in the history of philosophy, particularly moral philosophy: "What I am going to suggest is that the key episodes in the social history which transformed, fragmented and, if my extreme view is correct, largely displaced morality—and so created the possibility of the emotivist self with its characteristic form of relationship and modes of utterance- were episodes in the history of philosophy, that it is only in the light of that history that we can understand how the idiosyncrasies of everyday contemporary moral discourse came to be and thus how the emotivist self was able to find a means of expression." (36) Indeed, it turns out on his account that these episodes in the history of philosophy play the major causal role in shaping the nature of the modern self. But I want to question whether we can really believe that the philosophical failures Maclntyre identifies could have such dramatic effects upon the very nature of selfhood in human beings, effecting such an impoverishment upon it as he says occurred over the modern period. In my view, Maclntyre's story of historical decline is over-intellectualist, in two ways in particular. First, he swallows too uncritically the account of the modern philosophical project provided by modernity's own philosophers. Whilst Maclntyre very skilfully draws out the implications of the conceptions of selfhood that they advance, he is too quick to conclude from this that this is what we have become, since this gives too much credence to modernity's philosophical self-understanding in the first place. Second, he overstates the power of philosophy to shape the development of culture, and for that matter of the character of a culture to determine the nature of the selves that can exist within it. But before I can develop an argument along these lines, we first need to get

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clearer about what the philosophical problems are supposed to be, since it remains somewhat murky in the narrative as I have presented it so far. After all, aside from a few specific attacks on the arguments of individual Enlightenment philosophers, which are hardly comprehensive (e.g. 43-47), the crux of the Enlightenment's problem is said to be its cack-handed failure to grasp the way that the tripartite scheme of the ancients had to fit together. But pointing out that the Enlightenment philosophers were engaged in what the ancients would have considered a quixotic enterprise establishes little by itself, since we need some further reason to suppose that it was the moderns not the ancients who were confused. It's not as though moral philosophers like Hume and Kant failed to understand what the ancients thought they were up to. They certainly did. They just rejected it, as relying on philosophically untenable presuppositions. Recall that Maclntyre argues that the Enlightenment endeavour was doomed because human nature and the precepts of morality had been specifically designed to be at odds with one another. But moral philosophers of pro-Enlightenment sympathies could reply that this misrepresents the situation, in a way which unfairly generates the sense of inevitability Maclntyre wants us to embrace. Unless one accepts a subjectivism which Maclntyre himself clearly would reject, one must accept that morality is not designed, but grasped. So we don't have a later set of people trying to understand something which had been shaped by some earlier people in some particular way, so that failing to grasp how they had done so would necessarily amount to misunderstanding its nature and purpose. We have rival attempts to apprehend the place of ethics in human life, a place it has independent of anyone's specific beliefs about that place. So the philosophical elements of the narrative as presented above in fact merely alerts us to a disagreement, and give us no grounds for siding prima facie with one party or the other, or indeed with Nietzsche. But there are certainly deeper philosophical arguments in play. In my view we can learn a lot about the problems of the modern self as Maclntyre conceives it, by comparing it to the condition of a self which he does take to have a substantial identity, and asking what that latter self is supposed to possess which the former doesn't, by virtue of which it enjoys this substantiality, and what it is about its situation that denies this to the modern self. The answer seems to be: precisely by living a life that provides it with the sense of meaning that the arbitrariness and compartmentalisation of modernity undermines. This idea of the importance of a life's meaningfulness to its subject is a partially submerged but nevertheless central concept throughout After Virtue. We might put the point like this: for Maclntyre, meaning is the material out of which substantial selfhood is constructed. And of course, for a life to be properly meaningful, certain conditions must be in place. Famously, Maclntyre's claim is that in order to transcend the alienating arbitrariness to which the modern project has led us, we need to go back to fundamentally Aristotelian modes of self-conception, of which there are three essential components: practices, the narrative unity of a life, and the notion of a moral tradition (180-225). Consider first the idea of narrative unity. Maclntyre thinks that to be able to identify oneself as a person in any substantial sense one must

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be able to narrate one's life more or less explicitly as an ongoing connected story. In performing the role of unifying an individual as a person existing across time, the story then provides the agent with a source of putative reasons-claims, over and above those associated with what the agent happens to want at any particular time, and frequently trumping them. The idea is that certain courses of action cannot be rationally performed, because doing so cannot be woven intelligibly into the story that the individual has been 'telling' as she has been living it, except in ways that consign that story to being one of failure. As an example, consider a case of a family man tempted towards adultery. His behaviour over the years has been geared towards preservation of his family unit and the well-being of its members, and has involved him in ongoing personal sacrifice for the sake of these ends. Now he has been the target of a seduction attempt by another woman, whom he strongly sexually desires. No doubt her charms loom large in his mind in comparison to what he takes for granted in the person of his wife, and so on. And so he may be powerfully motivated to have the affair, and this may even be his strongest desire. Nevertheless, whatever might be the case in this regard, in fact he has reason to reject the advance, because he cannot make this action intelligible in terms of the project with respect to which he understands his life; he cannot weave it successfully into his narrative, except as a story of weakness, failure and betrayal. For to narrate it in a positive light would necessarily cast the earlier stages of his story into unintelligibility or insincerity. Indeed, for someone like him, the fact that he wants to sleep with this other woman gives him not so much reason to do it, as those subscribing to instrumentalist conceptions of practical reason would have it, but instead reason to treat the desire itself as alien and dangerous. This conception of human personal identity as given in narrative is at least as old as Augustine, but it is also advanced by other prominent recent philosophers. For instance, when Heidegger says that 'thrown projection' is an existential attribute of Dasein he is saying much the same thing (1927, 185). But where Maclntyre differs from Heidegger and in my view provides a better account, is in his explicit insistence that personal narratives must ultimately be framed with respect to some publicly available conception of value. It is these values that provide the narrative with its grounding intelligibility, and since such meaning requires an intersubjective context, these conceptions cannot be private, but in principle need to be communicable to and sharable with others. This is the role played by practices and moral traditions, which is why they are so crucial to the picture. It is practices and traditions that function as the living repositories of the evaluative conceptions with respect to which a true narrative needs to be articulated. Practices can fulfil this role because they presuppose standards over and above an individual's beliefs and attitudes, with respect to which his efforts can be judged, and against which they can be pronounced successes or failures; for a person to open up the possibility of properly achieving a practice's internal goods, he must subject himself to public judgement. Traditions perform a similar role, but characteristically in a much more comprehensive fashion, offering standards by which we can assess whole lives, and indeed societies and cultures, and not just elements of them.

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The central point is that such a narrative can't be a purely personal one intelligible only to its subject, or else it collapses back into the arbitrariness associated with mere preferences, and the meaning and substance we might hope to bestow on a life by means of it slips through our fingers. It must be something that someone else could understand, and at least potentially endorse from a point of view more general than that of the subject who is living it. What we see in Maclntyre's work, then, is an implicit 'private language argument', put to a practical use in moral philosophy. Just as Wittgenstein argued that in the absence of a speech community sharing at least a certain level of agreement in judgements about how a word is to be used, no determinate meaning can exist, so Maclntyre thinks that neither a stable and substantial conception of value, nor the existential meaningfulness which requires it, can be sustained by an individual in the absence of a shared social conception of the point of human activities, one aspiring at least to some form of objective status, with respect to which they gain their sense. Another way to make the point would be to read Maclntyre as effectively advancing an accusation of what we might call 'moral Cartesianism' against the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment. Here's why I take the analogy to be apt: Descartes' epistemological project begins with the solitary meditator, the isolated self and its thoughts. It then tries to build up step by step from there to secure knowledge of the existence and nature of the external world, other persons and their minds, and so on. So the endeavour of enquiry for Descartes and the modern philosophers who followed him proceeds from the inside out, from ideas to the world they ostensibly represent. But of course, famously, Descartes' own attempt do this was quite unconvincing, and all the other attempts in modern philosophy to evade scepticism on this model failed. In beginning as they did within the arena of solitary consciousness, with the veil of ideas, it proved to be impossible to break through it, and achieve knowledge of an independent reality. The overthrow of Cartesianism began with Kant's Refutation of Idealism, in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (B 274-279 and xxxix-xli), and then properly got going in the work of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The strategy of all these philosophers was to reverse the direction of enquiry and argument, from 'inside-out' to 'outside-in'. Whereas Descartes and the early modern philosophers began by asking a question along the lines of "What do my ideas reveal to me of the world?" these later philosophers asked instead "What are the conditions of my experiencing the world as I do, and what can I conclude about myself and the world as a result?". It turned out that these conditions include such factors as there being a stable external world of objects existing independently of my representations of it, the existence of a languageusing community of other intelligent beings similar to me, and so on. As a result the sceptical problems which had dogged the epistemological project of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant were dissolved, as it became apparent that the assumptions that generated the problems were untenable. Or so Kant, Wittgenstein and the others argued. And in the process various things were learnt which led to substantial changes in the modern self-conception. For instance, once it became apparent that the range of thoughts available to an individual is

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circumscribed at least in part by the communal linguistic practices into which she has been initiated, the notion of the rational self-sufficiency of thought came under considerable pressure. In effect, Maclntyre thinks that modern moral philosophy, as well as epistemology and philosophy of mind, faces much the same problem. Just as the modern epistemological project began with the self-consciousness and ideas of the subject, so the modern moral project starts with the individual, with his private desires, emotions and allegedly context-independent powers of rationality. From there it tries to show that any such individual is rationally committed to a universal morality, encompassing concern and respect for other people, the community at large, and so on. But all such attempts have failed. And they were bound to fail, since at best such a reasoner could arrive there only contingently, if moral behaviour happened to satisfy his deepest desires and express his most powerful emotions, because any conception of practical rationality suited to an individual so conceived will be too thin to do the work required of it. It is only through living a life immersed in and structured by communally intelligible values, and hence within the communities and traditions in which this must be based, that a person can come to fully understand the value of morality at all, and indeed, have any genuinely robust reasons at all, since it has turned out that the modern individual is the emotivist self, and the emotivist self merely has preferences. So Descartes was asking the wrong question. And he was doing so because of an unquestioned yet flawed assumption about the self-sufficiency of the mind in the absence of the social world in which it is immersed. Similarly the modern moral philosophers have been asking exactly the wrong question in Maclntyre's view. Instead of asking, in effect, "Conceiving of myself first and foremost as an individual, do I have any moral reasons, and if so what are they?", they should have been asking "What are the conditions required for persons to possess robust reasons at all?". Had they asked the latter, then they might have had some chance of arriving at a rationally compelling understanding of the authority of moral considerations, because it is through the role they play in the communal selfunderstandings that ground the possibility of living a fully meaningful human life that they gain it. And once again the mistake was made in the context of a similar flawed assumption, this time about the self-sufficiency of practical rationality, in the absence of its immersion in a communal evaluative self-understanding and set of practices. For Maclntyre then, the problem with modernity is individualism as such, the flawed assumption that our natures, powers and even identities can be understood in isolation from the social lives in which we are immersed, with the value of the social lying only in what it can be seen to offer an individual so conceived. And individualism is a more or less explicitly articulated but always central premise of all the modern moral philosophies Maclntyre criticises, and at the heart of the newly emerging values they were variously trying to express as well; or so he thinks. This is why Nietzsche is for Maclntyre the modern moral philosopher (114), and not some more run-of-the-mill moral sceptic, since Nietzsche is the philosopher who most clear-headedly explores where modern

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culture's individualistic assumptions lead us, in the self-assertion of the personal will. We also see his view of what the ultimate fate of individualism has to be in his critique of Nietzsche. The core of a Nietzschean moral philosophy would be the question of how an individual could produce out of his own resources a new and personal table of goals and goods, Maclntyre tells us (114). But it is clear that he thinks that no substantial progress has been made in that project. Noting that Nietzsche and his sometime ally Sartre are sharp and cogent in their critiques of Enlightenment outlooks, but no more than vaguely metaphorical in their positive proposals, he derides the Ubermensch as an ultimately contentless fantasy (22). And the reason it is a fantasy is precisely that in the absence of the social frameworks that Nietzsche also wants to overthrow, no real sense can be given to a life. Existential meaning is just not the kind of thing that one can privately spin out of one's own will, 'heroically' or otherwise.

3. Beyond Individualism, within Modernity? If I am right in my characterisation of Maclntyre's thinking, then this issue of philosophical individualism is for him the crux of the matter, essentially the motor driving our ongoing cultural and personal impoverishment. But his focus on the question of what follows from philosophical individualism is also the reason I think that Maclntyre's narrative is over-intellectualistic. For there is a crucial distinction to be drawn between critiquing a culture's values, and critiquing a culture's philosophy, including its philosophies of value. The reason is that the philosophers a culture produces can be mistaken about the kinds of philosophical grounding it is possible to give for those values, and if this is the case the failure of their moral philosophies would not entail the bankruptcy of the values they have been advanced to defend. And indeed they can be generally mistaken en masse. This is the possibility I now wish to explore. Suppose for the sake of argument that I concede that the moral philosophies of the Enlightenment rest on shared individualistic assumptions that ensure that their destiny is Nietzschean nihilism, as I am in fact inclined to do. Since there is a distinction between values and particular philosophical articulations and defences of them, adherence to those values is separate from adherence to any of the particular philosophies which take themselves to ground them, and it makes sense to ask whether some quite different type of philosophical defence might be available. And indeed one might well be inclined to ask whether a shared communal sense of the importance of human freedom, dignity and social justice could be able to play a central role in supporting and sustaining the kind of meaningfulness that a human life requires, if it is not to sink into arbitrariness and alienation. If a positive answer to this last question could be provided then Maclntyre's critique would turn out to be a mere critique of the philosophical attempt to ground modern values; it would not expand into a critique of those values themselves, or the selves that try to live by them, without substantial further argument. Note that this claim about the distinction between values and philosophical conceptions of them is quite distinct from the claim that social and cultural history and the history of ideas proceed in isolation from one another. When I

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earlier referred to my scepticism about the role of philosophy in impoverishing modern culture, supporters of Maclntyre were likely getting ready to accuse me of having failed to absorb what he says about the inseparability of philosophy and a number of other disciplines, particularly sociology, anthropology and history. One of Maclntyre's key contentions since his early work has been the claim that moral concepts cannot be properly understood in abstraction from the social structures within which they are given life, a view summed up in the famous slogan "A moral philosophy characteristically presupposes a sociology" (23). Nor does he think that sociology can effectively proceed in the absence of a philosophically informed sense of history, as Goffman's mistake in ascribing the social condition of modern man to humanity as such demonstrates. And he is similarly sceptical of the idea that social history and the history of ideas can be studied in isolation from one another, because they do not proceed independently of one another. So in questioning his appeal to the progress of philosophy as explanatory factor in cultural change, it might be thought that I am merely revealing a prejudice against just that kind of historically informed philosophical enquiry which Maclntyre thinks is essential for acquiring a proper grasp on our condition. Consequently he could be expected to simply brush such a criticism aside. But I do not wish to deny such connections, since Maclntyre is clearly right that they exist, and are centrally important to all the disciplines mentioned, and that enquiry in any of these areas which denies this will thereby be impoverished. Rather, I merely wish to challenge what I take to be the overly intimate conception of the relationship between philosophical theories and the cultures they help to shape that I take to be implicit in the narrative Maclntyre provides. Clearly ideas, including philosophical ones, shape the course of history and the development of cultures. But whilst the broader culture can be greatly influenced by particular philosophical ideas that ultimately turn out to be untenable, the values that these ideas generate can nevertheless take on a life of their own, as they are instantiated in the culture's wider practices, and so acquire a legitimacy of their own even after the philosophical positions which largely gave birth to them are defeated. So, back to the question: effectively, what I am asking is whether there could be a modern tradition with modern values at its core, playing a similar role in sustaining substantial selfhood in the contemporary world that the classical tradition, emphasising instead excellence and authority, did for the ancients and the medievals. It is certainly quite clear that Maclntyre rejects the idea that there could be a modern 'tradition' in the relevant sense, and in particular that liberalism could ever take the form of a genuine tradition, despite some of its main contemporary proponents' efforts to transform it in this direction. As we've seen, the problem in his view is that the individualistic conception of the self that the modern world operates with leaves no room for genuine immersion in the socially-circumscribed significance of a tradition, and so ultimately for any substantial personal identity. Against classic philosophical liberalism, Maclntyre clearly has a point. Central to this outlook, as everyone knows, is a distinction between 'the right' and 'the good' (e.g. Rawls 1971, 30-33, 446-452). Certain values, such as freedom, distributive justice, formal equality and so on, are public,

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and these comprise the right. These are the values that circumscribe and protect each individual's ability to engage in private pursuit of the human good as he or she sees fit. For philosophical liberalism, the good was supposed to be quite separate from the right, and certainly was not supposed to ground it. This then meant that the public rules of the right had to be rooted in some abstract feature or features that all individuals as individuals share- practical rationality as such, or desires common to all, or certain primary goods held to be important for self-determining beings universally. And of course, Maclntyre and others have given us very good reason to think that no such attempt will be successful. But this is not the idea I have in mind, nor is it that being pushed by a number of the most important recent and contemporary defenders of modernity, and indeed liberalism, as Maclntyre himself notes (1988, 346). The alternative is instead a championing of modern and in large part liberal values as a self-conscious conception of the good, competing on this territory with older, more authoritarian and aretaic conceptions for dominance of the public sphere, but happy to allow these rival conceptions which it itself rejects to attempt to flourish as best they can in the private practice of those who adhere to them. The first lines of defence of this conception would be twofold. First, since we are conceding that ultimately no sense can be made of the idea of the right, we must accept that human beings will always have to try to order their societies according to some conception of the good or other. Having done so, we only have to grant that there will inevitably be a plurality of views about the good to recognise the advantages that are brought by a conception of the good which accommodates as best it can its rivals, by allowing people to privately guide their lives by them without fear of interference or violence. These include social stability, and the emancipation of those who would otherwise feel themselves trapped by the beliefs and expectations of others. Second, it would be argued that human life simply goes better if modern values are instantiated within it. For instance, it is not an implausible claim that human nature makes it the case that we require a substantial degree of freedom—conceived of in the right way, of course—to flourish. Nor that understanding oneself to be the possessor of a certain kind of dignity—along the lines the Kant understood it—and a corresponding entitlement to a certain kind of respect, irrespective of one's status in society, can substantially contribute to a sense of worth that flourishing lives cannot lack. Whilst Maclntyre accepts this general possibility, he says surprisingly little to rebut it in his major works. And what he does say seems to me unconvincing. His explicit response to the issue in his Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

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cussion of liberalism for instance is extremely brief (1988, 346-347), and consists in the suggestions that, first, the liberal order requires the self to present itself as having a well-ordered ranking of preferences, which it almost certainly won't have, so that presentation of self in the modern world is likely to be psychologically disabling, and second, that the pursuit of the good of liberalism itself will frequently come into conflict with the pursuit of the individual goods that it permits, and when they do liberalism has no answer to the question of why the former should trump the latter. Underlying this seems to be a further thought, that the values themselves have a corroding effect on those who espouse them,

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pushing us inexorably towards anti-social individualist attitudes and conceptions of practical rationality (1988, 335-345). And so it pushes us towards thinking of the social arena as essentially having the character of a market, and our interactions with one another as contracts; individualism is clearly at the forefront of this way of thinking. As I said, I am unconvinced by these arguments. The claim that liberalism psychologically deforms the self by forcing it to publicly present itself as a false unity is very undeveloped in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? at least, and I probably don't fully understand it. But it seems to have a connection to the problem of the compartmentalisation of modern life, insightfully discussed in "Social Structures and their Threat to Moral Agency" (2006, 196-202). On this issue, whilst I fully agree about the nature of the threat—that various modern institutions such as profit-maximising companies have internal norms which those involved in them are expected to adhere to, but which conflict with those applying in other areas of life—I don't see that these features of modern life are any more than a contingent threat to modern moral agency, or that a modern individual has nowhere to stand from which to assess the competing norms (2007, 199). On the contrary, many of these organisational norms are in manifest breach of central moral values. Any broadly Kantian moral code would hold that one should not be involved in buying and selling conflict coltan, for example; the fact that many people are involved in this, because they work for companies geared solely towards profit maximisation, and that this leaves them conflicted as they also try to inhabit spheres of life where norms of decency are expected, is neither here nor there. These issues seem to me to show rather that living a good life in the modern world can be very demanding, not that the modern self can make no principled ethical choices. The claim that a post-foundationalist liberalism faces the problem of grounding its claim to override other goods when they conflict is true, but at the present time should not be taken as grounds for pessimism about the project. Having only recently come to terms with the need to abandon foundationalism, liberals have only recently seen the need to produce defences of liberal values on this form. The answer will lie in precisely the attractiveness of the social life which prioritising the liberal goods makes possible, some of the advantages of which I briefly mentioned earlier. I see no reason why a detailed account of such could not be outlined. Admittedly I am not producing one here, but neither does Maclntyre do more than express his pessimism, and he is the one making the stronger and more counter-intuitive claim. And whilst a liberal outlook requires us to treat various individual conceptions of the good as if they were preferences, when we are acting and arguing within the public sphere, it isn't true that having to so think of them in this context ensures that we come to think of them as preferences in themselves, and start down the road towards the emotivist conception of goods. And it certainly doesn't require us to think of the goods of respect, freedom and so on as mere preferences; these are the route to the good society in which good human lives can be lived, the post-foundationalist liberal thinks, and she can keep this very firmly at the front of her mind. Similarly, the emancipation from tradition that clearly was and is an essen-

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tial part of modernity's self-conception need not be understood as the rejection of tradition in Maclntyre's very particular sense. Rather, it is tradition in the Burkean sense that must be rejected, that is, tradition as repository of unchangeable, unchallengeable wisdom about humanity's place in the world, with a corresponding authority over people's lives (cf. 1988, 353). Indeed, the idea of rational enquiry as situated enquiry is perfectly at home in modern thought, which from Kant's introduction of the notion of 'critique' onwards has been much more self-conscious about the status of its own rational credentials than anything pre-Enlightenment, and from at least Hegel onwards accepted that rationality frequently has to come to terms with the contingency of its own origins. Whilst I believe it is true that the essential elements of Maclntyre's notion of tradition-based enquiry are present in Aquinas, and indeed Augustine, they are not the exclusive property of traditions emphasising authority, nor even are they unequivocally endorsed by these Christian thinkers, since they coexist in their work with appeals to both classical foundationalist conceptions of reason and the authority of Scripture, relationships which are at any rate not obviously harmonious. So the idea that the individual is very important, and that we must never abandon respect for her and the way she conceives of her own life, need not require philosophical individualism in the derogatory sense, which Maclntyre's arguments do succeed in targeting. On the contrary; it seems perfectly possible to me for an individual to find an objective good in membership of something like "the party of humankind" (Hume 1751, IX.i, 275) or "the kingdom of ends" (Kant 1785, 4:433-440), and for this conception of the good to at least partially ground a temporally unified and intelligible life which confers a meaning upon human action that mere preference does not. And surely people in the modern world do exactly this. Remember: it is us that he's talking about, or the majority of us at least. We are the ghosts in question, the pegs on which successions of social roles hang, with no substance behind or apart from them. So most of us are, or at least act as if we are, incapable of living lives which have any real temporal unity, incapable of making any rationally justified value judgements, except with reference to the achievement of arbitrary preference, in and of ourselves nothing. This is a very strong claim, and on reflection surely unbelievable, psychologically compelling as it may be for some of modern society's discontents. One only has to look at the obituaries section of a decent newspaper for its strength and implausibility to become evident. What an obituary is, of course, is a 'post mortem' attempt by another party to outline the form of the deceased's life in terms of a narrative. And it seems clear to me that the lives of numerous individuals with a clear commitment to distinctively modern values not only allow this, but demand it. These include feminists, civil rights campaigners, environmentalists, global justice campaigners and so on, as well as people who have devoted large parts of their lives to alleviating particular social problems, or just to some useful national or local institution, or some particular practice. Taking an example of someone still alive, consider Peter Tatchell. Tatchell's life has been largely spent in an attempt to advance a characteristically modern value, gay rights. Until very recently, of course, even in the western democracies a homosexual lifestyle

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was at odds with society's dominant vision of the good life, and it still is for many people and important institutions; not only this, but homosexuals found and still to some extent find themselves at best marginalised, and at worst persecuted. In campaigning to change all this, Tatchell has been guided by values such as: freedom to pursue unorthodox lifestyles; equality of opportunity and concern; the importance of personal relationships one has chosen to enter into, and the freedom to do so; a peculiarly modern concern with the badness of individual suffering, and the corresponding cruelty which inflicts it; a conception of justice independent of one's contribution to some constrained social project, and so on. All these are quintessentially modern, but this in no way means that they are unsuitable for the unification of a life narrative; nor does there appear to be any danger that their adherents will be forced to recognise that they are merely asserting arbitrary preference instead. Tatchell is not an emotivist self, despite being a modern through and through. So Maclntyre's account of the nature of modern selfhood and the role of modern values in its construction requires him to misrepresent the nature of lives like Tatchell's, and indeed those of very large numbers of us. And to avoid doing so, he would need to substantially tone down his criticism of modernity. In response he might want to claim that I am exaggerating what his thesis commits him to. Indeed, this was suggested to me in defence of Maclntyre by one of the editors of this journal issue, a noted sympathiser with Maclntyre's philosophy: "What [Alasdair Maclntyre] says in the opening chapters of After Virtue regarding] emotivism is far from exhaustive of what he says of (even modern) moral agency, especially given what he has consistently stressed of the importance of practices from chapter 14 up until last Friday". 2 It is certainly true that much of what Maclntyre says does implicitly ascribe to us much more by way of agency and self-awareness than his ascription of modern selfhood as emotivist selfhood would suggest, and that what he says about practices and their preservation in the face of particularly institutional pressures is a central part of this. And it is clear that practices still play a tremendously important role in the lives of moderns, despite the unmistakeable threat they face from modern capitalism. After all, when Maclntyre introduced the concept into moral philosophy, it was not received as an alien one at all. Everyone knew at once exactly what he meant by it. But this just reinforces my point, I think; since it would be quite implausible to claim that this engagement with them is restricted to the remaining 'premoderns' amongst us, it shows that at least this source of meaning can be accommodated in modern individuals' lives. Admittedly, broad generalisations like the one Maclntyre makes always admit of exceptions, and so the response remains potentially open to say in respect of any problematic counter-example "Well, of course, I never meant to exclude cases like that". The trouble is that if you do this enough times, the force and interest of one's thesis starts to slip away. Maclntyre's critique of 2

Kelvin Knight, personal correspondence, July 2007.

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the modern self is so pessimistic and so all-encompassing, that he has little room to admit exceptions before it starts to look overblown. So the issue is not whether, when pressed, Maclntyre will ascribe substance and rationality to certain characteristically modern agents. It is whether he can do so consistently with his critique of the modern self. The argument of this paper has been that he cannot. Postscript: In the final stages of writing up this article, I came across the just published 3 r d edition of After Virtue, and read its stimulating Prologue (2007). A number of themes I address are taken up again there, including the question with which I begun, of how to explain the success of After Virtue's reception. My view of course is that the characteristically modern selves that most of us are, structuring our lives in large part with respect to modern values, are nevertheless perfectly capable of engaging in substantive reasoning about justice and the like, and finding modernity to be in many ways wanting with respect to it. And so I would add, it is easy to throw the baby out with the metaphorical bathwater, and disavow the modern values which in fact largely comprise the evaluative stance within which the illegitimacy of much of the modern world shows up. Such a thesis is in substantial tension with the thesis of the book itself, however. In implicit answer, Maclntyre draws a distinction between "the ruling elites of advanced modernity" and the "plain persons [... ] who were the intended readers and pleasingly often the actual readers of After Virtue, able to recognise in its central theses articulations of thoughts that they themselves had already begun to formulate and expressions of feeling by which they themselves were already to some degree moved" (2007, xiii). Noting that "elites never have the last word" he argues that: "(W)hen recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics and local forms of political community. And that regeneration enables such plain persons to put to the question the dominant modes of social and political discourse and the institutions that find their expression in those modes." (2007xiii) Maclntyre is quite explicit in the Prologue that he has not changed his mind about the fundamental character of modernity since the publication of the first edition nor has its character changed in the intervening period (2007, viii). Furthermore, he remains committed to the view that modern culture blinds its adherents to its deficiencies: "I remain equally committed to the thesis that it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of modernity" (2007, viii). But now the explanation for the properly anti-modern currents that are still present in the modern era has been clarified. These not only represent survivals, but also an ongoing process of reconstruction de novo at the level of ordinary practice, presumably because the innately socialising drive of the biology of a communal

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animal (2007, ix) must prove to be ultimately irrepressible, despite the ability of our dominant social structures to warp it in the case of a great many individuals. This distinction between the deluded elites and the proto-virtuous plain individual, drawing her evaluative inspiration from the relatively unpolluted roots of day to day life, seems an important one as far as the issues I've been discussing are concerned. To be honest, I have had little time to give it due reflection, and I'd like to hear more about it, as well as more precisely how Maclntyre thinks that even the adherents of the Aristotelian tradition today must bear the "social and cultural marks" of advanced modernity (2007, ix). But I remain suspicious. First, it isn't clear to me that this distinction is not overly artificial. There are very few persons untouched by the modern world, and whose discourse is not saturated with modern evaluative concepts, as Maclntyre would no doubt be happy to admit. But why then should we think that to the extent that people form genuinely valuable communities, fundamentally premodern values must be the driving force, when those people themselves often take them to be expressing values that Kant might have endorsed? Second, so many of the grassroots movements of the kind Maclntyre points to have a strongly 'cosmopolitan intent', and draw their inspiration not from a local communal life, but a sense of identification with the wider world. I'm thinking of those powerfully moved by the problems of poverty in the developing world, or environmental degradation, for instance. The concern for these people seems to be precisely that the modern world is failing to live up to its own values, which prescribe that everyone is treated with concern and respect, and that we should not treat others (and the natural world) as a mere means to our own ends, as we have been so obviously doing for a long time. I recognise these brief rejoinders will need developing, but they must be my final word at least for now.

Bibliography Anscombe, E. (1958), Modern Moral Philosophy, in: Philosophy 33, 1-19 Heidegger, M. (1927/1962), Being and Time, Macquarrie, J./Robinson, E. (trans.), Oxford Hume, D. (1751/1975), Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Nidditch, P. H. (ed.), Oxford Kant, I. (1785/1996), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Gregor, M. (trans.), in: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, Gregor, M. (ed.), Cambridge Maclntyre, A. (1970), Marcuse, London — (1981), After Virtue, London — (1982), How Moral Agents Became Ghosts: Or Why the History of Ethics Diverged from that of the Philosophy of Mind, in: Synthese 53, 295-312 — (1985), After Virtue {2nd ed.), London — (2006), Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge — (2007), After Virtue (3 rd ed.), London — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice, Cambridge/MA

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Abstract: I begin this paper by examining what Maclntyre has to tell us about radical disagreements: how they have arisen, and how to deal with them, within a polity. I conclude by radically disagreeing with Macintyre: I shall suggest that he offers no credible alternative to liberalism's account of radical disagreements and how to deal with them. To put it dilemmatically: insofar as what Maclntyre says is credible, it is not an alternative to liberalism; insofar as he presents a genuine alternative to liberalism, this alternative is not credible. In large part the credibility problems that I see for Maclntyre's project arise from the history on which he bases it; it is with this history that I begin. Reflection on Maclntyre's profound and subtle political philosophy thus fails to dislodge liberalism from its contemporary intellectual supremacy—a supremacy which I think liberalism has well earned. If anything, such reflection enhances the hegemony of liberalism still further. And a good thing too.

