Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue: The Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre [1 ed.] 0754651126, 9780754651123

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TRADITION, RATIONALITY, AND VIRTUE

Margaritae reginae sanctae margaritaeque Scotiae

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue The Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre

THOMAS D. D’ANDREA Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK

First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2006 Thomas D. D’Andrea Thomas D. D’Andrea has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data D’Andrea, Thomas D. Tradition, rationality, and virtue : the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre 1.MacIntyre, Alasdair C. I.Title 192 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data D’Andrea, Thomas D. Tradition, rationality, and virtue : the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre / Thomas D. D’Andrea. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-5112-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. MacIntyre, Alasdair C. I. Title. B1647.M124D36 2006 192–dc22 2005034916 ISBN 9780754651123 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction

ix xi xiii

PART I: THE ROOTS OF MACINTYRE’S THOUGHT 1

Re-conceiving Ethical Inquiry 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5

2

Philosophy and the Exigence of Praxis 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

3

The Appeal of Marx: A First Estimation The Uses and Abuses of Marx’s Thought A Democratic Culture of Critical Inquiry Towards a Post-Marxist Ideology of Liberation

3 23 52 57 68 87 87 96 101 109

The Rational Resources of Christianity

123

3.1 3.2

123

3.3 3.4 3.5 4

How Not to Conduct Ethical Inquiry Lessons from the History of Ethics ‘Ought’ Language The Moral Quandaries of the Modern Social Order Towards the Formulation of a New Moral Theory

3

First Explorations Christian Belief and the Challenge of Philosophical Rationality The Atrophy of Reason in Modern Christianity Social Change and Christian Unbelief Ethics and Christian Theism

The Explanation of Human Action: Psychological, Social and Historical Considerations 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Psychoanalysis and Explanation Action Explanation, Logical and Causal The Refutation of Behaviourism Historical Context and the Limitations of Social Scientific Explanation

132 140 148 154 165 165 171 194 197

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4.5

Social Explanation and Ideology

216

PART II: THE AFTER VIRTUE PROJECT 5

6

The After Virtue Synthesis

225

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

226 235 247 267 280

The Project Developed

289

6.1 6.2 6.3

289 293

6.4 6.5 7

Evidences of a Present Moral Crisis The Crisis in its Historical Causes Resources for the Restoration of Rational Moral Discourse Reconstituting Virtue-based Morality The Present Social Imperative

After Virtue’s Aftermath The Evolution of Pre-modern Practical Reason The Augustinian Contribution and the Thomistic Synthesis Challenging Modern Morality Confronting Today’s Moral Dissensus

The Project Applied 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

Present Humanistic Debate in its Social and Historical Context Competing Conceptions of Moral Inquiry The Thomistic Aristotelian Epistemic Ideal: A Reformulation The Distinctiveness of the Thomistic Moral Standpoint The Vindication of Thomistic Moral Theory Revitalizing Contemporary Academic Debate A Postscript to the Project: Moral Inquiry and Dependency

306 313 327 341 341 345 356 358 365 372 374

PART III: FUTURE DIRECTIONS 8

Continuities and Discontinuities in the Œuvre

385

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

385 388 393 397

The Normative Question in Ethics Theism and Religious Belief Marxism: The Considered Verdict MacIntyre’s Mature Outlook: A Unified Perspective?

Contents

9

vii

Criticisms, Internal and External

403

9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6

403 410 414 421 426 430

Relativism and the Question of Vindication Historicism versus Thomistic Aristotelianism? Anti-pluralistic Authoritarianism? Romantic Conservative Utopianism? Reactionary Anti-modernism? Morality Justified?

Select Bibliography Index

435 453

Acknowledgements This book has been a long journey, and the debts incurred along the way have been correspondingly large: the creditors cited below are, of course, absolved from any responsibility for the final product. My thanks in the first place to John Haldane, who was the original inspiration for this study and a great help in its early stages. Thanks also for their various solicitudes to Gordon Graham and David Archard, successive Chairs of the Department of Moral Philosophy of the University of St Andrews, where the research and writing of the book was begun during two fruitful and stimulating years. David Solomon looms large as an inspiration for this work; it was he who first introduced me to MacIntyre’s œuvre and encouraged me to persevere in the trek through it, and I happily acknowledge my debt to him here. The welcoming and engaging atmosphere of Wolfson College, Cambridge and the generous interest of Onora O’Neill, Principal of Newnham College, were responsible for my coming to Cambridge, initially as a Visiting Scholar. So I wish to thank Gordon Johnson, President of Wolfson, for his support, and all the Fellows of the College, particularly David Money, Alec Tait, and Evelyn Lord. Special thanks to Onora O’Neill for sitting through many conversations tracing the stages of book’s writing and for critical feedback along the way. Dorothy Emmet, sadly no longer with us and very much missed, was my first introduction to Cambridge, and I can but fondly recall numerous lively conversations with her on themes in the book as I record my gratitude to her here. Martha Nussbaum was a great spur in the writing of these pages, and I thank her for encouragement and for many conversations on themes in the book, particularly during one stop along the journey as a Visiting Scholar at the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago. Thanks also to Michael Forster, Philosophy Department Chair at the University of Chicago, for his assistance during my stay and for the kind use of his office. A sincere thank you as well to Quentin Skinner for his encouragement during later stages of the writing, and particularly for the timely reminder that it really is worth trying to understand a project correctly before beginning to criticize it. The book was completed while I was a Madison Fellow at the James Madison Program in the Politics Department of Princeton University, and I am very grateful to Robert George, Director of the Madison Program, and to all the JMP staff for the lively, friendly, and stimulating environment they provided during the academic year of 2001–2002. A generous research grant for the book’s completion was provided by the John Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, and to Luis Tellez the Institute’s President I owe a great deal of gratitude.

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For generous comments on draft chapters of the book I am indebted to Miranda Fricker, John Gueguen, Christopher Hill, Peter Schaber, David Solomon, and Christopher Tollefsen. Earlier drafts of this book were presented in papers to the Scots Philosophical Club in St Andrews, the Ethikzentrum of the University of Zurich, the UK Philosophy of Education Society, the Politics Department of Princeton University, the Philosophy Society of the University of East Anglia, and the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Padua, and I thank the audiences at each of these for various lessons learned. Much was learned also from conversations with Raymond Geuss, Alan Gibbard, James Griffin, Rosalind Hursthouse, Richard Rorty, Richard Sorabji, Charles Taylor, and especially Bernard Williams, to all of whom I am most grateful. A final word of thanks to Alasdair MacIntyre himself, who spent nearly a week of his time speaking with me about various episodes in his academic career, providing biographical information, and making various unpublished documents available to me.

List of Abbreviations References in the text to works of MacIntyre not on this list will supply year and page number(s). References to the works of other authors will supply author, year and pagination. In contexts where it is evident that I am referring to the same work, only the page number(s) will be given. AM ASA AV DCB DPR EP FP HM MC MI RSA SH SM SMJ TP TRV UN WJWR

After MacIntyre Against the Self-images of the Age After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory Difficulties in Christian Belief Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and Polemic Marxism and Christianity Marxism: An Interpretation The Religious Significance of Atheism A Short History of Ethics Secularization and Moral Change The Significance of Moral Judgements The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Introduction

Hegel was right and Fichte was wrong; we cannot enjoy the outcome of the history of thought without reappropriating that history. (1980h: 46)

This book aims to provide a more or less comprehensive overview of the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre and to tell the story of his thought. Its concern therefore is Alasdair MacIntyre as thinker, not merely as ethicist, or historian of ethics, or social critic, or what have you. I take it that the primary task of studies of this kind is, as the great historian of philosophy and historical philosopher Etienne Gilson once noted, to understand and to make understood. But we also have Gilbert Ryle to thank for the lesson that crucial to a large-scale philosophical engagement with the work of another philosopher is an attempted, and to an extent conjectural, identification of the problems with which she or he is engaged – problems which may have a robust life of their own independent from her or his engagement with them (see Ryle’s helpful statement of method in Ryle, 1971, Vol. 1: ix–x). Philosophy is indeed about a good deal more than understanding and interpretation of the thought of other philosophers: even in its interpretive moment it should be centrally concerned with criticism and counter-argument, with carrying their inquiries forward and aiming to improve upon their results. Still, philosophy with, and to a certain extent through, other minds ought at least to be about understanding them (and for a sign that selfdescribed analytic philosophers have in recent years become increasingly aware of this, see Peter Hylton’s comments in the Preface and Introduction to his highly acclaimed study of Bertrand Russell: Hylton, 1990: vii–17). Bearing this in mind, while considerations of time and space have by and large required me to forgo attempts at extended criticism of theses of MacIntyre – and generally to avoid challenging his accounts of historical texts and figures – I have tried to specify what problems he has been exercised by and what the evolving shape of his solutions to them has been. And I have tried to raise various critical queries along the way, while devoting the third part of this study to a brief examination of exemplary criticisms of his overall standpoint. MacIntyre is an aspiring systematic philosopher: one best learned from and criticized when taken systematically. So this study aims at a perspicuous representation of MacIntyre’s thought from the inside – an internal perspective on his work through which the system-under-construction that binds his thought together and the internal logic of that quasi-system can be brought into clearer view. The book is, and does not pretend to be other than, an introduction. As he approaches full academic retirement, MacIntyre has made notable contributions in a number of areas of philosophy: moral philosophy, philosophical

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psychology, the philosophy of the human sciences, political philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of explanation. His thought has also ranged far beyond certain conventional boundaries of philosophical interest into psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, religious sociology, and the literary imagination. I have tried to do some justice to his work in each of these areas while at the same time keeping an eye to the unity of interest and of intellectual commitment which connects them. MacIntyre’s career can be divided roughly into three periods: a first in which he is groping for a systematic standpoint from which to address questions in ethics and in the philosophy of the human sciences generally; a second, corresponding to the writing of After Virtue, which aims at a sketch of such a standpoint; and, a third which seeks to fill in that sketch and respond by accommodation or rejoinder to criticisms of its central tenets and historical claims. Since After Virtue amounts to the keystone in MacIntyre’s œuvre, I have made it the centre of this book. It is no exaggeration to say that, since shortly After Virtue was published in 1981, it has changed the way ethics is written and studied in many parts of the English-speaking world and beyond. Indeed, it is not implausible to claim, as a long-standing interpreter of MacIntyre’s thought has, that along with John Rawls, MacIntyre has been the most influential Anglophonic figure in, broadly speaking, practical philosophy in the last half-century (see David Solomon’s comments in AM: 142). But After Virtue is a magisterial work, a rich synthesis dense with compressed treatment of issues from the first part of MacIntyre’s career; as a magisterial work, a view from a lofty height, it is best approached through the works preceding it. So my effort has been to enter the river by the streams, as it were, and then to follow the river as it broadens, chiefly into his two subsequent book-length studies Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Speaking as I do of MacIntyre’s work subsequent to After Virtue as forming part of a consistent project draws its initial justification from MacIntyre’s own words. Since he addressed the first criticisms of After Virtue, and indeed to the present day, MacIntyre has repeatedly stated that his allegiance to After Virtue’s central claims and positions remains unchanged. Part of the task of this book will be to ascertain whether MacIntyre has attained the consistency for which he has striven–and whether reports of his changes in belief have been greatly exaggerated. My effort in this light has been to help the texts speak for themselves and not to rely in any straightforward way on MacIntyre’s or others’ accounts of his development. While sharing Aristotle’s conviction, expressed at the beginning of his Politics that, ‘he who … considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them’ (1 252a 24-6), I am not unaware that developmental studies of the present kind are liable to a particular kind of philosophical criticism. As H.H. Price put the matter some time ago when this was a topic of particular controversy, it is of little interest to know how author or philosophical school x got from position A to position B to position C, if C or any of the other positions can be assessed on their own philosophical merits. Where they came from, or indeed how they arose, has little to do with their independently assessable epistemic value (Lewis, 1963: passim, esp. 21–-2). This view, though,

Introduction

xv

it seems to me, represents a rather simplistic conception of what philosophical positions are. They are not, in general, free-standing answers to shared, impersonal, standpoint-independent questions; they are more often attempts at answering highly particular because highly contextualized questions. Position D of author x cannot often be understood in order to be assessed if the questions to which it is an attempted answer are not themselves first understood. One therefore needs the approach of both a Ryle and a Gilson to accomplish this. Moreover, the worthwhileness of developmental studies of philosophical authors rests on certain highly plausible assumptions: that consistently focused inquiry yields increasingly positive epistemic results; that if, ceteris paribus, authors have been wrestling with roughly the same questions for a long period, their later views will generally be more sophisticated, more adequate, and more cogent than their earlier views. And if the later views can provisionally be assumed more reasonable than the earlier ones, it will be helpful and interesting to learn and to assess why they thought that abandoning tenet A for tenet B was called for, and so to trace the logical history of their inquiries and commitments. Nevertheless, provisos must be made here. Systematic conceptions do not spring into their author’s mind ready-made and fully formed, and it would be highly unusual if in the course of an academic career one were free from various external constraints – teaching out of the area of one’s systematic interest, publication pressures, and the numberless other contingencies in a human life – to be able to elaborate some systematic framework in a straightforwardly chronological fashion without significant interruption, distraction, or deflection. Later needn’t mean clearer or more adequate, earlier may sometimes mean more self-critical or more fine-grained. But if caveats like these are borne in mind, developmental studies of significant thinkers have obvious things to be said for them. Doubtless we may not ourselves engage in developmental studies of authors whose epistemic authority we do not hold in high regard, or whose initial starting point or framework we think not promising, but even for such authors, if we think their views merit or demand honest criticism, a developmental perspective on their work may be indispensable. This style of approach seems particularly advisable in the case of a thinker like MacIntyre, who far from being a trend-follower in his career or a one-issue author, has consistently been a pathbreaker, initiating topics of philosophical investigation and conversation and then moving on to new areas, all the while trying to be mindful of the connection between his thoughts in the different domains. In the final section of this book I will consider questions of the overall coherence of MacIntyre’s œuvre as well as noteworthy criticisms of his project in the moral sciences. In part because of the colourful, multi-faceted nature of this career and in part because of his own work on the relevance of social and historical context for inquiry, there is considerable interest on both sides of the Atlantic in MacIntyre’s past life. Where was he born? Where educated? What were his early beliefs and commitments? Why has he moved from place to place so frequently? What are the dominant influences of teachers and peers on the development of his thought? So before turning to an

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examination of his written work, the following biographical sketch is provided in the hopes of satisfying some of this curiosity. A Brief Biographical Sketch Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born in Glasgow on 12 January 1929 to Eneas John MacIntyre and Margaret Emily Chalmers, but his birth in Glasgow was due only to his mother’s spending a brief period of time there. He was raised primarily in the East End of London, where his parents, both medical doctors, found work. He also spent part of his youth with a paternal aunt in Argyllshire in the west of Scotland. After his father’s death, his mother moved to a home outside Belfast. MacIntyre spent much time there, as well as in a house outside Donegal, during summers and holidays of his early academic career. He remains a frequent visitor to Ireland. His father’s family, Protestants from the north of Ireland, had emigrated to the west of Scotland several generations earlier. His mother’s family was Scottish. While baptised a Presbyterian, MacIntyre’s upbringing was of a non-denominational Christian sort. At age 13 he enrolled in Epsom College, an independent school in Surrey specializing in the education of children of physicians. Illness prevented him staying in residence and completing the normal five-year course of studies at Epsom, but he remained in residence for much of four years and received private tutorials to make up for his absences. One of his tutors during this time was a former student of R.G. Collingwood at Oxford, and he introduced MacIntyre to the thought of his former mentor. To this day, MacIntyre lists Collingwood, and through Collingwood, John Ruskin as major influences on his thought. In part owing to the discovery that his paternal family had remained Roman Catholic for several generations after the Reformation, and in part owing to his friendship with a number of Dominican priests, MacIntyre developed an interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and in Catholic doctrine in his teen years. He received instruction in the Catholic doctrine from several Dominicans in his midteens, and he read and discussed aspects of the thought of Aquinas with them. But certain fundamental religious doubts kept him from entering the Roman Catholic Church, and his then Catholic mentors advised him against doing so. At age 16 MacIntyre enrolled in Queen Mary College of the University of London. Because of his promise as a student he was admitted one year prior to the ordinary age of entrance, and he completed his degree at Queen Mary in four years, graduating with an honours BA in Classics. While at Queen Mary, he spent much of his time reading Plato and Aristotle and mathematics. His university training was primarily philological, and he admits to being greatly influenced by the scholarly virtues of a noted Queen Mary classicist of the time, W. Alison Laidlaw. Laidlaw’s attention to detail, love of truth, and ability to allow his mind to be governed by the objects of its inquiry made as much of an impression on MacIntyre, or so he has said in conversation, as have the traits of any teacher before or since.

Introduction

xvii

During his university years, MacIntyre’s first contact with the Communist Party came owing to contact with fellow university students in the party and with party workers in London’s East End. He found the communist critique of the British politics of the time – and especially of a certain kind of liberalism – highly compelling, and at age 18 he joined the party and began attending party classes. His rapport with the party was not to last long, as after little more than a year he left dissatisfied. Though attracted by the party’s involvement in the labour movement and in the peace movement, he found it to be, in his words, ‘one of the most highly inefficient organizations conceivable’, and he was also very put off by the party’s dissimulations about the atrocities of Soviet Marxism. His interest in Marxism was to continue, though, and he was to resume allegiance to it in the form of Trotskyism until his definitive break with the latter around 1963. Of course, he still professes that there is much to be learned from the study of Marx, as we shall see. While at Queen Mary, MacIntyre acquired a keen interest in philosophical questions, especially philosophical ethics, and he occasionally attended philosophy seminars at University College London (UCL) given by A.J. Ayer, then Grote Professor of Mind and Logic at UCL. MacIntyre’s interest in Christianity led him also to involvement with the ecumenical Christian Student Movement at Queen Mary, and while he began moving in the direction of Anglicanism, he formed no firm ecclesiastical allegiance at the time. He did continue involvement with the Christian Student Movement during his Manchester years, and engaged in informal discussion groups on Christianity with friends at Manchester, several of whom were to become Roman Catholics. Upon graduating from Queen Mary at age 20, MacIntyre decided to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy, and so he enrolled in the one graduate programme then available in Britain, an MA programme in philosophy at the University of Manchester. His continuing interest in ethics, and his perception of the challenge of emotivist ethics in the form presented at the time by C.L. Stevenson, led him to choose as a topic for his MA thesis, ‘The Significance of Moral Judgements’. The thesis was written under the supervision of Dorothy Emmet, and received a mark of distinction on the recommendation of its external examiner. Upon completion of his degree there were only two job openings in Britain available to him, an assistant lectureship in philosophy at the University College of North Staffordshire, and an assistant lectureship in the philosophy of religion at the University of Manchester itself. MacIntyre opted for the latter on account of the favourable research conditions it provided. Promoted to lecturer after three years, he taught courses at Manchester on the philosophy and the psychology of religion for six years. During these Manchester years MacIntyre came into contact with Michael Polanyi and Polanyi’s assistant at the time, Marjorie Grene. The desire to teach in a philosophy department proper – and especially to teach ethics – and a job offer at Leeds University, drew him next to Leeds in 1957. He remained there from 1957 to 1961, and during this period he acquired the conviction that ethics cannot be studied adequately without an accompanying knowledge of sociology. He so applied for, and received, a research fellowship at Nuffield College,

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Oxford to engage in full-time sociological research. The fellowship at Nuffield was followed by a permanent fellowship at University College, Oxford. While enjoying and benefiting much from the intellectual atmosphere at Oxford, the desire to be in regular conversation with social scientists and the offer of a professorship in sociology drew him next to the University of Essex. During the late 1960s, MacIntyre had been attending a study group in the USA organized by Marjorie Grene. In receipt of an offer from the Philosophy Department at Brandeis University in 1970, MacIntyre decided to move to the USA. This move was not without its political difficulties: since the time of his first academic visits to the USA beginning in 1961, he had been required to undergo political examinations by the US Department of Immigration on account of his involvement with the British Communist Party. On the occasion of the offer of a permanent position at Brandeis, it took the intervention of one of Massachusetts’ senators, Senator Brooke, for MacIntyre to be permitted by US Immigration to take up the Brandeis position as Richard Koret Professor of the History of Ideas. Disappointed, on his account, by the university’s failure to provide promised resources, he began to look for a position elsewhere, and after only a two-year period at Brandeis he was recruited to Boston University by its President, John Silber. He remained at Boston University from 1972 to 1980. While at Boston, he was offered an open-ended professorship at Wellesley College, as the first Henry R. Luce, Jr. Professor of Language, Mind, and Culture. He accepted the offer, though he was to resign from the position two years later. During this time he met his wife, Lynn Sumida Joy, who was working on a PhD at Wellesley at the time. When Joy had completed her PhD, both she and MacIntyre received independent offers of posts at Vanderbilt University, and they decided to accept the offers and move to Tennessee, MacIntyre becoming the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt. They remained at Vanderbilt from 1982 to 1988. The promise of a bigger graduate programme and the opportunity to teach more graduate students drew them next to the University of Notre Dame, MacIntyre becoming McMahon/Hank Professor of Philosophy there from 1988 to 1994. Lynn Joy’s interest in a philosophy department with a more historical orientation and joint offers at Duke University subsequently led them to Duke University in 1995, where MacIntyre was Arts and Sciences Professor of Philosophy. In a state of semi-retirement now, MacIntyre has since returned to the recently founded Center for Ethics and Culture of the University of Notre Dame, where he is a Permanent Senior Research Fellow, and where he continues to write and to teach courses in philosophy.

PART I The Roots of MacIntyre’s Thought

Chapter 1

Re-conceiving Ethical Inquiry

1.1

How Not to Conduct Ethical Inquiry

As noted, MacIntyre’s early interest in ethics was sparked in large part by A.J. Ayer’s lectures on the subject at University College, London which MacIntyre attended while a Queen Mary College undergraduate. This interest was to inspire the choice of The Significance of Moral Judgements as his MA thesis, a work written shortly thereafter, in 1951, at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Dorothy Emmet. Throughout the rest of his pre-After Virtue days, in what will hereafter be called the first phase of his career, ethical questions remained prominent for him, and by the time After Virtue is released in 1981, MacIntyre had written over twenty articles on ethical issues, a brief history of the subject (A Short History of Ethics: 1966d), and a number of related articles on action theory. What is the direction of his thinking in this period? From the MA thesis onward he is gripped by a sense of the inadequacy of the dominant styles of English-speaking ethical theory, and working primarily within the idiom of Oxford ordinary language philosophy, he is attempting to formulate an alternative to supplant these. It is one, as it turns out, which will discover only after the fact its kinship with certain pre-modern forms of ethical thought. The Significance of Moral Judgements (henceforth Significance) is primarily concerned with the shortcomings of intuitionism and emotivism; it seeks to provide an alternative account of both the logical form of moral statements and of the logic peculiar to moral reasoning and argument. Though written in the slightly awkward and rambling style characteristic of a young graduate student, the work shows an unusual dialectical ability and imaginative resourcefulness for a 22-year-old – and the kind of intense personal engagement with an issue or set of issues for which MacIntyre has since become famous. It is also a valuable repository of themes and theoretical commitments which he has revisited throughout his career – it contains, for instance, the seeds of the sophisticated treatment of a number of issues in After Virtue – so in spite of its occasionally murky and elliptical arguments, it bears close examination. What, according to Significance, is the problem with English-speaking moral philosophy at mid-century? The story the thesis tells goes roughly as follows. G.E. Moore, in his Principia Ethica, started the enterprise off on the wrong foot by setting the standards for ethical theory too high. Moore wanted to show that ethical

4

The Roots of MacIntyre’s Thought

beliefs have an epistemic status similar to beliefs in the natural and mathematical sciences: he wished for them to amount to knowledge after the fashion of perceptual and scientific beliefs, and even to enjoy something close to certitude (SMJ: 12). C.L. Stevenson rightly identified some of the flaws in Moore’s account of moral cognition, but Stevenson’s rival meta-ethical theory, for sharing presuppositions of Moore’s characterization of moral experience – and particularly for sharing Moore’s conception of the finality and self-containedness of moral appraisals – was itself variously flawed. Ethical theory, or so Significance will argue, cannot itself tell us how to solve our moral problems and to dispatch them in some neat and tidy rational or non-rational way: its deliverances can offer us no guarantee of the truth of our real-life moral judgements. But it can tell us what specific logic is in play when we are thinking ethically, and in that sense it can clarify our moral experience. Still, it can never render our moral deliberations amenable to some scientific algorithm: The question for moral philosophy seems to be what we are doing when we … distinguish between good and bad reasons [for action] … Ethics is the science of practical problems. This is not to say that ethics tells us how to solve our moral problems, but it does tell us what kind of task we are undertaking in attempting to solve them. With this we must be content, and yet moral philosophers in the past have sometimes asked moral philosophy to do more than this. (SMJ: 4)

In general, Significance faults the contemporary ethical theories of Moore and Stevenson – and the older modern theories of Kant and Mill – with having failed fully to respect the ordinary moral agent’s point of view. Because these authors have shared the desire to solve ethical problems abstractly and definitively, MacIntyre claims, they have, in order to attain this otherwise unrealizable goal, miscast the ethical experience of the ordinary agent. Instead of illuminating the ordinary agent’s moral experience, their theories obscure a number of its true features. The task of a suitably modest ethical theory, Significance argues, is to characterize lived moral experience, to show what is involved in the act of moral judgement, and to explain the nature and meaning of ethical disagreement. While ethical theory can and should lay bare the structure peculiar to ethical thinking, MacIntyre will claim – especially its concern with good versus bad reasons for action – it cannot itself tell us what a good or bad reason for action is, but must leave this up to something like philosophical anthropology, where rival accounts of human flourishing are debated (MacIntyre does not actually state this important conclusion in so many words, but it emerges from explicit arguments in the text. Interestingly, nowhere in the thesis does MacIntyre advert to, or seem fully cognizant of, the distinction between meta-ethics and first-order ethical theory (i.e. normative ethics). In the course of its critique of Moore and Stevenson, and following its recipe for moral theory rightly understood, Significance sketches out the lineaments of an alternative moral theory: that is (a) a rival account of moral experience; (b) an anatomy of the moral judgement that is at the heart of moral experience, and an account of its significance for human living, and finally, (c) an account of the causes and possibilities for resolution of ethical disagreement.

Re-conceiving Ethical Inquiry

5

Turning to the details of MacIntyre’s argument in Significance, his criticism of Moore shares much with other criticisms of Moore familiar at the time (especially Strawson, 1949). Few moral agents, he observes, would describe their moral experience as the intuiting of some mysterious, trans-empirical property – ‘goodness’, as Moore has it – though they would admit that they frequently distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ and ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ in their moral thinking (SMJ: 6). Moore’s theory also stumbles when it comes to the veridicality of alleged intuitions of the non-natural property goodness: if such intuitions were infallible, there would be no accounting for the fact of ethical disagreement; but, if fallible, this would imply that some standard exists in terms of which they could be corrected. If such a standard were to exist, then intuitionist accounts of the source of moral knowledge would no longer be true, so in either case the intuitionist theory of moral judgement is faced with a contradiction (SMJ: 8). Why has Moore so erred, MacIntyre asks? Because he has been driven by a desire for ethical certitude – a wanting it to be the case that perceptions of ‘goodness’ are like perceptions of ‘yellow’, having the latter’s finality and self-referential validation. But our discrimination of moral goodness is not like this, Significance argues. In an account of moral cognition alternative to Moore’s, MacIntyre maintains that we judge x to be morally good in virtue of certain factual, non-moral evidence, which evidence may itself be incompletely or imperfectly grasped. So his claim will be that ethical facts are different from empirical facts – without this entailing that they are wholly non-empirical in Moore’s sense or purely emotive in Stevenson’s. In the concluding part of the thesis MacIntyre tries to show how, contra Moore and Stevenson, natural facts are logically related to ethical norms, albeit in a unique way (i.e. neither inductively nor deductively). Before attempting this, MacIntyre, much in the manner of Wittgenstein in his post-Tractatus phase, faults both Moore and Stevenson in Significance with a priorism – with failing to respect the unique role and function of moral terms, and with a consequent failure to read the meaning of these terms off their customary use (SMJ: 19; compare Wittgenstein, 1929). While Moore has it that goodness is some sui generis property hovering above the empirical world and ready to be passively perceived and registered by the moral agent, for Stevenson, similarly, ‘moral properties’ are passively experienced by being read off of one’s inner life of feelings and of emotional aversions and attractions. Moral appraisal is in neither case seen as something actively discriminatory. MacIntyre concedes that although both theories pick out elements of what constitutes the ‘moral’ in ‘moral experience’, both have a deficient understanding of ‘experience’, missing its connotation of increase in facility and skill through time. Moore and Stevenson have not carried out an empirical investigation into what moral experience and the ‘morally experienced person’ are taken to be, he notes. Instead they have brought a priori constraints, an alien and Procrustean logic, to the characterization of that experience. This explains why neither the intuitionism of the Principia nor Stevenson’s emotivism can account for the skill element in moral cognition (SMJ: 16).

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The Roots of MacIntyre’s Thought

Significance argues further that these two theories falter also with respect to explaining moral disagreement. MacIntyre notes here how Moore and Stevenson both deny that once agreement is attained about the morally relevant facts of the matter there can be any rational progress with, or resolution of, remaining ethical disagreement. In this sense, both theories take account of that part of moral disagreement which concerns non-moral matters, but neither can account for that part of experience which involves specifically moral disagreement. In accord with the overall effort of Significance to split the difference between Moore’s cognitivist intuitionism and Stevenson’s non-cognitivist emotivism, MacIntyre will argue that as regards moral disagreement, Moore, with his claim that such results from disagreement about the presence of some non-natural property, misses the moral in ‘moral disagreement’, and Stevenson, with his claim that all such disagreement is emotional-attitudinal, is unable to account for the element of genuine (i.e. because cognitive) disagreement (20–22). How, then, does MacIntyre think in Significance that such disagreement should be interpreted? Admitting more affinity with Stevenson’s view than with Moore’s, he argues that specifically moral disagreement stems not so much from factual or emotional-attitudinal causes as procedural ones. As he states: ‘[n]either consider that moral disagreement might be neither about the facts nor in the attitude but rather as to how to attack a practical problem’ (22). His own theory of moral judgement will have yet to spell this how out, but the main object of his criticism is what might be called a correspondence-referential picture of the moral: the notion that moral terms simply pick out some non-natural fact or express some emotional-attitudinal state. According to this picture, when different parties fail jointly to perceive the presence of the moral x in question, moral disagreement is rationally insurmountable: it is insoluble by any rational dialectic. So, in both the non-naturalist and the emotivist account of moral disagreement, Significance observes, we lose sight of the specifically moral (versus the purely cognitive or the merely psychological), with the result that the focus of moral discussion becomes the factual ‘is’ instead of the moral ‘ought.’ By way of a further criticism of Moore and Stevenson (and now H.A. Prichard: see Prichard, 1949: 21), MacIntyre notes here how the immediacy upon which these thinkers wish to rest moral convictions renders baffling the often discursive nature of moral argument: this is because their theories are more concerned with ethical situations and lack the ethical agent’s own context of the ‘problems of living’ (SMJ: 25). Because he sees Stevenson’s theory as a more serious contender than Moore’s, the bulk of the thesis is devoted to a detailed examination and criticism of the Stevenson of Ethics and Language. Stevenson, he states at the outset of the thesis, ‘sharpens the distinction between science and morals at the cost of blurring the distinction between morals and feelings’. So Stevenson’s attempt to analyse moral concepts into emotive ones without remainder turns moral judgements into persuasive arguments pure and simple, and their intrinsic significance is lost (28). Moral argument and moral reasoning become strictly identified; personal moral deliberation becomes the non-rational jostling of subjective desires. What MacIntyre wishes to show is how moral judgements

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have intrinsic significance (specifically, rational significance) for the agent herself or himself. So, in examining Stevenson’s feeling analysis of moral judgements, he maintains that it does not hold up well as an interpretation of common moral experience. To illustrate this with reference to an example, Significance notes that when one deliberates about whether one ought to defend democracy by enlisting in the army to fight in a war, or whether one ought instead to oppose war by conscientious objection, one’s thoughts have a self-transcendent reference: they are governed in a certain sense by cognitive considerations about external states of affairs. Such deliberation seems not at all merely to involve the introspective weighing of one’s inclinations as Stevenson has it. So while Stevenson allows for a distinction between moral and non-moral uses of terms, he still under-describes the moral (32). MacIntyre’s own list of the marks of the moral point of view in Significance runs as follows: (1) the use of certain distinctive terms – for instance, ‘immoral’, ‘wrong’, or ‘duty’ – as opposed to terms such as ‘dislike’, ‘unpleasant’ and so on; (2) the appeal to principle instead of personal preference (he gives the example of opposition to the opening of cinemas on Sunday because Sunday is the Sabbath rather than because one dislikes the noise and the traffic such would cause), and (3) reference to the seriousness of the consequences of actions envisaged (SMJ: 34). Whereas for Stevenson, MacIntyre notes, the distinctively moral appears in reference to attitudes of sin, guilt, remorse and so on, this begs the causal question at issue. Common usage – for instance, psychologists’ discussions of irrational guilt, or the distinction we ordinarily make between proper and improper remorse – suggests that such feelings frequently follow upon the perception of moral wrongdoing. Such perception involves the application of certain distinctive concepts – ‘wrong’, ‘obligatory’ and so on – and a recognition of the binding character of these concepts and the seriousness of the consequences of acts carried out in their violation. Ordinary usage also attests to our recognition that our collective moral instincts may be askew, as moral reformers in the past and present have convincingly argued. Thus, MacIntyre notes, both the expressions ‘This is wrong although most people approve of it’ or ‘This is permissible although most people feel sin, guilt, or remorse over it’ are intelligible to us and seen to involve no contradiction – but Stevenson’s theory, he argues, would have to be stretched quite a bit to account for this (35–6). Significance notes as a further explanatory weakness of Stevenson’s emotivism its tendency to obscure the differences in meaning and logical form between various expressions of approval in ordinary English. So MacIntyre observes that ‘I like x’, ‘I approve of x’ and ‘x is good’ are all expressions of approval, but the first alone is standardly emotion-referential, whereas the second typically involves the citing of external reasons for one’s approval, and the third the citing of such reasons in a more explicit and robust form (37). On Stevenson’s account, though, all such statements would share the logical form of ‘x pleases me’, and all moral judgements would be reduced to statements of perceived subjective relations. And yet, MacIntyre notes, even as far as the mild approval statement ‘x is pleasant’ goes, such a reduction does not hold.

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The Roots of MacIntyre’s Thought

He therefore bids us to consider the case of wine-tasting experts debating the merits of two different wines: here the experts’ approval is given not in measure of their subjective approval, but by the application of shared standards. MacIntyre will concede that in cases such as whether the statement ‘Turkish delights are pleasant’ is true or not, we are restricted to perceptions of subjective relations, that is, to rendering a verdict on that statement based upon the evidence of our own taste sensation. By the nature of this type of case there are no non-subjective standards to which there can be appeal (39). But Significance will want to argue that this is conspicuously not so with respect to moral statements. MacIntyre provides an example here whose object lesson is fundamental to the justification of his own account of moral judgement. It concerns a dispute in wartime between a willing conscript (C) and a conscientious objector (O). In their dispute about whether to become part of the war effort or not, C and O agree about the facts with respect to which a decision must be made, and agree about certain principles, such as the abhorrent nature of fascism and of war itself. They agree both about the kind of evidence relevant to settling the dispute and the kind of principles that might be invoked to settle it. Thus, they can and do argue meaningfully up to a point: by adducing, for example, different factual considerations, or by giving different weight to the same factual considerations, or by predicting different outcomes on the same factual basis. Such discourse is not mere sloganeering, MacIntyre notes – mere trading in sentiments inspired by different subjective dispositions – and it is difficult to see how emotive theory can distinguish it from this. Indeed, he observes, in moral debate we frequently are eager to give weight to other persons’ considerations (40). Here as elsewhere in Significance, it must be noted, MacIntyre does not think he is providing definitive objections to Stevenson’s emotivism – only showing the strains on its plausibility and its phenomenological weaknesses with respect to the moral; clearly, for example, the emotivist could think it important for the development of one’s ethical outlook that one take the thought and behaviour and moral appraisals of others into account. It is particularly by a close examination of Stevenson’s logical analysis of approval statements, Significance argues, that we can see where his larger theory goes off the rails. For Stevenson, ‘I approve/disapprove of x’ is equivalent to a verbalization of my introspectively discovered feeling of affinity/aversion for x. But this analysis, MacIntyre notes, surely rests on a crude philosophical psychology. S’s disapproval of smoking is hardly his occurrent feeling of aversion (as in twinges of some sort) whenever S observes smoke, smokers, tobacconists or the like. Rather, it is at least a disposition to act and react a certain way with respect to smoking and related phenomena, in the future as well as the present. It is, for instance, for S to ban his children from smoking, or for him to criticize the government’s policy with respect to tobacco imports, or for him to express verbal disapproval of smokers when he comes across them. Moral appraisals then are not mere psychological reports of occurrent emotional states: they have a behavioural significance, a connectedness with thought and action, which far transcends that of a transient or even habitual emotional state.

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This does not seem a very impressive argument, as an emotivist could respond that even the state of liking, for example, Turkish delights, can and does have the same connectedness to future thought and action as does the state of morally disapproving of smoking. It might incline one, for instance, to buy marshmallows often, or to letting it be known that one would like to be given Turkish delights as a gift, and so forth. But MacIntyre’s point here is that connectedness to thought and action implies cognitive content in the appraisal. He goes on to argue that while Stevenson was right to see in moral judgements, as Moore initially had not, an imperative beyond an indicative aspect, Stevenson misconstrued this imperative aspect to be particularistic instead of universalistic. The moral judgement ‘Lying is wrong’, MacIntyre claims, does not involve the injunction to some anonymous person R to abstain from lying in this particular instance – or in any and all future instances. Rather, it has implicit in it, as Kant saw, a universal scope and is meant to apply to all persons in all conceivable circumstances (43). Borrowing the point from Gilbert Ryle (see Ryle, 1949: 128), MacIntyre calls such moral judgements ‘impersonal injunction tickets’: judgements which license but cannot be reduced to ‘personal action tickets’, as statute laws license but cannot be reduced to particular orders (SMJ: 44) While aware that he has not yet made clear how such moral judgements or ‘moral statute laws’, such as ‘Lying is wrong’, can be rationally criticized or justified, he faults Stevenson’s style of moral theory with denying to such appraisals the very possibility of rational support. So, for Stevenson, he notes, if one accepts and affirms conclusion F on the basis of a set of considerations E, one is merely stating one’s resolve to accept F given E; one is not maintaining that E provides any rational as opposed to purely psychological basis for F. But if this were true, MacIntyre argues, there could be no meaningful distinction between good and bad reasons for action, and we would be incapable of saying that G is a course of action in any way rationally superior to F. This would render paradoxical the distinction we commonly make between competent agents (e.g. ordinary adults in possession of their mental faculties) and incompetent ones (drunk or otherwise mentally incapacitated persons) – a distinction precisely between persons who are capable of distinguishing good from bad reasons for action and those who are unable. Stevenson, in MacIntyre’s view, is therefore correct in claiming that the choice of G over F on the basis of E is not the same as distinguishing a valid from an invalid syllogism, but incorrect for concluding that we have no means of speaking of G as rationally superior to F with respect to E. We could categorically deny that G is a more valid choice than F, but only if we are using a notion of logical validity drawn from mathematics or the sciences. But why, MacIntyre asks, should we import their alien logic into the field of morals? If there is a logic and a logical validity peculiar to moral discourse and practice, it should be drawn from actual instances of such, and not tailored in advance on the basis of other practices. So Stevenson, he concludes, is guilty in his theory-construction of a fundamental methodological error. Even if it proves impossible to justify moral inference, Significance adds, as some philosophers following Hume think it impossible to justify induction, at least the actual forms of moral inference should be examined and a list of the canons of