1. Maclntyre's Diagnostic History T h e most famous part of Maclntyre's most famous book may well be the "disquieting suggestion", the picture of a world after the collapse of science, with which it begins (Maclntyre 1981, 1 - 2 ) : " T h e hypothesis which I wish t o advance is t h a t in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same grave state of disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described." T h i s brilliant coup of philosophical and historical imagination continues to captivate even those, like me, who have rather fallen out of love with the project of After Virtue. To show t h a t our language of morality is disordered in t h e fundamental way t h a t he proposes, Maclntyre does two things. First, he offers a survey of the contemporary moral scene t h a t leads him to t h e verdict t h a t " T h e most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is t h a t so much of it is used t o express disagreements; and t h e most striking feature of the debates in which those disagreements are expressed is their interminable character [ . . . ] there seems t o be no rational way of securing agreement in our culture." (6) Secondly, he traces a history t h a t is meant to demonstrate how moral concepts, principles, and modes of argument have been wrenched from the contexts in which they originally made sense and redeployed in contexts where they are no more at home than, say, a pendulum is at home in a tumble drier: how allegedly universal rules, for instance, have been detached from the descriptive teleology in which they were grounded in the Aristotelian tradition, and without which such rules can, according t o him, have no ultimate justification at all. (This, briefly, is "why the Enlightenment project had to fail".)

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Maclntyre's complaint about pervasive disagreement might seem an odd one. Why, as Stephen Mulhall (in: Horton/Mendus 1994) asks, should we even want a way of securing agreement in ethics that meets the standards suggested by Maclntyre's talk of "unassailable criteria", "compelling reasons" (Maclntyre 1981, 8)? Ethics is not science; not even broken-down and disordered science après le déluge. In any mature science, we can demonstrate results—Mulhall's example is the result that there are mountains on the moon—by methods to reject which is simply to manifest scientific incompetence. Nowhere in ethics (either contemporary ethics, or any other credible sort of ethics) can we do anything remotely parallel. In ethics a Sartrean move is always available. It is always possible, not only to query the accounting, but also to query the currency: to any Condorcet who says to us calculemus (see Berlin 1969, 52), we can always reply not only calculemus aliter but also NON calculemus. This fact alone—and quite apart from the obvious, banal, and patently un-World-Historical phenomena of special pleading and bad faith which play such important roles in so many human interactions—is enough to explain persistent disagreement even if we accept a common currency of well-regimented argument, whether that common currency is a pernicious Bayesian consequentialism, or a salutary Aristotelian teleology. A further question about Maclntyre's idea that our disagreements are a sign of our moral degeneracy is: when was it ever otherwise? 1 Consider the detail of Maclntyre's extended history of our alleged moral collapse—his Interminably Long History of Ethics, as Maclntyre himself amiably calls it. I cannot do justice to that still-in-progress historical project here, but I can offer a few comments. Maclntyre writes (Maclntyre 2006b, 239): "What is lacking in modern political societies is any type of institutional arena in which plain persons [...]. are able to engage together in systematic reasoned debate, designed to arrive at a rationallyfounded common mind on how to answer questions about the relationship of politics to the claims of rival and alternative ways of life." The right retort is: "What do you mean, 'lacking in modern political societies'?" It is not as if some previous society had been very good at this sort of debate in a way that we are not. Certainly classical Athens was not very good at this; overall, the history of the Athenian ecclèsia is not a history of "systematic reasoned debate", but of riotous assembly. The same applies, for instance, to the Assemblée Nationale from 1789 to 1793. Even its striking initial results, though certainly achieved by the expression of a "common mind" about political theory, were not products of debate with the French crown, but of defiance of it. Thereafter the Assemblée declined steadily towards the condition of what Carlyle acidly called "a Sanhédrin of pedants", bickering over the small print of constitutions that were never actually enacted, while, for good or ill, the real Revolution happened elsewhere.

1 Maclntyre seems now to acknowledge the difficulty here: "Continuing disagreement is a permanent condition of philosophy." (2006b, 72)

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Consider, again, the following remarks: "We have all too many disparate and rival moral concepts [... ] and the moral resources of the culture allow us no way of settling the issue between them rationally. Moral philosophy, as it is dominantly understood, reflects the debates and disagreements of the culture so faithfully that its controversies turn out to be unsettlable in just the way that the political and moral debates themselves are." (Maclntyre 1981, 235) The existence in our moral discourse of a plethora of moral-theoretical resources with multifarious origins need not reveal the incoherence that Maclntyre sees. As Maclntyre himself shows, concepts can be and are adapted to fit new frameworks, and sometimes this process enhances the concepts rather than mutilating them. Socrates' response to Simonides' definition of justice as "rendering to each what is due to him", which begins in Republic Book I as a flat rejection of the Simonidean formula, has been turned by the end of Republic IX into a transformation of it: "render each his due" is, it turns out, precisely what the perfect Platonic state does. The Republic (notoriously, in some commentators' eyes (Foster 1937) transforms the ordinary Athenian concepts of justice and happiness in the course of investigating them. Nor, as Bernard Williams observes, need a plethora of diversely-originating resources be a sign of ethical confusion rather than of profusion. To take it that way is, ironically enough, characteristic of the very moral philosophers whom Maclntyre opposes: "Theory typically uses the assumption that we probably have too many ethical ideas, some of which may well turn out to be mere prejudices. Our major problem now is actually that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can." (Williams 1985, 117) Anyway, to repeat, it is hard to identify another age that was any less incoherent or confused. Maclntyre himself has provided no picture, not even a sketch, of a golden age of practical rationality. On Maclntyre's own showing in 1981, chs. 11-12, Plato and Aristotle both struggled throughout their careers, not just to prove certain theses within an uncontested method of argument that was accepted by a philosophical community around them, but also to establish the propriety of the method of argument itself. This second-order debate was just as contentious and just as wide-open as the first-order debates that its deliverances were supposed to settle, or at least to regiment. In the Gorgias Socrates and Callicles are just as much at odds about whether pleasure is the good as they are about what counts as a good argument that pleasure is or is not the good. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle is not only trying to argue us into a particular view of human well-being, he is also trying to liberate us from what he considers a crucially mistaken account—Plato's—of what argument about human well-being can be. Beyond these diverse conceptions of the nature of moral argument—conceptions which deserve to be called "incommensurable" if any do—there stands a wider Athenian society which, like ours, mostly does not even recognise that moral argument is philosophical at all, as opposed to a religious

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practice, or a rhetorical or dramatic or narrative practice; or simply a reflection of the play of individual and corporate emotional forces. If we wanted a paradigm of a society that was fundamentally divided between incompatible and incommensurable conceptions and currencies of moral debate, we could hardly do better than classical Athens. Just as, if we wanted an example of a society where arguments were rationally interminable, or where a method of argument had degenerated into a mere mask for the pleading of vested interests, we could hardly do better than the scholasticism of pre-Reformation Europe. As many Protestants over the centuries, not least John Locke, have noted: "Where Mens Parts and Learning are estimated by their Skill in Disputing, [and] Reputation and Reward shall attend these Conquests, which depend mostly on the fineness and niceties of Words, 'tis no Wonder if the Wit of Man so employ'd, should perplex, involve, and subtilise the signification of Sounds, so as never to want something to say, in opposing or defending any Question; the Victory being adjudged not to him who had Truth on his side, but the last word in the Dispute [... ] this artificial Ignorance, and learned Gibberish, prevailed mightily in these last Ages, by the Interest and Artifice of those, who found no easier way to that pitch of Authority and Dominion they have attained, than by amusing the Men of Business, and Ignorant, with hard Words, or imploying the ingenious and Idle in intricate Disputes about unintelligible terms [... ]" (Locke, Essay III.X, 7, 9) We can agree with Maclntyre that Locke's splendid invective is, on the whole, unfair to the achievements of scholasticism without swinging—as Maclntyre apparently did at the time he wrote After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?—to the other extreme, and claiming that there is nothing at all in the Renaissance/Reformation critique of scholastic method. We can then agree with Maclntyre that the scholastic era was not a dark age for philosophy and practical rationality (in fact, not even Locke thinks this 2 ), without accepting as the only alternative the idea that it was a golden age. In political argument, it is always a bad strategy to commit oneself to a hunt for a golden age. The hunt for a golden age is an unfortunate feature of Maclntyre's philosophical history in After Virtue. We might want to opt out of that hunt even if we agree with Maclntyre about the importance of philosophical history in general: "it is only by reference to [the history of morality-and-moralphilosophy] that questions of rational superiority [between traditions] can be settled" (Maclntyre 1981, 269), or in the words of Hegel that Maclntyre here echoes, "the court of truth is the world-court of history" (Hegel 1820, 343). 2 "I say this not any way to lessen Aristotle, whom I look on as one of the greatest Men among the Antients; whose large Views, acuteness and penetration of Thought, and strength of Judgment, few have equalled; And who in this very invention of Forms of Argumentation, wherein the Conclusion may be shewn to be rightly inferred, did great service against those, who were not ashamed to deny any thing." Locke, Essay IV.XVII, 4: a pointed rejection of the magisterial reformers' noisy abuse of Aristotle (not to mention their willingness to entertain contradictions).

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In its biggest and most general claims, the diagnostic history of After Virtue faces potentially decisive criticisms. Its more particular claims can be criticised too: for instance, the claims that Aristotle and Kant are not historicists in the good sense, not examples of "tradition-constituted" inquiry (Maclntyre 1981, 277; 1988, 8). A tradition-constituted inquiry is one in which (1) "To justify is to narrate how the argument has gone so far", (2) where "what justifies the first principles [of a theory], or rather the whole structure of theory of which they are a part, is the rational superiority of that structure to all previous attempts within that tradition to formulate such theories and principles" (Maclntyre 1988, 8), and (3) where "rational superiority" consists both in greater capacity to explain or otherwise rationally connect the rival theories' target phenomena, and also in a capacity to explain why the rival theories were less successful. On this definition, Maclntyre himself notes good evidence that Aristotle was a historicist: "Aristotle tried to write the history of previous philosophy in such a way that it culminated with his own thought." (Maclntyre 1981, 146) Here Aristotle contrasts sharply with Plato, for instance, who will not even name his chief opponent among his predecessors (Democritus), takes most opposing philosophical views to be in fundamental error, and has a theory—the myth of the Cave—which explains why this is so. Compare Aristotle's well-known methodological dictum tithenai ta phainomena (NE 1145b3): a philosopher should take previously-accepted beliefs as his starting-point, do as much as he can with them, and abandon as few of them as possible. (As the opening of the Analytica Posteiiora tells us, "All instruction given or received by way of argument proceeds from pre-existent knowledge.") It conflicts with this evidence to say, as Maclntyre does, that Aristotle "envisaged the relationship of [his] thought to those predecessors in terms of the replacement of their errors or at least partial truths by his comprehensively true account", or that his view was that "once his work had been done, theirs could be abandoned without loss" (Maclntyre 1981, 146). For "the comprehensively true account" that Aristotle aimed at was not exclusively his at all, any more than the true picture of the world that the later Wittgenstein aimed to rescue from the deceptions of philosophy was Wittgenstein's own. Broadly, Aristotle's aim was to secure a common understanding of the world, largely inherited from those "received opinions" (endoxa) of his predecessors which he undertook to incorporate within his own explanatory framework, and only partially undergirded by the new foundations of his own philosophy. In this sense Aristotle's inquiry was, precisely, historicist and tradition-based; and, in its opposition to Plato— the greatest enemy of historicism in the Greek tradition, and the philosopher whose authority Aristotle most consistently rejects—self-consciously so. Kant too saw his own inquiry as tradition-constituted in Maclntyre's sense. Prom the opening sections of the First Critique it is clear that Kant regards his own work in epistemology as a proto-Hegelian synthesis of the predecessor rationalist and empiricist alternatives. Comparing the opening sections of the Groundwork, it is equally clear that Kant regards himself as synthesising a number of earlier ethical views: the Christian view that virtue is rewarded and the Stoic view that it is its own reward; Locke's individualist contractarianism and

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Rousseau's collectivist communitarianism; Grotius's positive account, and Hobbes's sceptical account, of the place of principles of natural law antecedent to the formation of any particular political community. Kant's claim about these resources from the history of philosophy is that his own theory appropriates what is right about each of them, without recapitulating the mistakes of any of them—because Kant's own theory also possesses the resources to explain why those previous views were mistaken. The antithesis between Kant and traditionbased inquiry is another antithesis that does not stand scrutiny.

2. Utopias and the Art of the Possible If modernity is in such a mess then what is Maclntyre recommending we do instead? I am, as promised, working towards the conclusion that Maclntyre's policy recommendation is best understood as one that classic Millian liberals like myself can and should accept. To reach this conclusion, I will trace a route from one well-known Maclntyre quotation to another, even better-known quotation, which we'll get to at the end of this section. My train of thought between them stops at a number of stations, some of them some distance from recognised Maclntyre territory, and will recruit some surprising names as more or less intimate allies of Maclntyre: Nozick and Rawls, for instance. First, then, a quotation from Maclntyre's essay on Marx's Theses on Feuerbach : "The modern state [... ] behaves part of the time towards those subjected to it as if it were no more than a giant, monopolistic utility company and part of the time as if it were the sacred guardian of all that is most to be valued. In the one capacity it requires us to fill in the appropriate forms in triplicate. In the other it periodically demands that we die for it." (Knight 1998, 227) The modern state does indeed have a split personality of this sort. Call the utility-company side the Bureaucracy—and forget, for our purposes, the term's rather pejorative flavour. Call the sacred-guardian side the Community—and forget, for our purposes, the term's rather cosy flavour. (I capitalise both terms to mark the technical senses I give them.) Then the thesis of this section is not 'Bureaucracy bad, Community good'; though this sometimes seems to be Maclntyre's message, and is certainly the burden, more often than sometimes, of much recent 'communitarian' writing. 3 Nor is the thesis 'Bureaucracy good, Community bad (or at any rate suspect)'; though that often seems to be what 'libertarians' want to tell us. Rather, my thesis is 'Bureaucracy good in its place, Community good in its place'. The institutions of Bureaucracy and Community both serve essential purposes. But they serve different purposes, which it can do great harm to confuse. If we find ourselves well-placed historically to see not only 3 Prom which Maclntyre has always distanced himself with a positively Sartrean vehemence: "I am not a communitarian. I do not believe in ideals or forms of community as a nostrum for contemporary social ills. I give my political loyalty to no programme", (in: Knight 1998, 265).

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the importance of the Bureaucracy and the Community, but also the differences between them, that is just our good luck. (As we have seen already, my optimism about our present situation is not the only way in which I read history differently from Maclntyre.) My slogan 'Bureaucracy good, Community good' should not, of course, be read as meaning that I think that either a Bureaucracy or a Community cannot go wrong. What it means is that they constitute different threats when they do go wrong (as happens with depressing frequency), and achieve different goods when they go as well as they can (which happens with depressing rarity). The distinctive goods that a successful Community achieves are familiar from a whole library's worth of stirring writings: "Although, in [the passage from the state of nature to the civil state, man] deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man." (Rousseau, du Contrat Social, 1.8) George Orwell's marvellous Homage to Catalonia could be read as a book-length study of the states of political consciousness, characteristic of a sense of Community, that Rousseau sums up in this one short brilliant paragraph. In particular, perhaps, the ending of Orwell's book is a study of the sad truth in Rousseau's foreboding parenthesis "[...] did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left". Humans acting and living in concert achieve goods that they can never achieve alone; they achieve a sense of belonging and purpose that transforms their lives, and leads to acts of idealistic altruism unmatched by the individualist. 4 The political "community cannot express authority unless it possesses corporate initiative; that is, unless the mass of its component units are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the whole sovereign indeed" (Belloc 1911, 1). But when "corporate initiative" is there, so is a political authority which is not just in-principle and theoretical, but exhilaratingly actual. Something of this is what Orwell found on the streets of Barcelona. As for the distinctive ways in which the state conceived as Community goes bad, these hardly need rehearsing to anyone at our point in history. As Orwell himself was to emphasise in his later books, and as Proudhon pointed out in 1851, with the state-as-Community the thin end of the wedge is intrusiveness, and the thick end is tyranny: 4 "When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meagre, limited, egoistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes." Karl Marx, quoted by Machan 2006, 234. One is reminded of Peter Singer's impartialism in How Should We Live?

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The more a government sees itself as legitimated by, and indeed the expression of, a popular enthusiasm, the 'corporate initiative' of a Community, the more it is prone to see itself as entitled to meddle in every aspect of its citizens' lives; to presume that they owe an account of themselves to it rather than vice versa, in such forms as, for example, compulsory voting, the formalisation of a duty to report minor infractions to the state's operatives or to incriminate oneself, and the carrying of ID cards. No Bureaucracy (in my sense of the word) that correctly understood its own limits, and that it is by rights no more than the servant and agent of citizens' freedoms, would be likely5 to engage in such presumption to any great extent. This stress on the Bureaucracy's proper limits brings us neatly to the good points of the state conceived as (no more than) Bureaucracy: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and farreaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?" (Nozick 1974, ix) The Copernican turn made in this first question of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is arresting, even shocking. Nozick's question is not the boringly familiar 'How much room should the state allow individuals?', but the bracingly novel 'How much room should individuals allow the state?' I take this to be a salutary shock. In political philosophy, at the level of first principles, the individual rules-, the 5 Provided it understood a variety of other important 'background' truths: the falsity of consequentialism, for example, in any form that might legitimate the enslavement of citizens A B and C by showing that this 'maximised' the freedom of citizens D E F and G, and that the freedom of the latter four is the most freedom we can expect to achieve.

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state is there for the individual, not the individual for the state. To think anything else is to be victims of our own rhetoric. We are well used to the organic conception of the state that, at the foundations of our culture, Plato, Aristotle, and St Paul all give us in their different ways—and later on, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx 6 do something different with the same basic idea. We are so used to the organic conception t h a t we forget t h a t the state is never literally one body, and t h a t St Paul can hardly have meant to say t h a t the church was, either. Or we forget that the polis is not literally a substance for Aristotle, and—despite the higher tides of the rhetoric in Politics Book I—cannot possibly be understood as a substance, given Aristotle's fundamentally individualist background metaphysics. 7 Or we forget that, despite the structuring metaphor of Plato's Republic, the state is not literally a soul in three parts, either. The organic conception of the state is basically a metaphor, and what is only metaphorical cannot have moral priority over what is literally real. To elevate the rights of the state above those of individuals is to fossilise the organic metaphor into literality. For all that, I would not quite as far as Nozick: "[Tjhere is no social entity with a good t h a t undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more." (1974, 33) Pace Nozick, there are social entities in some sense, even if that sense is less fundamental than the sense in which there are individuals. There is even such a thing as their flourishing: think of the various ways in which a team, a fellowship, a society, a partnership, or a business can—in a perfectly literal sense—do well or badly. None of these 'social facts' (to reuse Durkheim's phrase) is reducible to facts about individuals. But all of them presuppose individuals: there can be individuals without any such social entities, but there can be no such social entities without individuals. If social entities exist and flourish, t h a t flourishing is not a good t h a t those social entities themselves can enjoy (in any experiential sense) or promote (in any agential sense). It is individuals alone who are pleased at the success of societies, and individuals alone who can take steps to realise or perpetuate such successes. The flourishing of social entities is a good—where it is a good at all—only by being a good to individuals. No converse statement is true. There is no good sense in which my health only matters insofar as it subserves the purposes of some larger association. Irreducibly, my health also matters to me. The first axiom of political philosophy is therefore: individuals first. As the classical utilitarians saw, the whole point of political arrangements is to make things go better for individuals. Or as Adeimantus so nearly objects to Socrates 6 The image is there in Marx too, with most traces of its metaphorical origin effaced: "For Marxism, humanity is an organism, akin to a human individual as we ordinarily understand one. In Grundrisse, Marx even calls humanity an 'organic whole' or 'body'" (Machan 2006, 235). 7 For more detailed criticism of Aristotle's political thought, see Chappell (forthcoming).

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(Republic 419al), to design a political system that makes no individual more eudaimon is peculiarly futile. If it is objected, in classic Marxist style, that my "Individuals first" can only mean "Individuals of a particular ideological and historical sort first", or that I have up my sleeve some ideologised account of happiness, I simply deny it. So far I have no commitments at all about the meaning of "happiness" or "individual". Moreover, I am reasonably sure that all the conclusions I want about individuals and their happiness will go through on any plausible account of what individuals and happiness are, including the Marxist one: variations in the definitions of "happiness" and "individual" will cancel through. This is not to deny that "individual" and "individualism" and "happiness" can provide an ideological cloak for various nefarious developments. Of course they can (as can the key concepts of Marxist theory 8 ): indeed ideological cloaking is one of the distinctive ways in which the state, conceived as no more than a Bureaucracy, is apt to malfunction. For a Bureaucracy, four sorts of malfunction seem especially typical. Three are the themes of objections to Bureaucracy familiarly pressed by Maclntyre: the relativism charge, the moral-vacuum charge, and (as just seen) the ideologicalcloaking charge. A fourth charge is less insisted on by Maclntyre, though something like it has been well developed by other critics of the Bureaucracy conception and the libertarianism that goes with it. This is the charge of heartlessness. No doubt the four charges are connected: it is because the Bureaucracy is apt to look morally uncommitted in itself that it is likely to take on whatever colour its participant citizens give it—both overtly and, more sinisterly, covertly. Furthermore, it is just its lack of moral commitment that makes a Bureaucracy look heartless. In itself, and as understood by Nozick, a Bureaucracy seems to have none of what Hilaire Belloc calls 'corporate initiative', the kind of generous impulse of compassion that leads, say, to the formation of the Churchill-Lloyd George or Attlee-Bevin welfare state. These charges can be parried by a better understanding of what the Bureaucracy is for. I have already said that the Bureaucracy is there for the individual; the Bureaucracy is that conception of the state on which it is true that the state is there for the citizens, not the citizens for the state. The point of the Bureaucracy is to support the aspirations of individuals. (More below about what "support" means.) But one thing individuals aspire to do is participate in Communities—i.e. different versions of that conception of political organisation on which it is not precisely true that the state is there for the citizens, not the 8

Berlin 1969, 61-62: "There is a sardonic note (inaudible only to their most benevolent and single-hearted followers) in the words of both (Marx and Hegel] as they contemplate the discomfiture and destruction of the philistines, the ordinary men and women caught in one of the decisive moments of history. [Here] the two great prophets of destruction are in their element; they enter into their inheritance; they survey the conflagration with a defiant, almost Byronic, irony and disdain [... ] When history takes her revenge—and every enrage prophet in the nineteenth century looks to her to avenge him against those he hates most—the mean, pathetic, ludicrous, stifling human anthills will be justly pulverised."—In short, Marxism can be a good cloak for ressentiment.

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citizens for it, since what individuals characteristically want in a Community enterprise is that they themselves should, in one way or another, be subsumed in it. If then the Bureaucracy is there to support the aspirations of individuals, and Communities rank high among those aspirations, the Bureaucracy must also be there to support the aspirations of individuals to be involved in Communities, and indeed to support the aspirations of Communities themselves. But Communities will, as Maclntyre notes, express very different ideas of the good; and the Bureaucracy is equally committed to supporting all of them. The Bureaucracy cannot fulfil this commitment without being neutral between the different communities. No wonder, then, if any Bureaucracy appears to be, in itself, a moral vacuum, and to reflect nothing more objective than the differing preferences of its constituent individuals and Communities—whether by overt relativism, or covert ideological cloaking. For that neutrality is the point of the Bureaucracy. The Bureaucracy's role is transcendental: not to achieve a substantive conception of the good, but to provide the preconditions without which no substantive conception of the good can be achieved. The point is a Kantian one, parallel to Kant's famous doctrine of the transcendental role of pure practical reason in ethics. In the individual, pure practical reason is not a commitment to a substantive notion of the good: it is a commitment to doing or being what any agent needs to do or be to pursue any substantive notion of the good. Likewise in political philosophy, the role that I propose for the Bureaucracy is not to pursue any particular Utopia, but to make possible the pursuit of all manner of Utopias. It is not only in the most familiar sense of the phrase that the sort of politics that concerns the Bureaucracy can be called "the art of the possible". "Utopia will consist of Utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people live different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for Utopias." (Nozick 1974, 312) The Bureaucracy's neutrality between different particular Utopias or Communities is easily confused with relativism or moral vacuum; just as, in Kant, pure practical reason's neutrality between conceptions of the good is easily misinterpreted as subjectivism. But the Bureaucracy's neutrality is not contentless, any more than Kant's pure practical reason fails to lead to specific moral instructions to the individual. (There is of course a whole tradition, from Fichte to Maclntyre himself, of objecting to Kant that pure practical reason is contentless. I believe this tradition to be mostly mistaken, but cannot tell that story here.) 9 Another familiar way of attacking this notion of pure practical reason, in the political deployment that I give it following Kant, is to deny that such transcendence is attainable. So Maclntyre writes: "It is an illusion to suppose that there is some neutral standing point, 9

See Chappell 2005, ch.3.

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some locus for rationality as such, which can afford rational resources sufficient for enquiry independent of all traditions [... ] the person outside all traditions [... ] has no adequate relevant means of rational evaluation and hence can come to no well-grounded conclusion, including the conclusion that no tradition can vindicate itself against any other." (Maclntyre 1988, 367) I waive the response, developed in the first part of this paper, that Kant is not in fact working "outside all traditions". 10 I simply ask: As an anti-Kantian point, how should this be taken? Not presumably as the denial of the thesis that there is some standpoint that is not itself a standpoint; no one worth five minutes' thought will assert that. Then perhaps, as the denial of the thesis that there exists some standpoint from which all other standpoints can (interestingly, rationally) be assessed? But it is important to note that Kant does not need the very strong thesis that we get by putting the quantifiers this way round ("there is some standpoint such that for any other standpoint [... ]"). His transcendental practical philosophy can get by with the much weaker thesis that for any pair of standpoints, there exists some standpoint from which they can be compared. Indeed he can make do with a weaker thesis still: that for at least a good number of pairs of standpoints, there exists some standpoint from which they can be compared. Since this last thesis is manifestly true, the moral is that Kant's aspiration to transcendence does not prevent his ethics, and his politics, from becoming grittily practical. Suppose the Bureaucracy is there, as I've suggested, to enable the pursuit of Utopias. This commits the Bureaucracy to being more than a moral vacuum, even if it is and must be neutral between the Utopias. Roughly, it commits the Bureaucracy to John Stuart Mill's Greatest Liberty Principle: the liberty worth promoting and protecting is the greatest liberty for any consistent with the same liberty for all. More specifically, it commits the Bureaucracy to ensuring that each Utopia and individual is not arbitrarily prevented from pursuing the goods that it cares about, by e.g. violence, murder, or coercion into someone else's conception of the good. One form of arbitrary prevention arises from extreme need. Is the Bureaucracy committed to doing anything to alleviate such need? I believe it is, precisely because extreme need is arbitrary prevention. (Recall Kant's duty to assist the needy, which he derives directly from the categorical imperative itself.) Here we come to the charge of heartlessness against the Bureaucracy conception of the state. That charge seems entirely justified against Nozick-style 10

I also waive the obvious point that, while no one can ever be outside all traditions, still outside some tradition is often a useful place to be: it can highlight problems that are real, but invisible to those within the tradition. So I have argued, in my "Why wasn't Socrates a Cosmopolitan?" (forthcoming), that for most Greeks of Plato's time the conflict between the universal principle of the Crito ("Harm no one") and the Euthyphro's indifference to the rights of slaves was virtually invisible. To them, the idea that slaves were among those whom we should never harm would have seemed a preposterously literalistic reading of the Crito's principle, just as many gentlemen in early America would have thought it preposterously literalminded to assume that the 'All men' who were 'equal' according to their own Declaration of Independence included those men (and come to that women) who were black slaves.

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libertarianism, but can be accommodated by a better understanding of what the Bureaucracy should be. Nozick offers a historical entitlement account of distributive justice: "whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just" (1974, 151). If there was no injustice already present in a given distribution, and if no unjust transfers have taken place since, then there can be no injustice in the present situation. Nozick's arguments for this account are three. First, he apparently takes the account to be self-evident, in something like the way of physical conservation principles: "if we start with justice, and we add nothing but justice, and, in particular, no injustice, how can we end up with injustice?" (Cohen 1995, 41). Second, Nozick thinks that anyone rejecting his account of distributive justice must accept a pattern-based account instead—egalitarianism or prioritarianism or something like that—and he offers cogent arguments against pattern-based accounts. Third, he describes his own project as that of providing a "potential explanation" of why certain developments have taken place in political philosophy, and why certain views of a broadly Lockean sort look plausible there, which derives the political from the non-political, i.e. moral, background (1974, 7-9). He disclaims any ambition to explain or defend the moral views that he finds in this background, which he identifies with "the law of nature in [Locke's] Second Treatise". This third argument is almost, but not quite, an appeal to intuition. If it were an appeal to intuition, we could respond that the intuitions to which Nozick appeals run no deeper than the intuition that when someone is in dire need, he can have a right to our assistance. However it is not an appeal to intuition, but rather to the authority of Locke. And Locke writes this, though Nozick does not quote it: "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions [... ] Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another." (Locke, Second Treatise II. 2.6) Locke himself tells us that others (and not only the direly needy) can have a right to our assistance—and that in virtually the same breath as he tells us about the rights of self-ownership and property that Nozick so much stresses. This merely exegetical fact demolishes Nozick's third argument for his account of distributive justice. The third argument was just the authority of Locke, and Locke's authority is not on Nozick's side at all; Locke recognises a duty to help those who are in need when we are not in need ourselves. To neglect this duty would be a breach, not only of justice, but specifically of distributive justice, because what the duty requires is precisely redistribution: from my surplus

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to someone else's deficit. If there is, as Locke says, a duty to assist—and I see no reason to doubt that there is—then the existence of this duty destroys Nozick's first argument too, because it shows how his principle that "whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just" is not only not self-evident, but not even true: it faces compelling counter-examples. Given the world's familiar vicissitudes, the situation where X is in dire need and Y is not can easily be a situation which has "arisen from a just situation by just steps". An earthquake, for instance, does not arise by injustice. That does nothing whatever, if X is an earthquake victim, to abridge the stringency of X's right to Y's help, and of Y's duty to help X. Finally, the existence of a duty to assist also destroys Nozick's second argument for his account of distributive justice, namely that anyone rejecting it will have to accept an unattractive pattern-based account instead, such as egalitarianism. I agree with Nozick in rejecting egalitarianism (and I will resist the temptation to say that there is more than a whiff of egalitarianism in Locke's Second Treatise—or at least, I will resist the temptation to say more than this about it). When someone claims, like Jerry Cohen, that "in socialist perception, there is injustice in a system which confers high rewards on people who happen to be unusually talented" (Cohen 1995, 256), I just find myself having bizarreness reactions. If everyone has enough, why it should matter, from the point of view of justice, that some have much more than enough? Any argument that I can imagine for Cohen's 'socialist perception' will have to use the premiss that any inequality of distribution is intrinsically unjust. But that premiss is obviously false. How is it unjust for you to be, say, better at darts than me? Perhaps what drives the 'socialist perception'—more broadly, the theory of egalitarianism—is the thought that, where there is a marked inequality between the holdings or positions of A and B, this is bound to give A, who holds more or is better positioned, power over B, who holds less or is worse positioned. But this is highly doubtful; it would be absurd to say that your superior darts ability delivers me into your power, doubly absurd to say that it is bound to, and triply absurd to describe your superiority in darts as unjust because it inevitably so delivers me. There are many sorts of inequality, and they do not all cut the same way. If A is a publisher and B is a bank manager, A has positional power over B when B asks A to publish B's novel, and B has positional power over A when A asks B for a loan. Even differences in holdings of money, which no doubt is what egalitarians are mainly thinking of, need not deliver the poor into the hands of the rich, and need not in any obvious way operate unjustly. The fact that, say, Donald Trump is far richer than I am has no general tendency to deliver me into Trump's hands, and even in the special case where Trump and I are engaged in litigation, will not necessarily win the day for him. Perhaps egalitarianism might also be derived from the thought that when I am allocating resources that I have the right to allocate, and when an indifference argument applies to those to whom I allocate, then I act irrationally if I do not allocate equal shares to all. But not even this thought seems correct. If I have the right to allocate these resources, then I will typically have discretion about how to allocate them. Where I do not have such discretion, that is most likely to

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be either because the indifference argument does not apply, or else because I am in one of the familiar situations where we take equal shares as a mark of equal respect, and equal respect to be morally required. (Some decisions about wills, for instance, are like this—though even here not all.) But where I do have this discretion (as I sometimes do), I can without irrationality allocate the resources however I please, notwithstanding the indifference argument. The thought that rationality always requires equal allocations of all resources that I have the right to allocate is wrong. Even if it were right, the words in it that I have just italicised would still be crucial. One capital issue between the egalitarian and the non-egalitarian is which resources 'we' have the right to allocate. Nozick says: Only those resources that we hold by just acquisition. I say: Only those resources that we hold by just acquisition, plus whatever else we need to appropriate to meet dire needs. The egalitarian, apparently, says, or just assumes, that we have the right to allocate everything. (Perhaps he holds that a refusal actively to allocate is tantamount to a decision to allocate by abstension. In this rejection of the act-omission distinction, and adoption of a global model of agency 11 , the egalitarian shows up, interestingly, as the ally in political philosophy of the act-consequentialist in ethics. Now that's what I call guilt by association.) So, for instance, Thomas Christiano quietly builds this assumption into his defence of egalitarianism by way of what we might call The Egregious Passive: "The key idea is that if there is a reason for any person to be brought to a certain level of well-being, then the same reason holds for every person to be brought to that level of well-being." (Christiano 2007, 62, my italics) Who is supposed to have the right to do this "bringing", and what are they allowed to appropriate in order to do it? The egalitarian idea that we at least start from the presumption that everybody has that right, and can appropriate anything, begs one of the main questions at issue. But to say, as I do, that there is a duty to assist the seriously needy which forms an important part of any plausible theory of justice is not to buy into any sort of egalitarianism. 12 All 11 On these see further Chappell 2007, especially chts. 5 and 8 (available online at my OU webpage). 12 Unless perhaps it is to buy into some sophisticated and diluted sort of egalitarianism such as that defended by Michael Walzer under the name "complex equality" (1983, 19-20): "The regime of complex equality is the opposite of tyranny. It establishes a set of relationships such that domination is impossible [... ] complex equality means that no citizen's standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good. Thus, citizen X may be chosen over citizen Y for political office, and then the two of them will be unequal in the sphere of politics. But they will not be unequal generally so long as X's office gives him no advantages over Y in any other sphere [... ] So long as office is not a dominant good, is not generally convertible, officer holders will stand, or at least can stand, in a relation of equality to the men and women they govern."