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The Roots of MacIntyre’s Thought

moral reasoning established. But Stevenson despairs of classifying moral reasoning according to its logical form: he is, like others, over-impressed with Hume’s dictum about the difficulty in deriving ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements, and by completely separating ethical norms from the realm of fact and external rational support he simply gives up on the task (48). While MacIntyre does not see asserting the self-evidence of moral principles à la Moore or Thomas Reid as a sound response to Hume’s challenge, he does think that the logical form underlying the family of moral reasonings can be captured, and by showing how moral principles are logically related to facts, he hopes to escape the situation described by Stevenson in which moral principles are arbitrarily related to facts. His argument proceeds as follows. To begin with, ordinary experience shows us that moral judgements can have a descriptive versus a purely prescriptive or imperative logical form. If the proctor of an exam prescribes that numbers instead of names are to be written at the top of the exam, and a candidate who arrives late is told by another candidate, ‘You must write your number not your name at the top of the examination,’ this moral judgement will have a factual/descriptive component as well as a prescriptive component: it will report that a moral rule has been laid down. Of course, MacIntyre realizes that this example makes no epistemological or justificatory point about moral principles, it simply shows that the logical form of moral judgements permits them a potentially descriptive function. Returning to his earlier example of the conscientious objector and the conscript, MacIntyre identifies as crucial to understanding the logic of moral judgement and reasoning its similarity to legal judgement and reasoning. So, in an argument concerning the morality of war, just as in a dispute in the law of contracts, parties may agree about which facts are relevant, and about which criteria should be used to judge the facts, and yet they may meaningfully disagree – for a time, at any rate. Their disagreement cannot be viewed as merely emotive or attitudinal in some wholly nonrational sense, but rather as a dispute about what inferences can be drawn from the facts in the light of shared criteria or norms (50). Since almost no one would describe legal argument as emotive-attitudinal, MacIntyre argues that this shows that moral reasoning, too, has an ineliminable rational and cognitive dimension. MacIntyre concedes to Stevenson that moral judgements can of course serve to evince subjective feelings – and that such judgements are often intended to have a persuasive function. But it is Stevenson’s, like Moore’s, inadequate theory of meaning that leads them to miss the rationally calculative nature of moral judgements. Such judgements do not mean merely by referring to facts – whether non-natural qualities or subjective emotions – as a referential theory of meaning would have it. They mean relative to a perceptual-cum-inferential context. Thus, the statement ‘This is good’ can mean ‘I approve of this, do so as well’, but the approval element here need not, and typically does not, have either a non-natural or a strictly emotive sense. Its sense may be, as it were, rational-performative. To illustrate this claim, MacIntyre bids us to consider a case in which a potential employer writes on an application, ‘Mr X’s application for that post has my approval.’ Here the approval is said not in reference to the employer’s feeling of approval, but

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in demonstration of it. In stating his approval, the employer is binding himself to future thoughts and actions. Analogously, a moral judgement in this type of case is like such a performative action: ‘moral judgements are part of a pattern of behavior [and] … are themselves actions that lead us to expect certain other actions on the part of those who utter them’ (54). MacIntyre observes that we typically judge a person’s ethical commitments not by his stated ethical beliefs but by his actions, another illustration of the connectedness to future action of moral appraisals (and something which also manifests their cognitive dimension, for which Stevenson’s theory cannot account). This, as it were, dynamic as opposed to categorical aspect of moral judgement, its internal connectedness to thought and action, suggests for MacIntyre a different way in which moral appraisals can be rationally justified: not in their faithful registering of some moral property in the world by means of a moral sense or moral faculty, but as an appropriate active response to some factual state of affairs. In his own words, ‘to make the right moral judgement is to know how to proceed to act in the light of the facts and to be able to formulate our procedure’ (56). Moral knowledge properly understood would then be more a ‘knowing how’, a practical skill relative to a particular agent’s concrete circumstances (the influence of Gilbert Ryle on MacIntyre here is unmistakable – and acknowledged), than a ‘knowing that’ (i.e. a knowledge that would satisfy the unduly abstract demands of the ethical theorist). MacIntyre will insist in Significance, but without adequate argument or justification, that moral judgements are never concerned to lay down merely particularistic injunctions, but always have an implicitly universal scope. It is not clear why he insists on this, apparently because he thinks that moral judgements are per se concerned with action types – with what any agent X should do in circumstances of type Y. So he states: ‘the point of making a moral judgement is to lay down a rule applicable to anyone in similar circumstances … the moral judgement points to a rule which presents the kind of injunction to oneself or to others suitable in a particular situation’ (SMJ: 56). Likewise, to judge the actions of another from a moral point of view is to employ and commit oneself to norms or standards for action that one would apply to oneself in similar circumstances. His point, then, is about the intrinsically impersonal character of the moral point of view. He is no doubt aware in Significance that we can be hypocritical in making moral judgements, but his claim is that implicit in the act of appraising the behaviour of another morally is a putting oneself in their shoes to see how things look. In this sense, moral judgements are impersonal and objective, hence non-particular and universal. They are, he will claim, like clauses in the King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions enjoining obedience to orders instead of particular orders by, for instance, a petty officer. Whether obedience to a particular order of a petty officer is required is decidable in the last resort by an appeal to the King’s or Queen’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions; whether a particular moral judgement is true or not is decidable by appeal to moral principles of greater generality (57). If this is an accurate depiction of the practice of moral judgement MacIntyre in Significance thinks that we can begin to see the logic that is peculiar to moral

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reasoning. In the first place, it has as its basis an agent’s commitment to certain highly general action-guiding rules, for example ‘Lying is to be avoided.’ The agent then seeks, when reasoning morally, to determine whether this or other such rules apply to the circumstances, the facts, in front of him. So he might query whether a falsehood told to a sick man to cheer him up and maintain his health was actually a lie proscribed by the norm in question. Reasons can be adduced for and against the applicability of the rule to this case, and the agent will seek to determine whether these are good or bad reasons. Deceiving in order to cheer up might be considered a good reason to deny that the action violated the norm, whereas deceiving in order to maintain one’s social reputation looks like a bad reason. In either case, MacIntyre argues, ‘reason’ here, pace Stevenson, has a logical and non-emotive sense: it refers to something which serves or can serve as the premise for an inference with a moral judgement as its conclusion (57). Significance suggests that the parallel nature of legal and moral reasoning can be illuminating here also. Even, as in cases in the law of contract, when there is agreement as to the relevant facts and to the legal principles according to which the facts are to be judged, there can be disagreement which is not merely emotive, but potentially cognitively decidable. This disagreement will concern how to apply the legal principles in question to the facts at issue. And even when the resolution of the legal issue is seen in hindsight to have been defective, the due process involved in a legal decision can be seen as the very opposite of that rationally arbitrary decisionmaking which the emotivist considers the activity of moral appraisal to be. If we consider again the earlier example of the moral argument between the draft avoider and the willing conscript: both parties agree as to the facts and principles that are relevant, but they disagree as to the application of the shared principles to the facts. MacIntyre’s claim is that their disagreement, and their grounds for moral belief, should no more be considered emotive than should the disagreement and the grounds for legal belief of parties in a legal dispute. In this context, MacIntyre speaks of another similarity between moral and legal reasoning, the ‘open texture’ (borrowing Friedrich Waismann’s expression) of moral as well as legal concepts. ‘Truth-telling’ and ‘murder’, just as ‘contract’, cannot be defined adequately simply by stating the conditions necessary for their existence: they must be defined by stating also all those conditions whose obtaining would nullify their existence. Since these conditions are endless, no such fully adequate definition can be given. MacIntyre thus wishes to claim that moral as well as legal definitions, because of the peculiar and similar character of their definienda, are defeasible in their applicability to a given set of facts (61–2). Rationally meaningful moral argument can therefore occur, according to MacIntyre’s picture here, only when moral principles are shared. Such argument will concern the applicability of these principles to a set of facts. Interestingly, in Significance MacIntyre maintains the analyticity of various moral principles. Moral principles such as ‘murder is wrong’ can be analytic-for-a-social-group, he holds, and these principles, moreover, can be known as true by an immediate intellectual apprehension: once one understands the constituent terms of the proposition there is

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nothing more one needs to know to see that the proposition is true. MacIntyre gives no supporting argument here to justify this claim, but he does cite approvingly (see SMJ: 62, n. 32) Aquinas’s teaching on per se evident ethical principles (principia per se nota) – an interesting foreshadowing some three decades beforehand of MacIntyre’s later enthusiasm for Aquinas’s ethical theory. Given that there can be analytic moral truths, Significance suggests, without fully endorsing the claim, that one can deduce moral judgements from facts and norms in the following way: 1. Murder is wrong (true because it is an analytic proposition in a given social context by the conventions of ordinary speech therein). 2. Acts with empirical characteristics X, Y and Z are acts of murder (similarly true as 1 above), therefore 3. This act possessing characteristics X, Y, Z is wrong. What is noteworthy about moral reasoning so conceived is that much of its complexity arises from its minor premise, where the open texture of moral concepts makes it difficult to determine whether a given act falls under the scope of a given concept – or whether meaning conventions connected to that concept must be extended or modified. Of course, MacIntyre is aware that the major premise of this kind of moral reasoning can also be called into question (it often is in times of social change, he will note, particularly when different moral traditions confront one another – an interesting anticipation of MacIntyre’s later concerns in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?). Thus, to a Frenchman, in MacIntyre’s example, the Corsican practice of vendetta might initially seem, as an instance of murder (i.e. the intentional, coldblooded taking of a human life), clearly to be wrong. But a further inspection of the rule of law in Corsica might lead him to believe that the statement ‘Murder is wrong’ (i.e. in French usage) is not universally true. ‘Murder’ as such may not be wrong: a change in the term’s descriptive content may require or effect a change in its normative content (64). This analysis is meant to show how important linguistic usage is to moral argument, and to shed light on debates not only between ordinary moral agents, but between moral philosophers as well. Those philosophers, Macintyre notes, who argue that ‘good’ is indefinable, or those who define it as ‘conducive to biological survival’ or ‘pleasant’, simply speak two different languages, and he observes how linguistic difference is of further importance when one moves beyond that stock of basic moral concepts on which moral philosophers have tended to focus, such as ‘ought’, ‘right’, ‘bad’, ‘duty’, to the largely naturalistic, empirically verifiable language of ordinary moral experience and judgement. Macintyre bids us to consider here Flaubert’s description of Emma Bovary’s character in Madame Bovary as an example of the unsuitability of some simple moral concept such as ‘bad’ for moral appraisal. Simple and general moral terms such as ‘good’, ‘right’ and so on are useful and even indispensable for the language of moral intentions, he notes, but they are typically not useful enough for the language of moral appraisals (65).

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This leads us to a key point in Significance: the account of moral judgement rival to emotivism or intuitionism that it proposes. Agents, the text observes, in the formulating and expressing of moral intentions frequently do move from the rich language of moral appraisals to the simple and integrative language of moral intentions, and they sum up their complex moral deliberation in judgements such as ‘This is the right thing to do.’ But non-naturalist as well as straightforwardly naturalist accounts of moral judgement misconstrue this transition. Having argued previously that it is highly implausible to think of moral appraisals as mere psychological reinforcements of attitudes, Significance next seeks to rebut the two dominant alternatives to this expressivist view. The naturalist, MacIntyre argues, is correct in seeing the rational relevance of natural facts to moral judgements, but wrongly despairs of finding any logical connection between the ‘is’ of the former and the ‘ought’ of the latter. This leads him to posit a realm of special natural facts which the term ‘ought’ is meant to denote, and he chooses these in accordance with his own preoccupations and metaphysical commitments (as the utilitarian might identify obligation with ‘the pleasurable’, or a Spencerian with ‘the evolutionarily victorious’). The non-naturalist in his turn, also finding it also hard to explicate the transition from ‘is’ statements to ‘ought’ statements – and rightly struck by the irreducibly non-natural element in moral concepts (i.e. that element which distinguishes them from non-moral concepts) – falsely cleaves the two by denying them any logical connection. But both theories in their unmodified form are misled, MacIntyre notes, by seeking or expecting some characteristica universalis, some factual element common to all situations of moral judgement, which would suit the needs of their abstract ethical theories (67). More reasonably, we might think that the situations which call forth the use of terms such as ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’ are alike by way of family resemblance, and that the logico-linguistic transition between naturalistic premises and moral conclusions is made precisely by the introduction of moral principles. The more embedded these principles are in ordinary use, the smoother and less noticeable is the transition in question. Some moral principles, MacIntyre notes, are for practical purposes selfvalidating, because they employ terms whose descriptive component has a received and socially reinforced evaluative shading. Thus in ordinary English the following inference seems perfectly unobjectionable, because the term ‘murder’ has such a character (SMJ: 67): To do x would be to murder Sam. Murder is wrong. Therefore doing x is wrong.

On this account, of course, disagreement as to whether the term ‘murder’ legitimately applies to x in this case remains possible: agreement about moral principles always leaves room for disagreement about their application to specific circumstances. Significance will note here how linguistic convention has much influence on the

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making of moral judgements, since ‘through our language we learn to see the world differently’ – the moral world as well as the empirical world (69). Because of the habitual correlating of the evaluative and the descriptive in moral discourse, MacIntyre notes, straightforwardly evaluative terms such as ‘good’ or ‘immoral’ can themselves have descriptive connotation. So, among Marxists, ‘proletarian’ may be connoted by ‘good’, as among Baptists ‘drinking and smoking’ may be connoted by ‘immorality’. The employing of the same language by conflicting moralities leads to conflicting uses of the same terms, ‘yet,’ Significance points out contrary to Moore’s and Stevenson’s accounts, ‘within our language and in the imprecision of our use, moral argument and reasoning go on’ (70). MacIntyre concludes Significance by considering the ordinary agent’s manner of justifying moral reasoning and the moral principles upon which that reasoning depends. Thus far MacIntyre has argued that moral inference as such takes the form of an ‘If … then’ hypothetical syllogism with a potentially indefinitely long descriptive protasis leading to, with the introduction of certain moral principles, an imperative apodosis. Against Moorean intuitionism, he has denied that any entailment relation holds between facts and moral principles. Against Stevensonian emotivism, he has denied that facts are logically irrelevant to moral principles and that moral principles are mere expressions of non-cognitive advocacy. Against certain existentialists, he has denied the claim that there are no general moral principles which can make possible the transition from reasons to moral judgement and action. Against Mill and Kant, he has denied that moral principles useful for real-life moral reasoning can yield us the inductive or deductive certitude appropriate to ‘knowing that’ as opposed to the reasonable confidence of a ‘knowing how’. And finally, against the then current view of Stephen Toulmin (Toulmin, 1949–50), he has denied that when we employ moral principles we do so assuming that they are capable of only autobiographical as opposed to impersonal justification (SMJ: 70–72). There are no extended arguments on this last point, but MacIntyre’s account of the phenomenon of moral judgement supports this conclusion (and it is one to which Christine Korsgaard’s now much discussed quasi-Kantian account of moral normativity in The Sources of Moral Normativity bears a striking resemblance: see Korsgaard, 1996). Having put forward an account of how moral judgements are formed, Significance must yet show, beyond what the particular logic governing their use is, what their particular function for agents is. According to an earlier claim in the thesis, naturalists and non-naturalists alike have erred by assuming that moral terms are referentially meaningful. If (and now a new claim), exploiting their failure, emotivists like Stevenson have regarded moral terms as but interjections of solely psychological significance, this is because all the parties in question have failed to examine the logic of moral language in its reallife use. Moral judgements occur and are justifiable, Significance ends up claiming, because they are inevitable: human agents are faced with practical problems, decisions concerning action, and they make moral judgements to aid them in deciding between different available courses of action. Social systems will often provide the justificatory framework for these moral judgements, MacIntyre notes, and so, for

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example, in deliberating about how one ought to dispose of one’s estate, a Burkean picture of social life might lead one to favour family over nation, a Benthamite picture might lead one to favour the reverse (SMJ: 74–5). To illustrate this point further and to bring the thesis to a conclusion, MacIntyre draws our attention to three different cases of ‘moral logic in use’. Each example is drawn from literature, ‘for the logic [exhibited therein] is the logic of any Folgesethik [sic]’ (SMJ: 82). The examples are chosen with an eye to showing the complexity and variegated nature of justification in moral argument. The first, taken from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, involves an implicitly moral dispute between several characters in the novel over the appropriate recipient of an estate bequest. As the dialogue in the novel reveals, MacIntyre notes, the disputants agree about what would count as good or bad consequences of a given bequest, but they disagree about which consequences would in fact follow. Moral argument can so be driven by predictive disagreement: it can be quasi-factual. The parties in the dispute can agree about the evaluative properties of a set of empirical facts, but disagree about the likely obtaining of those facts. A second example, drawn from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, is meant to introduce a new and distinct type of moral logic. Here moral disagreement is driven by difference in evaluative standpoint. The two parties in the dispute agree about the likely consequences of an act of homicide, but disagree in their moral assessment of the action in light of those consequences. Ivanov thinks that the consequences legitimate the act; Rubashov thinks that although in some cases they do, in this case they cannot. Moral disagreement here extends beyond disagreement about the applicability of shared norms to the facts to a more basic disagreement about which norms to apply; it extends also beyond disagreement about how the facts are related to shared norms to the more basic disagreement about which facts in the moral situation are genuinely relevant. MacIntyre takes these two types of moral situations to illustrate that the action-guiding principles of the traditional moral philosophies of Mill and Kant are inadequate if thought of as self-sufficient algorithms for action. There is no pre-packaged fact-set facing the moral agent in many situations of moral deliberation: ‘we have moral problems precisely because we are uncertain which facts are relevant’ (SMJ: 81; emphasis added). His final example is a familiar scene from Sophocles’ Antigone. Unlike the previous example in which expected or foreseeable consequences, particularly social consequences, are adduced and serve as reasons for action and moral belief, in this case of moral reasoning we have the introduction of the notion of consequenceindependent obligation, or ‘duty for duty’s sake’. Antigone defends the action of burying her rebellious brother on the grounds that this act was intrinsically obliged of her – irrespective of its social ramifications. This is the adducing of a reason for action of a distinct logical type, one that makes possible, in the case of Antigone (as of Socrates after her, MacIntyre notes), the transition from a tribal code of morality to a civic code. On a further note, MacIntyre argues that because of the performative character of moral judgements the experience of obligation cannot be reduced simply to

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the experience of external or internal psychological compulsion. The ultimate determinants of moral choice and action are performative and self-obliging acts: ‘in taking up a moral standpoint explicitly or implicitly one is committing oneself to certain attitudes and courses of action in the future’ (SMJ: 85). Putting in his own language a point familiar to existentialist authors, MacIntyre maintains that moral judgements are both responsible judgements, because they are free and reasonbased as opposed to non-rational and arbitrary, and that they are prerequisites for human living. One can no more dispense with the practice of moral judgement than one can with practical decision-making. Whatever weight one gives to external ethical sanctions (the putative voice of God, some social group’s moral codes, etc.), or whatever force internal psychological motives are felt to possess, one’s ethical thought and behaviour remain inalienably one’s own. He will acknowledge here that ethical argument with oneself is possible, and that one can certainly improve the rationality of one’s ethical beliefs. Ethical beliefs and whole ethical codes, on this view, can be judged superior to one another inasmuch as they can marshal better or worse reasons for action in the practical context in which they are employed. But it is this relation to action and practical problem-solving that gives moral judgements their significance and indispensability. Summing up the results of the thesis and providing a rationale for its title, he concludes: All we can do is to consider and to reconsider our decisions and if we are prepared to stand by them we find that they have authority over us. To be moral is to recognize such authority when reasonable as lawful and as intrinsic to moral living. … It is because they enable us to solve problems of appraisal and action that moral judgements possess significance. They are part of a pattern of language and action, continually to be adjusted and criticised, and just because they are never exempt from criticism to be accorded the title of reasonable or unreasonable. (SMJ: 88, 92)

We can step back a bit now and take stock of the over-arching argument in this, MacIntyre’s first coming-to-grips with the moral point of view. In Significance he has rejected the possibility that moral judgements can possess certitude, but affirmed that there are such things as better or worse reasons for action relative to a context, and better or worse moral principles enshrining those reasons in universalistic form. He has denied that abstract moral theory alone can solve our moral problems, but maintained that it can supply us with moral principles which aid but underdetermine a rational solution to those problems. Finally, Significance claims that whereas the logic of the sciences involves primarily a ‘knowing that’ – a knowing how to draw inferences from what is the case – the logic of morals: is a matter of knowing how to draw inferences not from facts but from patterns of action and judgement. Yet the facts are not irrelevant and most moral arguments are probably about facts and the kind of relevance they have. Here once again there is no general rule to be laid down. But in particular cases we can lay down particular criteria and relate these to our general moral injunctions. (89)

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We are left, then, with a picture of moral judgements as indispensable because a necessary means to rational choice and action in the face of life’s practical problems. While he has not yet argued how one might adjudicate between competing and conflicting moral judgements (i.e. in the same individual, between different individuals or groups of individuals), that has not been the object of this early work. Instead, appealing to our ordinary practice – for example, our finding rationally defective the moral logic of an obsessional neurotic – he has at least denied that the rational justification of any normative framework is impossible, and he has rejected the view that such justification should be individualistic or merely autobiographical. While arguing that the moral judgements human beings spontaneously and ineluctably make are per se universalist and objectivist, he has not yet made any claims about moral truth. In fact the thesis is concerned solely with the significance, the practical utility and indispensability, of moral judgements, not with the vindication of any particular, or particular set of, such judgements. Nor has he yet said anything about what the vindication of a moral judgement or a system of such judgements would look like. So several ambiguities remain in Significance. The work seems to maintain that only a contextual justification is possible for moral judgements, and to deny that there can be any external standard or rule to which such judgements should conform. Consider the parallel it draws between moral and legal reasoning: legal judgements can be better or worse in rationality according to the way they apply man-made, objectively recognized legal statutes to a given fact pattern. Does and should moral reasoning proceed against a similar backdrop of objective norms? But would these moral norms, like legal norms, be simply man-made in a relativistic sense, that is, constructs legitimated by social agreement alone, enshrined in and reinforced by shared linguistic practice? Another ambiguity is: if moral reasoning is a ‘knowing how’ skill versus a ‘knowing that’ skill, to what end – subjectivist? universalist? – does or should this ‘knowing how’ aim? We will have to see how MacIntyre wrestles with these issues in his future writing. As for the MA thesis, it ends, prophetically, with the words: ‘on this topic [of moral rationality] one can only be conscious of how little [this author] has … said, how much remains to say’ (92). In his next essay on moral philosophy, ‘What Morality is Not’, authored six years later in 1957, we can already observe a change in MacIntyre’s thinking about what constitutes the ethical. This article is informed by the growing awareness that, ‘moral philosophy to date has been insufficiently lexicographical’ (1957c: 103). Whereas Significance had held that moral judgements are essentially and necessarily, if implicitly, universalizable prescriptions, this succeeding essay aims precisely to deny this. The object of criticism on this occasion is R.M. Hare (see Hare, 1954) and Hare’s claim that a valuation is moral if and only if it is universalizable. MacIntyre now rejects this piece of conceptual analysis and offers three counter-examples to it, one from Sartre’s ethics, another from Christian ethics, and a third from what might be called personal systems of ethics.