There is much to agree with in this passage. It brings out nicely, for instance, some of the deeper and less obvious reasons why political corruption matters so much. But it is not clearly an advocacy of any distinctively egalitarian thesis, unless it is egalitarianism to believe that all citizens in the state should (in general) be treated with equal justice, and (as a particular application of that general requirement) given equal protection against what Walzer calls "tyranny". This requirement of equal justice is not, it seems to me, a requirement of equality, it is a requirement of justice. Thus I agree with the substance of Walzer's thesis of complex equality, but disagree with him that it is well labelled egalitarianism.

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justice requires is what we do have the right to bring about by redistribution via the instruments of the Bureaucracy: that every member of society should have a minimally decent level of well-being, resources, and opportunity. To say that is not to advocate a pattern at all; as many patterns are consistent with this requirement as are consistent with Nozick's own. ("But why should an individual duty to assist, fulfilled by voluntary acts, imply a state's duty to assist, fulfilled by coercing individuals and appropriating their holdings?" The logic that gets us from the one to the other is Nozick's own. It is Nozick's view that the state's coercive rights depend entirely on what justice is for individuals. If his account of justice for individuals omits a vital duty of individuals to assist the needy, we may expect, by his own reasoning, that that omission will be mirrored by an omission in his account of what the state may permissibly constrain individuals to do.) This much to develop the heartlessness objection to the Bureaucracy or minimalist or libertarian conception of the state. (Cheap dig: the Index to Anarchy, State, and Utopia contains no entry for "compassion".) As I've said, this seems to be the really telling objection to Bureaucracy; the charges that Maclntyre makes most of in After Virtue, about relativism, ideological cloaking, and moral neutrality, are in danger of missing the whole point of the Bureaucracy. But even this charge can, as I've argued, be resisted. And when we articulate a notion of Bureaucracy that can deal with the charge of heartlessness, the upshot is that argument from the kind of evidence that Nozick allows himself will not get us to Nozick's Night Watchman State, but to something rather less minimal—a state that shares the Night Watchman's negative functions of preventing force and fraud, but also accepts a positive duty to assist those in serious need, i.e. those who fall short of a minimally decent welfare level. This is the shape of the Bureaucracy once these four objections, and particularly the last one about heartlessness, have been given their due. Remember, we arrived at this conception from transcendental considerations alone. No particular conception of the good for humans is required to agree that agency within the state should be protected from violence, force, intimidation, or fraud (whether of external or of internal origin 13 ), or that those in dire need should be assisted: 13 One important potential source of coercion and other illegitimate pressure on individuals can be either internal or external to a given society: it can also be both internal and external at once. This potential source is, of course, the activities of Big Business. I say 'potential source', because I wish to leave this issue open here. I am aware of the standard arguments of the Left, that the forces of Big Business effectively deprive many individual citizens of any worthwhile freedom at all, and that a political 'individualist' like Nozick is, in reality, no more than an ideological apologist for such forces. As a matter of fact, I think the first of these claims somewhat exaggerated: in societies like the UK and the US, Big Business does deprive typical individual citizens of important freedoms, for example, often, of the freedom to compete with them; but it comes nowhere depriving them of all worthwhile freedom. But whether this claim is exaggerated is a matter of fact, and I do not wish to get into a factual debate here. What I do want to point out is that, if Big Business deliberately or otherwise deprives citizens of important freedoms, then for reasons given in the main text, the Bureaucracy will have a duty to counteract this effect. It follows that the Bureaucracy will then be obliged to appear as the friend of the individual citizen, and the opponent of Big Business, wherever such effects are appearing. This tends to show how the Left's second standard claim, about 'individualists' as apologists for Big

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these conclusions will follow on any plausible conception of the good for humans. Thus far the Bureaucracy, and no further.14 To go beyond these limited and minimal roles is to begin to articulate a particular conception of the human good; and this, I've insisted, is not the role of the Bureaucracy, but of particular Communities that live in the space created by the Bureaucracy. "Space" is a good metaphor here: even in its role of addressing dire need, the Bureaucracy needs to be understood as removing obstacles to Community. If the Community is a positive institution, promoting what Isaiah Berlin famously called "positive liberty", the Bureaucracy is essentially a negative institution, protecting 15 Berlinian "negative liberty". I said before that the state is for the sake of the individual, not the individual for the sake of the state. We can add that the Bureaucracy is there for the sake of the Communities, not the Communities for the sake of the Bureaucracy. If these are the characteristic advantages and defects of Bureaucracy and Community, it will be obvious how dangerous it is to confuse them. 1 6 A Bureaucracy cannot rightfully usurp the Communities' claim to their members' enthusiasm, devotion, and loyalty. The Bureaucracy, to say it once more, is there for the citizens, not the citizens for the Bureaucracy. Conversely, the Communities cannot rightfully usurp the Bureaucracy's claim to coerce: a Community that is not freely entered into, and cannot be freely left, is not a Community at all but a form of slavery. A government which demands our devotion, and demands it with coercive power, is one familiar sort of political nightmare, the nightmare of totalitarianism that has tragically dominated so many human lives in the twentieth century. The other extreme would be a government which offered us Business, is also an exaggeration. Though there is certainly a perturbing silence about the effects of Big Business on individual freedom in Nozick, at any rate political individualism need not invariably serve t h e interests of Big Business, and can be seriously deployed against them. 14 Well, not much further, though there is a pressure for other possible state functions t o be included too. For instance, town planning involves appeals to aesthetic criteria, and it is hard to see how a refusal to allow a building t o be built by Jones—on land t h a t Jones owns, by Jones' legitimate contracts with construction firms, etc.—can be justified, within Nozick's framework, simply by t h e consideration t h a t t h e building will be horrendously ugly. Again, rules can be legitimately imposed by t h e state simply in the interests of co-ordinating action. Driving on the left is a simple example: what does t h a t have t o do with acting against force or fraud, and enforcing contracts? If Nozick's Night Watchman State has no brief to co-ordinate action, or prevent t h e imposition of gross ugliness on society, in such simple and essential ways as these, t h a t surely casts doubt upon whether it is the state t h a t we want at all. 15 For more on protecting vs. promoting see Chappell 1998, ch.3; 2003; 2007, ch.6. 16 Some argue t h a t , on t h e contrary, there are dangers in not running Community and Bureaucracy together. Alasdair Maclntyre might seem to be implying this argument in the first quotation in this paper, when he raises t h e question why anyone would die for t h e modern state. Lucas 1966, 292, as quoted by Nozick (1974, 351), spells t h e argument out in full: "A state which was really morally neutral, which was indifferent to all values, other t h a n t h a t of maintaining law and order, would not command enough allegiance t o survive at all. A soldier may sacrifice his life for Queen and Country, but hardly for the Minimum State [... ] Some ideals are necessary to inspire those without whose free co-operation t h a t state would not survive." Nozick asks "Why does Lucas assume t h a t t h e employees of t h e minimal state cannot be dedicated to the rights it protects?" I echo his rhetorical question. I also note t h e oddity of supposing t h a t the social utility of belief in a given ideal is any argument at all for t h e t r u t h of t h a t belief.

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nothing to be devoted to, but on the other hand did no coercion either. Such a situation is less common, but no one should think that life would be good in the absence of any sort of state protection from fraud and violence. The astonishing thing is, of course, just how much in the history of political philosophy has depended on confusing the Community and the Bureaucracy, and arrogating to the Community what rightfully belongs only to the Bureaucracy, or vice versa: the political philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx cannot even be stated without committing this confusion. But maybe that is now changing. We've already seen how Nozick effectively recognises the distinction that I've made between Bureaucracy and Community in the last chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia: to quote his illuminating slogan again, "Utopia is a framework for Utopias" (1974, 312). But strikingly enough, Nozick is not the only political philosopher now taking the idea seriously. Here is John Rawls: "I believe that a democratic society is not and cannot be a community, where by a community I mean a body of persons united in affirming the same comprehensive [... ] doctrine. The fact of reasonable pluralism which characterises a society with free institutions makes this impossible. This is the fact of profound and irreconcilable differences in citizens' reasonable comprehensive religious and philosophical conceptions of the world, and in their view of the moral and aesthetic values to be sought in human life [... ]" (Rawls 2001, 3-4) And here is Michael Otsuka, who in his recent book expresses his commitment to a vision of "a left-libertarian national confederation in which like-minded adults are permitted to found profoundly illiberal or inegalitarian towns, cities, or provinces so long as the confederation also contains liberalegalitarian political societies to which individuals may migrate without difficulty." (Otsuka 2003, 130) And here, finally, is Maclntyre—for now we come to the second Maclntyre quotation promised at the outset of this section's argument. "A crucial turning point in that earlier history [the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages] occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead [... ] was the construction 17 17 We might worry about this talk of constructing new communities of virtue. Surely the point of a Maclntyrean community of virtue is that it's a historically authentic and organic development that happens spontaneously and unselfconsciously. How could such an unselfconscious entity be deliberately constructed? The quickest response, no doubt, is simply to deny that communities of virtue do have to be unselfconscious in this way. A sense of unease remains.

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of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming age of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for some time." (Maclntyre 1981, 263) For reasons that I've explained, I don't share the pessimism of Maclntyre's famous peroration to After Virtue about the possibility of "shoring up the imperium", or accept his implied advice that we abandon that task, retreat into our Communities, and pull up the drawbridge behind us. As I've argued, we need the Bureaucracy as much as the Communities: we cannot credibly or sensibly pull up the drawbridge, as (e.g.) the great monasteries of Clonmacnoise, Iona, or Lindisfarne very sensibly did in the seventh to ninth centuries AD, both because the world beyond the drawbridge is nowhere near as chaotic as it was then, and also because we need to stay in a position to foster both the Bureaucracy and the Communities. The interesting thing is that Maclntyre himself apparently no longer accepts After Virtue''s pessimism either: "[...] every ruling power that asserts its legitimate and justifiable political and legal sovereignty over its subjects [must be able to] provide at least minimal security for its subjects from external aggression and internal criminality [... ] But the good of public security, although it is a good served by [the] admirable devotion [of police officers, firefighters, and soldiers], and although it is a good without which none of us in our various local communities could achieve our common goods, must not be allowed to obscure the fact that the shared public goods of the modern nation-state are not the common goods of a genuine nation-wide community and, when the nation masquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome is bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both [... ] In a modern, large scale nation-state no such collectivity is possible and the pretence that it is is always an ideological disguise for sinister realities [... ] insofar as the nation-state provides necessary and important public goods, these must not be confused with the type of common good for which communal recognition is required by the virtues of acknowledged dependence, and that insofar as the rhetoric of the nation-state presents it as the provider of something that is indeed, in this stronger sense, a common good, that rhetoric is a purveyor of dangerous fictions." (Maclntyre 1999, 132-133)

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On the evidence of this passage (and numerous others like it), Maclntyre and I have reached the same place by different routes. We agree on the need, given modern conditions, for both a Bureaucracy and a Community (or rather Communities). We agree that most of the political goods that make human life good are achieved in Communities, although some 'executive' or 'transcendental' goods need a Bureaucracy to achieve them. Above all, we agree that—at least in the conditions of modernity—the Bureaucracy is not and cannot be any sort of Community, and in particular, not a super-Community; and that it is extremely dangerous, and a source of pernicious ideological illusions, to confuse the Bureaucracy and the Community. My route to this conclusion was a Kantian argument which began from the question "What does any Community need secured for it, no matter what goods that particular Community distinctively aims at?", and as it were 'deduced' the need for a Bureaucracy as the answer to this question. Maclntyre's route to it is essentially subtractive: he starts from the notion of a Community, and then points out one by one, or at any rate by way of examples, the features in virtue of which a modern Bureaucracy is bound to fail to be a Community. 18 However we get there, the striking thing is that we get to the same place, and that along the way certain other features of Maclntyre's approach come into clearer focus. For one thing, we come to see why Maclntyre is so adamant about the distance between his own views and communitarianism (Footnote 3). The communitarian typically takes it that our Bureaucracy can and should be a Community—a crucial mistake as I have argued, and as Maclntyre too now clearly believes. For another, we can now see, more clearly than in 1981, what After Virtue is getting at by complaining about the interminability of moral argument in our society. The real point is not what it all too readily seemed to be at the time, that moral argument is not but ought to be apodeictically cogent as the sciences are, and should procure this cogency by eliminating and/or rationalising large swathes of its own rather chaotic mix of inherited resources. Nor, come to that, did Maclntyre have any genuine need to invoke what in After Virtue he so often seemed to be invoking—most puzzlingly, given his own genius for the fine detail of the history of ideas: namely, the apparently uncritical notion of a golden age for practical reason. What really counts is Maclntyre's thesis that Communities must be nurtured, because they are where humans achieve much the greatest part of the human good; and his concomitant view that the construction of Communities is a feasible (if dauntingly difficult) ambition for us today, living as we do in the context of the modern nation-state, because there are forms of Community that are worth the trouble of constructing or entering that can and do co-exist with the Bureaucracy. About all of this Maclntyre seems crucially right—and to have insights to offer that liberals like me can learn much from. I might go further still, and add that, properly understood, Maclntyre begins to look like a sort of liberal himself. 18

Though he now adds a different route: Maclntyre (2006a, 77) spells out the preconditions of dialogue between those who fundamentally disagree in a way which Maclntyre thinks Thomistic, but which to me looks remarkably reminiscent of Habermas' account of those preconditions. See also "Toleration and the goods of conflict", in the same volume.

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I say this despite his continuing rejections of that description: see e.g. his 1995 paper "Three perspectives on Marxism". He there gives three reasons why he rejects "liberal democracy" (Maclntyre 2006a, 153). The first of these reasons is that he thinks events have vindicated the Marxist prediction that "liberal democracy" would first domesticate and then destroy "effective trade union power", leaving workers "returned to the condition of mere instruments of capital formation". Even if this claim were true, it would not be an argument against 'liberal democracy' as such—any more than the fact that "truth" can be used as a name to cloak various lies is an argument against truth as such. In any case, I doubt the claim is true, at least in contemporary Britain. Union power has certainly been diminished here—though not because it sought or accepted "domestication" so much as because of its own strategically unwise militancy. And since the collapse of union power, it simply isn't the case that "workers" (who are not, by the way, a Marxian proletariat, or anything like one) have been "returned to the condition of mere instruments of capital formation" that they occupied in, say, 1860 or even 1930. It does not seem, then, that the Marxist prediction has been fulfilled. Maclntyre's second reason for rejecting liberal democracy is that "liberalism is the politics of a set of elites, whose members [... ] predetermine for the most part the range of political choices open to the vast mass of ordinary voters [... ] entry into and success in the arenas of liberal politics has increasingly required financial resources that only corporate capitalism can supply [... ] Liberalism thus ensures the exclusion of most people from any possibility of active and rational participation in determining the form of community in which they live." (Maclntyre 2006a, 153) This seems an apt and accurate critique of something immediately recognisable and importantly dysfunctional. But not liberalism, or liberal democracy; what Maclntyre describes here is the US political system as it now operates. Hence what Maclntyre has hold of here is not a reason not to be a liberal. It is a reason to reform American politics. Indeed, it is a liberal reason to do that. Maclntyre's third reason for rejecting liberal democracy is that "the moral individualism of liberalism is itself a solvent of participatory community": "Liberalism in its practice as well as in much of its theory promotes a vision of the social world as an arena in which each individual, in pursuit of the achievement of whatever she or he takes to be her or his good, needs to be protected from other such individuals by the enforcement of individual rights. Moral argument within liberalism cannot therefore begin from some conception of a genuinely common good that is more than the sum of the preferences of individuals. But argument to, from, and about such a conception of the good is integral to the practice of participatory community." (Maclntyre 2006a, 153-154) This misses the possibility that I, following Nozick and Maclntyre himself, have been developing: that a close to minimal state, a Bureaucracy, might protect not only the legitimate negative liberties of individuals, but also, and as a necessary

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part of that, the legitimate negative liberties of whatever Communities those individuals may choose to form or join. If that happens, then certainly, in one sense, "moral argument within liberalism" will not be able to "begin from some conception of a genuinely common good". There is a distinction between moral argument between Communities, and moral argument within any Community. Naturally the first sort of argument cannot begin from agreement on the good: that it begins, instead, from transcendental considerations is (I have argued) its defining feature. That does not mean that the second sort can't. Nor does it mean that the first sort of argument can take no rational form: as I have argued, its form will be transcendental. Here too I see no reason for Maclntyre to maintain his official self-exclusion from the liberal fold.

3. Conclusions: Two Historical Narratives—and Two Cities My disagreements with Maclntyre, at any rate the Maclntyre of After Virtue, are important ones. But my agreements with his views, especially in their more recent forms, are more important (and the more I redraft this essay, the more salient they become). I have argued that Maclntyre's viewpoint is best understood as at least compatible with liberalism, perhaps even as a version of liberalism. If we are called on by Maclntyre to build Communities, that is a calling that the liberal can accept too; if we were called on by the Maclntyre of After Virtue to reject the Bureaucracy, that is a calling that no sensible person should accept—and especially not the liberal, because the liberal is in a good position to articulate what is good about the Bureaucracy. But then, Maclntyre himself apparently no longer thinks that we should reject the Bureaucracy: "[T]hose who practise the virtues will have a double attitude to the nation-state. They will recognise that it is an ineliminable feature of the contemporary landscape and they will not despise the resources that it affords. It may and on occasion does provide the only means for removing obstacles to humane goals and we all have reason, for example, to be very grateful indeed to those who secured the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and to those who have used its provisions constructively and creatively. But they will also recognise that the modern state cannot provide a political framework informed by the just generosity necessary to achieve the common goods of networks of giving and receiving." (Maclntyre 1999, 133) To the extent that he now accepts the need for a Bureaucracy alongside our Communities, and tells us to engage with it, albeit cautiously, Maclntyre is, at least, closer to liberalism than he used to be. For us now, I suspect, no credible political vision could be other than liberal in one sense or another. But the reasons why that is so are, I take it, deeply historical ones. I completely agree with Maclntyre that history has a role in securing (or undermining) both moral theory and the rationality of moral action. It is

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just for that reason that I am myself a liberal—because I simply do not find any deeply non-liberal position so much as rationally tenable (let alone convincing) at this stage of our history. I therefore think that there is a quasi-MacIntyrean story to be told about how and why liberalism has become rationally unavoidable for us. However exactly it goes, one upshot of that story must be that there can for us as a whole society be no going back to anything like the ancient unities of the Athenian polis. This too Maclntyre now explicitly accepts: "[T]he notion of reviving the polis at some later time—not only a recurrent phantasy of some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantics, but a phantasy recurrently imputed to Aristotelian critics of modernity, such as myself, no matter how vigorously we disown it—has always been absurd, as the emperor Hadrian unintentionally demonstrated, when he tried to restore the polis by imperial edict." (Maclntyre 2006a, 5) If those ancient unities are to be recovered anywhere, it will have to be in a particular Community sharply distinct from the rest of society—and so in at least one crucial way radically unlike the Athenian polis. Another upshot will inevitably be that it is not rationally tenable for us to reject either the eighteenthcentury intellectual and moral achievement that we call the Enlightenment, or the twentieth-century achievement that we might call the globalisation of ethical concern. We can of course criticise and refine the details of those intellectual programmes. But we can no more dis-invent their achievements than we can reconvene the Spanish Inquisition. If I am disagreeing with Maclntyre here—but I doubt I am—I am disagreeing with him on historical grounds, of a sort that he might recognise. Likewise, I began by questioning the historical narrative of After Virtue. But I did that because I disagreed with that narrative, not because I deny that historical narratives are philosophically important. The historical narrative I should wish to tell—this is the narrative that I think supports my own liberal political philosophy—is a modester and in some ways even a more pessimistic story than After Virtue's-, it is certainly a less racy and less shapely narrative. The short name for it is "the cock-up theory of history". Versions of parts of it have been offered by Isaiah Berlin; his finest contribution to the telling of this tale is perhaps his wonderful denunciation of the notion of "Historical Inevitability".19 It is a narrative that places us on Dover Beach, listening to the "turbid ebb and flow Of human misery", and to ignorant armies clashing by night. It is a tale of continual failure, repetition, and reinvention of the wheel (sometimes, as Bernard Williams tartly remarked of Philippa Foot's neo-Aristotelianism, of the reinvention of the square wheel). It is a tale both tragic and farcical; a story, in sum, of beings who given the necessary imperfections of all interference, need 19

Berlin 1969, 43: "Comte's conception of sociology pointed him in [the direction] of one complete and all-embracing pyramid of scientific knowledge; one method; one truth; one scale of rational, 'scientific' values. This naïve craving for unity and symmetry at the expense of experience is with us still."

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to be as free from others' interference as possible, yet also need some arena in which to pursue their own high ideals. This vision of an imperfect public world which stands alongside Utopian aspirations that (so history repeatedly teaches us 20 ) are best not imposed on it, but expressed some other way, is certainly a liberal one. But it is one that Maclntyre seems to share: see his remarks about a 'double attitude', quoted above. It is also - and here we come, finally, to my deepest agreement with Maclntyre—a Christian, and indeed an Augustinian, vision:21 "The city of God we speak of is the same to which testimony is borne by that Scripture [...] For there it is written, "Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God- [... ] Prom these and similar testimonies [... ] we have learned that there is a city of God, and its Founder has inspired us with a love which makes us covet its citizenship. To this Founder of the holy city the citizens of the earthly city prefer their own gods [... ] I will endeavour to treat of the origin, and progress, and deserved destinies of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, which [... ] are in this present world commingled, and as it were entangled together [...]" (Augustine, dCD XI.1) St Augustine was in more than one mind about how to read history, inclining sometimes, like Maclntyre and Hegel and Marx, to see a particular providence expressing itself through history's grandest architectonic conceptual and cultural changes, at other times, like me and Berlin, to see a much more inscrutable and much more chaotic picture. 22 But perhaps that indeterminacy between a grand récit and a Dover-beach darkling-plain picture is just what we should expect, if there really are, as Augustine claims, two cities, and if Christians like Maclntyre and me find ourselves landed, one way or another, in both. 23

Bibliography Augustine, St (1972), The City of God, tr. Owen Chadwick, London Belloc, H. (1911),The French Revolution, Oxford Berlin, I. (1969), Four Essays on Libert, Oxford Chappell, T. (1998), Understanding Human Goods, Edinburgh 20

In the words of the 'beat poet' Steve Turner: "History repeats itself. Has to. No one listens." 21 Maclntyre in fact denies, surprisingly perhaps, that the church is an example of what he means by a Community. 22 As evidence that the providential and chaos theories of history are not, in the last analysis, incompatible—not at least for a Christian—I cite the greatest poem of the nineteenth century: Hopkins' The Wreck of The Deutschland. A citizen of both Augustine's cities may perhaps say that he sees the chaos qua citizen of the one, and the providence qua citizen of the other. 23 Thanks for helpful discussion to Russell Keat, Anton Leist, Tim Mulgan, Jon Pike, Sean Sayers, Raj Sehgal, and other participants at the Radical Maclntyre conference at London Metropolitan University, July 2007.

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— (2002), Two distinctions that do make a difference: The Action/Omission Distinction and the Principle of Double Effect, in: Philosophy, 77(2), 211-233 — (2003), Practical Rationality for Plurality about the Goods, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 6(2), 161-177 — (2005), The Inescapable Self, London — (2007 version), Ethics and the Vision of Value. Online at: http://www.open.ac.uk/ Arts/philos/chappell-drafts.htm — (forthcoming), Aristotle's Naturalism, forthcoming in: Balot, R. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Aristotle's Political Thought, Oxford Christiano, T. (2006), A Foundation for Egalitarianism, in: Holtung N./Lippert-Rassmussen, K. (eds.), Egalitarism, Oxford Cohen, G. A. (1995), Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, Oxford Foster, M. B. (1937), A Mistake of Plato's The Republic, in: Mind 46, 386-393 Hegel, G . W . F. (1820), The Philosophy of Right, Numerous editions. Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.) (1994), After Maclntyre, Notre Dame Knight, K. (ed.) (1998), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge Locke, J. (1690), Essay concerning Human Understanding, Numerous editions. Lukas, J. (1966), 1966, The Principles of Politics, Oxford Machan, T. (2006), Libertarianism Defended, London Maclntyre, A. (1981), After Virtue, London — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London — (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, London — (1999), Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Chicago — (2006a), The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays 1, Cambridge — (2006b), Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, vorlume 2, Cambridge Nozick, R. (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford Otsuka, M. (2003), Libertarianism without Inequality, Oxford Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice, Oxford — (2001), Justice as Fairness: a Restatement, Cambridge Rousseau, J.-J. (1763), Du Contrat Socia, Numerous editions. Turner, S. (1980), Up to Date, London Walzer, M. (1983), Spheres of Justice, Oxford Williams, B. (1985), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London

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Bowring

Misunderstanding Maclntyre on Human Rights

Abstract: This short article starts with Alasdair Maclntyre's famous critical remarks on human rights in After Virtue, and proceeds to ask whether in fact Maclntyre can be read against himself, taking a range of his own texts. This provides the basis for a sketch of a substantive account of human rights, more historicised and political than those for which Maclntyre has so little time. The article engages with some leading English Aristotelians—James Griffin and John Tasioulas in particular. Maclntyre has been a Marxist: this article suggests that perhaps he still is and that a consistent Aristotelian is a Marxist, especially where human rights are concerned.

0. Introduction In this article I start from Alasdair Maclntyre's notorious remarks about human rights in After Virtue, and cite a number of leading human rights scholars, each of whom would appear to have misread the text entirely, in startlingly different ways. I contend t h a t these authors and others have missed the point about Maclntyre; and although he has moved a long way in his intellectual journey since his earliest works, there is an underlying core which has not changed so much. I do not pretend to have fully understood Maclntyre; and certainly do not purport to understand him better t h a n he understands himself. Furthermore, my own take on Maclntyre is highly selective, and not at all consistent with the general tenor of his thought. Nevertheless, I do seek to present his reflections on issues concerned with human rights, taken from a range of his many publications. I do have an ulterior motive, not connected with any desire to criticise Maclntyre. My reason for undertaking this exercise is that I am seeking to develop an account of human rights which is substantive rather t h a n procedural. This is presented at greater length in my book (Bowring 2008). T h a t is, I argue that a case can be made for an Aristotelian, substantive account of human rights; a case that is thoroughly historicised, but restores human rights to their proper status as always scandalous: human rights are the product of, and constantly reanimated by, human struggle. I have found a number of points in Maclntyre's work at which, for reasons consistent with his Aristotelian frustration with the emptiness of contemporary rights talk, he provides strong support for my contentions. I would argue t h a t there is significant consistency to his remarks, and t h a t he can be taken to hold a

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set of opinions which might seem to run counter to the bold statements in After Virtue. I recognise, however, that in his more recent work Maclntyre tends to an increasingly conservative set of conclusions, consistent with his Catholicism. But my own feeling is that not only has Maclntyre been misunderstood by his human rights critics: in an important sense, he may be taken, in this respect, more and more to have misunderstood himself. My strategy in the paper is first to refer briefly to the critics already referred to. Next, I outline Maclntyre's own core positions as I read them. This takes me to an account of the thinking about human rights of two contemporary Aristotelians, James Griffin and John Tasioulas. Finally, I attempt a sketch of what an Aristotelian Marxist account of human rights might look like.

1. After Virtue, and Human Rights Critics and Supporters In After Virtue Alasdair Maclntyre famously assaulted the contemporary discourse of "rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings". He selected Gewirth (1978), and Dworkin (1976), in order to show that there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns (Maclntyre 1990, 69). He specified that by 'rights' he did 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." (Maclntyre 1990, 68-69) Maclntyre points to the fact that prior to the eighteenth century, where such rights were spoken of as 'natural rights' or 'rights of man', there was no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by the modern expression 'a right'. This of course does not mean that there were no such rights—only 'that no one could have known that there were'. In a rather later text, now explicitly Christian, Maclntyre referred to " [... ] the inadequacy and the sterility of the modern idiom and rhetoric of rights." (Maclntyre 1991, 110) Maclntyre is not alone in considering that human rights are no more than rhetoric, the position held for example by Martin Loughlin (2001, 45). As a result of these arguments, Maclntyre has become something of a straw man for human rights theorists and apologists. Michael Freeman, who studies human rights as a political scientist, selects Maclntyre as someone who asserts that human rights doctrine is false; according to Freeman, Maclntyre holds the view that the belief in human rights is an ontological error (Freeman 1994, 500). According to Freeman, "Maclntyre misses his target, and the target he misses is a non-foundationalist defense of rights." However, a closer reading of Maclntyre's text would show that Maclntyre would be equally critical of a nonfoundationalist account. In Freeman's more recent, and very popular, textbook he contends that Maclntyre's mistake is to think of "human rights" as "things" that we could "have" as we have arms or legs (Freeman 2002, 5-6). Freeman's

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answer is that rights are not things, but just claims or entitlements. Thus, this "[...] defeats Maclntyre's objection that belief in human rights is superstitious, for there is nothing superstitious in thinking what human beings may be entitled to". But that is surely not Maclntyre's objection, which concerns the pretended universality of human rights, when their inception can be specified in both space and time. Next, Upendra Baxi, a passionate critic of law and rights, characterises Maclntyre's position as "human rights weariness—a kind of moral fatigue with rights languages and logics, marked by an ethical disposition that contests the very notion of human rights as a moral language and rhetoric." (Baxi 2002, 51-52) I myself would reply that Maclntyre's views are characterised not at all by weariness, but by a lucid and ardent moral passion. The Director of Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics, Conor Gearty, in his popular recent Hamlyn Lectures, observes as follows: "I think Maclntyre was wrong to hanker after a now impossible Aristotelian virtue but he was right that something needs to be done." (Gearty 2006, 57-58) It does indeed; but Gearty has clearly not read Maclntyre's Dependant Rational Animals (1999), which explicitly argues for the contemporary necessity of—the virtues. Finally, in her Who Believes in Human Rights?, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour simply classes Maclntyre, with herself, as a "human rights nihilist or discourse scholar" (Dembour 2006, 258). Her own view is that human rights, far from being inherent or inalienable, are "a system of persuasion", a "kind of rhetoric", an 'expression of the will to power—even to domination—of those making the [human rights] truth-claims over those who are being addressed by them" (Dembour 2006, 275; citing Snyder 1988, xii). Her desire to recruit Maclntyre to her cause is perhaps premature.