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In Sartre’s famous example in his post-war essay ‘L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme’, a Frenchman during the Second World War might have decided that he ought to stay and take care of his mother rather than leave France and join the Resistance in England. However, he would not make a universal rule out of this maxim, MacIntyre argues, yet he would still view the maxim, correctly, as a moral maxim and as obliging of him in kind. Similarly, MacIntyre claims, a Christian might perceive a personal duty to perform some work of supererogation and determine, for instance, that he ought to perform some act of almsgiving, not out of his abundance but out of his need. While thinking this is something he morally ought to do, he would not hold others accountable to the maxim under which he performed it. Finally, a pacifist might think that he had a duty to abstain from armed conflict in all conceivable circumstances, but he might not think this duty incumbent on anyone save himself. In many other such cases of personal moral judgement, a morality does not cease to be a morality for being private or personal. Hare’s restriction of the moral to the universalizable is therefore unwarranted, MacIntyre concludes, and it represents more a prescription or recommendation of how moral valuations should be employed than the piece of neutral conceptual analysis it presents itself as. The kind of liberal morality which Hare espouses has led him to build universalizability into the concept of morality and to make it a matter of logical as opposed to moral consistency that one’s moral maxims be universalizable (1957c: 104–5). If some but not all moral valuations are universalizable, the question of the point of moral valuation can be raised anew, and in ‘What Morality is Not’ MacIntyre gives a rough-and-ready list of six distinct ways in which moral valuations may be employed: 1. The expression of emotion – for example, indignation, as in ‘He ought to put his foot down!’, where such expression need not indicate the prescribing of an action-guiding maxim but only the expression of a personal emotion. 2. The expression of commands or exhortations – as when one might say to a child, ‘You ought not to do that’ meaning ‘Don’t do that!’ 3. The appraisal of actions – as when one judges of another’s course of action that ‘You ought not to do x.’ This type of appraisal need not be imperatival, as one can say without inconsistency that ‘You ought not to do x [that is, meaning ‘Most members of society morally disapprove of x’], but do it anyway.’ 4. The giving of advice – this type, for MacIntyre, corresponds most closely to Hare’s claim about the prescriptive character of moral valuations. Here, MacIntyre admits, universalizability appears to be an essential feature of such valuations, as we typically advise someone to do or not to do something on the basis of certain universal features of the actions, circumstances, and persons in question. 5. Persuasion – that function of moral valuation which Stevenson carefully analysed but mistakenly identified as the sole function of moral valuation. 6. The expression of one’s principles–as in ‘I (or one) ought to do such and such’, where this may express a deeply held personal conviction about the rightness

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of an action, or a provisional and not entirely stable belief about the rightness of the action (i.e. a belief subject to revision and further scrutiny). Type 6 actually captures for MacIntyre what he faults universalizability theorists like Hare with having overlooked – that moral maxims are action-guiding, but only when an agent decides to let them exercise this function. They may be tacit, and so inform his action, they may change, or they may be sincerely held and fail to guide action (a possibility, he argues, which Hare overlooks), and this simply because the agent decides not to let them, either out of weakness of will or out of a desire on a given occasion not to bring his actions under the rubric of morality. So MacIntyre observes here that when an agent fails to guide his actions by moral maxims which he holds – when, for instance, he does not practise what he preaches – he is guilty of a moral (MacIntyre means here presumably a character) defect, but not a logical one as Hare has it (1957c: 104). This essay thus aims to eliminate another candidate for how to think about moral judgements, but MacIntyre continues to restrict his argument so far to the level of phenomenology and analysis. This pattern will continue in two of his next articles on ethical topics, ‘Hume on “is” and “ought”‘, and ‘Imperatives, reasons for action, and morals’, and begin to cease with the writing of A Short History of Ethics (1966d). We can examine the articles first. ‘Hume on “is” and “ought”’ (1959b) is an important entry into a debate at the time between Stephen Toulmin and R.M. Hare concerning the foundations of Hume’s moral theory (see Hare, 1952, and Toulmin, 1956). In opposition to the then prevailing interpretive view, MacIntyre sides with Toulmin and against Hare on the question of whether Hume should be considered an ethical naturalist. The debate centres upon the interpretation of, to use Hare’s expression, ‘Hume’s law’, that is, Hume’s contention in a famous passage of his Treatise of Human Nature (III, i, sect. 1) that ‘ought’ statements, or statements of moral obligation, cannot obviously be derived from ‘is’ statements or factual premises. Hare, like others, had taken Hume to be asserting in proto-Kantian fashion the autonomy of morality and of moral considerations from empirical considerations (e.g. of moral values from natural facts). According to this reading, Hume meant to hold that one can only deduce moral conclusions from empirical premises by the introduction of certain universal moral principles neither derived nor derivable from empirical facts. MacIntyre argues for the opposite interpretation: Hume did indeed think that the transition from ‘is’ statements to ‘ought’ statements is a logically special one. But as Book III of his Treatise shows, Hume thought such was possible, since in Book III he himself derives certain moral principles – namely, principles of justice – from empirical considerations about human nature and individual human self-interest – that is, from facts about human needs, wants, and desires and the difficulty of their satisfaction outside of a stable community (1959b: 120–22). Hume thought of the logical transition in question as unusual, MacIntyre argues, because he realized that the relation of moral conclusions to their premises is of a non-deductive sort (a point we have seen already seen MacIntyre arguing for in

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Significance). Hume’s moral theory is thus an important effort to reverse a trend begun in the High Middle Ages and culminating in the moral theory of the Protestant Reformers (and, through Reformation theology, having a decisive influence on the moral theory of Kant): that trend of separating moral considerations from putative facts about human nature and human desire-fulfilment. ‘Hume on “is” and “ought” ’ so concludes with an interesting, if avowedly simplistic, thumbnail sketch of things to come in MacIntyre’s ethical writings: One way of seeing the history of ethics is this. The Greek moral tradition asserted – no doubt with many reservations at times – an essential connection between ‘good’ and ‘good for,’ between virtue and desire. … Morality, to be intelligible, must be understood as something grounded in human nature. The Middle Ages preserves this way of looking at ethics. Certainly there is a new element of divine commandment to be reckoned with. But the God who commands you also created you and His commandments are such as it befits your nature to obey. So an Aristotelian moral psychology and a Christian view of the moral law are synthesized even if somewhat unsatisfactorily in Thomist ethics. But the Protestant reformation changes this. First, because human beings are totally corrupt their nature cannot be a foundation for true morality. And next because men cannot judge God, we obey God’s commandments not because God is good but simply because He is God. So the moral law is a collection of arbitrary fiats unconnected with anything we want or desire. … Against the Protestants Hume reasserted the founding of morality on human nature. The attempt to make Hume a defender of the autonomy of ethics is likely to conceal his difference from Kant, whose moral philosophy is, from one point of view, the natural outcome of the Protestant position. (1959b: 123–4)

MacIntyre’s sympathy with Hume is not, of course, complete. As he notes several years later in his editor’s introduction to Hume’s Ethical Writings (1965f), while Hume is to be praised for returning us to the pursuit of both a non-theological morality and a morality intelligible against the background of human nature (i.e. where an internal connection between morals and desires is envisaged), Hume’s moral theory can be faulted both for relying on a too ahistorical conception of human nature and for the weakness of the moral psychology on which it rests. Hume’s attempt to define moral sentiments without reference to moral judgements must be regarded as a failure, since by it, MacIntyre observes here, we cannot sufficiently distinguish moral from other species of sentiment or feeling. Sentiments or feelings, unlike sensations, do not merely happen to us, but are subject to our rejection, criticism, revision and so forth; that is to say, they are subject to our rational control. In addition, feelings are only identifiable with reference to intentional states such as wishing, fearing, desiring, believing, etc., so they cannot by themselves elucidate the nature of moral judgements (1965f: 15–16). Mid-century analytic philosophy is yet in search of, MacIntyre implies, an adequate description of the phenomena of moral appraisal. If Hume cannot be reliably made out a champion of the modern liberal conception of the autonomous ethical realm, neither can a selective appeal to facts about common linguistic use and a certain grammatical form – or so it is the purpose of ‘Imperatives, reasons for action, and morals’ (1965d) to argue. Again the thought of

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R.M. Hare is the target of criticism, this time Hare’s The Language of Morals (Hare, 1952) with its famous attempt to assimilate moral utterances to imperatives. The nub of MacIntyre’s criticism of Hare here is methodological: Hare’s analysis is flawed for its mistake of trying to elucidate the more determinate by means of the less. The essay begins by observing that the common grammatical form of imperative sentences is, on closer inspection, a misleading guide to these sentences’ linguistic function. Depending on their context of utterance and the manner in which they are stated, as MacIntyre observes, imperatives can serve as requests, commands, threats, the giving of advice, or simply, as in the case of a cookbook recipe, the giving of information of how to achieve some desired end. Given this multiplicity of linguistic function, it is not easy to believe that the imperatival grammatical form as such sheds much light at some meta-level on the nature of moral language (1965d: 127). As guides and injunctions to action, MacIntyre notes, imperatives derive their force and their effect from certain implicit or stated reasons: in the case of commands, the authority relation between speaker and addressee; in the case of threats, the likelihood of the threat being carried out and the perceived seriousness of its consequences; and, in the case of advice, the various considerations which warrant the particular advice that it is, and so forth. In each of these cases, MacIntyre observes, the imperative derives its force and nature as imperative from certain indicative or factual states of affairs – proof of which is that the reasons backing up the imperative can in each case be put in the indicative mood. Given that this is so, we misconstrue the nature of obligation if we locate it in some grammatical form itself. The force of an obliging ‘ought’ may derive from facts about an agent’s plans and interests, or from facts about the applicability of socially established or personally held norms to the contemplated action in question (e.g. civil law in the former case, belief in divinely revealed law in the latter). But one searches ordinary language and the ordinary circumstances of an agent in vain for the presence of some pure autonomous moral ought which obliges without appeal either to socially established practice or to an authoritative command or to some conception of human well-being (134). If the pure moral ought is a fiction, from whence does it derive, and why have prescriptivist and emotivist theories flourished of late, MacIntyre asks, seeking to explain an error he has identified in these two theories of morality rival to his own. He begins in this essay, and for the first time really, to see the relevance, and even the indispensability of sociological analysis for ethical inquiry. What if, he asks, in the culture preceding our own, terms roughly synonymous with ‘ought’ derived their force from appeal to social role or to divine law or to accounts of human flourishing, or, as in a period of the Middle Ages, from all three understood as existing in harmony? What, then, if consensus about ideals of human flourishing were eroded, and notions of a substantive common interest or common good underwriting appeals to the discharging of the obligations of one’s social role disappeared? What if belief in the existence of a sovereign divine law-giver wore away as well? We would be left with the vocabulary of obligation (but not moral obligation), and yet we would be deprived of any sense for the reasons backing up such obligation. In attempting to

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make sense of this predicament, we might first view obligation as a mysterious and puzzling feature of our discourse and then construct theories, emotivist, intuitionist or prescriptivist, to account for this puzzling sui generis feature of our lives, speech and thought. We would become theorists of autonomous ‘morality’, and our theories would come in time to alter the semantics of moral terms in the minds of many: that is, theory would alter ordinary use, and then find confirmation of its truth in that use (134–5). Here we have a very clear anticipation of one of the main theses of After Virtue: MacIntyre will return to this theme again twice in two short pieces entitled ‘Ought’ and ‘Some more about “ought”’ before subjecting it to book-length treatment. But prior to looking at these two seminal essays, we must first examine his intervening and influential study, A Short History of Ethics (1966d). 1.2

Lessons from the History of Ethics

Short History is in a number of ways a curious and, by MacIntyre’s own admission, an unsatisfactory book. It is brisk and stimulating, but concise to a fault, amounting to a series of striking and provocative portraits of key and lesser-known, if significant, figures in the history of Western ethics. Few would deny, though, that the book is an impressive achievement – MacIntyre was but 38 years of age when he first published it. On reading it, one has the sense that it was his attempt to break out of the confines of ahistorical conceptual analysis in ethics and to expose his thinking to the diversity of schemes of moral belief – and to the diverse types of moral and evaluative discourse – from past epochs and social settings. This aim is stated fairly plainly in the work’s Introduction, which is possibly the best place to go to get a short version of MacIntyre’s contribution to changing the way ethical inquiry is now conducted by many. Ethical concepts have a history, he notes. Unlike concepts in relatively stable and more abstract fields of inquiry, such as geometry, ethical concepts are subject to a regular flux. They are in part constitutive of social practices and forms of social life, even providing us with a means for distinguishing between these, so that as social life changes, moral concepts change, and vice versa (SH: 1). Given this point (which he justly observes was overlooked or ignored by many ethicists at mid-century and which it will be in part the burden of the rest of Short History to demonstrate), if we are to avoid an insular and defensive approach to answering ethical questions today, we must have a keen awareness of the diversity of past moral beliefs – both in our own predecessor cultures and in other historical cultures (this conviction, which is central to Short History, will be reinforced in MacIntyre’s later work, where he will say things such as ‘cultural difference ought to have the first word’, see 1994k: 46, and, ‘it will soon be the case that worthwhile work in moral philosophy will require a detailed knowledge of more than one social and cultural order, if only because comparison and contrast are a necessary part of the work of elucidation’, 1988d: 587).

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Even as we necessarily approach the past and the culturally unfamiliar with present preconceptions, he adds in the Introduction, we should allow the past and the alien to challenge the present and the familiar. This helps us avoid the antiquarian illusion that we can have some pure unmediated access to the past, and it helps us resist the temptation of constructing Hegelian-style narratives in which the past is viewed as mere material for present self-congratulation (SH, 1966d: 4). The narrative of Short History thus moves from Homeric Greece through Plato and Aristotle and then on to Christianity, and with it the transition to the modern era; the book finishes with a consideration of the problems of contemporary moral philosophy. The guiding thread of the narrative is clearly MacIntyre’s search in the past for elements out of which to construct a new moral theory to help us out of our present moral predicament today. To begin with his treatment of Homer (a subject to which he will return over two decades later in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?), MacIntyre notes that in the Homeric depiction of Hellenic society, the application of what we would call moral predicates respects the way in which an individual exercises his or her particular social role or function (MacIntyre has been accused of taking the Homeric account of Greek society as highly historically accurate, but this is an unfair charge, since even in this early work he identifies it as merely an idealization of one strand of Greek social life; see SH: 8). When a Homeric agent skilfully or effectively discharges the duties of his social role, so displaying a)reth& (‘excellence’), he is regarded as a)gaqo&j (roughly speaking, ‘good’). But whether an agent is able to do otherwise in his actions is not for Homer, as it is for us, a reason to regard praise or blame as inapplicable to his actions. Nor do considerations of motive affect the application of these terms in the social order; moreover, their application is indiscriminately descriptive-cum-evaluative, and the possibility of any gap between description and evaluation is not countenanced in Homer’s time (6–7). Social change in Greece and the articulation of that change in new cosmogonic myths, MacIntyre argues, causes a change in the semantics of moral terms. The one over-arching cosmic order of the Homeric world-view, with its microcosmic reflection in a highly functionalized, teleologically ordered society, is replaced by myths of strife and division under pressure of the Persian invasions and Hellenic efforts at colonization and the experience of alien cultures. A gap opens up between being a)gaqo&j (meaning now merely ‘of noble birth’) and a)reth& meaning ‘possessed of qualities that make a human as such good’ – chief among these being the quality of dikaiosu&nh (meaning, roughly, ‘of integrity in disposition and fair in external conduct’, that is, something close to our ‘just’). Criteria for the application of dikaiosu&nh themselves vary as the experience of alien social orders and alien moral rules provokes critical reflection on the scope (i.e. the universality or relativity) of what is reputed just. The question now emerges as to whether there is a just by nature (fu&sij) or simply a just by local convention (no&moj). The sophists and Socrates enter into this debate, on MacIntyre’s view, as figures offering moral theories aimed at meeting a pressing social need. Theirs is not a metaethical task – a task of speculating about the metaphysical status of moral concepts

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already determinate in their social use – but rather the aiding in a task already undertaken by the ordinary moral agent of the day: that of trying to fix criteria for the application of moral terms of presently indeterminate meaning (14). The sophists’ approach to this task, MacIntyre observes, is by and large to relativize conceptions of the right, the just, etc. to social order: moral terms such as ‘just’ or ‘admirable’ are identified as meaning simply ‘just for society x’, ‘admirable for society y’, and so on. The moral is the conventional; the successful life the one which accords with local moral standards. The good life, human a)reth&, is the socially effective life, and moral education is a rhetorical art, or te&xnh, in which those who have learned the local standards and how to operate effectively with respect to them impart that knowledge to others, and impart particularly that knowledge concerning successful self-presentation via appropriate speech. What is unsatisfactory, though, about the sophist’s kind of moral theory, MacIntyre notes, is its failure to provide a set of rational criteria to guide their choosing to those faced with a choice between rival social orders each containing rival mores – and the sophists’ contemporaries were faced with precisely such a choice. Sophists such as Protagoras are driven by their relativism to construct a notion of natural or presocial man which is ultimately incoherent (here we have one of MacIntyre’s abiding arguments against individualist ethical theories). The ‘natural’ man of Protagoras’s devising exists independent of any social order with a set of desires – chiefly those for pleasure and power. He enters into a given social order to learn its mores and to manoeuvre, deceitfully if necessary, within them so as effectively to satisfy his pre-social desires. Yet this allegedly universal ‘natural’ man is not some accurate portrayal of universal humanity, MacIntyre observes; it is merely the man of the preceding Homeric social order now faced with existence in new social orders the rules of whose game, as it were, are different and which present him therefore with new practical challenges. The man in Protagoras’s ‘man is the measure’ is not, as it is deceivingly presented by Protagoras, universal human nature, but merely a particular social construct of the human drawn from a determinate social order (17–18). MacIntyre observes here, uncontroversially, that the Socratic approach to the moral predicament of the period can best be understood by its contrast with the sophistic approach. Socrates senses the confusion and the inconsistency in Greek moral vocabulary, and so he sets about trying to convince his contemporaries of that confusion, whether they be social and moral traditionalists like Cephalus in the Republic, or innovators as were many of the sophists. Socrates’ guiding principle in this task is that self-knowledge of one’s inadequate understanding of moral concepts is the first step to a correct understanding of those concepts. It must be said here that MacIntyre’s Socrates in Short History is a philosopher of peculiarly linguistic preoccupation and has something of an anachronistically Wittgensteinian look about him. While it is more common to claim that Socrates’ criticisms and sketches of solutions to ethical inquiries presuppose the existence of universal criteria for the application of moral terms – standards set by universal nature (fu&sij) as opposed to the ambiguous and inconsistent standards of local convention (no&moj) – MacIntyre has it that Socrates is merely after criteria for the correct application of moral terms