2. Macintyre's Aristotelianism In fact, Maclntyre (2006, 111) is very far from being a nihilist. Instead, he has argued for "socially embodied moral concepts". Aristotle, according to him, had the following position: "[.. .]that it was only within a particular type of political and social order that rationally practical and moral concepts could be socially embodied". This was in fact his position from at least 1967. In A Short History of Ethics, published first in that year, he wrote: "Moral concepts are embodied in and are partially constitutive of forms of social life." (Maclntyre 1999, 1) Indeed, Steven Lukes described Maclntyre as " [... ] developing a 'social ideological', quasi-Aristotelian view [...]" (Lukes 1981, 334). Another commentator, Susan Stephenson, summarises what she described as Maclntyre's "reworked Aristotelianism" as having three central terms - practices, narratives and traditions. Stephenson points out that Maclntyre defines "Practices" as "any coherent and complex form of socially established human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that

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form of activity with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended" (Maclntyre 1985, 187). Furthermore, he defines "tradition" as "[...] an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition [...]" (222). Moreover, Maclntyre has also criticised conservative thinkers, such as Burke, who wanted to counterpose tradition and reason, and tradition and revolution. Maclntyre makes what is for me a very profound and important remark: "Yet, if the present arguments are correct, it is traditions that are the bearers of reason, and traditions at certain periods actually require and need revolutions for their continuance." (Maclntyre 2006, 12) He is referring to the 'great revolution'—the French Revolution. Part of my own project is the rehabilitation of the great revolutions, and the restoration of their honour. Of course, Maclntyre is commonly categorised as a 'communitarian', although he declared his dislike for "[C]ontemporary communitarians, from whom I strongly dissociate myself whenever I have had an opportunity to do so", because they "[...] advance their proposals as a contribution to the politics of the nation state." (Maclntyre, in Horton/Mendus 1994, 302) However, he has also stated that "[...] Aristotle gave us excellent reasons for believing that both rational enquiry in politics and ethics and rationality in action require membership in a community which shares allegiance to some tolerably specific overall conception of the ultimate human good." (Maclntyre 1991, 99) In Whose Justice? Which Rationality, exploring Aristotle's legacy, he wrote: "Aristotle's presupposed social context is one in which evaluation is primarily in terms of the achievement of the ends of activity; Hume's is one in which evaluation is primarily in terms of the satisfaction of consumers. The individual envisaged by Aristotle engages in practical reasoning not just qua individual, but qua citizen, of a polis4, the individual as envisaged by Hume engages in practical reasoning qua member of a type of society in which rank, property, and pride structure social exchanges." (Maclntyre 1988, 298) Maclntyre has also said the following in the same text: "The conclusion to which the argument has so far led is not only that it is out of the debates, conflicts and enquiry of socially embodied, historically contingent traditions that contentions regarding practical rationality and justice are advanced, modified, abandoned or replaced, but that there is no other way to engage in the formulation, elaboration, rational justification, and criticism of accounts of practical rationality and justice except from within some one particular tradition in conversation, cooperation, and conflict with those who inhabit the same tradition." (Maclntyre 1988, 350) This is what Charles Taylor has described as Maclntyre's distinction between "substantive notions of ethics" and "procedural notions of ethics"—the latter

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in a powerful tradition from Bentham through Kant to Rawls, Dworkin and Habermas. (Taylor, in Horton/Mendus 1994, 27) Taylor says that for the former "[...] you have to start for your theory of justice from the kinds of goods and the kinds of common practices organised around these goods that people actually have in a given society" (Taylor ibid, 31). It will be seen from these quotations which Maclntyre it is that speaks to me most directly. This Aristotelian Maclntyre is, for me, plainly arguing for a substantive and embodied rather than a procedural and deracinated understanding of ethics, one that is socially embodied and located in history. This understanding, I contend, is equally applicable to human rights as I wish to present them. It seems to me that the later, more religious, Maclntyre has allowed himself to view rights as only and always "admirably suited to the purposes of individuals or groups who believe themselves restricted or restrained in any way by religious institutions or authorities." The very conservative tendency of this line of thought may be seen in the passage which follows on the same page: "Generally and characteristically [rights] are used to present continually renewed challenges to what is taken by those who present them to be the institutional status quo, challenges designed to dissolve the bonds, and undermine the authority, of all institutions intermediate between the individual on the one hand and the government and the justice system on the other: such institutions as, families, schools and churches." (Maclntyre 1994, 105) This in fact is very close to Burke's critique, Reflections on the Revolution in France, of the human rights contained in the French revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: "While they are possessed by these notions [rights of men], it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of the constitution [... ] they have wrought under-ground a mine that will blow up at one grand explosion all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters and acts of parliament." (Burke 1790, in Waldron 1987, 104)

3. Human Rights as Substantive Rather than Procedural So, what would it mean to think substantively about human rights (or for that matter about other categories and concepts which find their place at the centre of international law, for example the right of states to non-interference in their internal affairs, or the right of peoples to self-determination)? At this point I have drawn particular inspiration from a pair of articles in the European Journal of Philosophy, the first by James Griffin (Griffin 2001), the second John Tasioulas (2001). Both draw on a substantive account of human rights, developed by Wayne Sumner (1987). Griffin states that "We need a substantive account of human rights. By a 'substantive' account I mean one that adds enough content to the notion of 'human' in the term 'human rights' to tell us, for any proposed such right, whether it really is one—one that thereby supplies what I shall call 'existence conditions' for a human right." (Griffin 2001, 307)

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The reader will note that this is what is entirely missing in Habermas' proceduralist (or Loughlin's) account. Griffin contrasts this with a "structural" or "conceptual" account—the accounts of Feinberg, Dworkin, Rawls, or Hohfeld. In order to supply a substantive account, he prefers a "bottom-up approach"—which starts with "human rights as used in our actual social life by politicians, lawyers, social campaigners, as well as theorists of various sorts, and then sees what higher principles one must resort to in order to explain their moral weight [... ]" (Griffin 2001, 308) For Griffin (in his Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society in October 2000), human rights are grounded in "personhood" - with the constraint that they are rights not to anything that promotes human good or flourishing, but merely what is needed for human status. (Griffin 2001, 312) Griffin's Aristotelian account of human rights "[...] is centred on the notion of agency. We human beings have the capacity to form pictures of what a good life would be and to try to realise these pictures. We value our status as agents especially highly, often more highly even than out happiness. Human rights can then be seen as protections of our agency - what one might call our personhood. They are protective of that somewhat austere state, the life of an agent and not of a good or happy or perfected or flourishing life." (Griffin 2000, 10) John Tasioulas argues for a broadening out of Griffin's approach, for a "pluralist" account—he means a pluralism of values. This follows from his notion of "temporal relativity": "on this view, human rights would be possessed by humans qua human, but not necessarily at all times and all societies throughout history. Instead, they would be possessed by all in certain broadly defined historical contexts." (Tasioulas 2002, 87) His substantially Aristotelian conclusion is that: "[...] if we were to reduce the pluralist account to a slogan, it would be that human rights are to certain minimum conditions of a good life [... ]" (Tasioulas 2002, 96) . In this account, human rights are not rhetoric, nor a claim to universality derived from some purported characteristic of humanity, but are embodied and socially embedded. More recently Tasioulas has specifically criticised Maclntyre for overlooking another understanding of rights which is in fact Tasioulas' own: "that in order to 'complete the Enlightenment project' of human rights we need to go back beyond the Enlightenment to an Aristotelian tradition of thought about the human good and the special protection it merits." (Tasioulas 2003, 26)

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I would agree to that. That is in part because my own understanding of Aristotle is close to that of Terry Eagleton, who reminds us that: "For Aristotle, ethics and politics are intimately related. Ethics is about excelling at being human, and nobody can do this in isolation. Moreover, nobody can do it unless the political institutions that allow you to do it are available. This kind of moral thinking was inherited by Karl Marx." (Eagleton 2003) That I think is also what Maclntyre had in mind when he used the phrase "historically extended, socially embodied" (see above) in relation to moral concepts.

4. A Sketch of Another Account At this point I want to focus on the importance of 'temporality' as identified by John Tasioulas. I have already referred to the scandal attaching to the concept of human rights from the very first declarations of fundamental rights. For me, the delight of teaching human rights is that they problematise themselves at every step. Witness the substantial attacks made on the 'first generation', civil and political, rights of the French Declaration from the right (Burke), the centre (Bentham) and the left (Marx), with a few years of their promulgation (Waldron 1987). For the purpose of my attempt at a substantive account of rights, I now turn to the schema—much criticised and perhaps primarily of pedagogical value—of 'three generations' of human rights, developed in the 1970s by Karel Vasak of UNESCO (Vasek 1977 in Crawford 1988, 41) It is interesting that this model gained currency as part of the fierce debate concerning a concept of human rights which has always been highly controversial. In the 1980s, it was on the crest of a wave, but is now largely disowned—the concept of 'people's rights'. First and foremost of these is the principle, now the legal right, of the right of peoples to self-determination. In chapter 1 of my new book (2008) I show how the originator of this concept was none other than Vladimir Lenin; and that in Bolshevik Russia he put it into practice. The 'first generation', the civil and political rights, together with the right to private property, have temporal and geographical origins: they sprang directly from the French Revolution in 1789, and the American Revolution of the same period. I have already mentioned the horror inspired by the Declaration in England. However, Marx a little later provided the most devastating critique of the 'first generation' of rights, the civil and political rights. In his short polemic On the Jewish Question (Marx 1975a; Waldron 1987, 119-150), written at the same time as the Contribution referred to above, he engaged with the rights set out in the French Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Constitutions of 1793 and 1795. Marx stated as follows: "Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself [...]. the right of

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man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself [...]. The practical application of man's right to liberty is man's right to private property." Marx' critique of 'first generation' rights was and remains incisive, indeed definitive. What he could not anticipate was the increasing importance, as a direct result of political events and struggles, of the 'second' and 'third' generations, namely social and economic rights, and peoples' rights. I suspect his response now would be rather different. The temporality of the recognition in international law of the 'second generation' of human rights, social and economic rights, as human rights can also be located very accurately. These rights achieved the status of legal rights, and, most important, became available as instruments of legitimation and struggle, as a direct consequences of the events of 1917, more specifically in the creation of the International Labour Organisation in 1919. The ILO remains the most important source and mechanism for protection of social and economic rights. These rights have recently become much more concrete, in the context of the collapse of the USSR, by way of the Council of Europe's 1996 Revised Social Charter1, which came into force in 1999, with its mechanism for collective complaints, by Trade Unions and NGOs, to the European Committee of Social Rights. In Chapter 10 of my new book (Bowring 2008) I explore the scandalous nature, to this day, for the United Kingdom, of these rights. The 'third generation'—the peoples' rights to self-determination, to development, to a clean environment, to peace - were recognised as rights in international law following the colonial struggles of the 1960s, specifically with the coming into force of the two great UN Covenants on Human Rights in 1976. They have lost none of their relevance in the context of continuing cruel injustice of the global economy (Crawford 1988; Alston 2001; Bowring 2008).

5. Conclusion There is another way of putting this point. That is, as the successor to Hegel's (fundamentally Aristotelian) critique of liberalism. As Stephen B. Smith put it: "Rights, then, are not simply given, but are part of a larger historical struggle of human beings to achieve, or to become worthy of respect or recognition." (Smith 1989, 114) Thus, as I have argued above, rights have a real, substantive content, which may be located temporally. This is not to relativise human rights. On my account, the concept of the universality of human rights on a foundation of natural law has no moral content. It cannot assist either in the critique of ideology or indeed actuality; nor can it provide the bridge which can indicate the actions we ought to take. 1

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On the contrary, it is my case that human rights are real, and provide a ground for judgment and for action, to the extent that they are understood in their historical context, and as, and to the extent to which, they embody and define the content of real human struggles. That is also for me the meaning of the doctrine of the UN's Vienna World Conference on human rights in 1993, that all three generations of human rights are indivisible. The doctrine of indivisibility and inseparability is—and in my own view will prove to be - much more subversive than at first glance it seems. I would argue furthermore that this is also what Patricia Williams meant by 'alchemy' in her profound book The Alchemy of Race and Rights. She observes: "To say that blacks never fully believed in rights is true. Yet it is also true that blacks believed in them so much and so hard that we gave them life where there was none before." (Williams 1992, 13) Human rights discourse is often and increasingly the meaningless rhetoric of the powerful and the oppressor. This is the true meaning of Dembour's remarks noted above. But it is only part of the story. Human rights become real when articulating the present, not the endlessly deferred, claims of the oppressed.

Bibliography Adiprasetya, J. (2003), Whose Aristotle? Alasdair Maclntyre's Communitarian Virtues and Martha C. Nussbaum 's Non-Relative Virtues, Boston University School of Philosophy, at: people.bu.edu/joas/papers/ts961-virtues.pdf Baxi, U. (2002), The Future of Human Rights, Oxford Bowring, B. (2008), The Degradation of the International Legal Order? The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics, Abingdon Crawford, J. (1988) (ed.), The Rights of Peoples, Oxford Dembour, M.-B. (2006), Who Believes in Human Rights? Reflections on the European Convention, Cambridge Dworkin, R. (1978), Taking Rights Seriously, New York Eagleton, T. (2003), Living in a Material World, in: The Guardian Review 20, 34-35 (extract from T. Eagleton, After Theory, London) Freeman, M. (1994) The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, in: Human Rights Quarterly 4(3), 491-514 — (2002) Human Rights: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Cambridge Gearty, C. (2006), Can Human Rights Survive?, Cambridge Gewirth, A. (1978), Reason and Morality, Chicago Griffin, J. (2000), Discrepancies Between the Best Philosophical Account of Human Rights and the International Law of Human Rights, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 101(1), 1-28 — (2001), First Steps in an Account of Human Rights, in: European Journal of Philosophy 9(3), 306-327 Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.) (1994), After Maclntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair Maclntyre, Cambridge Loughlin, M. (2004), The Idea of Public Law, Oxford Lukes, S. (1981), Can a Marxist Believe in Human Rights? Praxis International 5(4), 334-345 Maclntyre, A. (1999), A Short History of Ethics. A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century, London

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— (1990) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London — (1990), The Privatisation of Good: An Inaugural Lecture Review of Politics 52(3), 344-361 — (1991), Community, Law and the Idiom and Rhetoric of Rights, in: Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 5, 96-110 — (1994), A Partial response to my Critics, in: Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.), After Maclntyre: Critical Perspectives On the Work of Alasdair Maclntyre, Cambridge, 283-304 — (1999), Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Chicago — (2006), Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science, in: The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays 1, Cambridge, 3-23 Marx, K. (1975), On the Jewish Question, pp.146-174 in: Marx, K./Engels, F., Collected Works 3 (Marx, K./Engels, F., 1843-1844), London, at: http://www.marxists.org/ archive / marx/works /1844/jewish-question / Smith, S. (1989), Hegel's Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context, Chicago Snyder, J (1988), Translator's Introduction in: Vattimo, G. (1988), The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, Cambridge Stephenson, S. (1999), Narrative, Identity and Modernity, ECPR Workshop, Mannheim, at: www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/ events/jointsessions/ paperarchive/mannheim/ w22/Stephenson.pdf Sumner, L. (1987), The Moral Foundation of Rights, Oxford Tasioulas, J. (2002), Human Rights, Universality and the Values of Personhood: Retracing Griffin's Steps, in: European Journal of Philosophy 10(1), 79-100 — (2003), The Moral Reality of Human Rights UNESCO Seminar Oxford, March 2003, at: http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/file_download.php/ 8d5b01d4c9074aea 070631bfF932dc52jonh_Tasioulas.pdf Vasak, K. (1977), A Thirty Year Struggle—the Sustained Efforts to give Force of Law to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Paris Waldron, J. (1987), Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man, London Williams, P. (1992), The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Boston

Analyse & Kritik 30/2008 (© Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart) p. 215-227 Paul

Blackledge

Alasdair Maclntyre's Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken

Abstract: This essay questions, through a critique of his reading of classical Marxism, the path taken by Alasdair Maclntyre since his break with the Marxist Left in the 1960s. It argues that Maclntyre was uncharitable in his criticisms of Marxism, or at least in his conflation of the most powerful aspects of the classical Marxist tradition with the crudities of Kautskyian and Stalinist materialism. Contra Maclntyre, this essay locates in the writings of the revolutionary Left which briefly flourished up to and just after the Russian Revolution a rich source of dialectical thinking on the relationship between structure and agency that escapes the twin errors of crude materialism or political voluntarism. Moreover, it suggests that by reaching back to themes reminiscent of the young Marx this tradition laid the basis for a renewed ethical Marxism, and that in his youth Maclntyre pointed to the realisation of this project.

0. Introduction "Dialectical idealism is closer to intelligent [dialectical] materialism t h a n metaphysical, undeveloped, dead, crude, rigid materialism." (Lenin 1961b, 274) Since his break with the Marxist Left four decades ago, Alasdair Maclntyre has argued that while the young Marx aimed at understanding how "reasoning, especially practical reasoning, [gave] expression to forms of social practice" (Maclntyre 1994, 35), the older Marx came to embrace a form of mechanical materialism represented by the base-superstructure metaphor. Thus, in 1968, Maclntyre claimed that in his mature writings Marx understood the economic base and the political and ideological superstructure as standing "in external, contingent, causal relationship to each other". Repeating this claim in 1995, he suggested that this reified way of conceptualising the relationship between politics, economics, ideology and so forth reflected the extent to which Marx's thought was "distorted in a characteristically bürgerlich manner" (Maclntyre 1995a, 136-137; xviii; 1970, 60-61). One consequence of this error was that Marx failed to register as a problem, and therefore did not see the need to analyse, the ethical dimension of workingclass agency. On the contrary, he combined an assumed but undeveloped variant of an Aristotelian virtue ethics with empirical observations of the class struggle

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between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, to deduce that proletarian agency would foster a virtuous alternative to capitalism. Discussing this deduction in his essay "The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken" (1994), Maclntyre argues that, by contrast with Marx's expectations to the contrary, the process of proletarianisation has simultaneously made resistance a necessary part of the lives of the working class, while robbing that resistance of those characteristics which might underpin a virtuous alternative to capitalism (Maclntyre 1998b, 232). He claims, consequently, that Marx's wager on the proletariat cannot today be justified, and that had Marx developed the implicit Aristotelianism of his early concept of working-class practice he might have recognised the limitations of this practice, and, thus, the Utopian nature of his own political optimism. Maclntyre suggests that it was Lenin who most cogently recognised the limitations of proletarian practice, and it was this that led him to argue that workers could not create socialism under their own impetus and must therefore be led by bourgeois intellectuals: "What resulted", Maclntyre notes, "scarcely needs comment" (Maclntyre 1985b, 247). If a variant of this argument informed Maclntyre's break with the Marxist Left in the 1960s, his articulation of the concept of social practices in After Virtue and elsewhere can be read as an attempt to complete a project begun by Marx in 1845 but discarded thereafter: the search for those forms of practice that might underpin a virtuous alternative to capitalism. Indeed, Kelvin Knight has argued that while Maclntyre has never "abandoned Marx's idea of revolutionary practice", he has abandoned "'the Marxism of the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals', including the Leninist understanding of revolution as an event to be effected by a small community of cadres, using the working class as their instrument" (Knight 2007, 122). In this essay, I challenge this reading of classical Marxism with a view to suggesting a re-appraisal of Maclntyre's early Marxist writings. As Maclntyre himself once pointed out, Marx's base-superstructure metaphor need not be interpreted as a variant of mechanical materialism (Maclntyre 1998a), and while it came to be interpreted in such a way by both Kautsky (at his worse, cf. Blackledge 2006b) and by Stalin, the insights of the young Marx were renewed by the revolutionary Left of the Second and Third Internationals in the all too brief moment between the lead up to 1917 and the Stalinist counter-revolution. In this essay I examine the process through which sections of the revolutionary Left in this period decisively broke with mechanical materialism. I suggest that it was Maclntyre himself who pointed to the consummation of this project in the 1950s, and that it is a minor political tragedy that he did not develop his early insights in this direction.

1. Towards an Ethical Marxism: Lenin, Lukacs and Grossman In "Rights, Practices and Marxism" (1985), Maclntyre wrote, fairly conventionally of Lenin, that unlike Marx he recognised that because the working class did

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not have the moral resources necessary to construct a socialist future he revised Marxism to become the ghost in the machine, offering leadership to the working class through the socialist intelligentsia (Maclntyre 1985b, 247). By this route, as he argued in After Virtue, in conditions of moral impoverishment, Marxists were wont to construct their own "versions of the Übermensch": "Lukacs's ideal proletarian" or "Leninism's ideal revolutionary" for instance (Maclntyre 1985a, 261-262). Despite the widespread acceptance of something like this interpretation of Lenin's politics, it is simply not the case that he believed that that the working class was too morally impoverished to lead a socialist revolution. Rather, as a socialist intellectual, his efforts were focused on what he could do to advance the workers' struggles. For instance, in an early critique of the 'egal Marxist' Peter Struve, he argued that, while it was a weakness with traditional moral theory that it failed "to connect its 'ideals' with any immediate interests", Struve ran the "risk of becoming an apologist" for the status quo because he erred in the opposite direction by reducing materialism to its objectivist caricature. In opposition to both moral subjectivism and economic objectivism, Lenin suggested that materialism, because it examined the contradictions of any social process, "includes partisanship . . . and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in any assessment of events" (Lenin 1960, 400-401). The break with any form of dualism between science and morality that is implicit to this argument, was subsequently reinforced through Lenin's attempt to realise the project of What is to be Done? (Lenin 1961a). It is one of history's ironies that a core constituent of the myth of Leninism, constructed by the Stalinists from the mid-1920s onwards to justify their own power and accepted by Western liberal intellectuals thereafter for their own ideological reasons, includes a key constituent part of the Bersteinian revisionism which Lenin fought from the outset: what Meszäros calls Bernstein's "patronizing treatment of the working classes" (Meszäros 1995, 4). According to Lars Lih in his definitive study of What is to be Done?, in the 'textbook interpretation' of Leninism, Lenin's contempt for the intellectual capacities of workers was reflected in his insistence on building a party of professional revolutionaries who would bring socialist ideas to the working class from without and subsequently lead this class in a top-down manner. By contrast with this myth, Lih shows that Lenin's underlying assumption in What is to Be Done? was an optimism about the possibility of the growth of socialist consciousness within the Russian working class, combined with scathing criticisms of the weaknesses of Russia's radical intelligentsia generally and the Russian socialist movement specifically, which, he claimed, were in grave danger of failing the workers' movement in the coming revolution (Lih 2006, 27; 615; cf. Blackledge 2006a). Concretely, Lenin polemicised against the re-emergence of economism within Russian social democracy—the local variant of Bernsteinian reformism. A crucial constituent part of Bernstein's revisionism included a rejection of what he believed to be Marxism's romanticisation of the working class. Against Marx, Bernstein claimed that the working class was "not yet sufficiently developed to take over political power", and that the only people who disagreed with this

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prognosis were those pseudo-revolutionaries "who have never had any close relationship with the real labour movement" (Bernstein 1993, 206). Similarly, the Russian 'economist' Krichevski accused the Iskra group of "being over-optimistic about the possibility of proletarian awareness and organisation", and insisted that workers were interested only in basic bread and butter issues, not socialist politics. Against Krichevski, Lenin argued in Lih's paraphrase, that "worker militancy is not the problem because it is increasing in leaps and bounds all on its own. The problem, the weak link, is effective party leadership of all this militancy" (Lih 2006, 316-317). Indeed, Lenin suggested that socialists who spoke only of bread and butter issues to workers both patronised them whilst simultaneously failing to challenge the hegemony of bourgeois ideology within the working class (226). Unfortunately, as is widely known, in so far as Lenin theorised this position he borrowed concepts from Kautsky who insisted that "socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without" (Lenin 1961a, 384, 375). Given the preponderance of crude nonsense written about this argument, two points are worth stressing. First, the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness is not the central thesis of What is to be Done?. Rather, Lenin's discussion of this point was hurriedly added to the text as a response to Krichevski's discussion of the relationship between spontaneous movements and conscious leadership in an article published as Lenin was writing What is to be Done?. Second, understood in the context noted above it is clear, as Lih points out, that on this issue Lenin meant the opposite of what he typically taken as meaning. It was his opponents who dismissed the socialist potential of working-class struggle, whereas he defended it. Elsewhere Lenin did address the question of the relationship between socialism and the movement from below in terms which both confirm Lih's interpretation of that text and which point to his developing break with Second International dualism (cf. Cliff 1986, 81; Lenin 1962, 32). Indeed, whereas Kautsky famously wrote that "social democracy is a revolutionary party, but it is not a party that makes revolution" (Kautsky, in Salvadori 1979, 40), for Lenin the party "would not sit round waiting for the call to insurrection, but would carry out such regular activity that would guarantee the highest probability of success in the event of an insurrection" (Lenin, in: Harman 1996, 31). If the gap between Lenin and Kautsky was only implicit before 1914, the shock of war and Lenin's subsequent reading of Hegel made his split with his former teacher explicit and absolute. In notes taken from a close reading of Hegel's Science of Logic he expressed his break with dualism thus: "The activity of man, who has made an objective picture of the world for himself, changes external actuality, abolishes its determinates ( = alters some sides or other, qualities of it), thus removes from it the features of semblance, externality and nullity, and makes it as being in and for itself (=objectively true)" (Lenin 1961b, 217218). Commenting on these notebooks, Stathis Kouvelakis points out that it is "particularly significant that Lenin ended the section on "philosophical materialism" with a reference to the notion of 'revolutionary practical activity'". For Lenin understood subjective practical activity to be at the centre of the "ob-

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jective" world, and consequently insisted that social scientific laws should not be "fetishised" as things distinct from conscious human activity but instead be recognised as necessarily "narrow, incomplete, [and] approximate" attempts to frame political intervention (Kouvelakis 2007, 174, 186). Consequently, whereas Second International theorists had interpreted Hegel's claim that to act freely meant to act in accordance with necessity in a reductive manner, for Lenin, as Day argues, "man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world but creates it" (Day, in: Anderson 1995, 113). In fact, as Callinicos argues, it was because Lenin was unsure about the future that he acted with the intention of influencing the course of history: his activism was rooted in his belief that "the very unpredictability of history requires that we intervene to help shape it" (Callinicos 2007, 26). Commenting on Lenin's overall political trajectory, Lukacs argued that "the development which Marxism thus underwent through Lenin consists merely— merely!—in its increasing grasp of the intimate, visible, and momentous connexion between individual actions and general destiny—the revolutionary destiny of the whole working class" (Lukacs 1970, 13). If Lenin's praxis led him to a break with Kautskyism, it was in part because, as he argued, "practice is higher than (theoretical) Knowledge" (Lenin 1961b, 213). Nevertheless, the break with the Second International had to be theorised, and while Lenin, in State and Revolution, went back to Marx and Engels' criticisms of the Gotha and Erfurt programmes to argue that the key political error of Kautskyism was its strategic orientation towards the state, Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness magnificently articulated this break at a philosophical level. According to Martin Jay, Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness "can be seen as the most articulate expression on a theoretical level of the world-historical events of 1917" (Jay 1984, 103). More specifically, Arato and Breines point out that within this book Lukacs developed a "powerful critique of Kantian ethics" (Arato/Breines 1979, 126). Indeed, Lukacs' book includes a criticism of Kant's concept of the thing-in-itself, which, he argued, underpinned the antinomies of his philosophy by acting as a limit to human knowledge of the world. Moreover, Lukacs claimed that this element of Kant's philosophy was characteristic of bourgeois social theory more generally—that is theory from the standpoint of civil society—which could not escape the antinomies between, for instance, freedom and necessity, fact and value, form and content, and subject and object (Jay 1984, 110). These antinomies, Lukacs suggested, were reproduced within Second International Marxism, and their transcendence became a possibility only with the rediscovery of the living concept of the totality associated with Lenin's return to Marx (Lukacs 1970). Concretely, Lukacs insisted that the totality can only be conceived from the standpoint of a social class (Lukacs 1971, 28). More specifically, it is only with the rise of capitalism, that is with the break with the last vestiges of the natural economy, that it becomes possible to conceptualise society as a totality, and of the two central classes of modern capitalism, only the proletariat is able to conceive the totality as a historical form. Marxism, as the scientific understanding of capitalist society, emerged and could have only emerged from the standpoint of the practice of the proletariat. Indeed, whereas Kant had

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argued that the essence of the world, the thing-in-itself, remained shrouded in mystery, Lukacs countered that at its essence capitalism was a system of generalised commodity production within which, fundamentally, human labour-power was a commodity. The emergence of proletarian class-consciousness thus coincided with the growing self-consciousness of the capitalist mode of production as a totality: the proletariat could potentially become the "unmediated consciousness of the commodity" (Lukacs 1971, 173). Conversely, while the bourgeoisie, like the proletariat existed as global class, it was unable to conceive capitalism as a totality because of the structurally competitive relations between its individual members. Human liberation could only come from a global class, and the bourgeoisie, unlike the proletariat, was incapable of playing this role because, while it was global, it was also necessarily fragmented. Lukacs' deployed the concept of "imputed class consciousness" to describe the relationship of Marxism to the actual political consciousness of the working class. Maclntyre, like others of his critics have often pointed to this concept to suggest that while Lukacs aimed to overcome the dualism characteristic of Second International theory, in practice he failed to conceptualise the movement towards class consciousness within the working class except as an epiphenomena of a mythical final collapse of capitalism (Stedman Jones 1977, 42). Against this argument, John Rees has pointed out that in both History and Class Consciousness, and in the recently discovered defence of that book, Tailism and the Dialectic, Lukacs did indeed point to the process by which workers could develop class consciousness (Rees 2000, 28-32). In fact, Lukacs insisted that the emergence of socialist consciousness within the working class "does not lie outside the real process of history. It does not have to be introduced into the world by philosophers" (Lukacs 1971, 77). More specifically, he argued that the revolutionary party should not be understood as an elite group of intellectuals, but should rather be thought of as "that part of the proletariat that spontaneously rebels against its leaders' behaviour" (Lukacs 1971, 289). More specifically, he suggested that "in no sense is it the party's role to impose any kind of abstract, cleverly devised tactics upon the masses. On the contrary, it must continuously learn from their struggle and their conduct of it. But it must remain active while it learns" (Lukacs 1970, 36; cf. 1971, 331, 334). Consequently, for Lukacs, as Michael Lòwy has pointed out, "'imputed' class consciousness is not a transcendental entity, an "absolute value" floating in the world of ideas: on the contrary, it assumes an historical, concrete and revolutionary shape - the Communist Party" (Lowy 2003, 183; cf. Rees 1998, 219-225; Lukacs 2000, 63-86). Moreover, this model of revolutionary leadership is predicated upon the existence of a spontaneous socialist working-class movement from below, and by synthesising revolutionary leadership and the movement from below Lukacs confronted full square Kautsky's dualism. Commenting on Auer's famous letter to Bernstein which suggested a de facto reformist practice as a more efficient strategy for changing the party than Bernstein's frontal assault on the programme, Lukacs claimed that Auer's proposed project had in practice been realised by Kautsky; for Kautsky deployed Marx's concepts, while simultaneously assuming a dualism between facts and values

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which effectively neutered Marxism by clinging to its vocabulary whilst jettisoning its practice (Lukacs 1972, 133). More generally on the revisionist debate, Lukacs claimed that Bernstein's embrace of Kantian moralism reflected not the transcendence of Second International fatalism, but its opposite side: it "is the subjective side of the missing category of totality" (Lukacs 1971, 38). Indeed, while Lukacs agreed with Kautsky's criticisms of the formalism of Kant's ethics (cf. Kautsky 1918), he pointed out that it was not enough to conclude that any moral imperatives derived from this perspective were an inadequate basis for socialist strategic thought. Rather Kant's ethical formalism pointed back to the methodological problem of his concept of the thing-in-itself which acted in his system as a fundamental limit to human knowledge of the world (Lukacs 1971, 124-125). Thus the critique of Kant's ethical formalism should have pointed Kautsky back to the concept of the totality. That it did not reflected the way in which his dualism allowed him to talk revolution whilst abandoning the real practical leadership of the party to the reformists. Lukacs argued that whereas Kant assumed that social reality was a given, by showing that it was in fact a product of human history Hegel had pointed beyond this dualism, and by materialising Hegel's project Marx had overcome it. To separate free human actions from a necessarily given social world, as was done by the neo-Kantians, implied losing sight of the fact that both freedom and necessity existed in a dynamic relationship such that not only is the world a product of human actions, but the kind of people that we are is itself a product of history: in Parkinson's paraphrase "we are both producer and product of the historical process" (Parkinson 1977, 43). The consequence of this methodological movement was to unfreeze the concepts through which we aim to understand the world. As Jay argues, "Being would then be understood as Becoming, things would dissolve into processes, and most important of all, the subjective origin of those processes would become apparent to the identical subject-object of history" (Jay 1984, 111). Indeed, Lukacs suggested, a key philosophical task "is to discover the principles by means of which it becomes possible in the first place for an 'ought' to modify existence. And it is just this that [Kant's] theory rules out from the start" (Lukacs 1971, 161; cf. Arato/Breines 1979, 127). Concretely, the aim of History and Class Consciousness was "to demonstrate methodologically that the organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism" (Lukacs 2000, 47). Lukacs argued, the structure of both the SPD specifically and the Second International more generally reflected their de facto reformism, while the Bolshevik Party, because it was built as a combat organisation, became the organisational embodiment of the Marxist transcendence of dualism: Lenin's aim was not to comment upon objective developments within the world but to shape such processes through praxis (Lukacs 1971, 295-342). Lukacs suggested that two works were of fundamental importance to the renewal of Marxism out of the degeneration of the Second International orthodoxy: Lenin's State and Revolution and Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital (Lukacs 1971, 34-35). According to Lukacs, through his book Lenin completed his political break with Second International fatalism, while Luxemburg

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played a similar role in freeing Marx's economic theory from Second International Marxism. Luxemburg's study was intended as an extension of her earlier critique of Bernstein's rejection of the Marx's breakdown theory. Whereas Kautsky denied that Marx held to such a model, in Reform, or Revolution Luxemburg argued that the contradictions of capitalism will progressively worsen "resulting inevitably, at some point, in its collapse" (Luxemburg 1989, 29). Similarly, in The Accumulation of Capital, she claimed that capitalism "must break down" and that at "a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles" (1951, 467). Whatever the undoubted merits of this argument, it is open to the criticism that by embracing a theory of breakdown Luxemburg did not actually succeed in theorising a break with Second International fatalism. By contrast with this line of argument, Rick Kuhn has recently argued that the problem with Luxemburg's analysis of capitalism lay not in her embrace of a theory of breakdown, but the substantive arguments through which she defended this theory. Kuhn argues that it was to this problem that the early Frankfurt School Marxist, Henryk Grossman, applied himself in his classic The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System (1929). Grossman claimed that Luxemburg's arguments failed because they were "not rooted in the immanent laws of the accumulation process, but in the transcendental fact of the absence of non-capitalist markets" (Grossman, in: Kuhn 2007, 126). In relation to Bernstein, Grossman insisted that he "was perfectly right in saying [... ] 'if the triumph of socialism were truly an immanent economic necessity, then it would have to be grounded in a proof of the inevitable economic breakdown of the present order of society'" (Grossman 1992, 39). By denying that Marx held to a theory of breakdown, Kautsky fatally damaged his critique of Bernstein by accepting his basic assumptions about the nature of capitalism. Grossman went on to say that it was Luxemburg's great contribution to the revisionist debate to return to Marx and defend the theory of breakdown. Unfortunately, because she shifted "the crucial problem of capitalism from the sphere of production to that of circulation" she undermined her own arguments. Moreover, she tended to conceive of the breakdown as a "mechanical" process, which consequently opened her defence of the theory to the charge of "fatalism" (1992, 41-42). Somewhat ironically, given this criticism of Luxemburg, in 1934 Grossman was criticised by Anton Pannekoek for apparently reducing Marxism to a form of mechanical materialism (Pannekoek 1977, 62). Actually Grossman followed Lenin in insisting that "there is no absolutely hopeless situation" for capital. He believed that a defensible theory of economic breakdown must be integrated into an adequate theory of political revolution. His goal was thus to overcome the problems with Luxemburg's defence of the theory of breakdown such that it could be developed as a theoretical basis for political action. Against political fatalism, he insisted that capitalist breakdown was not an automatic, mechanical process; whilst against political voluntarism he pointed out that an adequate theory of political practice must be rooted in an understanding of the crisis prone dynamic of the capitalist system. Consequently, as Kuhn explains, Grossman aimed to do for the Marxist approach to the critique of political economy what Lenin

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had done for politics and what Lukacs had down for philosophy: to transcend Second International dualism through a dialectical approach to the relationship between freedom and necessity (Kuhn 2007, 125). Concretely, Grossman insisted that Second International theorists had departed from Marx's theory of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It was this secular tendency, he argued, itself rooted in the capital accumulation process, which condemned capitalism to recurrent crises. Following Marx's method of moving from the abstract to the concrete, Grossman opened his book with an abstract model of capitalism's tendency towards crisis. He then shifted to examine the countervailing tendencies which mediated against breakdown. Finally, in a section that is unfortunately absent from the English edition of his book, he examined the interaction between crises and class struggle. Arguing that no crisis is irresolvable so long as workers are prepared to pay the price, he pointed out that the class struggle would itself "shape the actual course of the system's tendency to break down" (1992, 135). Kuhn points out that Grossman took the British miners' strike of 1926 as an example of the dialectical relationship between economics and politics in a period of crisis: economic crisis set the scene for miners' lockout and the General Strike, but the actual outcome of these struggles and thus of the economic crisis itself was ultimately determined by the political struggle. Writing to Paul Mattick two years after the completion of his book, Grossman pointed out that his aim had been to show how "objective revolutionary situations arise", which inform the intensification of the class struggle, but which neither mechanically guarantee the victory of either side in these struggles, nor determine the outcome of the crisis itself: "The purpose of my breakdown theory was not to exclude this active intervention, but rather to show when and under what circumstances such an objectively given revolutionary situation can and does arise." (Grossman, in Kuhn 2007, 144)

2. Revolutionary Ethics If Lenin, Lukacs and Grossman all added to the renewal of Marxism through a break with Second International dualism, it is unfortunate that none of them made more than tentative comments on the ethical dimension of socialism. Nevertheless, two works were produced in this period which pointed towards a Marxist ethics: Evgeny Pashukanis's Law and Marxism, (1924), and Leon Trotsky's ' Their Moral and Ours" (1938). According to Pashukanis there exists an intimate and necessary relationship between the emergence of the idea of individual equality and the system of generalised commodity production: "For the products of human labour to be able to relate to each other as values", he wrote, "it is necessary for people to relate to each other as autonomous and equal personalities" (Pashukanis 1978, 151). Indeed, Pashukanis insisted that three conditions must be satisfied for capital accumulation to become generalised: people must become "moral subjects", "legal subjects", and they must live their lives "egoistically". Corresponding to this situation, moral law, far from being a universal good, is best understood as

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the ideological form necessary to regulate the "intercourse between commodity owners". A consequence of the relationship between morality as the ideology of free action and capitalism as a system of social compulsion, Pashukanis argued that there is a necessary ambiguity in the moral law whereby, on the one hand, it presents itself as the rational basis for the actions of free individuals, while, on the other hand, it is a social law standing above individuals (Pashukanis 1978, 154). The only way to rid the moral law of this ambiguity, he claimed, is to eliminate capitalism through the creation of a planned economy. However, in so doing, the atomised nature of our present day individuality would be overcome, and so would the basis for the ethical form itself (158). Thus, just as the struggle for socialism involves a struggle against states and laws then it similarly involves the struggle against morality (160). Trotsky's pamphlet Their Morals and Ours was written in a more concrete register than was Pashukanis' book, and as an explicit challenge to those for whom Marxism was a crude form of moral consequentialism, according to which "the ends justified the means". In opposition to such interpretations of Marxism, Trotsky first insisted that any adequate ethical theory must have an eye to the ends of action, as the alternative most fully expressed by Kant, could not survive without the idea of God, and thus represented a backwards step after Darwin (16-17). While Trotsky therefore argued that "a means can only be justified by its end", he also pointed out that "the end in its turn needs to be justified". He subsequently proceeded to offer two Marxist justifications of the end of revolutionary socialist action: first, "if it leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and to the abolition of the power of one person over another"; second, which is really a variation on the first, "that is permissible [... ] which really leads to the liberation of humanity" (48). Whereas the distance between this formulation and Bernstein's Neo-Kantianism is plain, it is less obvious that Trotsky's model escapes the charge of consequentialism. Nevertheless, Trotsky did insist that Marxism "does not know dualism between means and ends", and suggested a "dialectical independence" between the two. Thus he repeated Lassalle's suggestion that "a different path gives rise to a different goal". Moreover, he claimed that "not all means are permissible", and because "the liberation of the workers can only come through the workers themselves" then only those means are permissible "which unite the revolutionary proletariat". Indeed, any means which lowers the "faith of the masses in themselves", by, for instance, "replacing it by a worship for the 'leaders'" is not permissible (49-51). Whatever the shortcomings of this short pamphlet, Trotsky's argument certainly does not fit easily with the claim that Marxism is a form of dualism which posits itself as the ideology of the leaders who use the working class as an instrument in their struggle for state power. Moreover, against the claim that Trotsky simply regurgitated a form of consequentialism, John Dewey pointed out that Trotsky had in fact made an implicit differentiation between two types of ends: final ends and those ends which are themselves means to the final end. While Trotsky had not made this differentiation explicit in Their Morals and Ours, Dewey suggested that it would be a simple matter to so do. Moreover, if this were done then Trotsky could, quite rigorously, claim both to have defended the

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interdependence of means and ends, and to have provided an answer to those who argue that by positing only some distant end, consequentialism does not actually reflect on the observable short-term consequences of the means deployed to reach this end (Dewey 1973, 68-69). Nevertheless, despite these strengths, Dewey claimed that the force of Trotsky's position was weakened by what he perceived to be a dogmatic "deduction" of the claim that the agency of radical change would be the working class: "the selection of class struggle as a means", Dewey insists, has itself "to be justified" (1973, 70-71). That workers' struggles might generate a real need for solidarity which could underpin emerging socialist virtues was, to my knowledge, never explicitly defended by any of the intellectuals discussed above, and the Stalinist counterrevolution ensured that it was not until the emergence of a New Left after 1956 that these problems re-emerged and a new generation began to look for answers to them.

3. Conclusion Interestingly it was through the medium of the British New Left's debates on socialist humanism in the late 1950s that a young Maclntyre attempted to articulate a sophisticated Marxist justification for the ethical significance of workingclass practice (Blackledge 2005; 2006c; 2007). In "Notes from the Moral Wilderness" (1958-1959), he drew upon and extended Marx's claim, as made in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), that the separation of means from ends characteristic of production within bourgeois society might be overcome through workers' struggles (Marx 1975, 365). Maclntyre suggested that the proletariat, created objectively through the development of the forces of production, could begin in its struggles against capital to match the potential inherent in its objective structure and create the conditions for the solution of the contemporary problems of morality: it potentially begins to embody the practice which could overcome the "rift between our conception of morality and our conception of desire" (Maclntyre 1998a, 45). Indeed, by acting in this way workers come to realise that solidarity is not simply a useful means through which they struggle to meet their needs, but it is in fact what they naturally desire (1998a, 48). With this argument Maclntyre suggested a final piece of the puzzle through which the renewal of Marxism, opened by the revolutionary break with Kautskyism and then crushed by the rise of Stalinism, could finally be completed. That he subsequently came to accept the common assumption that Marxism be condemned by Marx's mature retreat towards a mechanical form of materialism rests upon a rather uncharitable reading both of his mature works and of the works of those revolutionaries who struggled against Kautskyism and Stalinism. If Marxism at its best escaped from the bourgeois antinomy between freedom and necessity then this suggests more space for a rapprochement between Maclntyre and Marxism than he would probably care to admit. Nevertheless, there remains the problem of the ethical significance of those communities created by workers

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in struggle. If it is beyond question that such communities exist, it remains the case that their ethical significance can only be judged by close empirical investigation. This, I contend, is an open question of the utmost relevance to ethical anti-capitalists. Consequently I think it an important intellectual error on Maclntyre's part to assert that "while proletarianisation makes it necessary for workers to resist, it also tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance" (1998b, 232).

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— (1971), History and Class Consciousness, London — (1972), Bernstein's Triumph, in: G.Lukacs, Political Writings 1919-1929, London, 127-133 — (2000), Tailism and the Dialectic: A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, London Luxemburg, R. (1951), The Accumulation of Capital, London — (1989), Reform or Revolution, London Maclntyre, A. (1970), Marcuse, London — (1985a), After Virtue, London — (1985b), Rights, Practices and Marxism, in: Analyse & Kritik 7, 234-248 — (1994), Interview with Professor Alasdair Maclntyre, in: Kinesis 20, 34-47 — (1995), Marxism and Christianity, London — (1998a), Notes from the Moral Wilderness, in: Knight, K. (ed.), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge, 31-49 — (1998b), The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken, in: Knight, K. (ed.), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge, 223-234 Marx, K. (1975), Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in: Marx, K., Early Writings, Harmondsworth, 279-400 Mészàros, I. (1995), Beyond Capital, London Pannekoek, A. (1977), The Theory of Capitalist Collapse, in: Capital and Class 1, 59-81 Parkinson, G.H.R. (1977), Georg Lukàcs, London Pashukanis, E. (1978), Law and Marxism, London Rees, J. (1998), The Algebra of Revolution, London — (2000), Introduction, in: G.Lukäcs, Tailism and the Dialectic: A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, London, 1-38 Salvadori, M. (1979), Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, London Stedman Jones, G. (1977), The Marxism of the Early Lukacs, in: New Left Review (ed.), Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, London, 11-60 Trotsky, L. (1973), Their Morals and Ours, in: Trotsky L. et al., Their Morals and Ours, New York, 13-52

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Ron Beadle

Why Business Cannot Be a Practice

Abstract: In a series of papers Geoff Moore has applied Alasdair Maclntyre's much cited work t o generate a virtue-based business ethics. Central to this project is Moore's argument that business falls under Maclntyre's concept of 'practice'. This move attempts to overcome Maclntyre's reputation for being 'anti-business' while maintaining his framework for evaluating social action and replaces Maclntyre's hostility to management with a conception of managers as institutional practitioners (craftsmen). I argue however that this move has not been justified. Given the importance Maclntyre places on the protection of practices, the result is that much of Moore's contribution is misplaced. Business cannot name a practice but business institutions certainly do house practices. The task then is to try to understand the circumstances under which practices might flourish and those under which they might founder in a business context. This is not aided by Moore's redescription of all businesses as practices.

0. Introduction Despite Knight's characterisation of attempts to apply Maclntyre's work to corporate management as 'paradoxical' (1998, 283), business ethicists and organisational scholars have persisted in this attempt. Within business ethics the literature specifically interpreting Maclntyre's work stretches back some years (McCann/Brownsberger 1990; Hovarth 1995; Mintz 1996; Dobson 1996, 1997, 2001; Wicks 1996, 1997; Brewer 1997; Collier 1998; Dawson/Bartholomew 2003) and references are so common as to be de rigueur in contemporary considerations of virtue ethics (Crocket 2005; Whetstone 2005; Jones et al 2005; Weaver 2006) and Aristotelian organisation theory (Tsoukas/Cummings 1997). My purpose here is to consider Moore's use of the work of Maclntyre in three recent papers in Business Ethics Quarterly (Moore 2002, 2005a, 2005b). Moore's project is distinctive 1 in at least three respects. First it is a sustained and cumulative attempt to apply and critique Maclntyre's ideas in the context of business ethics when most other contributions are single efforts. Second Moore uses Maclntyre's goods-virtues-practices-institutions schema whilst rejecting Maclntyre's 'pessimistic' view of business through redefining business as a practice. Third Moore's purpose in applying this framework is both analytical and 1 I cannot establish these distinctions individually or serially without fully reviewing the other extant literature but that is not the task of this paper. In the absence of that, others can judge the veracity of this claim.

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practical, his proposals to change the perceptions of agents in respect of both the corporations they work for and their own agency (as craftsmen 2 ) directs itself towards the extension of virtuous practices and not simply to their consideration. These elements separately and serially mark out Moore's contribution so far. In this paper however I shall argue that Moore's attribution of the status of 'practice' to business fails. Given the importance Maclntyre places on the protection of practices from the invidious ambitions of institutions, the result is that much of Moore's contribution is misplaced. Moore's work needs to be re-cast in order to rescue the valuable contribution it could make from the error that undermines it. Hence the purpose of this paper is to save Moore from himself. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it summarises Maclntyre's goods-virtuespractices-institutions schema. Second, it shows how Moore's papers (2002, 2005a, 2005b) support, extend and critique the schema. Third, it will argue that Moore's attribution of the status of a practice (within Maclntyre's schema) to business is unjustified. It concludes that Moore's contribution in respect of 'corporate character' and 'craftsmanship' can survive the rejection of his attribution of the status of 'practice' to business and form part of a coherent use of Maclntyre's work.

1. Maclntyre's General Theory Maclntyre's 'general theory' (Moore/Beadle 2006) of goods, virtues, practices and institutions posits a series of relationships between agents and structures in which the development of virtues is seen as both dependent upon and potentially undermined by the institutions which house social practices and create goods. It is worth noting at the outset that Maclntyre's use of these concepts is largely but not wholly consistent with common usage. In this paper his definitions will only be deployed where their distinctiveness from common usage are critical to the argument. What then is this argument? Pared down to its essence Maclntyre holds that the importance of the virtues to the successful conduct of a human life (a claim involving a variety of contentions which it is not my purpose here to explore) first becomes apparent to agents through participation in practices. For example in the traditional circus (Beadle 2003; Beadle/Konyot 2006), an acrobat may develop her awareness of the virtue of constancy from recognizing the importance to the successful completion of her performance of the participation of a catcher whose role requires consistent alertness, flexibility and judgment. An inadequate catcher risks the limbs and sometimes the life of the acrobat. Where the catcher is training an acrobat their constancy may even be expressed in the practically wise judgment that they should allow their apprentice to sustain (avoidable) minor injuries so that the acrobat may understand the more significant risk that 2 Moore considers t h e gendering of t h e concept of 'craftsmanship" b u t rejects t h e neutral 'craftspersonship' on aesthetic grounds (Moore 2005a, 247).

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they run should they mis-time or otherwise fail to properly exercise a routine in performance. 3 Successful performance within practices is revealed to agents as a good but one intelligible only within the practice of which it forms a part. A triple summersault, the hallmark of successful performance in trapeze is intelligible as a good only within the context of the practice of a particular type of artistic display—the effort and risk required to develop and sustain such performance is unintelligible outside of such a context. Thus amongst the essential aspects of the definition of a practice is the generation of goods internal to such practices (Maclntyre 1985, 189-190; 1994, 284). Inasmuch as internal goods share a symbiotic relation with practices so practices share such a relation with institutions. For according to Maclntyre no practice can survive or flourish outside of some relatively permanent institutional structure. The resources required to sustain and improve the practice of acrobatics requires inter alia institutions such as gymnastic clubs and circuses to house and allocate resources to practitioners and to do this requires different goods, not generated through any particular practice but required by all practices. Maclntyre refers to these as "external goods" (Maclntyre 1985, 190-191) with prestige, status, power and money being its principal types (197). The relationship of practices to institutions is central to Maclntyre's social theory: "Indeed so intimate is the relationship of practices to institutions— and consequently of the goods external to the goods internal to the practices in question—that institutions and practices characteristically form a single causal order in which the ideals and the creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution, in which the cooperative care for common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution. In this context the essential feature of the virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions." (Maclntyre 1985, 194) The virtues are therefore not only critical to the generation of goods internal to practices and in turn to the leading of a good life but also to the maintenance of institutions which hold the generation of internal and external goods in the kind of balance that enables the flourishing of both: "the making and sustaining of forms of human community—and therefore of institutions—itself has all the characteristics of a practice, and moreover of a practice which stands in a peculiarly close relationship to the exercise of the virtues [... ]" (Maclntyre 1985, 194, emphasis added). It is to the characterization of this practice of the making and sustaining of such institution that Moore's papers (2002, 2005a, 2005b) are directed and it is with the adequacy of this characterization that this paper is concerned. 3

Circus performers have provided this example in the course of other research.

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2. Moore's Project Moore describes these papers (2002, 2005a, 2005b) as forming a developed argument (2005b, 659) in which Maclntyre' goods-virtues-practices-institutions schema is deployed within rather than in opposition to business ethics. His argument can be summarised as follows: 1. business is a practice (in Maclntyre's sense) 2. as other practices, business can be undermined by institutions 3. the special function of management is to protect the practice of business from the corporatist and capitalist form of institutions Let us consider these claims seriatim. 1. Business is a Practice

For Moore, business is a practice under Maclntyre's definition of practice as: "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." (Maclntyre 1985, 187) Moore maintains that because Maclntyre has described 'productive crafts' as examples of practices and because business can itself be described as a productive craft, "it follows from this that business, as a productive activity, may be redescribed as a practice" (Moore 2002, 23) and to confirm the scope of this identification Moore asserts that "each and every" (23) business falls into the definition. Despite his assertion that business "as with any practice, rewards those who possess and exercise the virtues" (25) Moore gives no example of the excellences of business qua business save that of "customer service" (25). The other internal goods he highlights: "quality" (25) and "the exercise of practical skills, the stimulation that the competitive situation affords, pride in accomplishment and the personal dignity that derives from a job well done" (Moore 2005b, 660) are generic descriptors equally applicable to other practices. Similarly he provides no definition or example of business qua business and refers to "the business of fishing, retailing, building or whatever" (Moore 2002, 25). The absence of a definition or examples of 'business qua business' and the associated limitations of the specific excellences of such provides a clue to the frailty of this contention.

Why Business Cannot Be a Practice 2. As Other Practices, Business Can Be Undermined by

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Having made the case for business as practice it is merely a matter of further deduction for Moore to demonstrate that this is subject to the same risks of institutional corruption as other practices. Business practitioners suffer the "ethical schizophrenia" that results because "the practice of business is often valued for its external goods" (25) and "the fundamental challenge" (2005b, 675) facing corporations is to resist the corruption emanating from the institution of "the corporation and the wider capitalist system" (Moore 2002, 26-27).

3. The Special Function of Management is to Protect the Practice of Business from the Corrupting Power of the Corporate and Capitalist Form of Institutions Maclntyre's own characterisation of management is unequivocally negative. He makes four distinctive and inter-related claims (Beadle 2002). First, that the character of the manager eschews any substantive notion of the good. Second, that the manager's role is to deploy supposedly impersonal facts in pursuit of the most effective and efficient means to achieve any prescribed ends but thirdly that the sort of morally neutral knowledge required to achieve such manipulation does not exist and finally that managers themselves inhabit in a deep personal compartmentalization without which their social role could not be understood. We need not examine these claims in detail to recognise how different Moore's characterisation becomes when business is itself seen as a practice. The villains can become heroes. Moore argues that the governance of institutions should have the maintenance of the practice as its principal and ongoing concern and that this indeed constitutes the particular practice of managers who have "in one sense, outgrown the practice and now represent the institution that houses it" (Moore 2005b, 663). Managers are thus required to be the protectors of the virtues of the practice of business: "The task of creating the virtuous corporation is essentially managerial." (Moore 2005b, 677) What is required to achieve the self-understanding necessary for the performance of this role is a concept of craftsmanship in which managers see themselves principally as practitioners of the craft [of business]. Moreover such understanding will form part of the individual manager's lifepurpose, their telos and the pursuit of the practice will frame their distinctive narrative quest for the good: "If they then endeavour to maintain an integrity of character by exercising the virtues, gaining such internal goods as are available, thereby helping them in their narrative quest towards their own telos, then not only would the individuals benefit but they would, in the very act of doing all of this, play a necessary part in the humanizing of business from within." (Moore 2005a, 249) Moore presents a variety of examples (in 2005b) to illustrate the characteristics

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required by such a virtuous manager and, given the intimacy of the relationship between individual and institutional action (for both Maclntyre and Moore) makes a convincing case to relate the prospects for such virtuous managers to institutional characteristics. Virtuous businesses so informed would have not only culture but more importantly (and conceptually distinctive) a 'corporate character' in which the claims of internal and external goods were balanced over the long term: "A virtuous corporate character is the seat of the virtues necessary for a corporation to engage in practices with excellence, focusing on those internal goods thereby obtainable, while warding off threats from its own inordinate pursuit of external goods and from the corrupting power of those other institutions with which it engages." (Moore 2005b, 661) The prerequisites of such character require a just purpose for the institution, a power-balanced structure, systems and processes that encourage active reflection and a supportive culture (Moore 2005b, 675-677), propositions for which Moore offers a variety of arguments and illustrations.

3. Is Business a Practice? It should be clear that the application of Moore's case across businesses and hence potentially to all managers of businesses relies on the 'redescription' of business-as-practice. How is this claim supported? In a number of other papers claiming that some activity or other is a practice (Lambeth 1990 in respect of journalism, Sellman 2000 for nursing, Leeper/Leeper 2001 for public relations, and various chapters in Dunne/Hogan 2004 for teaching) inductive arguments describe internal goods unique to their respective activities in order to make the case that the activity is indeed a practice. However, Moore's case cites no specific activities that are internal to business qua business. His argument (Moore 2002 and in abbreviated form in 2005a and 2005b) is a formal deduction (i.e. the conclusions follow from the definition of terms in the premises) as follows: Premise 1. All productive crafts are practices Premise 2. Business is a productive craft Conclusion. Business is a practice The central issue when considering the validity of claims of this type is whether the terms are appropriately defined. Moore's failure to define business is therefore indefensible. The situation is worsened by Moore's subsequent use of an extended list of examples: "the particular business may be fishing, or producing beef or milk, or building houses, or it may be financial services, or mining, or retailing" (Moore 2002, 23). This may mean either that the terms "business" and "productive craft" are synonyms or that every productive craft is also a business (albeit that they form a subset of all businesses) or that all businesses

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are productive crafts but none of these relationships are formally stated and in consequence we do not know whether the claim here is analytic or synthetic although the structure of the argument is certainly the former. Additionally the absence of any discussion of the relationship between business as an activity and 'the business of' as an institution is culpable given that Moore provides examples of both, though one explanation may be that the place of an institution in Moore's schema has already been occupied by 'capitalism'. Moore does however provide illustrations of the coherence and complexity of the productive crafts, specifically citing fishing and retailing (Moore 2002, 23-24). These are used to discriminate between practices and features of practices (and institutions) against an informal measure of coherence and complexity (24). None of this however supports the argument that business is itself a practice, it simply reinforces the case Maclntyre himself makes as to why the productive crafts that he cites (such as fishing) are requisitely coherent and complex to constitute a practice. While Moore neither poses nor answers the question "what is business?" another business ethicist has recently suggested an answer (Kaler 2003). This account provides us with substantive reasons to set alongside the formal arguments above for rejecting Moore's position. Kaler argues that the range of activities and modes of institutionalisation that fall under the rubric of business is such that their only common and hence definitive feature is that of having customers. All of the activities of business (accounting, investing, purchasing, marketing, employing) are conducted within other institutions (state agencies, voluntary bodies etc;)—only the relation with customers is unique and hence definitive. Whereas Moore argues that "the practice of business is often valued for its external goods" (Moore 2002, 25), the implication of Kaler's argument is that business qua business is uniquely and definitively constituted in relation to such goods. And here Kaler's account ends. However it is important to my argument that engagement with customers is predicated (not only but necessarily) on their ability to command sufficient resource to purchase one's product, nursery school children know that Simple Simon couldn't buy a pie because he forgot to bring a penny for the pieman. While Moore suggests that 'customer service' is one of the excellences required by businesses he does not draw out the implication (and this is part of where his disagreement with Maclntyre lies) that service, excellent or not, is only available to those who can pay. It is no part of my argument to make any suggestion in respect of the ethics of the business-customer relationship but it is part of my argument to suggest that Moore's case requires the description of the specific kind of life that business involves and the uniqueness of the goods internal to business that it generates. This he has not done. If the veracity of Kaler's position is accepted then it is only in terms of having customers that business can find such internal goods and in terms of which such a case could be made. In all other respects the excellences that Moore points to are those unique to particular productive crafts—fishing, architecture, science and so on rather than of 'the business of' such crafts. Maclntyre does not use the term "productive craft" rather than "business" by

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accident, nor does he mean by "productive craft" whatever Moore might mean by "business". As a fervent and continuing critic of capitalism whose sociology remains imbued by Marxism he has rarely even used the term "business" (one exception being his 1977 argument that "business executives" are compartmentalized emotivists (Maclntyre 1977, passim), another being his reference to a finding that 57% of "business students" admit to cheating in examinations (2006, 109). When he writes that "the needs of capital formation impose upon capitalists and upon those who manage their enterprises a need to extract from the work of their employees a surplus which is at the future deployment of capital and not of labor" (2006, 148) he is making no distinction between capitalism as a system and the enterprise such as Moore makes between capitalism and business. Rather the enterprise (the business) is the manifest institutional mode of capitalism. In his critique of the institutional injustice of capitalism exemplified by its failure to allocate rewards justly (in contrast to Moore 2002, 25), its propensity to turn those subject to it to the vice of acquisitiveness (the determination to have what they want rather than what they deserve) and in his hostility towards the consumer society (ibid passim and see also Maclntyre 1999b) he condemns the very relationship which defines business. If business is a practice then Maclntyre has defined practice in a way quite at odds with his own intent. He can only have done this if his definition is so imprecise as to rule in activities he would wish ruled out. In answering this charge I call in aid two papers. The first is an interview with Maclntyre by the educational philosopher Joseph Dunne (Maclntyre/Dunne 2004, 1-17) in which the status of teaching parallels the discussion here in respect to business. Maclntyre asserted in contradiction to many others (including both Dunne within the interview and Moore 2002, 21-22) that teaching is not a practice itself, because it is a feature of all practices, its very generality ruled it out of contention as a practice itself: "for it is part of my claim that teaching is never more than a means, that it has no point and purpose except for the point and purpose of the activities to which it introduces students. All teaching is for the sake of something else and so teaching does not have its own goods. The life of a teacher is therefore not a specific kind of life. The life of a teacher of mathematics, whose goods are the goods of mathematics is one thing; a life of a teacher of music whose goods are the goods of music is another." (Maclntyre/Dunne 2004, 8) This argument applies equally to business (including Moore's usages). In the same way that Moore refers to "the business off" followed by a list of examples (Moore 2002, 23) so, as we have seen, Maclntyre refers to "the teaching o f ' followed by examples to show that it is precisely because the formation of a sentence of this type is not only possible but essential to the definition of the activity under discussion, that this activity cannot describe a practice. The conduct of practices constitutes a 'specific type of life"—that of a particular practice rather than an activity required within practices as such.