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in their local context, so that Socrates’ legacy to moral philosophy is an ambiguous one. Plato, in contrast, in MacIntyre’s view, will accept that moral concepts are only intelligible against the background of a social order and will attempt to construct such a social order, in speech at least – one justified by its relationship to the overarching cosmic order, and one which will grant intelligibility, consistency and justification to the use of moral terms. The Cynic and Cyrenaic appropriation of the Socratic legacy, contrariwise, will be to tie standards for correct moral usage to the individual’s choices and decisions alone, so making the individual moral life a selfjustifying one (25). As regards Plato, Short History claims that moral philosophy is permanently indebted to him for two things, both developed in the Gorgias: an argument against rhetoric as the art through which one can attain to the good life, and an account of the conditions of the possibility for denominating something ‘good’ (i.e. in the sense of desirable) and for succeeding in the attainment of it. The sophists, Plato notes, view securing power as the overriding instrumental good, and satisfaction of one’s desires, whatever these happen to be, as the supreme good. Rhetorical skill bends others to do what one wishes, not by giving them reasons for action, but by producing ungrounded conviction in them through manipulative technique. Once one has subordinated the wills of others to one’s own, one can ‘do whatever one wants’. Plato’s aim in the Gorgias in response to this ethics of manipulation, MacIntyre observes, is to provide a critique of non-rule-governed desire. Plato’s Socrates goes about this by noting that in order to be satisfiable, desire itself must be delimited; it must a have a specifiable object, which object must in turn specify rules for its own successful procurement. To seek desire-fulfilment without regard to rules, that is, to ‘break any rules whenever one wishes’, is to undermine one’s own effort at desire satisfaction. It is also to make oneself unfit for life in society, because it leads one to engage in socially unintelligible behaviour which renders one incapable of satisfying those desires which only life in society can satisfy (31–2). The Republic, MacIntyre notes, will have as its task to specify what that common life is without which one cannot attain a fully good human life. No reader harbouring a suspicion that MacIntyre has a romantic, uncritical adulation for the Greeks and the pre-modern period could maintain this belief in the face of the treatment Plato is given in Short History. Plato’s great contribution to moral philosophy is said to be that with him, ‘the logician has entered moral philosophy for good’. Thanks to Plato’s inquiries into the nature of ‘the good itself’, ‘the just itself’ etc., ‘the systematic and self-conscious logical analysis of moral concepts will be at the heart of moral philosophy’ (43). Plato is also credited with helping us realize that such logical analysis of moral concepts ‘can nonetheless never be the whole of moral philosophy’. Here we have an important element in MacIntyre’s own view of what is needed for an adequate moral theory: ‘we have to understand not only the logical interrelations of moral concepts, rules, and the like but also the point and purpose such rules serve. This involves us both in the theory of

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human purposes and motives and in the theory of society, since different needs and wants are dominant in different social orders’ (43). Plato deserves praise, then, MacIntyre thinks, for linking the concerns of moral epistemology, moral psychology and politics in the Republic. But Plato does not otherwise get off easily in Short History. MacIntyre castigates him for ‘characteristic and utterly deplorable puritanism’ by ignoring or devaluing many bodily pleasures (a hardly plausible criticism, it should be said, given Plato’s statement of the need for bodily pleasures for the good life in various places in the Republic: see, for example, 571d–e, 587d–e). Plato is also charged with an authoritarian, paternalistic politics underwritten by bad arguments drawn from a defective philosophical psychology. Thus, Plato falsely infers from the unobjectionable premise that a virtuous citizenry can only be had in a social order with a certain kind of structure, MacIntyre claims, the deplorable conclusion that such a social order should be imposed upon its subjects (56). Still, it is Plato, he notes, who teaches us that the term ‘good’ is a predicative expression which we use to grade objects of desire so that we cannot identify the good with the desired tout court. While Plato correctly concludes from this point that ‘good’ must correspond to some possible object of desire, he mistakenly locates this object in a transcendental realm to which access can be had only either by religious revelation (e.g. which Socrates receives from the priestess Diotima in the Symposium) or by some long process of pedagogy. Plato thus separates excessively our perception and pursuit of the good from our everyday activities and practices, and opens himself up to Aristotle’s just criticisms in the Nicomachean Ethics (53). Although Aristotle is treated kindly by MacIntyre in Short History, he is not treated indulgently. While on the basis of his Nicomachean Ethics he is held to be in ways a ‘supercilious prig’, ‘very middle-aged’ and a ‘class bound conservative’ who is ‘extremely complacent about the social order’, MacIntyre still, at this stage of his own thinking, finds much to be admired in Aristotle’s ethical theory, and much from which to learn. He finds Aristotle’s ethical theory praiseworthy in the first place because it gives us a political ethics, an ethics which wishes to specify not only the shape of a good human life, but also the nature of the social and political institutions needed to foster and sustain such a life (57). Though MacIntyre (like most commentators) sees Aristotle’s view of the good human life as excessively influenced by his uncritical adoption of the Athenian socio-political status quo, he credits Aristotle with at least seeing the significant connection between the two. As with Plato, and as characteristic of pre-modern moral philosophy generally, the questions which frame ethical inquiry for Aristotle, MacIntyre notes, are ‘What is the good life?’ and ‘How is it to be attained?’ Doing good – for example, practising justice – is considered by Aristotle as a component of faring well. Aristotle’s formal sketch of the good life also has the advantage over Plato’s of being less transcendentalist and almost entirely concerned with faring well in the here and now, and not in the hereafter (a clear preoccupation of the Phaedo and the Republic, MacIntyre observes fairly enough).

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There are not really many twists in MacIntyre’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ethical theory in Short History. He reminds us that for Aristotle, happiness must be predicable not merely of some of life’s episodes and occasions, but of the whole of a life and of its habitual course; it must be something predicable of actualized human potential, and not merely of that potential as such. Also, it must be found in the goods internal to actualized potential – the skilful exercise of human faculties, especially the highest of these, and the concomitant pleasure deriving therefrom – and not in those external goods such as pleasure, wealth, honour and reputation which are instrumental to or consequent upon that activity. So the life that Aristotle refers to as eu)daimoni/a (roughly, ‘happy’) must be a life of virtuous activity: activity not merely sought for its own sake, but sought also as constitutive of some summum bonum – some final and fully sufficient te&loj which Aristotle will identify as the activity of contemplating God. The MacIntyre of Short History has reservations about this culminating point of Aristotle’s ethical theory, for him a relapse by Aristotle into a kind of transcendentalism, and he does not accept the argument Aristotle puts forward to justify it: namely, that there must be some summum bonum lest all human desiring be ultimately meaningless and fruitless. But he makes no careful effort to examine why Aristotle asserts this or how later commentators, particularly medieval ones, sought to justify it and square it with Aristotle’s other claims about the good life (a shortcoming MacIntyre has recently admitted to in the Introduction to the 1997 reissuing of Short History: see 1997b: x–xviii). While sympathetic in the main with Aristotle’s linking of moral rules to the pursuit of the goods internal to virtuous activities and practices (a sympathy which we shall see that MacIntyre has never lost), he has several other substantive criticisms of Aristotle’s ethical theory in Short History. In his correct identification of the virtues as key constituents of the good life, Aristotle provides us with no reliable criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of candidates belonging to that set of virtues constitutive of a good human life. And, also, he is insufficiently critical of the social presuppositions of his own class in Athenian society and of the political horizons of the Greek po&lij. This leads him to construct an idiosyncratic table of virtues weighted with implausible entries such as magnanimity, or of friendship of a highly self-regarding kind (SH, 1966d: 77–81). Aristotle’s theorizing about the virtues does, MacIntyre thinks, turn up the modestly helpful truth that because virtues are habits of character and mind required of anyone who wishes to live in a human society of whatever form, some virtues are necessary for a good human life – virtues such as truthfulness and promise-keeping and justice (i.e. in the sense of respect for others’ property, however ‘property’ be construed). But these primary virtues have a negative structure to them enjoining us to avoid certain types of actions, actions which would undermine any recognizably human community. What we wish to get from a theory of the good life, MacIntyre observes, is knowledge of what actions we should perform, and he finds Aristotle highly unsatisfactory as regards prescriptions concerning the positive virtues of the good life.

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So, according to the account in Short History, Plato and Aristotle have taught us to look beyond our untutored desire and beyond conventional understandings of the good life to an impersonal standard for the good life: one which would provide us with impersonal reasons for action and a means of ranking our desires. But their depictions of the good life can only be compelling for us in the twentieth century in part, and their theories show insufficient awareness of how the contingencies of social and political change regularly affect the adequacy of a theory of the good life. What is needed, MacIntyre notes, tipping his hand here on his future work, is some kind of neo-Aristotelian theory of the good life which adopts Aristotle’s formal framework – the connection between moral rules and the goods of activity, the relation of virtue to the good of a whole life – but which both empties it of its parochial content (i.e. its elitist, chauvinistic Athenian limitations) and which builds into it greater social and historical self-awareness (95–8). But prior to this work of re-construction, which Short History never quite undertakes, MacIntyre wishes first to tell the story of how social and political change has led to a loss of the promising core conception of the good life come to fruition in Aristotle’s ethical theory, and so along this plot line the narrative of Short History continues. (It has wrongly been claimed – see Robert Wokler’s essay in After MacIntyre: 108–26 – that MacIntyre is after a philosophy of history: what he clearly has been after is an explanation of how and why pre-modern ways of thinking about the ethics and the good life, so persuasive as he has it in the light of critical reflection, have lost their sway over so many in the Western tradition.) Picking up the thread of the historical narrative of Short History, MacIntyre observes that the social and political change effected by the Alexandrian and Roman empires led to the creation of a new context for thinking about the moral life. The horizon of ethical reflection is no longer the city-state, but the large-scale imperial state, and ethical questions are framed now in terms of how the individual can attain happiness in a social order which is more and more remote from his day-to-day actions and transactions: one in which he is to a large extent politically powerless. We have here the emergence of moral individualism: the individual is now a moral agent in the context of the universe as opposed to the city-state. Local community is no longer the locus for the pursuit of the good life; the individual must face up to the cosmos with resources of his own: ‘the individual … asks, What do I desire, as a man, apart from all social ties, in the frame of the Universe?’ (SH, 19966d: 100). While many might be inclined to view this heightened self-consciousness as having a positive side, MacIntyre sees little of value in it because, in Aristotelian fashion, he sees it as the abandonment of the social world as the indispensable realm for the pursuit and attainment of human well-being. The Stoical and Epicurean theories of the good life typify for him this new framework for ethical theorizing. Though the former provides some justification for participation in public life, and the latter for withdrawal from it, both are centrally concerned with providing the agent a recipe for the good life apart from its enjoyment in the context of local community. However, the appeal of these theories is not to the poor, oppressed and disaffected agents who comprise the majority of populace of

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the time, MacIntyre notes, but to the educated and ruling classes – those for whom Roman civic religion provides no satisfactory rationale for living. It will be Christian ethics instead which will have a particular appeal for the disaffected masses. Although a scant ten pages, MacIntyre’s treatment of Christianity in Short History is full of acute observations about the distinctive shape of Christian ethics, and in particular, about Christian theology’s at times excessive flexibility – its capacity to integrate within its creation–fall–redemption narrative a wide variety of ethical frameworks, whether Platonic, Stoic, Aristotelian, etc. While MacIntyre has since come to lament this chapter’s brevity, he has now made one important retraction from his account of the Christian moral outlook in Short History. He now renounces his earlier claim that the ethical message of both Christ and St Paul was aimed exclusively at small communities and predicated on a belief in an impending eschaton (see SH, 1997b: ix–x). Of interest in this chapter for future developments in MacIntyre’s thought is his taking note of the creative transformation of Aristotelian ethical theory effected by Thomas Aquinas. We can see quite clearly here the seeds of Macintyre’s later affinities for Thomism. Aquinas, he observes, by drawing upon Stoic as well as Hebraic law-based conceptions of ethics, was able to integrate these with the central and inter-connected themes in Aristotelian ethical theory, and so fashion a purely rational ethic at the service of moral theology. What Aquinas gives us is something notably different from Aristotle’s ethics, but something which demonstrates the hospitability of the Aristotelian virtue-happiness nexus to conceptual frameworks other than Aristotle’s own. Aquinas’s significance in the history of ethics, then, is his integrating the notion of natural law into the Aristotelian ethics of virtue, and his simultaneous modification and extension of the Aristotelian table of the virtues. Though heavily influenced by Aristotle’s conception of human nature, Aquinas escapes some of Aristotle’s parochial limitations, Short History notes, because Thomas views human nature as an artifact of the divine mind, and so considers it independent of its social exemplifications. Significantly also, Aquinas identifies contemplation of God as the te&loj of human nature as such, not merely as the te&loj of a privileged and mono-cultural city-state elite (SH 1966d: 117–18). Of Aquinas, little more is said in Short History, but we will see him return, and on centre stage, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in particular. It remains in Short History for MacIntyre to trace the decline of the pre-modern, communitycentred, teleogical ethical framework which we can glean from Plato and Aristotle and which MacIntyre sees as the most promising background framework for a theory of the good life today. The transition to a new and distinctive and therefore ‘modern’ style of ethical theorizing has as its primary agent causes for MacIntyre Luther and Machiavelli. In both of these, he notes, we see the emergence of a new and robust moral individualism. Short History attempts to substantiate this point about emergent individualism by first drawing our attention to Luther’s doctrines of divine sovereignty and of the total depravity of human nature. Given Luther’s conception of human nature, MacIntyre notes, the moral law becomes construed as the product of a divine fiat

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which human reason cannot presume to comprehend and which unregenerate human desire can have no inclination to follow (121–2). Moral transformation cannot thus be the product of moral pedagogy, but only of salvific faith working extrinsically on a human nature which receives that faith as a gift. The secular city is thereby delivered over into the power of the secular sovereign, and the possibility of a virtuous earthly human community is rejected. Relatedly, MacIntyre notes, fellow reformer John Calvin sees it as the duty of the sovereign to legislate religious precepts, such as those concerning marriage and religious worship, but Calvin’s sovereign is otherwise free to set his own moral rules for the socio-economic realm. So no close connection between activity in this secular realm and obedience to the inscrutable supernatural precepts of the divine law-giver is envisaged. The individual’s moral identity for the followers of the Reformation is seen solely as a function of how one stands before the commands of God; a large segment of man’s earthly activities are viewed as separate from this identity and thought to be justified on their own terms and in no close relation to religious righteousness and the norms of practical reason derivable therefrom (124–7). Such, according to Short History, is the legacy of reformed soteriology and moral theology for the future of occidental ethics. The political theory of Machiavelli, MacIntyre argues next, adds to the climate of moral individualism by first treating the ends of social and political life for the ruler as a given – the maintenance of power through order and general prosperity – and then by treating public action and moral rules as mere contingent means to these ends. Machiavelli is, like the sophists before him, MacIntyre notes, an ethical consequentialist who views any action as potentially justifiable in the pursuit of the goals of power, reputation and glory – and who accordingly treats social structure as malleable before individual ends. The Machiavellian individual is therefore one whose social role bears only an extrinsic relation to his identity. In the aftermath of Luther and Machiavelli, the stage is set for the moral-cum-political theory of Thomas Hobbes, one in which ‘the individual’ is viewed as the basic social unit, power is explicitly identified as the ultimate practical concern, and human nature is treated as a timeless, pre-political, pre-social abstraction. The flaw in Hobbes’s theory of morals for MacIntyre lies in Hobbes’s a priori theory of human nature. So he observes that while we owe to Hobbes the insight that the theory of morals is inseparable from the theory of human nature, it is precisely the weakness of Hobbes’s version of the latter that makes his version of the former so implausible. Both theories derive, MacIntyre reminds us, from Hobbes’s following of the methodological principle employed by Galileo in the natural sciences: that in order to understand a complex whole, one must seek to resolve it into its simplest component parts (132). But Hobbes’s dim view of human nature leads him to see all human behaviour as reducible to egoistical interests and to ignore the manifest presence of altruistic motivations in humans. Hobbes, on account of his deterministic materialism, MacIntyre notes, treats all human desires as unalterable givens and as lacking the kind of hierarchy that would make the criticism of desire and the rational reordering of desire possible – possible, for instance, in pursuit of a summum bonum. This has important consequences for

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his moral theory as Hobbes’s moral rules can only be hypothetical imperatives that appeal to the individual’s self-interest – in particular to his or her fear of death. Since moral motivation can only be egoistical, moral rules in society must require a sanction to have any binding force, and that sanction must be provided by a sovereign. Here, MacIntyre observes, Hobbes, owing not to any empirical inquiry but to his method of abstract analysis, introduces the notion of an original contract as that which gives legitimacy to a political sovereign. But Hobbes’s notion of such a contract as originative of all legitimate political authority and of any socio-political order is incoherent, Short History argues, since a prior social order with shared rules, standards and meanings must already be presupposed as background conditions for the framing of any contract. Hence, though we still see in Hobbes the remnants of a belief in the close connection between desire and morals that is characteristic of many pre-modern systems of ethics, Hobbes’s way of justifying morality is, for MacIntyre, a failure (136–7). Turning next to Hobbes’s seventeenth-century peer Baruch Spinoza, MacIntyre finds in Spinoza a number of valuable improvements on Hobbesian moral theory, and the introduction of two new distinctively modern values: freedom and reason. Spinoza, like Hobbes, MacIntyre notes, mistakenly identifies having a right with having the power to exercise that right, but unlike Hobbes he views human passions and desires as transformable in light of the goal of happiness, and so assigns a different set of goals and desires to the human agent than Hobbes. Virtue can be defined for Spinoza as the realization of that state in which knowledge of one’s true place in the world engenders freedom from needless suffering and discontent, and the effect of this enlightenment on one’s passions and desires produces the kind of happiness of which humans are capable. Politics is seen then as having a positive value – aiding individuals to develop that freedom and reason in which happiness consists – and the state is both a means to the end of individual enlightenment and the forum in which individuals can aid one another in enlightenment’s pursuit. Freedom and reason in Spinoza’s aftermath become central societal values, Short History observes, and MacIntyre clearly sees as a contribution to moral theory Spinoza’s valuing anew of the social and the political. The narrative of Short History turns next to the highly influential ethical and political theory of John Locke, and MacIntyre takes particular pains to argue how important episodes of socio-economic change at the end of the seventeenth century explain its emergence. Social change, according to a frequent argument in MacIntyre’s work, is regularly the efficient cause of new ethical-cum-political theory, because it often puts into question the legitimacy of the ethical standards that structure and in part constitute a social order. In and through social change, rival standards for conduct emerge – or rival justifications for the same or similar standards emerge – and these offer new possibilities for ethical theory, even as they require previous theories to be re-thought. Prior to examining the details of Locke’s standpoint, Short History engages in a bit of stock-taking. By the end of the seventeenth century, the book claims, there are three dominant forms of justification for moral rules: that of the sophists (and

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later Hobbes), that of Plato and Aristotle, and that of Christianity (though the book concedes that Aquinas is an important blend of the latter two approaches). According to the first approach, moral rules are justified because they aid us in the attainment of what we want now, that is, they minister to unreformed and uncriticized human desire as we find it. According to the second approach, moral rules are warranted since they help discipline and train our natures in the pursuit and attainment of certain types of good otherwise unattainable. According to the third approach, moral rules are justified in that obedience to them merits divine reward, and disobedience to them merits punishment. Each of these three accounts of moral justification is deployed against the backdrop of its own particular theory of human nature and its own metaphysical cosmology. By the late seventeenth century, Short History observes, Christian ethics is beginning to show a good deal of strain: its heavy metaphysical commitments (belief in miracles and in the truth of Scriptural narratives, for instance) and its demanding moral code come under attack by sceptics, deists, and free-thinkers alike. Also, its other-worldly focus becomes less attractive, as economic growth causes improvement in the conditions of earthly life for the masses. Religious values become absorbed into economic values (as is noteworthy in the seventeenthand eighteenth-century Puritanism of England and New England); and, as Daniel Defoe’s novels bear witness, economic man, even if with a Christian gloss, begins to emerge as a main actor on the centre stage of society – a society increasingly understood as, in MacIntyre’s words, ‘an arena for the struggles and conflicts of individual wills’ (151). Locke’s doctrine of natural rights, with an ancestry deriving from the Diggers and Levellers in mid-sixteenth-century England and drawing on the highly innovative Christian belief in the radical equality of each human person before God, is then ripe to emerge, MacIntyre claims. If individuality is waxing due to conditions of economic empowerment, and if appeals to divine law – or to a divine right of hierarchs to obedience by their subjects – are becoming less and less persuasive means of justifying political authority, then a new form of legitimation must be devised, and Locke’s ethical and political theory is tailored precisely to meet this need. MacIntyre reminds us that Locke’s effort to justify the revolution of 1688 in his Two Treatises of Government draws on a new depiction of the state of nature: one in which it is acknowledged that a social order and some measure of peace and cooperation must pre-date the existence of a social contract. Locke maintains that due to self-interest, inattentiveness, and the resulting lack of impartiality which individuals bring with them to disputes concerning justice, a political regime is necessary to protect the individual’s natural rights. And against the background of the ethical theory of his English predecessors the Cambridge Platonists, MacIntyre notes, Locke will defend his notion of natural rights by an account of moral judgement according to which moral truth is grasped, as mathematical truth, by seeing the necessary relation that obtains between various concepts. This view, like the view of Cambridge Platonist Henry More and of Plato himself, MacIntyre thinks, plausibly makes truth in moral judgement a matter of the possession and consequent ability correctly to