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In order to make the case for business-as-practice Moore would at the very minimum needs to show that business is specific in a way that (say) teaching is not. To do this he would have to exemplify both the goods internal to business qua business and the specific type of life in which these goods form an essential element without reference to any of the particularities of the productive crafts he has so far cited as examples of businesses. Such a case would require application to "each and every business" (Moore 2002, 23) including inter alia the businesses of drug-dealing, prostitution, arms manufacture, money laundering and the like. Should the obstacles presented by this be overcome there is a further obstacle to face and this is apparent from the paper to which I now turn. Maclntyre's use of fishing crews as an example of practice was written in the context of Maclntyre's acknowledged failure to provide sufficient examples of 'productive crafts' as practices in his work (Macintyre 1994, 284) and to distinguish between such crafts and other practices such as those involving the arts, games and sports. The charge to which he was responding was that his definition of practice excluded productive activities defined as those generating products for use by others (Miller 1994). Maclntyre's response in fact highlights the similarities between productive crafts when they are in good order and those arts, games and sciences which Macintyre had used as examples of practice in After Virtue. This contextualisation is relevant to this discussion for two reasons. First the practice of arts, sciences and games are themselves often housed within businesses, in the same way as productive crafts—for example 'architecture' are often (but not always) housed within businesses. Given this, Moore's position could be extended to suggest that arts, sciences and games may be redescribed as businesses. Moore does not of course claim this and I would suggest for the good reason that the vacuity of such a redescription would be immediately apparent, yet this is an extension that could be made using the reasoning he employs. What distinguishes the productive crafts from others is not that the former are businesses. Second, Maclntyre's response to Miller emphasises the particularity of individual practices; the practice of fishing, architecture, chess or whatever is a single activity with its own standards and not two conjoined practices being one of the above and that of business. Why is this important? Maclntyre's response to Miller contrasts two fishing crews whose over-riding purposes differ in respect of the goods they pursue. The crew pursuing external goods aims at wages for the crew and profit for the owners whereas the crew pursuing internal goods is devoted to the peculiar excellences required by the practice of fishing (Macintyre 1994, 284-286). The first crew would abandon fishing should they find another way to generate increased income. The second crew however would subordinate these economic goods to an allegiance to the continuation of the practice of fishing and the way of life that entails. Whilst most discussion has centred on the prospects for the second crew within a market economy (Dobson 1996, 1997; Wicks 1996, 1997) the point here is the basis of the distinction drawn between the two crews in terms of purpose (and hence what counts within each crew as reasons for action) and the way of life that

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manifests this purpose. For Maclntyre the second crew are practitioners and the first are not. For Moore however the situation must be quite different. If Moore is correct and each and every business is a practice then the crew that abandons fishing simultaneously maintains and abjures its commitment to practice by remaining in business (a practice) and abjuring fishing (another practice). That this is incoherent and that it follows from Moore's position, is evident. The coherence of Macintyre's definition of practice would be undermined if the same set of practitioners can coherently simultaneously engage in two practices. They cannot. It follows that either the practice of fishing is a practice in which case Macintyre's example effectively discriminates between practitioners and non-practitioners (as was his purpose) or the practice is that of business in which case there is no discrimination between the two crews and Macintyre's example fails. On this basis I maintain that one has to choose between Moore's 'business-as-practice' and Macintyre's conception of practice but given that Moore's case that business is a practice is of interest only to the extent that Macintyre's definition of practice is coherent, the choice is clear. Having rejected Moore's understanding of business as practice, how should we understand business within Macintyre's schema? A case may be made for understanding business in Macintyre's terms in one of two ways. First business could be seen as a mode of institutionalisation whose definition involves a particular vulnerability (this puts it mildly) to corrupting the practices it houses consequent upon its focus on external goods. Indeed in later collaborative work Moore refers to business organisations "as a particular form of institution" (Moore/Beadle 2006, 374) suggesting precisely this definition. Such an understanding rejects Moore's distinction between 'business' and 'capitalism' but regards them as defining the institutional and systemic modes of the same phenomenon. Second, business may be the feature of the life of all practices (and not just productive crafts) concerned with their relation to customers in a market where such a relation exists. For example Maclntyre has written favourably of premodern societies in which "markets are auxiliary to production that is not primarily for the market, but for local need, so that markets provide a useful means of exchange for what is surplus to local need, a means whereby all those who participate in them benefit" (2006, 148) the final condition, that of the common good, being subsequently contrasted with markets of modern capitalism which are "imposed both on labor and on small producers rather than in any sense freely chosen" (149). The notable point here is that again in contradistinction to Moore the basic model is of productive crafts for which markets are at most auxiliary—and hence productive crafts that cannot be described meaningfully as businesses except in the particular institutional setting of corporate modernity.

4. Conclusion On the first page of the first of the three papers considered here Moore describes Maclntyre as "his own worst enemy" (2002, 19) in respect of being anti-

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modernity, anti-business and anti-managerial. Moore's project of applying MacIntyre's schema to business may be seen as an attempt to overcome the obstacles that Maclntyre himself presents to this. However this paper has argued that his attempt to apply Maclntyre's concept of practice directly to business is deeply incoherent. Moore's argument that the protection of practices requires practitioners to understand themselves as craftsman and institutions to develop particular 'characters' can easily survive the abandonment of 'business-as-practice'. To understand why some institutions (even for Maclntyre) have in fact protected the practices that they house while others do not requires an analytical schema identifying individual, institutional and environmental level factors (Moore/Beadle 2006) which must deploy distinctions around issues of craft and character such as those Maclntyre himself deploys in his description of fishing crews. For Maclntyre neither agency nor structure should be sacrificed in the attempt to understand social phenomena. By way of illustration we can recall the old joke about an MBA graduate who becomes a consultant to a Philharmonic Orchestra, the punch-line to which is that within weeks the orchestra had been down-sized to a synthesiser. As someone who was not a craftsman one of the things that the fabled MBA holder failed to understand was the intimate relationship between the generation of external goods (i.e. ticket sales for the performances of the orchestra) and the internal goods to whose generation the audience wishes to be witness. Performing arts and service industries share environmental features more conducive to craftsmanship than those of manufacturing and processing industries because the former do not allow for the same commercial opportunities to be realised through the substitution of capital for labour as the latter, a point of particular importance given the role of the effects of the need for capital formation in Maclntyre's condemnations of the injustices of capitalism (2006, 147-148). It is in arguments such as this, that posit the circumstances in which markets reward and those in which (as Maclntyre maintains) they disregard the virtues of practitioners that a fruitful application of Maclntyre's framework to organisations lies. This may suggest to us a number of ways in which the business ethics and organization theory literatures might come together in describing the activity of managers quite differently according to whether or not the activities they manage might be meaningfully described as practices. The redescription of all businesses as practices is not only incoherent but probative to the development of such understanding.

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Culture and Organization 12(2), 127-137 —/Moore, G. (2006), Maclntyre on Virtue and Organization, in: Organization Studies 27(3), 323-340 Brewer, K.B. (1997), Management as a Practice: A Response to Alasdair Maclntyre, in: Journal of Business Ethics 16(8), 825-833 Collier, J. (1998), Theorising the Ethical Organisation, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 8(4), 621-654 Crockett, C. (2005), The Cultural Paradigm of Virtue, in: Journal of Business Ethics 62(2), 191-208 Dawson, D./Bartholomew, C. (2003), Virtues, Managers and Business People: Finding a Place for Maclntyre in a Business Context, in: Journal of Business Ethics 48(2), 127-138 Dobson, J. (1996) The Feminist Firm: A Comment, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 6(2), 227-232 — (1997), Maclntyre's Position on Business: A Response to Wicks, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 7(4), 125-132 — (2001), The Battle in Seattle: Reconciling Two World Views on Corporate Culture, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 11(3), 403-413 Dunne, J./Hogan, P. (2004), Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and Learning, Oxford Horvath, C.M. (1995), Excellence v Effectiveness: Maclntyre's Critique of Business, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 5(3), 499-531 Jones, C./Parker, M./Ten Bos, R. (2005), For Business Ethics, London Kaler, J. (2003), What is a Business?, in: Philosophy in Management 3(2), 57-66 Knight, K. (ed.) (1998), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge Lambeth, E. (1990), Waiting for a New St.Benedict: Alasdair Maclntyre and the Theory and Practice of Journalism, in: Business and Professional Ethics Journal 9(1-2), 97-108 Leeper, R./Leeper, K. (2001), Public Relations as 'Practice': Applying the Theory of Alasdair Maclntyre, in: Public Relations Review 27(4), 461-473 Maclntyre, A. (1977), Utilitarianism and Cost Benefit Analysis, in: Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, Goodpaster, K. E./Sayre, K.M. (eds.), Notre Dame, 217-237 — (1985), After Virtue (2nd ed.), London — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London — (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, London — (1994), A Partial Response to My Critics, in: After Maclntyre, Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.), Cambridge, 283-304 — /Dunne, K.J. (2004), Alasdair Maclntyre on Education, in: Dunne/Hogan (eds.), 1-18

— (2006), Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge McCann, D./Brownsberger, M.,L. (1990), Management as a Social Practice: Rethinking Business Ethics After Maclntyre, in: Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, 223-345 Miller, D. (1994), Virtues, Practices and Justice, in: After Maclntyre, Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.), Cambridge, 245-264 Mintz, S. (1996), Aristotelian Virtue and Business Ethics Education, in: Journal of Business Ethics 15(8), 827-838 Moore, G. (1999), Corporate Moral Agency: Review and Implications, in: Journal of Business Ethics 21, 329-343

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— (2002), On the Implications of the Practice-Institution Distinction: Maclntyre and the Application of Modern Virtue Ethics to Business, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 12(1), 19-32 — (2005a), Humanizing Business: A Modern Virtue Ethics Approach, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 15(2), 237-255 — (2005b), Corporate Character: Modern Virtue Ethics and the Virtuous Corporation, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 15(4), 659-685 —/Beadle, R. (2006), In Search of Organizational Virtue in Business: Agents, Goods, Practices, Institutions and Environments, in: Organization Studies 27(3), 369-389. Sellman, D. (2000), Alasdair Maclntyre and the Profession of Nursing, in: Nursing Philosophy 1(1), 26-33 Tsoukas, H./Cumming, S. (1997), Marginalization and Recovery: The Emergence of Aristotelian Organization Studies, in: Organization Studies 18(4), 655-683 Weaver, G. (2006), Virtue in Organizations: Moral Identity as a Foundation for Moral Agency, in: Organization Studies 27(3), 341-368 Whetstone, J. T. (2005), A Framework for Organizational Virtue: The Interrelationship of Mission, Culture and Leadership, in: Business Ethics: A European Review 14(4), 367-378 Wicks, A.C. (1996), Reflections on the Practical Relevance of Feminist Thought to Business, in: Business Ethics Quarterly, 6(4), 523-532 — (1997), On Maclntyre, Modernity and the Virtues: A Response to Dobson, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 7(4), 133-135

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Russell

Keat

Ethics, Markets, and Maclntyre*

Abstract: Maclntyre's theory of practices, institutions, and their respective kinds of goods, has revived and enriched the ethical critique of market economies, and his view of politics as centrally concerned with common goods and human flourishing presents a major challenge to neutralist liberal theorists' attempts to exclude distinctively ethical considerations from political deliberation. However, the rejection of neutrality does not entail the rejection of liberalism tout court: questions of human flourishing may be accorded a legitimate role in political decisions—including those about economic systems - provided that the powers of the state remain subject to certain recognizably liberal constraints. Further, although neutralist liberals often defend market economies on the mistaken grounds that they alone are consistent with the principle of ethical neutrality, a non-neutralist defence of them should not be ruled out, especially if the substantive theory of goods used to evaluate them is somewhat less restrictive than Maclntyre's.

0. Introduction I approach Alasdair Maclntyre's work with two related interests in mind. One is in the ethical evaluation of economic systems, and of market economies in particular; I use the term "ethical" here to refer specifically to questions about human goods and flourishing, about what makes for a good life or a life worth living. The other is in the place that such ethical judgments should have in political reasoning. Of particular relevance here is the neutralist liberal view that, since the powers of the state should not be used to selectively favour specific 'conceptions of the good', political deliberation should be restricted to questions of 'the right' (including distributive justice), eschewing questions of 'the good'. 1 Neutralist liberals often claim that only market economies are consistent with the principle of neutrality, and hence with the exclusion of ethics from political reasoning (Arneson 1987). Friedrich Hayek may be seen as presenting a particularly interesting defence of this view. He argues t h a t markets obviate the need for collective, societal-level decisions about the purposes to be served by economic activity—about, in my terms, its ethical goals or ends. This, he * This is a revised version of a paper given at the conference on 'Alasdair Maclntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism', organised by the HRSJ Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, 29 June-01 July 2007. 1 Dworkin 1985 is the locus classicus for this view; see Sher 1997 for a major critique.

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says, is extremely advantageous since in modern societies, no agreement could ever be reached about such collective purposes, or about their relative priority. The market enables us to avoid the various undesirable effects of attempting the impossible; it does so by 'devolving' (ethical) decisions to individuals, who are able to pursue their own freely chosen goals, in voluntary cooperation with one another, within the (ethically) neutral framework of the market (Hayek 1976, ch. 10). However, I believe it can be shown that this argument for the market is not persuasive, since market economies are not ethically neutral (Keat 2000, 161-165; Miller 1990, 72-97). This does not mean they cannot be justified, but only that any such justification must be (at least partly) an ethical one, and hence that political reasoning and decisions about economic systems must be ethical in character. Here I am in agreement with Maclntyre, who both denies the neutrality of markets and rejects the exclusion of ethics from politics. More importantly, his substantive theory of goods and practices has revived and hugely enriched the ethical critique of market economies that has—in the past, at least—been central to socialist political thought. I hope that what I go on to say in this paper, which will at times involve significant disagreement, also conveys my indebtedness to his work. 2 In the next section of this paper I suggest the need for certain revisions to his theory of goods, having first identified a number of its major strengths. In the following section I argue that this theory, at least in its revised form, does not straightforwardly entail the rejection of market economies. In section 3 I sketch an alternative to neutralist liberalism which accords to ethics a central place in political reasoning, but retains what I take to be crucial liberal principles. In the final section I return to the possible (ethical) justification of market economies and indicate how my approach to this differs both from Maclntyre's and that taken by neutralist liberals. To avoid possible misunderstanding, the following should be noted. I use the terms "market" or "market economy" to include both capitalist and noncapitalist market systems, the central case of the latter being so-called 'market socialist' systems. I shall consequently have little to say about the distinctively capitalist features of capitalist (market) systems. More generally, the specific features of market economies that I shall discuss are not intended to represent all, or even the most important, of those relevant to their possible justification. In particular, I shall exclude issues of distributive justice, but without implying that these are less significant than issues about 'the good'. 3

2 My understanding of Maclntyre's work has been greatly aided by Crowley 1987, McMylor 1994, Breen 2002 and Knight 2007. However, my primary concern is with the defensibility of certain claims or positions, and not with 'Maclntyre's views as such'. 3 Maclntyre would probably reject my use of this distinction between 'right' and 'good'—or in Habermas's terms, between morality and ethics (Habermas 1993)—but this disagreement affects little of what I will argue.

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1. Practices, Goods and Institutions I will begin by identifying three features of the account of goods and practices in After Virtue (Maclntyre 1981: henceforth AV) that are especially valuable in thinking ethically about economic systems, and stand in marked contrast to the a-social vacuity of much (though not all) liberal thought. In doing so I shall assume broad familiarity with that account, including the idea of standards of excellence; the distinctions between internal and external goods, and between practices and institutions; and the role of the virtues. 4 I shall then suggest how certain problems in that account can be seen as being resolved in some of his later work, before going on to note some remaining difficulties that call for some modifications to his position. First, Maclntyre's account of practices in AV shows how at least one major class of human goods (i.e. internal goods) is non-contingently dependent on complex social activities and relationships in which certain moral virtues play an essential part. They are not only essential to the integrity of the practice— and hence, as it were, to the 'existence' of its internal goods—but also to the possibility of its members enjoying these goods, something that depends also on their ability and willingness to learn how to judge and appreciate these goods by reference to the practice's standards of excellence. Putting the overall import of this in more general, and somewhat un-MacIntyrean terms, one might say that what is demonstrated here is the essential role of 'morality', or morally-guided conduct, in the 'real social construction' (and enjoyment) of human goods. Second, practices, and hence their internal goods, are not only virtue- (or morality-) dependent; they also depend on institutions, and hence on the use of external goods such as money, status and power. Precisely why this should be so I shall consider later. For the moment I will simply note that on Maclntyre's account, the tasks of what might be called 'institutional design' (and 'maintenance') are extremely important, since although practices cannot flourish without institutions, the inappropriate use of external goods is also the greatest threat to them. External goods must serve the integrity of practices and their internal goods; internal goods must not be subordinated to external goods, but the latter to the former. The final feature of Maclntyre's theory of goods and practices that I shall note (and endorse) is what I would call its pluralistic character, though this has to be understood in a number of partly distinct senses: (i) the internal goods of different practices are qualitatively distinct from, and not substitutable for, one another; (ii) there are—or at least can be—practices in several different areas or domains of social life, including family, work, the arts and sciences, sports and games, and politics; and (iii) the good life for individuals typically involves engagement in many or all of these domains or kinds of practice. In these latter respects especially, Maclntyre's position is clearly superior both to Aristotle's and to Marx's: the former wrongly excludes work, or economic production, as a possible practice (and source of human flourishing), while the latter wrongly 4 Maclntyre 1981, 169-189; for specific discussion of the implications for economic practices and institutions, see Keat 2000, chs. 2 and 6; Moore 2002, 2005, Moore/Beadle 2006.

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privileges the goods of economic production, to the exclusion of other domains of social life and their respective goods. I turn now to Dependent Rational Animals (Maclntyre 1999: henceforth DRA), confining my comments to the ways in which what is said there can be seen potentially to resolve what strike me as three problems about the theory of goods in AV. The first concerns its implications for individual autonomy. Despite the many attractions of AV's picture of untutored preferences being transformed through apprenticeship, and hence of the authority of standards of excellence and those 'qualified' to apply them, it was unclear what room this left for independent reasoning and judgment on the part of individuals. But Maclntyre's account in DRA (1999, 81-98) of how the capacity for independent practical reason is acquired and exercised seems to resolve this difficulty. The second problem is that the theory in AV seemed not to provide any basic, practice-independent, moral principles by reference to which all practices (and their internal goods) can and should be judged, so that one could rule out as morally unacceptable various social activities which otherwise meet the criteria for being a practice. One way of grounding such principles would be to provide a universalistic account of human needs, and hence of the various kinds of harm to which (all) humans are (equally) vulnerable and from which they should always be protected. Again, although not presented by Maclntyre himself as addressing this problem, I suggest that the DRA account of human vulnerability and dependence can be seen as enabling it to be resolved. Finally, the commitment to a broadly naturalistic ethics in DRA should enable one to address a third problem in AV. This is the absence of any theoretical resource for answering questions such as: "what is the value—or indeed 'good'— of this practice's internal goods; or indeed of practices more generally? How do they contribute to human well-being?" The naturalistic ethics in DRA points us towards the identification of generic features or elements of human flourishing, and these should help us to understand the value of practices and their internal goods. But DRA (quite reasonably) stops short of doing this, because of its more limited focus on our shared vulnerabilities. I will not try to do this here.5 But one thing one would need to ask, in thinking about "the value of practices and their internal goods", is: "valuable for whom?"—in particular, "for practitioners, or for non-practitioners?". 6 The importance of this will become apparent in the discussion of market economies in the next section. I turn now to certain aspects of Maclntyre's theory of goods and practices which indicate the need for further revisions or modifications. The first is that the internal and external goods of practices and institutions are not the only significant kinds of human goods: that is, this dichotomy is by no means exhaustive (as Maclntyre partly recognises). For example, the following kinds of goods are neither external nor internal, yet to contribute significantly to human 5 The most promising approach might be to draw on Nussbaum's 1990 'Aristotelian' account of the various 'functionings' essential to human flourishing, whilst using Maclntyre's account of practices to give these a properly social and institutional grounding. But note Nussbaum's 1998 implicit criticisms of Maclntyre's position. 6 See the distinction proposed by Miller 1994 between 'self-enclosed' and 'purposive' practices, and my discussion of this in Keat 2000, 127-132.

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flourishing or well-being: (i) certain kinds of social and personal relationships, such as friendship (and love), which although sharing with practices in being morally constituted or dependent, are arguably neither practices themselves, nor the internal goods of what are practices; (ii) various kinds of pleasurable bodily and sensory experience which, whilst often occurring in the context of social practices, are distinct from the enjoyment of their internal goods - there is a difference between, say, the pleasure of dancing well, and the pleasures of movement and rhythm in dancing: (iii) the various sources of what psychologists often refer to as 'intrinsic satisfactions', such as those that may (if one is fortunate) experience in work, through the development and exercise of skills, the sense of control over one's activities, the solving of problems, and so on. A second area of Maclntyre's theory that requires modification and amplification concerns the relationship between practices and institutions. Although the claim that practices require institutions is intuitively plausible, it is less clear just why this should be so. That they need money is easy to understand—this is a matter of resources. But what about power (and status)? Presumably power is needed because certain rules have to be enforced, including those related to standards of excellence. For example, academic journal referees make (supposedly) authoritative judgments about how bad a submitted paper is, but the journal's editor backs these negative judgments by the power to refuse publication, and does not rely on the author gracefully withdrawing their paper once they have read the referees' reports. Or again, the rule against academic plagiarism is backed by the sanction of dismissal. It may be true that plagiarism is self-defeating if one wants to enjoy the internal goods of academic life, but one cannot rely on this alone in the institutional design of academic practices. But if this is so, it suggests that one of the reasons why practices need institutions is that they cannot rely wholly on the virtues, or on other forms of moral constraint not backed by sanctions. So although it is true, as Maclntyre claims (1981, 181), that one of the essential functions of the virtues is to enable practitioners—and hence practices—to resist the corrupting potential of external goods, it may also be true that one of the essential functions of external goods is to provide sanctions when the virtues fail (which they always do, to some extent). 7 Nor is this need for sanctions limited to cases of 'simple moral failing'; it arises also from the attractions of goods that engagement in practices often makes available, yet are not internal to the practice. For example, as an academic I might derive considerable satisfaction from working out how to use Powerpoint, or from friendly contact with my colleagues, but these might actually detract from my contributions to teaching and research, and thus from the practice's flourishing. By doing these things I might deny myself full enjoyment of the practice's internal goods, but that may not bother me too much. So someone with the requisite authority, backed by power, has to tell me not to act like this, deny me promotion and enhanced status, and so on. More generally, and drawing here on Jerry Ravetz's illuminating analysis of the social organisation 7

This is arguably implied by Maclntyre's (1988, 35-36) discussion of the relationships between what he calls goods of 'excellence' and 'effectiveness'.

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of modern science—a paradigmatice practice, I would argue—one could say that there are generic problems of institutional design due to unavoidable tensions between what he calls 'individual purposes' and 'collective goals'.8 One final point about external goods can be noted here, which will be important in the next section. Money is needed by practices as a resource. It is also used as a reward. As in the case of power, one can ask just why such external rewards are required, but one can also ask why it works as a reward. Presumably this is due to its instrumental value for practitioners with respect to goods that are obtained and enjoyed outwith the practice where it is acquired. That is, it is useful for goods other than the internal goods of this practice, and sometimes for goods that are not internal to any practice. (Maclntyre rightly insists that external goods are goods; I am inclined to think that they can only be instrumental goods, and if anyone pursued them for their own sake, they would be making a mistake about what is good for humans.)

2. Goods and Markets I want now to consider the implications of this 'modified version' of Maclntyre's theory of goods for the ethical evaluation of market economies. I will not attempt to provide a direct answer to the question of whether markets are ethically justified, but I will identify some of the key issues that would need to be addressed in doing so, and to show why there are no easy routes to a clear-cut answer.9 To start with, one clearly cannot dismiss market economies simply on the grounds that they make systematic use of external goods, since this is true of the institutions required by practices and their internal goods. Further, as I have just suggested, one of these external goods, money, can only work effectively if it is useful for goods other than those internal to the institutional practice in which it is acquired. This points us towards the importance of consumption, and the possibility of arguing in favour of the market as an effective institutional design for the provision of consumer goods. That is, the market might be understood as a complex social institution which includes the contractual exchange of goods for money, private property rights, competition between firms aiming to maximise profits, the use of prices as signals, and so on—all of which are in various ways backed by the powers of the state; and it might then be argued that this institution operates in such a way that 'producers' can only succeed in acquiring external goods if they do so in ways that enable 'consumers' to acquire what they regard as 'good'. Such an argument depends on an adequate account of the good or value of consumption, about which only a few comments can be made here. The first thing to note is that although the acquisition of consumer 'goods' takes place through exchange within the market (or economic) domain, the realisation of 8 See Ravetz 1971 and my use of his work to explore the role of recognition in scientific and other practices, (Keat 2000, ch. 5). The inevitability of institutional power (including that of the state) makes liberal concerns with its limitation extremely important: see section 3 below. 9 Much of what follows draws on Keat 2000, chs. 6-7.

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their value typically takes place in non-market (non-economic) domains. One buys a loaf of bread, and then eats it at home, often sharing it with family or friends. The example is banal, but says something important: although consumer goods are 'items of private property', acquired through market transactions, they are typically enjoyed in the context of non-private, non-market activities and relationships. So if we want to understand and judge their value, we need to understand and judge what it is that they contribute to, and how significant that contribution is (or can be). In this respect it is important to notice that in at least some cases, and arguably quite many, consumer goods have an important role in various nonmarket practices. The food example can easily be expanded to include the many consumer goods deployed in the activities of 'home-making' (decorating, furnishing, looking after people and things). But there are many other kinds (and domains) of practices in which consumer goods play a useful part: one buys binoculars to go bird-watching, a guitar to play music, a book to learn how to philosophise. So these 'commodities', and the money one uses to buy them, provide one with access to the internal goods of practices and their enjoyment. Further, these connections between consumer goods and practices imply that the 'preferences' that get 'expressed' and 'satisfied', to use the vocabulary of neoclassical economics, are often very far from being 'untutored', to use Maclntyre's. The fact that neo-classical economists talk merely about 'preferences' does not entail that people's actual 'preferences' are merely that. However, it might be objected that this account of consumer goods and nonmarket practices ignores a fundamental problem about market economies: that they have an inherent tendency to expand or extend themselves into non-market domains, undermining the latter's distinctive kinds of goods and relationships. If this were so, the value of the kinds of consumer goods that have just been discussed would itself be compromised, since they would no longer provide one with the means to engage in non-market practices. This is clearly a critical issue. If markets cannot be prevented from colonising other domains of social life—if the boundary-maintenance that Walzer (1983) and Habermas (1987, 153-198) regard as a central task of politics cannot succeed —then no ethical defence of the market would be remotely plausible, given the ethical pluralism specified in the previous section. However, in thinking about the market's colonising tendencies, we need to bear in mind that, historically speaking, the domains we now regard as endangered by the market were themselves 'brought into existence' as distinct domains by the processes of differentiation associated with the emergence of the modern market. For example, we may nowadays fear the colonisation of 'personal friendship' by the sale and purchase of 'friendship services', or by its redefinition on the model of contractual exchange (Anderson 1990). But this very separation of 'personal friendship' from 'economic' considerations is itself arguably a feature only of societies in which 'economic' activities have become 'disembedded' from other kinds of social relationships, i.e. of societies with market economies. 10 10 On debates about differentiation and disembedding, see Holton 1992, 7-46 and Booth 1993; I discuss colonisation in more detail in Keat 1993 and 2000, ch. 4.

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But even if the colonising tendencies of the market can be kept in check, and even if consumption has greater value than many of its critics are willing to recognise, there remains the question that is central to any broadly MacIntyrean ethics, of whether market economies are compatible with production being conducted in the form of a practice. Maclntyre clearly thinks not. In a postly similar vein, Robert Lane has argued powerfully that market economies inherently privilege consumption over production - the value of products over that of the human processes involved in producing them - and that in doing so they privilege lesser goods over (what are potentially) greater ones (Lane 1991, Part V). The ethical criteria he uses in making this judgment differ somewhat from Maclntyre's, but are broadly in line with Maclntyre's insistence, in his well-known discussion of 'the two fishing crews', that the goods of productive practices must not be understood exclusively (or even primarily) in terms of 'good products' (Maclntyre 1994, 284-286). However, although market economies (necessarily) share certain basic features, they also differ in the specific institutional form they take in different countries at different times, and these institutional differences between 'varieties of capitalism' may well affect the extent to which they are antithetical to the conduct of production as a practice. For example, in what are often referred to as 'coordinated market economies', such as Germany, industry-wide associations play a central role in promoting cooperation in research and development, and in apprenticeship-based forms of training (Hall/Soskice 2001). These institutional arrangements, I would argue, are more conducive to production as practice than their counterparts in Anglo-American economies. That Maclntyre implicitly has the latter, rather than the former, kind of capitalism in mind is suggested by the fact that when he describes 'the capitalist fishing crew', he notes its vulnerability to the rapid withdrawal of capital when profitability declines; but so-called 'impatient capital' is generally regarded as a hallmark of Anglo-American economies, by contrast with the 'patient' capital of coordinated market economies.11 Admittedly, even if some varieties of capitalism are more conducive to production as practice than others, it is extremely unlikely that any of them will be 'optimal' in this respect. But it does not follow from this that market economies (of whatever kind) should be rejected on ethical grounds—especially if one thinks here of 'practical decisions', of political choices between different economic institutions. After all, it might be that there are no non-market systems that are any better, in this respect; and even if there are, they might be worse than market systems in other respects, including their ability to provide goods of consumption. So this may well turn out to be a case of 'hard choices' having to be made, requiring the prioritisation of some kinds of goods over others, and hence decisions about what should be sacrificed, and to what extent. Further, these are decisions that have to be made collectively, since they in11 See Keat 2008 for a more detailed development of this argument. On varieties of capitalism, in addition to Hall/Soskice 2001 see Crouch/Streeck 1997 and Whitley 1999. Mason 1996 argues that non-capitalist market economies are more conducive to practices than capitalism. See also Selznick 1992, Part Three for an account of morally responsible business institutions.

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volve issues of institutional design. They cannot be devolved to individuals, in the course of pursuing their own 'freely chosen' conceptions of the good, since they determine the framework of societal possibilities within which individuals must (largely) operate. But since the grounds for these collective political decisions are ethical, they would not be permitted by neutralist liberals.

3. Liberalism, Ethics and Politics Market economies, as I noted at the outset, have sometimes been defended by neutralist liberals on the grounds that they (and they alone) meet the requirement of neutrality on the part of the state, their adoption thus being consistent with the exclusion of ethical reasons from political deliberation. By contrast, although I have questioned any 'unduly hasty' rejection of market economies on ethical grounds, I have no quarrel with Maclntyre's view that markets are ethically non-neutral (1998, 238), nor with the central place he accords to ethics in political reasoning (1999, 129-146). Any defence of markets must be (at least partly) an ethical one, and since the institutional conditions for market economies are dependent on the powers of the state, their adoption can only be justified if the requirements of neutrality are rejected. 12 However, to reject neutrality is not to reject liberalism tout court, since it can plausibly be argued that the principle of state neutrality is not required by liberal political theory, and that the neutralist form of liberalism should be rejected in favour of non-neutralist forms. The most common version of such perfectionist liberalism accords ethical primacy to an ideal of individual autonomy, and in principle permits state action aimed at securing the conditions required for the acquisition and exercise of this fundamental human good. 13 But I suggest that one can and should go further than this in departing from neutralist liberalism, and that one can do so without abandoning politically crucial liberal principles. The position I propose is roughly as follows.14 As well as securing the conditions for individual autonomy, political communities should also secure the institutional conditions for an extensive (but necessarily limited) range of valuable goods to be available to individuals. That there should be some such range of goods, between which individuals may choose in living their lives in particular ways, is required by the (liberal) ideal of autonomy. But the grounds on which these goods are judged to be valuable will not be 'liberal' ones, since they are not derivable from autonomy itself, and are

12

Here as elsewhere I implicitly deny the relevance, for issues of collective political responsibility, of the distinction between neutrality of justification and of outcomes. 13 On perfectionist liberal defences of the market, see O'Neill 1998. 14 My account of this position owes a great deal to Raz 1986; 1994, though differing in certain respects. There is much in common between Maclntyre's account of independent practical reason and Raz's understanding of individual autonomy as an 'achievement' with specific social requirements, rather than a 'given' feature of human individuals. Maclntyre adds to this an emphasis on the moral character of the social relationships (and dependencies) involved.

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concerned with the substantive value of what will be available as possible objects of individual choice. Such grounds may be said to be 'non-liberal'. However, the ways in which the state acts to secure these goods, and hence the possibilities open to individuals in living their lives, must be subject to the constraints implied by basic principles of political liberalism. These are the constraints that have been central to the liberal tradition of political thought (and practice), and are encapsulated in the standard array of civil and political liberties, including the right to freedom of expression, the rule of law, and so on. That is, the state must not act ¿/liberally (i.e. inconsistently with these liberal principles) in securing the availability of goods, whether these are liberal (such as individual autonomy) or non-liberal (i.e. goods whose justification makes no reference to liberal principles or goods). One could call this liberal(ly constrained) perfectionism, or 'liberal perfectionism' for short.15 This liberal perfectionist position needs considerable elaboration, but here I will only note that its 'perfectionist' element incorporates the pluralist and institutionalist character of the (modified) Maclntyrean account of goods presented earlier. Thus 'good lives for humans' are seen as consisting in the enjoyment of a number of different kinds of goods, experienced in distinct domains of social life such as the family, work, the various constituents of civil society, and so on. In each of these domains, questions of appropriate institutional design are of great importance since the goods concerned are internally related to complex forms of social activity and moral norms that are themselves institutionally-dependent. It is the failure of neutralist liberalism to recognise this that undermines its picture of individuals choosing to pursue their own conceptions of the good, with the state's role being only to ensure a just allocation of the material resources needed to do so effectively. What this ignores are the institutional conditions required for the very existence of such goods as possible objects of choice. So for the liberal perfectionist, the collective political responsibility for making valuable goods available for individuals is essentially a matter of securing the institutional conditions for a specific 'repertoire' of ethical possibilities. Individuals will exercise their independent judgment about which particular goods to pursue within each domain, and about how their engagement in these different domains will be put together. Their autonomy is not limited by the existence of determinate repertoires as such: given the institutional dependence of (many) goods, and the impossibility of co-realising all possible goods in any one set of institutions, there must always in fact be such limitations. Perfectionist politics insists that collective responsibility for the ethical implications of these institutions should be accepted, and liberal perfectionism further insists that this responsibility should be discharged in ways that are consistent with liberal constraints. How does this liberal perfectionist account of the place of ethics in politics compare with Maclntyre's? As a first approximation, and putting aside for the moment the place of liberal constraints, this is broadly similar to the picture he presents in DRA, especially in its account of how the independent practical 15 I take it these liberal constraints rule out the legal enforcement of specific forms of action on ethical, rather than moral grounds, in Habermas's 1993 sense of these terms.

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reasoning of individuals about how they will live is related to the collective practical reasoning of political communities about the priorities to be given to different kinds of goods, about their 'political ordering' (Maclntyre 1999, 99146). However, there is a major complication here, which undermines this apparent similarity. For whereas I have implicitly assumed that liberal perfectionism can and should be applied to the politics of modern nation-states, Maclntyre is adamant that the kind of ethical politics he endorses can be practised only within certain kinds of small-scale local communities (Maclntyre 1998).16 Indeed, he argues that despite its (partly) fictitious character, a principle of neutrality should be applied to the state, since the political realities of modern societies make its use to promote supposedly shared conceptions of the good thoroughly suspect; similar considerations lead him to endorse standard civil and political rights at this level. By contrast, not only is the politics of local community determinedly ethical and non-neutral, on Maclntyre's account, but he appears to have some reservation about the unqualified application of at least some such liberal constraints at this level (Maclntyre 2006a, 214-223). So whereas the liberal perfectionism I have proposed drives a wedge between ethical neutrality and liberal constraints, rejecting the former while endorsing the latter, but makes no distinction between the place of ethics in the politics of local communities and of nation-states, Maclntyre not only sees this latter distinction as crucial, but also seems to regard liberal neutrality and liberal constraints as less easily, or less appropriately, separated. 17

4. Markets, States and Local Communities Maclntyre's restriction of ethical politics to local communities brings him somewhat closer to Hayek's view of market economies than one might expect. As I noted in section 0, Hayek argues that markets enable us to avoid the impossible: making collective decisions about social goals. They do so by devolving these decisions to individuals, each pursuing their own purposes, and cooperating freely with others through contractual exchanges. But Hayek's claim about the impossibility of collective decisions is intended to apply only to large-scale, modern societies; by contrast, such decisions make perfectly good sense in small-scale, 'household-based' systems of economic provision. Indeed, noting that the term 'economy' derives from just this sense of 'household' in ancient Greece, he insists that strictly speaking we should not talk of market economies as 'economies' at all (Hayek 1976, 107-109). So in this respect, at least, Hayek and Maclntyre can be seen to agree: apart from centrally planned economies, which they both reject, the only alternatives 16 For criticisms of Maclntyre's politics of local community, see Murphy 2003 and Breen 2005. 17 It is difficult to find in Maclntyre's work any unqualified endorsement of 'liberal rights'. Perhaps unfairly, one might attribute to him the view of such rights adopted in one major strand of socialist thought, i.e. as inherently related to a defective form of society. See Keat 1981 for criticism of this view.

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are household economies with collective goals and perfectionist politics, or market economies with neither. 18 It is this shared view with which I disagree. I would argue instead that we can conceive of 'instituting markets' in large-scale societies as a (possible) collective, ethically-based decision about how to secure the institutional conditions for certain kinds of goods, a decision that would be accompanied by recognising the need also to secure and protect the existence of other domains in which very different kinds of goods are likewise made available to all members of the political community. Justifying market economies in this way has important implications for what are regarded as the collective responsibilities of a political community. If markets are conceived as the institutional means adopted to promote (certain sources of) well-being, then when they fail to achieve this goal (for certain groups at certain times), there is every reason to secure it in some other way; the underlying rationale for market and non-market 'welfare' provision is essentially the same, and there is collective responsibility for both. More generally, regulation and limitation of the market to prevent damage to other social goods is not especially problematic, with respect to political justification, since what is at issue is 'simply' the institutional protection and prioritisation of various kinds of collectively agreed goods. This ethical justification for market economies thus differs crucially from certain others in rejecting the idea that contractual exchange in the market provides us with (or is based upon) an acceptable general model of the scope and basis of people's obligations towards one another, according to which the responsibilities of individuals are restricted to what they have voluntarily agreed. If market exchange is understood in this way, there is clearly no implied rationale for non-market provision when markets fail to secure people's well-being, and collective responsibility is limited to securing individual property rights and the conditions for their voluntary exchange. Now Maclntyre (1999, 99-118) has argued forcefully (and movingly) against the narrowness of this voluntaristic model of moral obligation and responsibility. But the adoption of market economies does not require one to view market exchange in this way. Instead, whilst recognising that the obligations generated through market exchange are narrowly circumscribed, and fall well short of what 'common morality' requires (McMahon 1981), one may try to show that this institutional device of restricted obligations is nonetheless valuable in achieving certain agreed social purposes. 19 If this can be shown then, having justified market exchange in this way, the members of a political community could be expected to accept responsibility for ensuring that those wider obligations towards one another, from which they 18 See O'Neill 1998, 16-34, on Hayek and Aristotle, and Booth 1993 for a defence of markets and their liberal egalitarian character, by contrast with the status hierarchies he argues are endemic to household economies. 19 This 'device' of voluntary exchange, with its specific obligations, is itself a social creation, as Durkheim argued (1893/1984, Book I ch. 7). It does not merely serve individual purposes that exist independently of it Maclntyre 1998, 239-240, 250, but also makes possible a certain kind of social relationship. In this respect it may be understood as what Raz terms a "dutyconstituted good" (Raz 1994, 40-42).

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have been released as economic agents in the market, are fulfilled by other institutional means. That this is not a 'merely theoretical' expectation is apparently confirmed by the fact that in countries such as the UK and USA, where the political ideology of the market is highly individualistic, it has proved very difficult to gain political support for solidaristic forms of welfare provision (Habermas 2001), whereas this has been much less of a problem in countries such as Germany, where markets are understood instead as creations of public policy intended to achieve social purposes (Streeck 1997, 37). But this social (and Christian) democratic conception of markets, states and welfare, with which I have a good deal of sympathy, would not be acceptable for Maclntyre, not least because it assumes the compartmentalisation that he regards as an especially problematic feature of modern societies, in which radically different moral norms are seen as appropriate in different social domains (Maclntyre 2006b; Breen 2005). Thus in place of a separation between people's obligations and responsibilities 'as economic agents' and 'as citizens', Maclntyre wishes to see economic exchange directly embedded in the networks of giving and receiving that can obtain only in the kinds of small-scale community that he endorses, with their local markets and small producers (Maclntyre 1999, 117; 1998, 249). 20 However, to explore the issues raised by this disagreement would take me well beyond the main purpose of this paper, which has been to show how the possible justification of market economies should be conceived within a perfectionist politics that is both informed by Maclntyre's ethics yet consistent with certain liberal principles.

Bibliography Anderson, E. (1990), The Ethical Limitations of the Market, in: Economics and Philosophy 6, 179-205 Arneson, R. (1987), Meaningful Work and Market Socialism, in: Ethics 97, 517-545 Booth, W . J . (1993), Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy, Ithaca — (1994), On the Idea of the Moral Economy, in: American Political Science Review 88, 653-667 Breen, K. (2002), Alasdair Maclntyre and the Hope for a Politics of Virtuous Acknowledged Dependence, in: Contemporary Political Theory 1(2), 181-201 — (2005), The State, Compartmentalization and the Turn to Local Community, in: European Legacy 10(5), 485-501 Crouch, C./Streeck, W. (eds.) (1997), Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping Convergence and Diversity, London Crowley, B. (1987), The Self, the Individual and the Community, Oxford Dworkin, R. (1985), Liberalism, in: A Matter of Principle, Oxford, 181-204 Durkheim, E. (1893/1984), The Division of Labour in Society, Halls, W. D. (trans.), London Habcrmas, J. (1987), McCarthy, T. (trans.), The Theory of Communicative Action 2, 20 So although Maclntyre accepts Polanyi's understanding of the emergence of market economies as the «¿¿«embedding of 'economy' from 'society', he seems to reject Polanyi's view of the later development of welfare states as a process of re-embedding (Polanyi 1944, 249-254).

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Cambridge — (1993), On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason, in: Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Justification and Application, Cambridge, 1-18 — (2001), Why Europe Needs A Constitution, in: New Left Review 11, 5-26 Hall, P./Soskice, F. (2001), An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism, in: Hall, P./Soskice F. (eds.), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford, 1-70 Hayek, F. A. (1976), Law, Legislation and Liberty: Volume 2, London Holton, R. (1992), Economy and Society, London Keat, R. (1982), Liberal Rights and Socialism, in: Graham, K. (ed.), Contemporary Political Philosophy, Cambridge, 59-82 — (1993), The Moral Boundaries of the Market, in: Crouch, C./Marquand, D. (eds.), Ethics and Markets, Oxford, 6-20 — (2000), Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market, London — (2008), Practices, Firms and Varieties of Capitalism, in: Philosophy of Management, forthcoming Knight, K. (ed.) (1998), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge Knight, K. (2007), Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to Maclntyre, Cambridge Lane, R. (1991), The Market Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge Maclntyre, A. (1981), After Virtue, Notre Dame — (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London — (1994), A Partial Response to My Critics, in: Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.), After Maclntyre, Cambridge 283-304 — (1998), Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good, in: Knight, K. (ed.) (1998), 235-252 — (1999), Dependent Rational Animals, London — (2006a), Toleration and the Goods of Conflict, in: Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge, 205-223 — (2006b), Social Structures and Moral Agency, in: Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge, 186-204 Mason, A. (1996), Maclntyre on Modernity and How It Has Marginalized the Virtues, in: Crisp, R. (ed.) How Should One Live?, Oxford, 191-219 McMahon, C. (1981), Morality and the Invisible Hand, in: Philosophy and Public Affairs 10(3), 247-277 McMylor, P. (1994), Alasdair Maclntyre: Critic of Modernity, London Miller, D. (1990), Market, State and Community, Oxford — (1994), Virtues, Practices and Justice, in: Horton, J./Mendus, S. (eds.) After Maclntyre, Cambridge, 245-264 Moore, G. (2002), On the Practice-Institution Distinction, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 12(1), 19-32 — (2005), Humanizing Business: A Modern Virtue Ethics Approach, in: Business Ethics Quarterly 15(2), 237-255 Moore, G./Beadle, R. (2006), In Search of Organizational Virtue in Business, in: Organization Studies 27(3), 369-389 Murphy, M. C. (2003), Maclntyre's Political Philosophy, in: Murphy, Mark C. (ed.), Alasdair Maclntyre, Cambridge, 152-175 Nussbaum, M. (1990), Aristotelian Social Democracy, in: Douglass, R. Bruce et al. (eds.), Liberalism and the Good, New York, 203-252 — (1998), The Good as Discipline, the Good as Freedom, in: Crocker, David A./Linden,

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T. (eds.), Ethics of Consumption, Lanham, 312-341 O'Neill, J. (1998), The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics. London Polanyi, K. (1944), The Great Transformation, New York Ravetz, J. (1971), Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, Oxford Raz, J. (1986), The Morality of Freedom, Oxford — (1994), Ethics in the Public Domain, Oxford Selznick, P. (1992), The Moral Commonwealth, Berkeley Sher, G. (1997), Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics, Cambridge Streeck, W. (1997), German Capitalism: Does It Exist? Can It Survive? in: Crouch, C./ /Streeck, W. (eds.), Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping Convergence and Diversity, London, 33-54 Walzer, M. (1983), Spheres of Justice, Oxford Whitley, R. (1999), Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems, Oxford

Reply

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Maclntyre

What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It

Abstract.The responses to my critics are as various as their criticisms, focusing successively on the distinctive character of modern moral disagreements, on the nature of common goods and their relationship to the virtues, on how the inequalities generated by advanced capitalist economies and by the contemporary state prevent the achievement of common goods, on issues concerning the nature of the self, on what it is that Marx's theory enables us to understand and on how some Marxists have failed to understand, on the differences between my philosophical stances and those both of John McDowell and of the physicalists, on the nature of human rights and of productive work, on the ancient Greek polis, and on the metaphysical commitments presupposed by my theorizing.

We all of us have good reason to be grateful to critics and, the more telling their criticism, the more reason to be grateful. I am therefore in debt to the authors of these uniformly interesting essays. But, were I to attempt to reply to them all adequately, I would have to write at the same length as they have done. So I hope that I will be forgiven for being selective, for focusing on relatively few issues, noting some matters that need more attention, while neglecting altogether more than one topic of importance. Responding in this way has been frustrating for me. I hope that it will not be equally frustrating for my readers. I After Virtue begins with reflections on what is distinctive about contemporary moral disagreement, its pervasive character, and the systematic inability of the inhabitants of modernity to resolve it. Timothy Chappell begins his in the end sad defense of liberalism with a forthright critique of those reflections. Echoing Stephen Mulhall (Mulhall 1994), he asks why we should suppose that this type of disagreement stands in need of explanation. After all on moral matters, so he and Mulhall suggest, we should expect just such disagreement (this issue, 180). And Chappell goes on to ask: "When was it ever otherwise?", citing the assemblies of classical Athens and revolutionary France as examples of this alleged ubiquity of moral disagreement.

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Chappell might have noticed that my discussion of, for example, classical Athens shows me to be well aware of how numerous and various past moral conflicts have been. So he might have inferred, and rightly, that I view the moral disagreements of modernity as having a peculiar character. What makes them significantly different from earlier types of moral disagreement is this: those who engage in them on the one hand seem to presuppose appeal to some impersonal standard by which those disagreements might be adjudicated, yet on the other by their obvious awareness that they have no hope of altering their opponents' convictions by rational argument also seem to allow that there is no such standard. This gives to much contemporary moral debate a paradoxical character. I did not however frame my explanation of this paradoxical character as adequately as I should have done and this because of my attempt, at the time that I wrote After Virtue, to minimize my metaphysical commitments. What I should have argued was that this paradoxical character is to be understood as due to the loss of the concept of an end, a final cause, a concept central to the practical discourse and thought of some of our Western predecessor cultures, but one characteristically abandoned at the threshold of modernity. (I did indeed speak of the concept of a telos, but spelled it out inadequately, because nonmetaphysically.) Something is directed towards its end, the end that is its in virtue of its specific nature, when it develops as it needs to, if it is to be completed and perfected. Plants and animals, including human beings, and a range of types of human activity have ends in this sense. And it is only because human beings as rational animals have the specific end that they have that questions about how they should act have determinate answers, answers that are true or false. Withdraw the concept of an end and those moral judgments that formerly presupposed it will continue to mimic judgments that are true or false, but will in fact only function as expressions of attitude. Hence the paradoxical character of so much modern moral utterance and hence too the differences between moderm moral disagreement and earlier types of disagreement. To speak of the end of human beings is to speak of the goods to which they are directed by their nature, both individual and common goods. And I therefore need to respond to what Thomas Osborne has said about my use of the notion of a common good. Moreover the conception of human beings as having an end by nature is certainly a metaphysical conception, so that I also need to respond to Seiriol Morgan's astute critique of my critique of the modern self. Let me begin with Osborne. What Osborne says about Maritain, DeKoninck, and myself in the first two sections of his paper is to the point. He is right, both in his judgment that DeKoninck is a more faithful interpreter of Aquinas than Maritain is and in his conclusions that political community is an imperfect and incomplete form of community and that individuals need to achieve more than one type of nonpolitical common good. He is also right in saying that on these questions I have sometimes followed Maritain too closely. So let me try again, although here I can only sketch what needs to be spelled out at greater length. What matters of course is not the interpretation of Aquinas for its own sake, but the light that Aquinas throws on the ordering of different types of common good towards the

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achievement of which individuals have to be directed, if they are to achieve their own individual goods. How, more particularly, is the common good of political society to be related to the common good of family and household and how are both to be related to the final good of human beings, that end to which they are directed by their nature? There are of course philosophical questions here. Common goods are not reducible to and cannot be constructed out of individual goods. Yet our individual goods can only be achieved through achieving or at least directing ourselves towards the achievement of some of our common goods. But we will go astray philosophically if we do not recognize that questions about the relationship of common to individual goods are also practical questions, questions that have to be answered in immediate and concrete terms by the members of any political society. The problem is that of identifying and achieving the goods of political society in such a way that the goods of family and household are also achievable and that individuals are able to move beyond both their familial and political ties and concerns in order to achieve their ultimate good, the good that is their end by nature. And it is clear that for this set of problems to be solved, two closely related conditions must be satisfied. First, the members of political societies must be able to engage together in rational deliberation about their common and individual goods. And, secondly, education from early childhood onwards must be such as to develop the capacity of members of political societies to participate in such deliberation. But it is hard, often impossible to satisfy these conditions in societies structured by those institutions that are indispensable to the modern state and to the globalizing market. Why so? The answer that I will give to this question puts me at odds with Russell Keat, and in what I say next I shall not be ignoring that. It is rather that I need first to provide premises from which I will later argue against some of his conclusions. Consider first the absence from contemporary political society of arenas of rational debate and deliberation which are open to everyone in the course of their everyday lives. That absence is the counterpart to the restriction of effective political debate to privileged elites. Every citizen does indeed get to vote at periodic intervals. But the vast majority have no say as to the alternatives between which they are permitted to choose. And there is no way in which the elites that determine those alternatives can be effectively challenged or called to account. So the ordinary citizen rarely becomes more than a political spectator. Add to these facts the large inequality of access to and influence upon political decision-makers that characterizes so-called democratic societies, an inequality that is largely, if not entirely, rooted in gross inequalities of money and economic power. Consider secondly the way in which education systematically prepares children to inhabit and to accept a society of gross inequalities and fails to prepare them for the activity of shared rational deliberation with fellow citizens on how their common lives should be lived and their common goods achieved, that often enough fails to introduce them to the concept of a common good. The joint effect of this kind of politics and this kind of education is to obscure from most people in advanced societies the salient fact about their soci-

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al order, that the costs of globalizing change, like the costs of natural disorders and the costs of war, are inflicted on and paid by those least able to afford them. What bearing do these political and economic observations have on Osborne's philosophical questions about common goods? They suggest what I take to be true, that to characterize the differences between different types of common good we need to specify in each case the relationships that must hold between those whose common good it is, if they are to achieve that common good. So, where God as the common good of the universe is concerned, the relationships between those who direct themselves towards the vision of God as their complete and final end must be relationships of charity, expressed in common lives of prayer and sacrament. So, as I have just been suggesting, those who direct themselves towards the imperfect and incomplete common good of political society must do so through relationships informed by shared deliberative activity. That type of deliberation, if it is not to go astray, requires shared virtues, those that are expressed in an active regard for the common good of political community, including both justice and the virtue that Aristotle called 'political practical intelligence'. Lacking those virtues, there will be lacking also an adequate understanding of the particular dangers and threats encountered by one's own political society, including in our own day those that derive from a globalizing economy. To this it will be retorted that I seem to be blindly ignoring the numerous benefits conferred by such an economy. For of course it is true, as liberal and social democratic apologists for globalization so often remind us, that large numbers of people do benefit from it. And it is also true that in the more fortunate parts of the world within that economy—Norway and New Zealand have for some time provided examples, as now does Vietnam—conventional liberalizing or social democratic policies can confer real benefits and, insofar as they do, ought to be supported. But in the most important political and economic societies, the heartlands of the global economy—the United States, China, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia—and in that economy as a whole great and growing inequality in respect of both income and wealth is the order of the day and the advocates of liberalism and social democracy by finding their place within the established order strengthen it and play a major part in disguising from their fellow citizens the nature of that exploitative order. Why do the economic inequalities due to globalization matter so much? There are four principal reasons. First, on account of the poorest 20% of the world's population, who because their labor is unneeded by the global economy, are left behind in abject poverty by globalization. Secondly, because the growth and the scale of inequality gravely hinders the reduction of poverty. Martin Ravallion has written: "At any positive rate of growth, the higher the initial inequality, the lower the rate at which income-poverty falls." (Ravallion 1997, 56) Thirdly, because, as inequality grows, investment is increasingly directed so as to maximize the wealth and income of an increasingly small minority. Many outside that minority may of course benefit incidentally from that investment, but even the distribution of those benefits has nothing to do with either needs or deserts. But many, as the stagnating wage levels of so many types of worker during the past forty years in the United States testify, do not benefit at all. And, fourthly,

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because such inequalities are the effect of the inescapable need to maximize profits that compels both private and public corporations and government agencies to treat their working populations as disposable labor forces, to be employed or to be abandoned to unemployment, to be retired early or to be retired late, to be thrown into the workplace as children or to be denied any function in the workplace at all. When cost-cutting is required, it can take many forms: cuts in wages, reduction in the size of the labor force, the attrition or abolition of pensions and pension rights, the reduction of unemployment benefits and so on. And as to how those costs are distributed, those on whom they are inflicted have no say. Notice too that inequalities of money and power are always also inequalities in respect of health care, of life expectancy, of housing, of education, of access to legal remedies for wrongs done to one, and of other crucial aspects of life. The relevant facts are provided in Richard G. Wilkinson's The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier. (Wilkinson 2005) This therefore is a type of economy that is inimical to and destructive of a great many of those projects through which in their everyday familial and political lives individuals and groups seek to achieve individual and common goods and beyond them their final good. Even in those parts of the world where the benefits of a globalizing economy are evident—the Norways, the New Zealands, the Vietnams—the human relationships enforced by that economy are apt to be as inimical to the kind of relationships needed for the achievement of common goods as are the relationships that result from harsh deprivation. To be a highly successful investor and a consumer of luxuries, with the appetites characteristic of those roles, may well be even worse for one qua human being than it is to be someone who pays the costs of that success. That this is so however goes largely unperceived by the members of both classes. For the vast majority the institutional structures of global capitalism are perceived as providing arenas within which they will be able to pursue to the limit the satisfaction of their desires, the achievement of those goods which they take to be of most significance for their lives. If, therefore, the view that I have been advancing is correct, there is the strongest of contrasts between how things are politically and economically and how they seem to be to most of those who play out the political and economic roles in which they are cast by the dominant structures. How is this contrast to be described and explained? It is on the answers to these questions that Seiriol Morgan's essay is illuminating.

II Morgan challenges what he takes to be my account of the modern self, asserting that modern individuals are not "as bereft of the resources to engage in rational thought about value as Maclntyre makes out" and this because the modern self is not the "ghostly" agent that I make it out to be (this issue, 158). Indeed, were it such a ghostly agent, there could not have been the readers for After Virtue that there have been. Morgan makes three central claims. The first is that I have

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unjustifiably told a story about the development of a particular conception of the self within philosophy as though I were telling a story about changes in social and cultural life, overstating "the power of philosophy to shape the development of culture" (this issue, 163). The second is that I have confused the way, or at least one dominant way, in which the inhabitants of modernity think about the self with how the modern self in fact is. And the third is that I have given quite insufficient weight to the possibility of a modern liberal tradition, focused on the values of respect and concern for others, one which provides, contrary to what I have claimed, a viable mode for the moral life. Morgan has advanced a case that is full of interest and I am grateful to him not only for this, but also for the illuminating account that he gives of my thought in relating aspects of it to theses and arguments proposed by Anscombe, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Let me address each of his claims in turn. Insofar as I may seem to have equated the history of the modern self with the history of philosophical concepts of the self, Morgan is of course right to object strenuously. What I needed to argue, and am prepared to argue, is that the history of philosophical conceptions of the self that I recounted mirrors and gives expression to the history of how in modernity people generally came to think of themselves, that is, as individuals whose social identity and whose reflective decision-making powers belong to them qua individuals, prior to and independently of the social relationships in which they happen to find themselves. What made the philosophical arguments seem compelling was precisely their success in capturing what had become a crucial feature of the self-understanding of modernity. The history that I need to write, if I am to vindicate this thesis, has of course in part already been written as the history of modern transformations of family and kinship, as the history of the weakening or dissolution of religious ties, as the history of changes in this labor market, as the history of the liberal discovery of and the cult of 'the individual'. What has not yet been written is the history of the relationships between these as a history in and through which individuals came to conceive of themselves as other than they are. What they in fact became was not of course the type of self abstracted from social relationships that they often conceived and sometimes imagined themselves to be. This is why in the third chapter of After Virtue I tried to be careful to make it clear that I was speaking about how the characteristically modern self is conceived and understood, rather than about how it is (Maclntyre 2007, 32-33), but, as Morgan makes clear, I did not try hard enough. So once again let me try to do better. In distinctively modern societies individuals move between two different kinds of situation. There are on the one hand roles in which they are invited and required not only to think but to act as individuals qua individuals, each with her or his own desires, preferences, principles, calculations, and acts of choice, choosing to enter into or break off from this or that social relationship as those desires, preferences, principles, and calculations dictate. So it is with the roles into which they are cast by the economy, whether that of individual competing in the labor market or that of individual consumer. So it is too with the roles into which they are cast by the political system in modern liberal de-

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mocratic societies, where the roles to which individuals are assigned are those of candidate, voter, office-holder, and political spectator. There are also however roles and relationships in and through which they are directed towards the common goods of family and household, of workplace, of neighborhood, where the key practical question is not "What am I to do?", but "How are we to work together?" and the primary moral question is not "By what constraining principles should I be guided?", but 'How are we to become able to achieve our shared and common goods?" So individuals are at odds with themselves at various points in their lives. The characteristic modern self is in various and varying ways a divided self. This division of the self is at once implicitly acknowledged and yet concealed from view by the increasing compartmentalization of modern life, a compartmentalization whose effect is to have individuals focus attention upon themselves in this particular role in this particular area of their lives or in that role in that area, rather than on themselves as unified agents. Thereby there is a lessening of inner conflict, but at the cost of a lack of self-awareness. And this lack of self-awareness obscures the underlying unity of the divided self, a unity one key aspect of which is the directedness of the self towards its final end. So the distinctive social forms of advanced modernity would be threatened by an acknowledgment of the metaphysical dimensions of selfhood. Morgan has his own unthreatening metaphysics of the self, one presupposed both by his critique of my view and by his defense of the possibility of a distinctively liberal conception of the good, one that might inform a way of life in which freedom is a central value and which has the resources to resist the conceptions of market individualism. But Morgan's account of his own standpoint is too brief for me to engage with it here. One footnote: Morgan implies and Marian Kuna argues that insofar as I have advanced arguments for my antimetaphysical stance in After Virtue, I have argued badly, and that in taking the project on which I was engaged to be free of metaphysical presuppositions I was mistaken. About this they are both right.

Ill Russell Keat in his interesting and acute paper—there is much that I would like to, but must resist commenting on, such as his observation that at points there is a kinship between my views and those of Joseph Raz—advances three central criticisms that need to be answered. The first concerns my account of goods. He accuses me of ignoring goods that are neither internal nor external to practices and he lists as among such goods friendship, some kinds of pleasurable bodily or sensory experience, and the satisfactions intrinsic to some work. I could defend myself by pointing out that in After Virtue, for example, I argued that we cannot dispense with the notion of "a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices, by constituting the goods of a whole human life" (Maclntyre 2007, 203). But Keat's basic point is right. I have so far failed to take adequate detailed account of the heterogeneity of goods and I have not

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spelled out, as I need to do, the various different ways in which goods may be rank ordered in a flourishing life. I made a start on the first of these tasks in "What Both the Bad and the Good Bring to Friendships in their Strange Variety" (Maclntyre 2004) and in several essays in which I have dealt with the good of truth. But Keat is right in saying that more needs to be said, especially if I am to defend my claim that the institutions of contemporary market economies frustrate the achievement of goods central to human flourishing. Keat's second set of criticisms concern my attitudes to such market economies. Here he argues that my criticisms of market economies do not take note either of the ways is which it is possible to check what he aptly calls the colonizing tendencies of the market or of the differences between coordinated market economies of the German kind and relatively unrestrained market economies of the Anglo-American kind. Keat's third critical thesis derives from his own liberal perfectionism. He claims that antipathy towards liberalism prevents me from recognizing the need for certain constraints on collective decisions, constraints that are necessary to secure the autonomy of individuals in making their choices about which particular goods to pursue in each domain of human life. And he questions my questioning of the nation state. Let me respond to some of these criticisms, beginning from the only respect in which Keat has misunderstood my position. He develops an ingenious argument designed to show an underlying agreement between myself and Hayek, concluding that "apart from centrally planned economies, which they both reject, the only alternatives are household economies with collective goals and perfectionist politics, or market economies with neither" (this issue, 253-254). But of course I do not and never have taken these to be the only alternatives to centrally planned economies. A local political community with its own economy can be of considerable size, providing sophisticated forms of exchange, both between local producers and consumers and between both and more distant producers and consumers, and yet be made to serve the purposes of the community. If we look at the larger city-states of the past in the periods of their maximal flourishing, or at, say, the Jesuit and Guaraní reducciones in eighteenth century Paraguay, or at those modern forms of association that have for some significant period of time sustained participatory achievement—forms of association as different as Donegal farming cooperatives, the state of Kerala in Southern India, the municipality of Bologna under Communist rule—we find excellent examples of how local market relationships can be put to use to serve local common goods, both through market exchanges within the local society and through the right, even if difficult, kind of market relationships with the larger economy. What matters is that the members of the community should be able to distinguish between market relationships that serve their common good and those that do not and should be able to act accordingly. The politics of such local societies is in key part a matter of promoting the right kind of market relationships and protecting the community against the wrong kind. Keat does not acknowledge such possibilities, perhaps because the concept of the common good seems to play no part in his analysis, perhaps because of his too hopeful view of what is possible in contemporary capitalism. It is this

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latter that seems to mislead him in his liberal perfectionist aspirations. Keat looks for a social order in which individuals exercise their autonomy in choosing between alternative sets of goods and alternative conceptions of a good life. But within present day market economies, whether of the Anglo-American or of the German kind, this possibility is open only to a minority whose privileged position depends upon the kind of education to which they had access and their present place in the labor market. To give to every child in a local community the kind of education that they need both to participate fully and reflectively in the decision-making of their community about common goods and to choose equally reflectively between alternative concepts of the good life would require a major shift in resources of a kind incompatible with the workings of the labor market in any type of capitalist economy. This is why I take Keat's combination of belief in a restrained and reformed capitalism with his liberal perfectionism to be an attractive but impossible dream. I spoke earlier of Chappell's defence of liberalism as in the end sad and the same feeling is evoked by Keat. The sadness does not derive from their defence of liberal principles—which generally need radical reformulation rather than outright rejection (see my discussion of Mill in Maclntyre 2006a)—but from the fact that the effect of the invocation of these principles in defense of thestate-and-the-market is in practice to undermine just those humane values to which Chappell and Keat give their theoretical allegiance.