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apply moral concepts, but it implausibly reduces moral disagreement between two individuals to simply a failure on the part of one of them to have grasped a relevant moral concept (160–61). What MacIntyre appears to have in mind here, though he does not state it, is the more adequate and nuanced account of moral disagreement he had offered at the end of The Significance of Moral Judgements, where moral disagreement can be a function of disagreement over the likely consequences of an action, or about which facts are relevant to the moral judgement, or about which moral concepts to apply (i.e. even when individuals agree about the meaning of moral concepts in question). Locke’s ethical rationalism is succeeded by a competing moral sense theory of moral judgement by Locke’s pupil, the Earl of Shaftesbury. We can summarize briskly here MacIntyre’s account of the movement of modern British moral philosophy from Shaftesbury through Butler and Hume to Adam Smith and then to the common-sense theorists. For Shaftesbury, he notes, a special moral sense registers a feeling when it perceives certain moral properties in the world, and a moral judgement is the expression of this feeling. Most humans are by nature benevolent, and the virtuous person is the one in whom the appropriate sentiments of pleasure or displeasure match up with the moral properties of, broadly, the noble and the ignoble. These latter can be specified as those properties of actions which make for the harmony, or alternatively, the disharmony, of individuals with one another (162). Bernard de Mandeville attacks Shaftesbury’s view that benevolence is man’s natural bent, and argues instead that it is self-interest which dominates in most, but that from such self-interest the public good benefits and society actually advances. This, MacIntyre observes, bequeaths to later British moral philosophy the new task of showing how it can be established, if feelings are indeed the source of moral judgement, that such feelings are actually benevolent as opposed to egoistic. British moral philosophers must also indicate which feelings constitute the springs of human benevolence. Francis Hutcheson, the next great moral sense theorist between Shaftesbury and Hume, dodges the question of why humans approve of benevolent actions and traits of character, MacIntyre argues, and simply asserts that they do. Hutcheson so fails to consider how moral judgements involve the formulating of reasons for acting one way or the other and how they relate to human motives. Successor Joseph Butler will attack Hutcheson’s theory on the former front, successor David Hume on the latter, MacIntyre notes, but neither is able to bring these two related components of the moral judgement together as a theory of moral judgement (i.e. according to MacIntyre’s past arguments) must (164). Butler, then, attacks both the implicit consequentialism in Hutcheson’s theory of moral goodness – that acts contrary to the well-being of individuals can be justified in view of the benefit of the greater whole – and Hutcheson’s equation of benevolence with the whole of virtue. For Butler, benevolence is but one of a set of sentiments and dispositions each of whose function and proper sphere must be respected. The task of the ethical life is to balance altruistic benevolence and egoistic benevolence,

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and this is possible since our self-love is the desire for our own happiness, and a part of this happiness is constituted by altruistic activity. Balance is attained by respecting the hierarchy of principles that both govern our nature as rational beings and direct that nature toward its fulfilment. So, like the Greeks, MacIntyre observes, Butler returns ethical thinking to thinking about what will satisfy our natures as rational beings. But unlike Aristotle, for instance, Butler attempts no satisfactory account of what it is for a rational being to be fulfilled. This, MacIntyre argues, is because the individualist climate of the Reformation and of economic capitalism lead Butler to view happiness in terms of individual psychology instead of in terms of flourishing – flourishing, that is, in and through excellence in fulfilling one’s socially situated roles. It is also because Christian theology leads him to rely too heavily on the next life to redress imbalances of duty and interest in this life (though Butler goes not as far in this direction, MacIntyre adds, as fellow clergymen William Paley and Abraham Tucker, for whom the moral goodness and badness of acts is entirely a function of their effects in the next life, and for whom eternity alone can provide the fundamentally egoistic individual with the motivation to behave altruistically; SH: 166–8). MacIntyre sees in Butler further evidence of the divergence between the concept of duty and the concept of happiness, a divergence which for MacIntyre constitutes the fundamental weakness in the moral theories of the modern (i.e. post-Reformation, post-capitalist) period. As happiness becomes defined more and more in terms of an individual’s subjective states, MacIntyre notes, the constraints of social duty become more and more difficult to justify, since what may make the individual psychologically happy may well conflict with what fulfilment of his or her duty in given instances requires. This gives rise to the tendency to define ‘morality’ either exclusively in terms of duty and independent of happiness, or exclusively in terms of consequences leading to individual satisfaction. So Butler has himself defined happiness in terms largely independent of an individual’s performance in social contexts, MacIntyre observes, since his invoking of conscience as the rational principle which governs desire links that work of conscience not enough (as Plato’s account of justice in the soul, for instance, did) to justice exercised in a certain form of social life (166). In his interpretation of Hume, MacIntyre notes that Hume follows Hutcheson in rejecting ethical rationalism, but that he does so with better arguments. For Hume, the work of reason – either grasping the relations of concepts or registering matters of fact – can produce nothing that would move us to act. Reason can only minister to human passion and desire as their more or less adept instrument. While MacIntyre applauds Hume’s ethical naturalism, Hume’s attempt to ground morals in human nature, he faults Hume in Short History (as he had in previous writings examined on pages 20–21 above) with treating human passion and desire as an unreformable, uneducable given – just as had the sophists and Hobbes previously. Hume so fails to see how much of human emotion, passion and desire is socially constructed and hence reshapable, and his ethical naturalism is therefore not critical

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enough (175). But Hume, for MacIntyre, still stands as a powerful critic of the pure and therefore artificial ‘moral’ ought – the moral imperative enjoining action upon agents but incapable of justifying itself. What Hume fails to countenance, though, MacIntyre notes here, is a return to the ought of social role and social context, where moral injunctions are similarly impersonal and yet are capable being justified – and of being made intelligible as injunctions – by an appeal both to social role and to anthropological ideal or standard for human well-being (172–3). In the aftermath of Hume, Short History notes, Richard Price raises the issue of the criticism of the passions by observing that with respect to any passion we can always ask, ‘But ought I to feel this way?’ Price’s attempt at a rationalist critique comes up short, though, MacIntyre argues, in that Price falls back on asserting the self-evidence of basic moral judgements, and regards notions of right and obligation as unanalysable. MacIntyre fails to specify here exactly how Price’s view on practical first principles differs from the Aristotelian view of the underived knowability of first principles, but his point is, apparently, that Price does not attempt to justify these first principles in light of any anthropological or teleological ideal as Aristotle does – nor does Price, like Aristotle, view first principles as properly knowable only through a process of rational dialectic and as items of cognition subject to dialectical testing and emendation. Fellow rationalist critics of Hume, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Brown, come up similarly short, Short History observes, in their too easy reliance either on notions of self-evidence or on the alleged deliverances of common sense. Reid, MacIntyre notes, goes the way of Price; Stewart maintains the existence of various self-evidently true moral perceptions, while Brown holds that God has so created us that our emotions spontaneously approve of what it is fitting for them to approve (177). In Hume’s friend Adam Smith, MacIntyre sees an attempt similar to Hume’s of appealing to sympathy as the basis of morals, with the difference that for Smith it is the propriety and fittingness of actions, not their utility, that humans perceive when they judge an action to be morally praiseworthy. The artifice of an impartial spectator’s perspective in Smith’s theory is intended as a device for us to free ourselves from the bias of self-love in our actions and judgements. But Smith, like Hume, MacIntyre observes, sets up the moral problem wrongly on account of his similarly individualist starting-point. In working from the needs and motivations of the pre-social individual, Smith is faced with the artificial difficulty of justifying those moral precepts that we already reasonably follow, and he must therefore leave unexplained the nature of that need in us to correct the defects of excessive self-love of which he speaks (176). As MacIntyre turns his attention in Short History next from eighteenth-century England to eighteenth-century France, his affinities with the problematic of the modern French moral tradition are evident. Thus, in Baron de Montesquieu he finds a fellow-traveller – one whose society-theoretic account of morals MacIntyre is already in the process of formulating himself, but whose account MacIntyre will find wanting for its failure to settle the relativist, anti-relativist question regarding the

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authority of moral norms (a shortcoming, interestingly, of which MacIntyre himself has frequently been accused, especially in view of his post-After Virtue writings). So Montesquieu, MacIntyre contends, is ‘the first moralist with a sociological perspective’: contrary to the individualist trend of his century, Montesquieu realizes that societies are not mere collections of individuals. He also realizes that social system, in the many diverse forms it can take, conditions individual wants, needs, possibilities, and values (179). Therefore, on the one hand Montesquieu correctly observes that every society has its own moral norms and its own means and standards for justifying these, so that any attempt at a supra-cultural justification of morals is bound to fail; on the other hand, though, he is in search of certain pre-societal timeless norms of natural justice in the light of which the moral beliefs and practices of any given society can be weighed and found wanting. But MacIntyre sees him as leaving the tension between these perspectives unresolved (180–81). As it happens, much of MacIntyre’s work since Short History can be seen as an effort to resolve precisely this tension. Montesquieu’s so-described quasi-relativism is in notable contrast for MacIntyre to the moral-cum-political theory of other figures of the French Enlightenment. In these, MacIntyre sees a facile universalism, a facile universalism joined with a weak diagnosis of the causes of human ills – ‘irrationality’ – and a weak remedy for social improvement, namely that that humans should ‘behave rationally’ (183). But this he does not find in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom he has a good measure of respect. Rousseau correctly understands that one cannot effectively answer the question of ‘What ought I to do?’ without first having an answer to the question ‘Who am I?’, and Rousseau also understands that this second question leads one back to a scrutiny of one’s embeddedness in social relations (a point, MacIntyre notes, which Kant will miss). Rousseau is therefore aware of the historicity and malleability of human nature before social forces, and in his state of nature speculations he avoids Hobbes’s mistake of characterizing humans as pre-social and entirely egocentric. So MacIntyre finds Rousseau’s moral and political theory a worthy attempt to dissolve the egoistic versus altruistic reasons for action problem that the successors of Hobbes have both taken to be central to moral-cum-political theory and have contrived an artificial individualist psychology with which to resolve it. Rousseau sensibly holds that self-love seeks a life lived in social relations, and he provides the basis for a notion of how we are to treat others for those relationships to succeed. Thus, from self-love, our primitive passion, other and social virtues such as justice are engendered, and in the simplicity of the human heart, the dictates of conscience provide us with the means to appraise and criticize political institutions – institutions which are designed to serve just social relations, but frequently fail in this task. Short History praises Rousseau for his awareness that there is a one common good for society and for his detailed analysis of the human ethical situation – an analysis which, MacIntyre notes, opens up the possibility for ‘a sociology of hope’. Though he sees in Rousseau a sensible pessimism about social improvement given its difficult preconditions, he values Rousseau’s failure to take an easy and too quick refuge in theological doctrines of the imperfectibility of human nature,

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and he values Rousseau’s attempt at a detailed specification of the causes of social evil. Still, MacIntyre sees at the bottom of Rousseau’s moral-cum-political theory an explanatory inadequacy. because while correctly diagnosing modern society as unjust and divisive, Rousseau also holds that universally valid moral principles exist in the untutored conscience of each individual, and yet he does not satisfactorily account for the compossibility of these two states of affairs (188). MacIntyre’s point here is that Rousseau says not enough, as Rousseau’s own theory demands, about the social deformation of the moral conscience (i.e. about both its actual mechanism and its remedy). After this treatment of eighteenth-century French thought, Short History moves next, in its Chapter Fourteen, to Kant. Though MacIntyre has since repented some of the brevity of the book’s treatment of this central figure in the history of modern moral philosophy (a scant nine pages!), he stands to this day by most of the claims in the chapter (see the new Introduction in the recent reprinting of Short History, 1997b: xiii–xiv). The matter of paucity of text notwithstanding, MacIntyre does in his present retrospect of Short History credit Kant’s ethics with being the defining moment, for allies and foes alike, in the future history of occidental ethics. In his new Introduction to Short History, MacIntyre also adds a note of respect for Kant, praising his attempt to provide, à la Socrates, an impersonal standard for practical reasoning – one to which all moral agents are invited to conform being persuaded by their own power of reason. What he continues to disagree with is Kant’s means of justifying impersonal moral precepts by a universalizability test (SH, 1997b: xiiixiv). It is worth noting for now how indicative this is of MacIntyre’s intent, at least, to be an ethical universalist and, of course, a moral cognitivist. Returning to Chapter Fourteen of Short History itself, Kant, in admiration for Rousseau’s doctrine of the nobility of the ordinary agent’s moral conscience, MacIntyre reminds us, sought not to justify ordinary morality or defend it from sceptical attack, but rather, and in accord with Kant’s own transcendental method, to account for its possibility. There is, for Kant, though, no rational warrant for treating nature as embodying divine creative wisdom (as in ancient and medieval thought), and so the search for the possibility of morality must be conducted without using nature as its domain. If the only thing good absolutely is a good will, the moral must be sought in the motive or intention of the moral agent. Since motives which derive from natural inclination, whether such inclination be selfish or beneficent, cannot count as moral motives for Kant – inclination belonging to the non-moral sphere of nature – the only properly moral motive can be that of following one’s duty for duty’s sake alone. Unsurprisingly, MacIntyre sees the emergence of the purely autonomous ought here in all its glory. For Kant, he reminds us, duty or obligation is not plural, but singular; it pertains to the autonomous, self-legislating individual, not to the socially embedded moral agent. And it is entirely constraining in character, because it provides the agent with no positive direction concerning how to act, since this form of obligation is in no way derivative from the agent’s socially established needs, wants, and purposes. Significantly, MacIntyre notes, Kant, as if aware of these

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shortcomings, brings in through the back door by means of the artifice of a postulate of pure practical reason that same happiness (albeit in the next life) as the reward for duty and virtue in this life that he had previously expelled. Because Kant in his ethics prescinds from attempting to guide action with respect to social context, MacIntyre argues, it has, in spite of its intentions, insufficient resources to criticize society as it is. Moreover, its means of being generated via a universalizability test is insufficiently constraining: all an agent need do is specify in a highly particularized way the maxim that is guiding his actions so as to be able consistently to will that it become a universal law – and then he need not fear that such a universal law will work against his own interests. Further, the universalizability test is but a (secondary) test – a test presupposing the existence of prior moral maxims whose nature and justification is, in the Kantian system, left unaddressed (SH, 1966d: 196–8). To get to the bottom of the moral outlook, MacIntyre thinks we must look to the process whereby, in the context of socially established practices, moral norms serving certain determinate social ends and purposes are spontaneously generated and seen as justified by their social context. All of MacIntyre’s own subsequent efforts at moral theory construction will be undertaken with this end in view. In Short History’s succeeding and succinct treatment of the thought of Hegel we see how deeply MacIntyre’s own efforts at ethical theory construction have been influenced by the great German historicist. Hegel, as MacIntyre recounts here, is gripped early on in his thinking by the question of how modern Germans differ from Greeks of the fourth-century po&lij. In formulating his answer to this question – because Christianity has separated the individual from the state by enjoining her or him to pursue a transcendent destiny – Hegel is led to the important discovery that moral concepts have a history and that they have varying social contexts which define them. Contrary to the sophists, Hobbes, and Hume, then, Hegel does not view human desire and aspiration as a stable given, but as something to a large extent socially constructed: the individual’s needs and wants are greatly determined by the objects presented to him by the social order to which he belongs. Through history, our awareness of human capacities evolves, and naturally so: our reason discovers new horizons for human realization, with the result that human self-awareness and human freedom grow together in history (204–5). In outline, Hegel sees this historical process as having proceeded up to his own time in the following way, as Chapter Fifteen of Short History recalls here. In his primitive condition, man has no sense of his individuality, but only of his social role. As a society of individuals, each with little or no self-awareness, becomes more complex and differentiated, alternative possibilities for human self-realization become manifest. From a society dominated by the master–serf relation, a new and individualist society is born in stages, but one with its own inherent limitations – and so one whose form of social organization must also be overcome. Persons in this newly individualist society, owing to a false consciousness which obscures even while it illumines, tend to compensate for their lack of true status in society by various strategies: by Stoic resignation to cosmic necessity, by Christian otherworldly aspiration, by thoughtless subservience to one’s assigned role and to the

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assigned tasks at hand, or by a selfish hedonistic pursuit of personal happiness (with its anarchic, self-defeating consequences). Against all of these, MacIntyre reminds us, Hegel holds that a new society must arise: one characterized not by the false consciousness of individualist contradictions, but by a re-identification with the values of community and of the socially established. In the sphere of ethics, this requires a renunciation of all individualist forms of moral reasoning with their failed and necessarily unrealizable universalist pretensions (200–209). While, needless to say, MacIntyre has little sympathy with Hegel’s identifying of the Prussian state of King Frederick William as the final stage of the fulfilment of human freedom and reason, MacIntyre does value highly the type of practical reasoning which Hegel thinks should be characteristic of the fully evolved social order. According to this view, the authority of moral norms must be derived from socially established practice, not from individual determination: the values internal to a society must impose themselves upon the society’s individual members, and be accepted by them as authoritative. Individual self-realization is to come through the shaping of one’s choices and actions within the framework of socially established norms and moral values, and the criteria for moral choice must not itself be chosen by the individual, but derived from the social order. It is these criteria which must serve as the basis of individual choice and self-realization. The moral life lived in any other way, according to this Hegel’s picture (which MacIntyre in Short History effectively endorses), is necessarily doomed to dissatisfaction (208–9). That the MacIntyre of Short History has much admiration for Hegel’s moral outlook is clear in the way he dwells upon Hegel’s points about the historicity of the virtues. Hegel teaches us that different social and political settings affect the list of virtues necessary for flourishing in that setting, so that what is beneficial in one setting may be oppressive and harmful in another. Against an Aristotelian or Kantian emphasis on a priori criteria for good action, MacIntyre denies (at this stage of his thought, at any rate) that one can have unmediated or socially unconditioned access to such criteria: thus, agent in social order x may think that her actions are informed by a Kantian good will, but she may think so mistakenly. Or she may think that they exemplify the Aristotelian virtue of courage, when they really, for example, exemplify a counterfeit form of courage which is in fact cruelty (206). While observations about the social conditioning of the individual’s moral consciousness (which MacIntyre had found lacking in Rousseau) need not add up to a decisive criticism of a broadly Aristotelian ethical theory, MacIntyre clearly takes it to be a valuable criticism of Aristotle’s picture of the moral life, and his own future work will be much aimed at socializing and historicizing (i.e. adding a social and a historical dimension) to Aristotle’s account of the virtues. Chapter 2 of this study will explore the ambivalences, both before and after Short History, of MacIntyre’s attitude to Marx and Marxism. As for Short History itself, MacIntyre’s treatment of Marx here is highly condensed and not terribly interesting or informative as regards MacIntyre’s own commitments at the time. With Marx, MacIntyre has no wish to accept Hegel’s arguments concerning the realization of the Absolute in time, but he seems somewhat non-committal about whether to accept

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Marx’s base–superstructure framework as a way to think about the realization of full human freedom (again, Chapter 2 below will address this). He does argue, against other of Marx’s interpreters, that Marx was always committed to the importance of conceptual change on its own terms as a means of social progress – even, that is, while Marx stressed, as Hegel did not, the role of societal work-relations in that progress (210–11). MacIntyre does appear to be convinced here by Marx’s account of society as, in its present form, deeply class-divided and by Marx’s related belief that appeals to moral principle against the social and political order must always be class- or Lebensform-relative. Such appeals, MacIntyre agrees, can never avail themselves of allegedly class-transcendent norms, but must rely instead on an immanent critique of the forms of social life which fail to accept the norms in question. Marx is faulted in Short History, though, with failing to specify which action-guiding norms will come into being when the working class awakens from its false consciousness and purposefully opposes the constraints of capitalist society. He is also faulted for failing to be adequately specific about the nature of morality in the ideal socialist and post-capitalist state (abiding criticisms MacIntyre has had of the Marxist standpoint, as we shall see ahead). But Marx’s criticisms of the alienating effects of individualist capitalist society are more or less taken on board in Short History: namely, that in such a society, individuals (a) believe themselves prey to bewildering forces which their own free and errant actions have actually created and now sustain, and (b) falsely believe themselves to be autonomous, when they are in fact enslaved by the dictates of their social and economic roles (212). As Short History winds its way towards a consideration of twentieth-century moral philosophy, the narrative of the book turns next to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and MacIntyre diagnoses in their respective ethical outlooks further dilemmas besetting the modern individualist standpoint. Kierkegaard’s ethical subject, he notes, faces a choice between ethical standards embodied in rival and incompatible ethical codes without the aid of rational criteria which might settle the issue one way or the other: the subject must simply choose one of the codes and submit to the consequences of the choice. Among the codes averted to by Kierkegaard is, of course, the Christian code which claims a source beyond the realm of the rationally demonstrable. While Kierkegaard rightly resists reducing Christian moral precepts to purely secular ones à la Hegel, he also does this, MacIntyre observes, at the cost of denying them any rational appeal. And Kierkegaard errs methodologically as well for assuming that one can give a purely neutral portrayal of rival ethical ideals – or that rival ethical ideals are ever assessable by individuals occupying a neutral, uncommitted standpoint. Only one who takes ‘the individual’ as an ultimate and unanalysed category, MacIntyre argues, would ever make such a mistake: one in fact only becomes capable of ethical portrayal or assessment by having first acquired reflective characteristics through actions and choices which already embody commitment to one ethical standpoint or other (219–20). This social embeddedness and social conditioning of practical reasoning and of the reflective moral agent will

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be a constant theme in MacIntyre’s later work, especially Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Dependent Rational Animals. In Nietzsche, MacIntyre finds a limitation similar to that found in Kant: the criterion for right ethical action is dangerously formal – and in the case of Nietzsche, it is elastic enough to justify various kinds of moral wrongdoing, even grave wrongdoing. For all his valuable diagnosis of how the will to power is present in disguise in various high-minded ethical theories, and for his salutary reminder that for the Greeks, αϕγαθοϖ’, poorly translated as ‘good’, referred to a standard of aristocratic achievement, Nietzsche’s Übermensch ethics is still, MacIntyre notes here, insufficiently critical. Before concluding Short History with a chapter entitled ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, MacIntyre treats first the transitional figures Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, F.H. Bradley, and T.H. Green (the latter three turn out to be important influences on MacIntyre’s own moral thought). With Burke MacIntyre has little sympathy; with Burke’s critic, the anarchist William Godwin, he has more. Burke’s appeal to the dictates of ‘nature’ (by which, MacIntyre observes, Burke meant organic societal development) against that of contemporary revolutionaries to the universal rights of man, represents the kind of uncritical acceptance of tradition which MacIntyre has always thought to be intellectually inadequate (228–9). While he thinks Burke was right in noting that we regularly do and must act on the basis of habit and ‘prejudice’, and that we should not be continually scrutinizing these, MacIntyre argues here that Burke’s uncritical confidence in the ‘known march of the ordinary Providence of God’ leads him to too closely identify the ends of society with society’s present institutional arrangements embodied in the form of the state. Godwin, then, can serve as a helpful corrective to Burke: when the right reason of individuals determines that present state institutions are in conflict with genuine societal values, radical destruction and re-creation is called for – and nihilism consists not in engaging in this revolutionary activity but opposing it. MacIntyre thus expresses his sympathy here with the parliamentarians who revolted against Charles I, and with the French and Russian revolutionaries (230). His enthusiasm for large-scale, radical transformation of society has since, however, and significantly, been abandoned (see MacIntyre, 1994k: 42) – a point to which we will return in the concluding section of this book. Burke, Short History argues, resists in an unwarranted way the making-explicitso-as-to-evaluate those principles which guide ordinary, unreflective action, and so his particular form of appeal to the moral and political resources of tradition is anaemic. MacIntyre’s view of Godwin as a utopian who believes humans have an inbuilt benevolent tendency to seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number leads Short History next to consider Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarian tradition. Bentham is not a utopian, MacIntyre reminds us, nor does he think that humans are at bottom as committed to altruistic behaviour as Godwin did. But with Godwin he shares an individualist framework for morals, and so he both views society as an aggregate of individuals and views the goal of society as making possible the happiness of those individuals-qua-individuals with a happiness that can be summed

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and calculated. On the basis of the mechanical and associationist psychology to which he adheres, Bentham then redefines ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as the pleasurable and the painful, and identifies the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain (both terms being understood in a very broad sense) as the only two possible motivations for human actions. But in his defining ‘right’ as that which conduces to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, Bentham is not offering a conceptual analysis of ordinary use, MacIntyre reminds us, but rather a theoretical re-definition of the term. MacIntyre, unsurprisingly, has sympathy with Bentham’s central reason for rejecting doctrines of natural law and natural rights – the empirical point that so little agreement about the content of these seems spontaneously to be had among those who advance such a doctrine. But on the difficult question of moral motivation –the question of why individuals who are moved only by desire for pleasure or aversion of pain should obey the laws and act in altruistic fashion – Bentham is constrained, MacIntyre notes, to answer that they should do so because altruistic activity is most pleasurable. In answering the objection in this way, though, Bentham merely bequeaths to his successor John Stuart Mill a theory with large weaknesses (233–5). While Mill, the narrative of Short History continues, discovers in the practice of his own life that the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number through programmes of social reform was not conducing to his own happiness, he stands all the same by the greatest happiness principle (henceforth GHP) and introduces into it modifications which still in the end fail. At the cost of saving the monism of value that the GHP presupposes, Mill stretches the concept of pleasure to include ‘higher’ (particularly intellectual) as well as ‘lower’ pleasures, but this, MacIntyre notes, merely renders the concept vacuous and evaluatively unhelpful, making it an analytic truth that pleasure is whatever humans desire. If instead, and MacIntyre takes this to be Mill’s point, ‘the pleasurable’ is understood as what contingently all humans happen to seek, and the only thing that they in fact seek, then the claim is surely empirically false. In the matter of the pursuit of the good life, as MacIntyre observes here, we are faced with the task of grading the objects of our desires and choosing between what kind of dispositions and habits of desire we shall cultivate, and in this important matter of the critique of desire Mill gives us far too little help (239–40). MacIntyre’s own subsequent work on goods internal versus external to a practice in After Virtue will aim to give central importance to the rational criticism of desire in the theory of practical rationality. On another level, and citing a stock criticism of utilitarianism, MacIntyre notes that Mill’s doctrine is open to the charge of permitting heinous crimes for the sake of some greater good. In defending his theory against such a charge by distinguishing between individual actions and those practices as a whole which serve the GHP and whose constituent parts need not therefore pass the GHP test (such as the system of justice), Mill is forced implicitly to concede, MacIntyre observes here, that the GHP is not our only evaluative criterion, but rather one which rides on the back of other such criteria (e.g. respect for persons). MacIntyre acknowledges in Short History that utilitarian criteria are useful in certain calculations about how the public good is best

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to be served, and he credits Bentham and Mill with helping us to see this, but he also sees in utilitarianism exactly the kind of theory that will have appeal in a structurally individualist society: one composed of fragments of rival and incompatible moral outlooks and one consequently in search of public criteria for adjudicating ethical disputes (243). Utilitarianism will thus be a theory doomed to treat the symptoms and not the root causes of our present moral predicament. That utilitarianism is flawed both for its individualist point of departure and for its insufficiently critical approach to desire-satisfaction is something, Short History observes next, which F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green both saw with great clarity, so they are the next figures to which the text turns. Green and Bradley (and MacIntyre also, as the tone of his exposition makes clear), in opposing the contractarian and utilitarian picture of society as an aggregation of individuals – each individual with his or her own particular desires and goals – and of social norms as the product of individuals’ compromises and agreements, see individuals’ desires as constituted for them in good part by the rule-governed relationships with others in which they already stand. Neither human nature nor human desire can be thought of as presocial. The weakness in the ethical theories of Bradley and Green for MacIntyre, though, is that both tie their insight about the social conditioning of character and desire too much to a metaphysical picture, with the result that both fail fully to develop by means of social analysis the implication this has for the close relationship between morality and social framework. Thus Bradley, MacIntyre observes, correctly notes that the question ‘Why be moral?’ is improperly formulated, suggesting as it does that morality must be a means to some end beyond itself. Bradley helps us to see instead that through moral action one closes the gap between one’s actual self and one’s ideal self, with the result that self-realization is achieved through morality. Through morality the self comes to occupy its proper place in the whole, and so overcomes its own finitude. The utilitarian picture can be seen as false from the perspective which Bradley bids us occupy, because it sees humans as striving for pleasure as an end in itself, whereas pleasure is really something which supervenes upon other ends. MacIntyre thinks that the Kantian moral picture can also be shown inadequate with Bradley’s help, since for Kant moral duty must be unrelated to human interest and inclination, whereas Bradley justly recognizes that in fulfilling the duty’s of one station in life and so realizing oneself fully, one can and must use all of one’s nature including one’s inclinations, properly ordered (246–7). MacIntyre finds particularly attractive Bradley’s conviction that while one has a certain freedom in choosing one’s station in life, once it is chosen, one is committed to objective, socially recognized criteria for self-realization in accord with which future choices and acts of self-determination must be made. To occupy a station in life is to cease to make one’s own dispositions of choice the arbiter of and sovereign authority over value, and to fail in the fulfilment of one’s duty is to thwart one’s selfrealization. MacIntyre thinks that Bradley finally comes up short, though, for failing to consider the viability of his ethical outlook for a moral agent living in a modern, post-traditional society, where agents characteristically live lives that are separable

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from the social roles which they discharge, and where there is no socially enshrined and agreed-upon conception of the good. MacIntyre also observes in Short History that Bradley failed to take up this question because he saw his ethical outlook as in some sense guaranteed by a metaphysical picture concerning the nature of reality as a whole (247). In sympathy with Bradley’s outlook, much of MacIntyre’s own subsequent work will be aimed at rectifying the sociological deficiency he sees in Bradley’s otherwise laudable moral theory, but doing so, needless to say, without drawing on Bradley’s background idealist metaphysical framework. T.H. Green’s outlook is more promising for MacIntyre because more sociologically aware, Green himself having been directly involved in programmes of political reform. His is a noteworthy attempt for MacIntyre at overcoming liberal individualism from within a liberal ethical framework. MacIntyre notes that although Green failed to consider the viability in late nineteenth-century western European society of his ethical vision of self-realization through moral striving, Green does place more attention than fellow-traveller Bradley on the gap between the ideal – a society in which the state in its way embodies that higher self of human moral striving – and the actual (247). And MacIntyre is clearly drawn to Green’s view that the good of the individual is a not-yet-fully-understood-and-realized-but-always-capable-ofincreasing-comprehension-and-realization common good to which the individual is able to contribute by his own moral striving: a striving that occurs in and through a form of social life which exists prior to the agent herself or himself. Although Green sees, with Kant, that the highest realm of human achievement is in the moral sphere, and that the only good thing absolutely is a good will, he attempts to give more content to the strivings of this good will than Kant did, MacIntyre notes. He does this by drawing on the Greek classification of the virtues while also and appropriately historicizing our understanding of the life of virtue by drawing our attention to the evolving character of human moral possibilities (248). We will see later in After Virtue how MacIntyre tries to develop these ideas about the historical situatedness of the moral life. What is conspicuously lost on Bradley and Green’s twentieth-century successors, Short History claims as it moves to its concluding chapter, is any awareness of the relevance that the background form of social life has for the intelligibility of moral vocabulary. A first case in point is G.E. Moore’s overly self-confident attempt to end the history of confusion and disagreement in moral philosophy. Absent in Moore and his intuitionist successors H.A. Prichard and David Ross, but not in R.G. Collingwood, MacIntyre notes, is any awareness of the historicity of moral concepts. ‘Good’, like ‘right’, ‘duty’ and ‘obligatory’, for Moore and company, are each seen as terms with a meaning fixed and invariable through time; they are not understood or analysed in terms of their role in a particular scheme of belief. Yet Kant, Plato and Moore, to take but one instance of comparison, MacIntyre reminds us, simply do not mean the same thing by these terms (255). Further, on Moore’s account of intrinsic goodness as on Prichard’s account of self-evident duty, we are given no explanation – indeed, an explanation is precluded– of how moral judgements move us to act. Since we are alleged simply to intuit these

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moral properties we can have no reasons for ascribing them to acts, circumstances and so on, and the existence of moral reasons for action becomes baffling. Moore in particular, MacIntyre observes, fails to give us any account both of how we acquire the concept of intrinsic goodness in our experience, and of how we are then able to extend it to other instances of alleged goodness. This important omission, MacIntyre notes, repeating a central claim in The Significance of Moral Judgements, prepares the way for a non-cognitivist account of moral properties as provided in turn by A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson. The remainder of Short History’s narrative, traversing as it does territory familiar from MacIntyre’s earlier writings, can be summarized briefly here. Ayer, MacIntyre notes, conveniently sections moral judgement off to the realm of the emotive, so making ethical discourse something concerned neither with factual matters nor with conceptual truths but with self-expression. Stevenson in effect improves on this account by drawing our attention to the persuasive force and function that moral expressions have – their capacity to affect the moral attitudes of others. But in their common sharp division between the ethical and the factual, both of these two theories come up short. It is clear that factual statements – ‘The house is on fire!’ – can be action-guiding, and this independent of the differing emotive overtones it may have on particular occasions (259). Factual discourse is action-guiding when the facts to which it refers are relevant to the needs, interests and desires of agents, and on this point MacIntyre sees himself as entirely in agreement with Hume. Stevenson’s emphasis on the use of moral statements leaves unexplained, Short History continues, how or why moral beliefs are acquired in the first place and how they have a first-person, action-guiding function that precedes and gives sense to their second-person function (again The Significance of Moral Judgements contains MacIntyre’s background criticisms here). Also, specifying the meaning of an individual’s ethical beliefs in terms of the emotions connected with them leaves us without the means to individuate the emotions themselves (259–60). MacIntyre doesn’t fully explain himself here, but his point is that the emotions of an individual, such as jealousy or anger, cannot be identified properly without a reference to the individual’s judgement that the circumstances, events, or actions that evoke the emotions in question have certain moral characteristics – characteristics derived from the relation of these circumstances, events, or actions to the individual’s own needs, desires and purposes. Cognition-cum-volition therefore precedes, causes, and gives intelligibility to emotion. In R.M Hare, the modern moral philosopher with which Short History ends, we have a moral theory which represents for MacIntyre a notable shoring up of the weaknesses of systems of modern moral theory generally – but one which represents simultaneously the apogee of the individualist ethics to which MacIntyre has always been opposed. Short History thus observes how Hare’s characterization of moral language as a species of prescriptive language has the advantage of specifying criteria for the application of moral terms such as ‘good’ or ‘ought’ and of explaining how it is possible for moral agents to formulate reasons for action. In this respect it is a notable improvement on emotivist and intuitionist ethics. Yet the theory is

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itself flawed for: (a) assuming there is a gap between fact and value, (b) admitting the possibility that moral disagreement is rationally irresolvable, and (c) ascribing a subjective origin and a wholly subject-relative authority to the sphere of the moral (SH, 1966d: 261–2). Moral norms, for Hare as for Kant before him, are products of self-legislation alone, MacIntyre notes, and they derive their authority solely from individual choice (MacIntyre has since retracted this claim, acknowledging now that Hare’s view does require the agent, if he is to respect the established use and logic of moral terms, to take account of the sum of preferences of everyone relevantly affected by the action concerning which he is morally judging; still, this revision leaves MacIntyre’s criticism of Hare’s theory largely unaffected; see SH, 1997b: xiv). As for Kant, for Hare also moral criteria are chosen and constrained only by a universalizability test, so one can be amoral in Hare’s terms without being irrational. This is, for MacIntyre, to privilege the agent’s first-person standpoint unwarrantedly, since it is to subjectivize evaluative criteria by making the individual-qua-individual sovereign over them. While at this stage MacIntyre has sympathies with descriptivist critics of Hare, such as Philippa Foot and Peter Geach, he is unwilling straightforwardly to sign on to descriptivism. He accepts, with Foot and Geach, that evaluative expressions connected with the virtues and vices, for example ‘rude’ or ‘courageous’, can have empirical necessary and sufficient conditions for their application, so that they can be deduced as evaluative conclusions from descriptive or factual premises. He also accepts that the criteria for the application of ‘good’ vary with the substantive to which the term ‘good’ is ascribed. But, somewhat curiously and without explanation, he draws up short in this work of affirming the existence of objective criteria tout court for the application of ‘good’ to ‘human’, and in failing to do so he says he wishes to follow Hare (SH, 1966d: 262–3). Prior to advancing his own view at the end of Short History on which evaluative criteria should be chosen, he offers both an account of the naturalist/non-naturalist split that has characterized much English-speaking ethics since mid-century and a hypothesis about how these two positions have arrived at a theoretical impasse. Ethical non-naturalists, he notes, maintain that facts can never entail evaluations, that philosophical inquiry is neutral between different evaluations, and that the authority of moral evaluations is entirely subjective in origin. For the naturalist, contrariwise, understanding our use of moral and evaluative criteria amounts to discovering standards and criteria which we do not create and which impose themselves upon us. Since, the naturalist argues, philosophical inquiry uncovers the existence of such non-subjective criteria, it is not morally neutral, and facts can at times entail values. Both theories, MacIntyre observes, refuse to allow that the differences between them can be settled by any empirical inquiry, since both think that ordinary moral usage can be and has been corrupted by false philosophical theory (264). How then, he asks, has this theoretical stand-off between the two positions come about? The concluding and retrospective pages of Short History which attempt to answer this question very clearly set the agenda for MacIntyre’s future work. They contain, in summary: a description of our contemporary moral predicament; a meta-critique, as

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it were, of various modern attempts to resolve the predicament; a list of desiderata for a new ethical theory, and finally, a set of unresolved theoretical problems to be tackled by a new, re-constituted ethical theory. To begin with the first item, the description of our contemporary moral predicament, this is meant to flow from the book’s historical survey of past ethical belief systems. Owing to various historical contingencies, MacIntyre claims here, contemporary social life lacks any genuine coherence: it is comprised of an agglomeration of past ethical vocabularies-cum-forms-of-social-life. Historical inquiry shows us that there is no language of morals as such, only a variety of moral languages articulating a variety of forms of social life. Contemporary moral discussion is therefore confused, as individuals employing one ethical vocabulary or the other – liberal individualist, Marxist, Catholic – often speak the same form of words, but talk past one another since their meanings for these same words vary. Different ethical conceptions share the same formal structure – each with a set of rules, a set of ends which the rules aim at promoting or securing, and a set of virtues which correspond to the following of the rules and the attainment of the ends – but as conceptions they diverge widely with respect to substantive content (265–6). How, then, is one to decide to which ethical conception to give one’s rational allegiance, once one has taken the big step urged by Short History of recognizing the incoherence in our present moral discourse? Here, as in The Significance of Moral Judgements, MacIntyre draws up short of a hard and fast conclusion. He disavows the moral phenomenology of individualist ethical systems: systems, that is, whether emotivist, prescriptivist, Kantian and so on, which are constructed by beginning from the standpoint of the individual cut away from any determinate form of social identity and social life. Our use of terms such as ‘good’ and ‘ought’, as opposed to terms such as ‘disapprove’ or ‘like’ or ‘commend’, is and can be an attempt to invoke criteria established by the society to which we belong, as the use of moral terms has been in traditional societies such as fourth-century BC Athens. Moral sentences often have socially established, socially recognized truth conditions, and since we find ourselves as members of a social community prior to our being capable of engaging in moral inquiry and moral criticism, subjectivist and individualist accounts of the meaning of ethical terms are false with respect to the experience of most moral agents. Only for someone occupying an impoverished evaluative standpoint and alienated from the norms of his or her community would an individualist-style account of moral judgement be true (MacIntyre’s modest background assumption here, of course, is that a good human life must be a socially engaged human life: a matter which his future writings will address). Since the meaning of moral terms is society-relative and subject to flux, Short History concludes, we have very good grounds for rejecting the boast of any ethical theory, whether emotivist, prescriptivist or Sartrean existentialist, to vindicate claims about moral language or moral concepts as such. ‘To understand this is to be liberated from any false absolutist claims,’ the final sentence of the book states (in rejecting false absolutist claims, MacIntyre is of course not rejecting the possibility of ethical