IV My disagreements with Paul Blackledge are of a different kind. His summary of the views that I addressed in "The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken" is admirably lucid and accurate, as is his account of the theoretical twists and turns of those Marxist thinkers who provide the basis for his response to my views. He is of course right in his claim that my conclusions are inadequately supported, unless I am able to reply to those theorists. But a full and sufficient reply must be a task for another time. What I am able to do here is twofold: to say something both about the distinctive character of Marxist theory and why the problem that Marx identified in the third of the Theses on Feuerbach, but never resolved, is so important for it, and about why Lenin too failed to resolve this problem. The distinctive character of Marxist theory can be brought out by contrasting it with a type of theory that Marx rejected in the third thesis. Such a theory explains to an external observer of some social system why those who, unlike himself, are parts of that system must behave as they do, both why their reasons, motives, and actions are what they are and why, given that their reasons and motives are what they are, the outcome of their actions must be what it is, and also why those participants remain unaware of how their reasons, motives, and actions are to be explained. Such an external observer, because he has identified the causal factors which make the individuals within the system reason, choose, and act as they do, has taken a first step, but only a first step, towards being

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able to alter the action of these individuals. Whether he is able to do so or not depends upon whether it is in his power to intervene, so that some of the relevant causal factors are neutralized and replaced by other causal influences under the control of the external observer. But such an observer sees himself as outside the system and exempt from the kind of causal determination to which the participants in the system are subject. Marx's theory of the development and workings of capitalism is of quite another kind. He does not understand himself as an external observer, but as someone who from within the system has acquired an understanding of its hitherto predetermined workings, an understanding that will, so his theory tells him, come to be shared to a significant degree by large sections of the working class. What this shared understanding provides is the basis for a new kind of collective agency. The working class, informed by such an understanding, will be able to respond to the pressures exerted on them in the labor market and the workplace, so that the outcome of those pressures will be a quite new kind of politics through which the working class will move towards appropriating and exercising power, using that power to move from capitalism towards communism through an intervening socialist stage. The act of understanding is itself potentially transformative, enabling the working-class and their intellectual allies, the Marxist theorists, to break free from the otherwise predetermined ongoing economic development of capitalism. Unhappily however it was possible to read Marx as saying that the development of working-class understanding and the movement of the working class and their allies towards socialism was itself predetermined, a movement as lawgoverned as the development of capitalism had been. Engels at times and Plekhanov understood Marx in this way, arguing that individuals could influence the course of history, but only within limits set by the predetermined movement of societies towards predictable outcomes. It was one aspect of Lenin's greatness that he recognized the difference between Marx's theory and its distortion by Plekhanov and so identified a need for decisive revolutionary intervention by those with the relevant theoretical resources. But Lenin unfortunately took for granted, as did other Marxist theorists, as did Marx himself, the answer to a key question posed by Marx's analysis: What goals will members of the workingclass—or peasants or others—have good reason to make their own, once they have acquired the relevant understanding, once they have understood the workings of a capitalist economy and their own place within it? Lenin, like Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov, takes it for granted that the only goals that workers could have good reason to make their own are the goals of socialism and communism, defined as they are in the Critique of the Gotha Program, and that, given time and opportunity, this is the conclusion at which workers will in fact arrive. Therefore, when working class individuals and groups set themselves a variety of different and not always socialist goals, influenced perhaps by anarchists or by their reading of Rerum Novarum or by Péguy or by Methodism, the only conclusion open to Marxist theorists was that such workers had been miseducated, that they must have fallen victims to ideological distortion. Marxist theorists

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had become committed to the view that they, the theorists, knew in advance what conclusions the working-class had to come to and would come to, if they were to be accounted rational. But this was massively to miss the point that, when workers and others, by becoming aware of the nature of capitalism, begin to put in question its power over them and to threaten that power, they open up genuinely new possibilities. Implicitly or explicitly they ask the question: 'What is our common good?' and with it the questions "Who are we?" and "What must our relationship be to those with whom we share this common good?" and "What virtues do we therefore need?" And to these Aristotelian and Thomistic questions, industrial workers, small farmers, and others have given and continue to give a variety of answers, some of them of course deeply mistaken. But what mattered was and is that they should ask and answer these questions for themselves rather than assent to the prefabricated answers of theorists. Of course workers, small farmers, and others all need to engage in dialogue with theorists, but in the kind of dialogue in which both parties are prepared to learn from the other. Worse still, Marxist theorists not only were often impatient with workers and peasants who thought for themselves, but, on some questions that confront anyone taking power in a modern society, they brought with them no well thought out answers. So they had never thought through sufficiently the difficulties of the relationships between town and country, between agriculture and industry, between people and the land that they inhabit, assuming that the road to progress must run through intensive industrialization. They had, for example, rarely, if ever, asked what different forms cooperative farming might take, one of the causes of the failure of Soviet collectivization. None of this became fully apparent while Lenin was alive. Lenin's greatest gift—and he had many—was in the exercise of practical judgment in response to moments of crisis. And the history of Russia from 1917 onwards was a history of one crisis after another, each met by Lenin and Trotsky with a set of brilliant but sometimes dangerous improvisations; dangerous, that is, to the Soviet future. It is to be regretted that the counterpart to the reactionary myth of Lenin as the precursor of Stalin has too often been the myth of Lenin as the-Marxist-who-never-(well, hardly ever)-made-a-mistake. And it is even more to be regretted that this myth has helped to make it difficult to disentangle that in Marxism—above all, but not only its understanding of capitalism—which has made it indispensable to any worthwhile contemporary politics and that in Marxism which needs to be rejected. The most important thought that Marxist theorists have been unable to entertain is that the rational self-determination of workers, peasants, and others might not lead to socialism and that 'the road to socialism' (itself an unfortunate metaphor) leads neither to rational self-determination nor indeed to socialism. This inability is not unrelated to a conceptual failure, the failure to understand adequately what rational self-determination involves. And that in turn has its roots in Marx's failure to resolve the issues that he posed in the third of the Theses on Feuerbach. None of this constitutes even the beginning of a reply to

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Blackledge. What it does is to supply some of the premises from which I would be arguing in any reply. I would not however want to end on a negative note about Marxism. It is not only from Marx's critique of capitalism, but also from his insistence on understanding theories as expressions of practice, his mode of writing history, his critiques of Smith and Ricardo that we still need to learn, something that becomes evident once again in Bill Bowring's discussion of human rights.

V Bowring is generous in identifying common ground between my all too brief remarks about rights and his own rich and detailed treatment. Let me say at once that his account is greatly superior to mine and that he has put both Marx and Aristotle to far better use than I have done, going importantly beyond John Tasioulas, who rightly chided me for my too negative stance and for not recognizing the possibility of and the need for an Aristotelian grounding for a proper understanding of rights (Tasioulas 2003, 26). Nonetheless there is something to be said in defence of my negative stance, something that needs to be integrated into the larger view taken by Bowring. It matters that eighteenth century claims, whether American or French, that there are rights that attach to individuals as such and that ascriptions of such rights can function as first and evident premises in our practical reasoning, are mistaken, that rights thus conceived are fictions. We need to reach conclusions about what rights human beings have or should have, but these are to be derived from quite other types of premise, from premises about the common good and about what both justice and generosity, virtues that are directed towards the common good, require in this or that particular situation. What justice as a virtue, both of individuals and as institutionally embodied, contributes to human flourishing is a regard for need, for desert, and for merit, and a recognition of the types of wrong that may be inflicted by a disregard for any of these, and a measure for the adequacy of remedies for such wrongs. The institutionalization of some of those rights ascribed by the American and French revolutionaries accords with the requirements of justice thus understood, but the institutionalization of others is incompatible with the achievement of justice. Marx's critique of those rights, quoted by Bowring (this issue, 211-212), although framed in very different terms from mine, is highly relevant: " [ . . . ] the right of men to liberty is based not on the association of man with man [ . . . ] It is the right [ . . . ] of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself [... ]" It was about this characteristic of such rights that I was speaking when I remarked how appeals to such rights are used "to dissolve the bonds, and undermine the authority, of all institutions intermediate between the individual on the one hand and the government and the justice system on the other, such institutions as families, schools and churches" (Maclntyre 1991, 105). The conception of rights and the political use of that conception which I was then attacking I took to be characteristic of Thatcherite conservatism, epitomized by Margaret

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Thatcher's brash assertion that there is no such thing as society. I am therefore puzzled that Bowring should appeal to it as evidence of an increasing conservatism in my views. But that is a minor point. The major point is that the movement from and beyond what Bowring calls the first generation of human rights to the second and third generations involves not only additions to the catalogue of rights, but also radical criticism of how initially human rights were conceived and catalogued. And on this I take it that Bowring and I are in substantial agreement.

VI Benedict Smith in his insightful and suggestive examination of possible relationships between my positions and those of John McDowell opens up inescapable philosophical issues. And it could scarcely be otherwise in any discussion concerned with McDowell, whose work rightly has so central a place in recent philosophy. What Smith says about those matters on which he takes it that McDowell and I agree—or are close to agreement—is accurate. But he does not reckon sufficiently with the extent of our disagreements, and perhaps, if he had done so, our agreements would have to be viewed differently. What are those disagreements? Smith takes careful note of my judgment that McDowell draws too sharp a line between the capacities of human beings and those of some nonhuman animals. But he does not consider—and how could he have done, since I have never spelled out my own view in sufficient detail in published writing—the larger background disagreements which are presupposed by that judgment. Fundamental to McDowell's view of things is the contrast that he draws between "the organization of the space of reasons and the structure of the realm" of the laws of nature, as identified by the natural sciences. (McDowell, 1994, 85) And this is a contrast that I am unwilling to draw. I agree with McDowell in his rejection of any scientistic reductive naturalism that reinterprets our concepts of reason-giving and reason-evaluating, of intention and intentionality, so that what is distinctive about human experience and activity disappears from view. On the contrary I believe that no scientific understanding of nature is adequate that cannot find a place for and give an account of how distinctively human activity, reason-giving and reason-evaluating activity, informed by intention and intentionality, shapes nature, so that, for example, much of the surface of the earth is now what it is, many landscapes are what they are, because of the conjunction of the exercise of two very different kinds of causal power, one explicable wholly in geological and, ultimately, in physical terms, one explicable only in human terms. Many philosophers of course do believe and have believed that there are no distinctively human causal powers. When what they are apt to call a mental event seems to bring about some physical event or state of affairs, they take it that that mental event must itself be identical with or supervene upon some physical event and that the relation of cause and effect holds only between that physical event and the event or state of affairs that was brought about. All

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genuine causal powers are, on their view, explicable only in the terms of the physicist. So why do I believe otherwise? In part I do so because everyone, including such philosophers, does in fact almost all the time believe otherwise, something made evident in the practice of our everyday lives, in which they and we constantly and confidently ascribe distinctive causal powers to ourselves and to other human beings. And in part I do so because I do not believe that such philosophers can give an intelligible account of what is going on in a laboratory experiment in which, say, a particular beam of light is polarized, because and only because some particular experimental physicist had decided that it should be so polarized, just in that way just at that time and just at that place, so that her students in Physics 101 would be able to understand what polarization is. Unless the physicist's reasons and intentions act as causes, we have no explanation of that particular reason- and intention-shaped physical event, of what made it reason-shaped and intention-shaped in the way that it was. Both Aristotle and Marx understood very well that human beings impose new and distinctively human forms upon material nature. And, although human beings are the most striking agents in this remaking of nature, it is also true that rabbits impose new and distinctively rabbity forms upon material nature, wolves new and distinctively wolverine forms. Moreover the same kind of causality is at work in the human world as in the rest of nature. Reasons not only can be causes, they have causes. And judgments to be made about human beings are often of this form: "His reasons for so acting are discreditable, because expressions of an unrecognized will to power, which is the result of his neurophysiology and biochemistry." How evaluation and explanation are thereby related—are indeed sometimes inseparable—needs of course to be explained and argued for, but I have perhaps said enough to make it clear how different my overall view of things is from McDowell's or from that of anyone else who follows Kant in distinguishing sharply between a realm where scientific explanations are in place and normative considerations have no place and a realm where normative judgments are in place and the explanations characteristic of the natural sciences have no place. Given this, it is unsurprising that McDowell's relationship to Aristotle in his work in moral philosophy is very different from my own, even though both of us claim to be in some sense Aristotelians. For McDowell goes much further than even I ever did in treating the Aristotle of the texts on ethics as a different philosopher from the Aristotle of the texts on metaphysics. Since I have discussed my disagreements with McDowell concerning Aristotle's ethics elsewhere (in Maclntyre 2006b), I shall say no more here.

VII I have followed Aristotle and Marx in speaking of the ways in which human beings transform material nature by imposing new and distinctively human forms upon it, from flint arrowheads and cave paintings to the drainage systems on which modern cities depend and such marvels as Miralles' and Tagliabue's Scottish Parliament building. Those transformations are the outcome of art and

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labor. It was one of Aristotle's greatest defects that his understanding of art, techne, was not matched by his understanding of labor. What Aristotle failed to understand—among other things—was that it is in and through our engagement in such laborious and productive activities as farming, construction work and the like that a number of virtues much needed in our individual and communal lives are developed and exercised. Doing one's work well rather than badly and recognizing the dependence of one's own work on the work of a wide variety of others, and therefore how much one is in debt to those others, are as important in the moral life as telling the truth and keeping promises. And it is of course not only Aristotle who has failed to recognize this. In the prefaces to books published by teachers in universities we often find gratitude expressed to colleagues or funding agencies, less often, but occasionally to librarians and secretaries, but rarely, if ever, to those janitors, cleaners, and security guards who make the academic life possible, let alone to those migrant farm workers, truck drivers, and supermarket workers, but for whom university teachers would not eat (and count me among those who need to be chided). It is therefore salutary that Cary J.Nederman should have shown so clearly and compellingly the place that there is for an adequate treatment of productive work within a genuinely Aristotelian account of social and political life. It has been remarked by several commentators that Aristotle's derogatory remarks about women are put in question at various points in his own texts by the inconsistencies into which he is forced. Nederman has now shown that the same holds of his derogatory remarks about the labors of farmers, craftsmen, and others. What he has to say about the nature of productive activity cannot be reconciled with those remarks. And so it is not surprising that some medieval writers who were deeply indebted to Aristotle had, unlike Aristotle, no difficulty in recognizing the significance of the mechanical arts and the skills and virtues of those engaged in them. To Nederman's excellent account I have only one thing to add: the medieval thinkers whom he cites were indebted to St. Benedict as well as to Aristotle and it is in part Benedict's understanding of work that has found a place within their Aristotelian framework. It matters that Benedict's treatment of work goes further than Aristotle could ever have done. For on the Benedictine view working is one way of praying. And it is only possible to offer one's work to God as prayer, if one is also able to offer it to one's neighbors as a contribution to the communal life that is sustained by it. Much work of course is necessarily tedious and fatiguing. But, if in addition it is carried out under oppressive and exploitative conditions, if it is organized so that the maximization of surplus value to be appropriated by others is the overriding consideration in organizing it, then work becomes something inflicted on the worker, rather than such a contribution. This is why strong and independent trade unions, controlled as far as possible from their grass roots, are necessary for the good life under any form of capitalism. This is why strike action, provided that the striking workers have some chance of success, is almost always to be supported.

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VIII I am usually hesitant to comment on discussions of my own development, since others may well be more perceptive in considering the evidence provided by my past and present writings than I am. But sometimes, when those discussions involve misconstruals of my present positions, it is worth commenting. Such claims often concern the relationship of After Virtue to my later writings and since, as I made clear in the prologue to the third edition of After Virtue (Maclntyre 2007, ix-xvi), I have not during the past twenty-six years changed my mind about its central theses, what I have to say now will be seriously misunderstood if the continuity between After Virtue and my later writings is not recognized. Marian Kuna understands this very well. For he recognizes what kind of change it was, when I moved from the project of presenting Aristotle's ethics as an ethics without metaphysical presuppositions to a recognition that Aristotle's ethics cannot be made fully intelligible, let alone justifiable, if its metaphysical dimensions are excluded from view. It was not that I had up to a certain time succeeded in avoiding metaphysical presuppositions. It was rather that in my presentation and defence of Aristotle's ethics I had from the outset presupposed certain metaphysical truths, but only at a certain point in time recognized that this had to be so. My own understanding of my earlier project was therefore inadequate, but in retrospect seems not to have damaged the project itself. And with the movement from After Virtue to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? I corrected my earlier misunderstanding. Why did I make that earlier mistake? Partly it was because I was still making too many concessions to the antimetaphysical temper of so much of the philosophy in which I had been brought up. But partly it was because I had failed to give due importance to a central characteristic of Aristotle's treatment of issues in ethics and politics. Aristotle enables us to understand what it is to be a rational agent aiming at the achievement of the human good both from the standpoint of such an agent and from the standpoint of an observer, a philosophically informed and enquiring observer, weaving together a first-person and a third-person account, and relying on the reader to distinguish them and to recognize that each presupposes the other. But in After Virtue I concentrated almost exclusively on the first and did not reckon sufficiently with the second. On Aristotle's view an agent who has learned to value the temperateness, courage, and justice of those others who educated him into the habits that issue in his present choices has to ask: What would it be for me to be temperate or courageous or just in this particular situation? And in the course of reflecting on and correcting his judgments and his choices he will gradually move towards a more general grasp of what that good is for the sake of which he is acting as he does. The philosophical enquirer who asks as an external observer what it is for a human being to flourish or to fail to flourish, who asks what the good of human beings is, finds that to spell out a justifiable answer he has to move towards a characterization of the types of situation in which particular agents find themselves. That is, to make progress from either point of view, whether that of the theoretically reasoning observer or that of the practically reasoning

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agent, is to move towards the standpoint of the other. Yet the range of concepts that need to find application in each of these enterprises is not quite the same and the types of justification that each offers for his judgments are significantly different. The explanations of the observer transcend the limitations of the particular agent's situation, both in that they identify as failures or as problematic actions that the agent at the time of acting failed to identify as such (for, if he had done, he would not have acted thus), and in that they rely on conceptions of potentiality and actuality and of the ordering of causes in teleological explanations which generally find no place in an agent's practical reasoning. But an agent's claim to have acted rightly in some particular situation always presupposes that his action is to be explained in one way rather than another. It was this connection between practical judgment and action on the one hand and explanation on the other to which I had accorded insufficient importance while writing After Virtue, neglecting questions of explanation. And since it is Aristotle's explanations that presuppose his metaphysical claims, I failed to understand the connection between Aristotle's ethics and his metaphysics. How did I later come to understand it? It was through reading Aquinas. For Aquinas's interpretation of Aristotle integrates the first-person perspective of the rational agent and the third-person perspective of the philosophically enquiring observer, so that one cannot fail to note the metaphysics in the ethics. And it turned out that my recognition of the metaphysical presuppositions of Aristotle's ethics was also a recognition of what had been my own unacknowledged presuppositions. So the correction of the inadequacies of my earlier views preserved a continuity with those views, as Kuna rightly observes. Alex Bavister-Gould however thinks otherwise. Bavister-Gould has some perceptive and telling points to make, for which I am in his debt. My principal quarrel is with his overall narrative. BavisterGould, for example, thinks that I suffered "a deep crisis of faith" (this issue, 73) in the early 1970's. Alas! I was not myself aware of it at the time or since. It was after all very much earlier that I had ceased to believe in God. And it was still to be quite some time before I seriously reopened the question of God's existence. It is true that I sometimes found the revaluation and correction of my own earlier positions in moral philosophy somewhat painful. Just too much had to be rethought. But I was not in the least worried about the so-called 'death of God'. Nor was After Virtue a last ditch attempt "to claw back some semblance of moral truth" (this issue, 73) in modernity. I did not—and perhaps this reflects badly on me—ever have that much doubt about the stock of moral truths, truths that I had first learned from my parents and my aunts. What I was in doubt about, doubt to a significant extent resolved in the course of writing After Virtue, was how to give a justifiable philosophical account of those moral truths. And the history of how that doubt was resolved is misrepresented in Bavister-Gould's narrative. Let me focus on just two aspects of that narrative. The first concerns the type of contrast that he draws between my treatment of tradition in After Virtue and earlier and that advanced in Whose Justice?

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Which Rationality? and subsequently. So far as the earlier treatment is concerned, Bavister-Gould lays stress on my thesis that "activities which inform a tradition are always rationally underdetermined" (Knight, 1998: 67, quoted by Bavister-Gould, this issue, 65, footnote 10). And clearly I was at fault in not spelling out what I meant by this further, perhaps by making explicit my debts to both Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn, but I had not supposed that I was saying anything controversial. In acting so as to carry any tradition further, say, the tradition of enquiry in the discipline of physics, there are no rules that guarantee success, there is, no way of giving sufficient reasons in advance for moving in this direction rather than that. All such justification is retrospective. It has turned out at each later stage that Newton or Maxwell or Bohr had indeed provided the resources needed for carrying the tasks of explanation one stage further. But, at the time they did their work, they were going beyond what could then be adequately justified. It is in this way that the activities that carry forward a tradition are rationally underdetermined. And as it is with scientific traditions, so is it too with philosophical traditions and even with social traditions. This is why Bavister-Gould is also mistaken in saying that the conception of tradition in After Virtue "is very different to the notion of a rationally constituted tradition of enquiry that Maclntyre develops in later work" (this issue, 65). In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? I was reflecting upon what it was to which I had committed myself by taking up the points that I had laid out in After Virtue. And I realized that the concept of tradition to which I had appealed was more complex than I had acknowledged. What I had spoken of as the tradition of the virtues was at once a social tradition and a tradition of enquiry embedded in that social tradition. Philosophers who carried forward that tradition of enquiry articulated, reflected upon, enlarged, criticized, and sometimes revised the conception of the virtues embodied in the practices of everyday life and on occasion prescribed new reasons for the everyday thoughts and actions of those participating in the social tradition of which they themselves, their families, and their neighbors were a part. This is of course not the only kind of relationship in which a tradition of enquiry may stand to a social tradition. But I have perhaps said enough to clarify the relationship between After Virtue and Whose Justice ? Which Rationality? I turn now to issues concerning incommensurable goods and tragedy. Here again Bavister-Gould draws the wrong sort of contrast between After Virtue and my later work. He is right in asserting that my reading of Aquinas changed my view of practical dilemmas and also right in thinking that such a change must have implications for one's view of the nature of tragic dilemmas, but he is mistaken in supposing that this change entailed a wholesale rejection of the position that I had taken in After Virtue. Consider the following five theses. First, there are incommensurable goods, goods such that nothing about them qua good gives us reason to choose one over the other. Secondly, we have to learn to live with this fact and make decisions about what place, if any, particular goods of this kind should have in our lives. We can have good reasons for making such decisions, but those reasons will have to do with our own character, our situation, and what we take our long-term goods to be, not with the nature

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of the incommensurable goods themselves. Thirdly, to be in a tragic situation is not just to be in a situation in which one has to choose between incommensurable goods, but in one in which, however one chooses, someone will be gravely wronged. Fourthly, the recurrent occurrence of such situations is a central and salient feature of human life. Fifthly, to find oneself in such a situation is always the result of some prior wrong choice, some imprudent, intemperate, rash or cowardly, or unjust choice. In Aquinas's terms no one is ever perplexus simpliciter. To the first two of these theses I was committed in After Virtue and remain committed. The third, as Bavister-Gould acutely notes, is at variance with my claim in After Virtue that "tragic opposition and conflict is the conflict of good with good embodied [in an] encounter prior to and independent of any individual characteristics" (Maclntyre 2007, 163, quoted by Bavister-Gould, this issue, 71) which was accompanied by a claim that Aristotle had misread Sophocles. In both claims I was mistaken and I am grateful to Bavister-Gould for putting this mistake on record. But my own correction of this mistake I owed to a rereading of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Aristotle, not Aquinas. The inescapability of choice between incommensurable goods is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for someone's situation to be tragic. And it was foolish of me to think otherwise. Note however that the fourth thesis does not entail the fifth and that it was the fifth of whose truth I was persuaded by Aquinas. So my views on tragedy gradually developed and there was no sharp discontinuity of the kind that Bavister-Gould portrays in his over-dramatic narrative. Most importantly my change of mind on these two issues from After Virtue to its successors was compatible with my reiteration of the central theses of After Virtue.

IX I turn now to four essays to each of which my response is simply a grateful and enthusiastic 'Yes', although for very different reasons. Ron Beadle has once again put me in his debt by his clarification of the notion of a practice, as I have used it, and his refutation of Geoff Moore's defense of contemporary managers and Moore's unfortunate attempt to show that business is a practice. Kelvin Knight, who has done so much more to situate my thought historically, and to relate it to the philosophical and political thought of others, not only than I have ever done, but than I would ever have been able to do, has now clarified for me as well as for my readers some of the ways in which a comparison with Heidegger and with Arendt can be illuminating. And Christopher Lutz has insightfully spelled out some aspects of the historical narrative presupposed by and gestured at in After Virtue. Of Beadle, Lutz, and Knight it can safely be said that they understand my work at least as well and sometimes better than I do. If everything in my work about which they have written were to be lost and was known only through their expositions, it might well improve my reputation. Carey Seal's essay is of a different kind, a discussion of the relationship of my conception of the Athenian polis to the ways in which I have been influenced by Aristotle's politics, an essay whose interest is such that readers interested in

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the polis and in politics, who have never read my work and are never going to read it, could profit greatly from it. Seal recognizes how much my reflections on ancient Greece were and are influenced by Moses Finley and enquires how far they are vulnerable to Malcolm Schofield's critique of Finley. In the light of that critique Hesiod is given his due place in the story and what emerges with admirable clarity is a narrative that is notably superior to the one that I supplied, in respect both of historical scholarship and of relevance to moral and political issues. Of Seal's essay I can only say: I wish that I had written it. Finally I come to Piotr Machura's searching reflections. I put on one side much in his essay that I would like to discuss and turn directly to his conclusions about my view of the place of philosophy in human life, in order to distinguish what is correct from what is misleading. Machura ascribes to me the view that philosophy "must be rooted in the everyday routine of the community to the degree that not only academic philosophers are the subject of moral discourse", asserting that my goal is to remake the culture so that every individual "will be aware of the necessity of intellectual activity in their life" (this issue, 136). The philosopher is to become for this remade culture a character in the sense in which I used that word in After Virtue. "As a character the Philosopher should be taken as a 'measure' of communal life. But as such they are also a role model for 'professional' philosophers." (this issue, 136) Philosophy is an independent mode of enquiry, but the questions that it asks are such that, in order to deal with them adequately, it has to call on resources afforded by other disciplines: on the narratives of historians, on the empirical data and the theories of physicists, on the interpretative and explanatory reports of anthropologists and sociologists, and so on. At some stages in the history of philosophy the acknowledgement of this interdependence of philosophy and what were later to become other disciplines has been unproblematic: for Plato and Aristotle, for Aquinas, for Descartes and Leibniz, for Marx. But for much postKantian philosophy and especially for much, although not all contemporary analytic philosophy it has been quite otherwise. The forms taken by late twentieth century academic professionalization and specialization have resulted in a damaging narrowness of mind. And as a counterpart to this there is a stereotype in the general culture, whereby "philosophy" is understood to be the name of a highly specialized discipline that can have little or no relevance to anyone who is neither a professional philosopher nor an undergraduate student. What this stereotype prevents is any widespread recognition that from time to time in the situations of everyday life it is impossible to become adequately reflective without opening up philosophical questions, and this for two different kinds of reason. On the one hand we sometimes find ourselves first asking about some familiar and habitual activity 'Do I really have good enough reasons for going on doing this?" and then having to ask "What would count as a good reason for engaging in this kind of activity and why?", or someone else perhaps questions a belief that we have so far taken for granted and we are forced unexpectedly to reflect on what the standards of truth and falsity are in this particular area and why truth matters. So, without having intended to, we begin to engage in philosophical enquiry.

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On the other hand there are those existential questions that arise in every life in every culture at certain times, questions about the significance of death, about what it is to live well or badly, about how we should confront pain and suffering, about what we owe to whom. Often religious answers have been given to these questions and subsequently antireligious answers, and how to evaluate those answers, how indeed to formulate and reformulate the questions, has been a central task for philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche. But in the presently dominant culture, whatever our standpoint, we are apt to ignore philosophy and to remain unreflective, making this a culture of answers, not of questions. And this is in part at least due to the gap between present day academic philosophy and everyday life. Both Thomists and Marxists have recognized the unfortunate nature of this gap and tried to overcome it, but we are still a long way from succeeding in doing so. This is why I would be unhappy if someone inferred from Machura's characterization of my views that I claim to know how to achieve this. Philosophy has yet to find anything like its due place in our common life.

Bibliography Maclntyre, A. (1991), Community, Law, and the Idiom and Rhetoric of Rights', in: Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 26, 96-110 — (1998), Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority, in: Knight, K. (ed.), The Maclntyre Reader, Cambridge, 53-68 — (2004), What Both the Bad and the Good Bring to Friendships in Their Strange Variety, in: Kelly, T. A. F./Rosemann, P. W. (eds.), Amor amicitae: On the Love That Is Friendship, Dudley/MA, 241-255 — (2006a), Toleration and the Goods of Conflict, in: Maclntyre, A., Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge, 205-223 — (2006b), Rival Aristotles: Aristotle against some Modern Aristotelians, in: Maclntyre, A., Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 2, Cambridge, 22-40 — (2007), After Virtue (3rd ed.), Notre Dame/IN McDowell, J. (1994) Mind and World, Cambridge/MA Mulhall, S. (1994), Liberalism, Morality and Rationality, in: Horton J./Mendus, S. (eds.), After Maclntyre, Notre Dame/IN Ravallion, M. (1997), Can High-Inequality Developing Countries Escape Absolute Poverty?, in: Economic Letters 56(1), 51-57 Tasioulas, J. (2002), Human Rights, Universality and the Values of Personhood: Retracing Griffin's steps, in: European Journal of Philosophy 10(1), 79-100 Wilkinson, R. G. (2005), The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier, London

Authors

Alex

Bavisier-Gould

Department of Politics University of York York YOlO 5DD [email protected]

Ron Beadle

University of Northumbria Newcastle Business School Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST [email protected]

Paul Blackledge

Leeds Metropolitan University School of Social Sciences Leeds LSI 3HE p. blackledge@leedsmet .ac.uk

Bill Bowring

Birkbeck College School of Law London WC1E 7HX [email protected]

Timothy Chappell

The Open University Open University Ethics Centre Milton Keynes MK7 6AA [email protected]

Russell Keat

University of Edinburgh School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences Edinburgh EH8 9JX [email protected]

Kelvin Knight

London Metropolitan University Department of Law, Governance and International Relations London N5 2AD k. knight @londonmet. ac. uk

Authors Marian Kuna

Katolicka univerzita v Ruzomberku FILOZOFICKq FAKULTA KU 034 01 Ruzomberok [email protected]

Christopher Lutz

St. Meinrad School of Theology St. Meinrad, IN 47577 [email protected]

Piotr Machura

Uniwersytetu Slaskiego Instytutu Filozofii 40-007 Katowice [email protected]

Alasdair

University of Notre Dame Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Notre Dame, IN 46556 [email protected]

Maclntyre

Seiriol Morgan

University of Bristol Department of Philosophy Bristol BS8 1TB seiriol. mor gan@brist ol .ac.uk

Cary J. Nederman

Texas A&M University Department of Political Science College Station, TX 77843-4348 [email protected]

Thomas M. Osborne Jr.

University of St. Thomas Center for Thomistic Studies Houston, TX 77006 [email protected]

Carey Seal

Princeton University Department of Classics Princeton, NJ 08544 [email protected]

Benedict

Durham University Department of Philosophy Durham DH1 3HN [email protected]

Smith