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absolutism tout court, and his After Virtue trilogy will be much preoccupied with advancing a sophisticated form of ethical anti-relativism). But what, then, is the way forward for moral inquiry and the pursuit of the good life which that moral inquiry is meant to direct? Short History has argued both a descriptive thesis and a diagnostic thesis. The descriptive thesis is that moral concepts are social-order-specific and that our present social order is composed of an incoherent mélange of fragments of these drawn from incompatible social orders. The diagnostic thesis is that rival moral theories today are at an unproductive impasse precisely for failing to recognize this situation fully. The conclusion of the book is that any attempt at making sense of the ethical inquiry of present moral agents and at securing agreement about ethical norms must begin from a recognition of this peculiarly modern situation. The book ends by assigning author and reader with three tasks: an epistemic task, a socio-cultural task, and a rhetorical task (by rhetorical task is meant here a task of rational persuasion, persuasion employing both rational criticism and positive rational argument). The epistemic task is to determine which social order-laden set of evaluative criteria one should adopt to guide one’s pursuit of the good and best life. This choice of evaluative criteria will also necessarily be, according to the argument, a choice of a moral community – a choice of which group of persons with whom to share and from whom to learn in the pursuit of common goals, in the observance of common moral rules, and in the acquiring of a shared set of virtues. This paramountcy of choice today, MacIntyre notes in Short History, owes itself to a peculiarly modern and not perennial set of circumstances: namely, the plurality of possibilities available to, and the incoherence in the moral education of, the moral agent since the social and intellectual fragmentation at the beginning of the modern period (there is a slight but very striking admission on MacIntyre’s part here that the emergence of the category of ‘the individual’ might have a good side to it; he states: ‘In our society the acids of individualism have for four centuries eaten into our moral structures, for both good and ill’; SH: 266). But which criteria has MacIntyre himself chosen in the course of the evaluative claims he has made in Short History? While this is not entirely clear, we have seen him give a list of desiderata for such criteria to satisfy, and they serve in his mind as a set of at least necessary conditions any system of criteria would have to meet in order to be acceptance-worthy today. According to the arguments of the book, a system of morally evaluative criteria should: 1. be aimed at directing us to seek excellence both in the activities which constitute socially established practices and in life as a whole lived in a community with a shared vision of the good; 2. aid us in rational criticism of our desires as we find them; 3. give us the ability to criticize the form of social life to which we belong if its institutions fail to serve the life of each member in that pursuit; 4. enable us, jointly and by rationally deliberative means, to enact laws which enshrine the community’s shared conception of the good life;

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5. be taken as falsifiable and revisable, and exposed to continual public scrutiny and criticism; 6. be adjusted to the realities of contemporary socio-economic life; and, 7. given the significant changes in socio-economic life since modernization and industrialization, take satisfactory articulations of evaluative criteria in the past as only ideal-typical. Finally, the use of these criteria to structure or re-structure our social order should: 8. produce in us a modest hope of moral progress, as through them we come to a progressively better understanding, jointly and as individuals, of what the good life is. This epistemic task is but the beginning, and leads right away, for MacIntyre, to the socio-cultural task. Here he thinks Marx is to be learned from, and the idealist community-based ethic of the likes of Hegel, Bradley and Green seen as inadequate. In the midst of the ruins of past moral communities – ruins, he has it, which comprise much of today’s cosmopolitan quasi-communities (e.g. nation-states) – new forms of moral community must be created over which the right kind of evaluative criteria can have authority. The matter of authority leads us to the third task with which Short History entrusts the reader: the rhetorical or persuasive task. How are others, outsiders, to recognize the authority of the goods, norms and virtues of this reconstituted moral community so as be rationally persuaded to enter into it? Much of MacIntyre’s early (and continuing) interest in ethical theory has been with unravelling the confusions in contemporary ethical discourse in the hopes of attaining ethical consensus. This rhetorical or persuasive task can only be carried out by constructing some compelling narrative, at which Short History aims to be a first effort, in which individualistic moral theory is explained as either the unfortunate ex post facto product on the level of theory of historical forces which have destroyed moral communities, or as an inadequate response to problems encountered in the inquiry of community-based moral theories, and thus as an unnecessary and impoverishing relinquishing of the aspiration for the-good-life-sought-and-lived-incommunity (through which form of life alone, MacIntyre will yet have to argue instead of merely presuppose, comes full human flourishing). What MacIntyre assumes as true here – an assumption of which he was not then, but is now, aware (see his acknowledgement of this in the new Introduction to the reissued Short History, 1997b) – is some teleological ordering of essential human nature and some refurbished, broadly Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing. A problem yet looms for MacIntyre’s own moral theory under construction, the same problem that was present at the conclusion of The Significance of Moral Judgements, and that is avoiding relativism. At this stage of his development, he is partially aware of the problem (and, as again the new Introduction to Short History reveals, see 1997b: xvi-xix, he is now more or less fully aware of it). On the one hand, he wants to agree with Hare that the type of overall well-being one

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conceives so as to pursue can only be a matter of personal choice, and not something constrained by any specific norm of reason. With respect to criteria for evaluating goodness in a person, he states: ‘Here surely, we do use a variety of criteria and we have to choose between them. Here surely, an argument like Hare’s is the convincing one’ (263). If this is the case and subjective choice alone fixes human ends, then relativism, or at least a strong form of pluralism, is the upshot, and if MacIntyre wishes his moral theory to avoid the first, he must show how the version of the second to which it is committed does not ultimately lead to moral relativism, which it well might. A possible remedy here would be to distinguish non-moral ends of human nature, where pluralism is to be expected and even embraced and defended, from its moral ends, suitably defined. In fact, any account of the essential moral means constitutive of the human end as such – any account invoking certain core virtues such as the account he has already given in Short History – presupposes the notion of at least a shared moral end of human nature anyway. How broad a relativism exactly, though, does MacIntyre’s position in Short History admit? The difficulty is that he wants to affirm two incompatible positions on the sources of normativity for community-based moral precepts: on the one hand, a kind of Aristotelian objectivism – moral precepts derive their authority from discovered timeless facts about human nature and human flourishing – and on the other hand, a kind of historicized social constructivism – moral precepts derive their authority from social stipulation which may be modified through time by an intellectual tradition. Clearly, these two sources can overlap, but in Short History MacIntyre seems not to have seen how they are distinct. Short History therefore does not and cannot tell us which particular community among existing or possible communities with rival and incompatible morals we should want to join – or construct – in our pursuit of the good life. MacIntyre here, as in The Significance of Moral Judgements, halts before explicitly joining considerations from philosophical anthropology, or the metaphysics of human nature as he calls it, with his account of right practical reasoning or of a tradition of moral inquiry in good order: I must choose for myself with whom I am to be morally bound. I must choose between alternative forms of social and moral practice. Not that I stand morally naked until I have chosen. For our social past determines that each of us has some vocabulary with which to frame and make his choice. Nor can I look to human nature as a neutral standard, asking which form of social and moral life will give to it the most adequate expression. For each form of life carries with it its own picture of human nature. The choice of a form of life and the choice of a view of human nature go together. (268)

We will see that After Virtue develops MacIntyre’s ethical views further in various ways, but that on the question of an objectivist versus a subjectivist understanding of the overall human good it develops them not much further. What seems to be holding MacIntyre back from affirming a thoroughgoing universalist objectivism at this stage is two things: first, an inability – or a failure as yet – to distinguish in Aristotelian parlance the accidental from the essential in human nature: those features of human nature subject to modification and flux through history and changes in

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social context from its timeless features, the constants of human nature. Secondly, there is MacIntyre’s attraction to Marx’s notion of practical rationality as something essentially class-relative, with its attendant point that any successful vindication of an account of right practical reasoning must proceed by way of an immanent critique of its rivals – a demonstration of inconsistency or internal breakdown in their forms of practical reasoning. A way to resolve the universalist-particularist tension here might have been to argue that some moral inquiries, Aristotle’s for instance, have made more progress in discovering the nature of the human good than others, so that social orders whose moral norms enshrine these discoveries are rationally superior to others. The rational authority of their norms lies not merely in the fact that they have been successfully socially established, but that they are objectively true in the way in which moral norms can appropriately be called ‘true’– that is, that when observed they reliably guide human action to the attainment of the human good, with both its core and variable components (this point anticipates much of the work of the After Virtue trilogy, and MacIntyre has since affirmed more explicitly that this is indeed his position, a matter to which we will return; see MacIntyre, 1994i). Such a way of thinking about moral inquiry and moral truth would make possible an external critique of rival accounts of practical rationality – one which does not preclude, but neither can it be reduced to, a further internal or immanent critique of the same. So MacIntyre in Short History seems close to conflating an epistemic issue – the truth about the human good, its discovery and vindication – with a pedagogical and or rhetorical issue – how to lead others to see this truth and to move them from their however differently situated conception of right practical reason and the good towards affirming it. Even at this stage of his development, though, MacIntyre would have been likely to respond that for us, discovery, vindication and even rational persuasion are not so easily separable: human cognition is not so constituted in moral, nor indeed in other matters, to know that it knows. We are only entitled to rational confidence that our moral conception is objectively true (i.e. and not merely rational) if it provides us with the resources to show up inadequacies in rival and incompatible moral conceptions. No thoroughgoing confidence in ostensible discoveries about the good (i.e. moral truth-claims) without vindication vis-à-vis rivals. These considerations must only advertise for now what will be examined in more detail in the final chapter of this book. 1.3

‘Ought’ Language

The next task in moral philosophy which MacIntyre addresses after Short History is trying to resolve the conundrum mentioned in passing at the end of the book – that contemporary prescriptivists and naturalists are at an argumentative impasse, either side claiming to be able successfully to rebut the other’s objections and yet neither being capable of convincing the other side to alter its views. This matter is re-visited

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in two essays, ‘Ought’ and ‘Some More about “Ought”’, written specially for the volume of collected essays Macintyre entitled Against the Self-images of the Age. There is, however, one intervening piece on ethics prior to these, an entry on ‘Egoism and Altruism’ in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, worth mentioning because we can see in it MacIntyre reiterating his objections to the post-Machiavellian, post-Hobbesian individualist framework for posing ethical questions – the framework taken for granted by British moralists from Shaftesbury through Hume and up to Sidgwick. Each thinker who adopts this framework, MacIntyre observes, is faced with the ‘impossible … task of reconciling an egoistic theory of human nature with a moral theory of benevolent utilitarianism’ (1967f: 464). What has been lost is the framework of community within which the good life must be sought. For Plato, like Aristotle, this encyclopaedia entry points out, self-interest and benevolence cannot be the name of two different springs of desire, since what they would mean by ‘selfinterest’ is just the name for many kinds of co-operative, other-regarding activities carried out in a person’s communal life. Because the self wishes to lead a particular kind of life, and because the pursuit of such a life requires trust, friendship, and cooperation with others, respecting the needs and interests of others is no more a matter of benevolence than it is of self-interest. Malign self-interest belongs only to those who do not wish to enjoy the goods of life lived in community (1967f: 466). Returning to the topic of ‘ought language’, MacIntyre in the first essay entitled, ‘Ought’, proposes to resolve the problem noted at the end of Short History by turning, in the mode of a sociologically aware lexicographer, to the ostensibly independent and theory-neutral facts about moral language with respect to which the rival theories of descriptivism and prescriptivism claim explanatory superiority. Here, he argues, consideration of the historicity of moral concepts is essential, and he proposes the following account of the relevant stages through which uses of the moral concept signified in English by the term ‘ought’ have passed. In its first stage of use, in a relatively primitive society such as that depicted in the Norse sagas, the Norse equivalent of ‘ought’ corresponds to the perceived duty one has of discharging the responsibilities of one’s social role. Revenge, for instance, ‘ought’ to be taken by kinsmen on the murderer of a member of their kin because the rules of the society establish it as such. This ‘ought’ corresponds neither to the naturalist nor the prescriptivist ought; it specifies an obligation which is neither consciously related to desire-fulfilment, nor freely and reflectively chosen by an individual. In a second stage of the term’s use, the fourth-century Athens of Xenophon’s Socrates, the Athenian gentleman Ischomachus ponders with Socrates what he ought to do, a3 dei= poiein, in order to secure the ends of well-being (i.e. ends that, as both he and Socrates acknowledge, he has already in some measure attained). Here we have the eudaimonistic ought which corresponds to the naturalist pattern of analysis: Ischomachus is wondering what conduct he ought to observe to attain ends that he is aware of being pre-reflectively inclined to pursue. Yet once social change causes the ends which an Athenian gentleman is raised to pursue to be problematized, the issue of choice does emerge, and then the naturalist analysis of ‘ought’ no longer suffices.

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This possibility, however, MacIntyre argues, must await yet a further historical transformation of the sense of ‘ought’, and this time at the hands of Catholic Christianity (ASI: 146–7). For a Catholic, one ‘ought’ to obey God’s commands not simply because they are the commands of a sovereign, but also because they are guides to human action which lead quite surely (i.e. with an assurance which God alone, with the sovereign epistemic authority He possesses, can give) to the fulfilment of that human nature which God Himself designed and created. Divine commands therefore furnish reasons for fulfilment-seeking action of the most unimpeachable sort. Yet, and in a next important historical episode, MacIntyre notes, other Christian views of human nature (and of its condition without grace) prominent in late scholasticism and the Reformation shake society’s confidence that human desires and the requirements of divine commands – the natural and the prescribed – can be aligned. Human nature is increasingly viewed as corrupt to the degree that even what it desires at a deep level is thought not to be where its fulfilment lies: only the inscrutable will of God is held to point the way to human fulfilment, a largely other-worldly fulfilment. And on another front, pressure is placed on Catholic moral rationalism by the increasingly widespread awareness that human conduct seems consistently to diverge from the requirements of divinely revealed moral precepts. Increasingly, it appears as if faith alone can assure one that what God enjoins and that through which human desire is fulfilled are one and the same thing. Milton’s Satan is, for MacIntyre, a key figure in the history of Western moral philosophy, because for the first time after the advent of the Christian concept of moral obligation, he asks explicitly, ‘Why ought I to do what God commands?’ We now enter into an era where the prescriptivist analysis of moral language has application: Milton’s Satan is, for MacIntyre, Kant’s precursor (ASI: 149–50). This ‘ought’ in Satan’s question, MacIntyre observes, is a new and individualist ought. The moral question has become: ‘Why should I, as rational individual, and as a matter of principle and not prudence, do what God commands?’ We teeter here on the brink of conceptual incoherence, since Milton’s Satan sees obligation as deriving from law, but God as law-giver is replaced by individual as giver of law to himself. This law is not a prudential directive about how the individual is to find happiness; moreover, it is a law whose sovereignty will enable the individual to call into question the legitimacy of other alleged laws, including supposedly divine ones. The anticipation of Kant is clear here, MacIntyre argues, as is the anticipation of the contextless and criterionless ‘ought’ of Sidgwick and of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury prescriptivism and intuitionism. This batch of theories captures for MacIntyre, with reasonable fidelity, dominant features of moral discourse after the social change attendant upon the dissolution of the theistic naturalist ethics of the High Middle Ages. The family of moral concepts that once formed the framework of this ethical system must now be given new meaning by ordinary moral agents, and by theorists as well. However, and for reasons we have already seen, since MacIntyre favours a form of communitarian naturalism, he laments this social change and laments the theories which take the

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misfortunes of this social change for granted – and replicate and sanction them at the level of theory. Fundamental moral choice in the absence of objective criteria to decide between human ends, the argument of ‘Ought’ continues, is now the modern moral dilemma, and Kierkegaard’s treatment of the ethical versus the aesthetic life bears witness to this new moral situation. One can for, Kierkegaard, MacIntyre notes, either conceptualize one’s moral life along the lines of the question ‘Which kind of life will satisfy my wants?’, or one can ask ‘What kind of life ought I to live?’ To ask the first question is to embark on the aesthetic life; to ask the second is to pursue the ethical life, the life in which duty-fulfilment is chosen as a value. But in neither case is there any fact of the matter about human well-being which could constrain or serve to criticize from an external standpoint the way one conceptualizes or describes our ethical situation. Allegiance to fundamental moral principles is warranted by selfdetermination alone in Kierkegaard’s picture, as MacIntyre interprets it here (and has continued so to interpret it despite challenges from Kierkegaard scholars), and such allegiance cannot be regarded as a deliverance of reason. The prescriptivist analysis of moral language then turns out to be true not of moral language as such, but of much, though not all, of modern moral discourse – discourse where it is presumed that fundamental moral principles are the subject of criterionless choice. According to this picture, a moral agent, by her actions, reveals the self-obliging imperatival principles she utters to herself, and this, MacIntyre agrees, is an accurate rendering of the moral consciousness of many moral agents in modern social orders. Still, there remains for MacIntyre something disingenuous about prescriptivism’s use of vocabulary to explain the moral point of view: it trades on the prestige of the original meaning of terms such as ‘law’, ‘obligation’ etc. Yet it employs these terms in a Pickwickian sense, since it deprives them of their former social meaning. How can one speak of ‘law’ and ‘obligation’, MacIntyre asks, when these terms refer no more to what is socially established, but only to what is subjectively chosen (ASI: 155–60)? If the naive naturalism of primitive society or the theistic naturalism of Christian ethics are no longer accurate descriptions of how moral terms function today, MacIntyre thinks that they may still offer us an alternative way of thinking about how our ethical lives and concepts still could be ordered. A new account of how this is possible in the world of cosmopolitan modernity must be given, and again we anticipate the project of After Virtue. If we move now to consider MacIntyre’s second early essay on the contemporary language of obligation, ‘Some More About “Ought”’, we encounter in it the first formulation of a thesis MacIntyre has maintained to the present: that modern ‘metaethics’ is not, as it purports to be, some neutral analysis of moral language as such, but a more or less accurate, if historically ill informed, account of what the use of moral language has largely become owing to social and ideological change. The main object of criticism in the essay is H.A. Prichard’s account of ‘ought’ language in his famous 1912 essay ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ and Prichard’s modified account of the same in his later book Moral Obligation (Prichard, 1949).

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For Prichard, MacIntyre notes, ‘ought’ is equivalent to obligation as well as to duty, and morality is the sphere of obedience to obligation or duty and held to function entirely independent of considerations of desire-fulfilment or the pursuit of happiness. Curiously, MacIntyre notes, Prichard fails to see that ‘duty’ in ordinary use refers to social role fulfilment, whereas ‘obligation’ standardly refers to what is owed to another determinate person or persons (ASI: 158). While the later Prichard admits that ordinary language contains a moral as well as a non-moral ought, MacIntyre observes, Prichard continues to hold that no moral ‘ought’ is derivable from any ‘is’, and that our perception of obligation arises from our intuiting in some given practical context that such an obligation pertains to us – intuiting the duty to return a borrowed book, for instance. Duty in a situation thus emerges as self-evident to the engaged moral thinking of the person in that situation. Hence the Prichardian ‘ought’ is pre-emptory and excludes the giving of other reasons for action to an agent – yet it claims to draw its force from an appeal to some impersonal standard (ASI: 165). This claim of the self-evidentness to all rational persons of a given moral duty is, MacIntyre argues, in view of the overwhelming empirical evidence of different forms of moral outlook in different social orders, something bizarre – something explicable only as the outcome of a peculiar history of social change with its attendant change in the semantics of moral terms. MacIntyre suggests here a point that will be developed at length in After Virtue: that Prichard’s ‘ought’ has the look of the ‘taboo’ about it encountered by Captain Cook and his sailors among the inhabitants of Polynesia. It enjoins one to engage in or abstain from some action for one knows not what reason (ASI: 166). And it is precisely here where this account of the moral point of view opens itself up to an emotivist critique – and here where Stevenson’s theory of the meaning of moral language as such is more a theory of the meaning of moral language for those who use it in Prichard’s intuitionist sense. Stevenson’s account applies, that is, to individuals who are both unaware of the absence of any genuine rational justification for such a use and unable to account for the widespread phenomenon of moral disagreement, (ASI: 171). Stevenson will argue, correctly to MacIntyre’s mind, that there simply are no grounds for the intuitionist attribution of obligation to acts. The intuitionist would like it to be the case that acts bear such moral properties, but in reality they do not. In expressing his attitude of like or dislike toward such acts he merely attributes these properties to them, and difference in subjective attitude among moral agents is the cause of the intractability and interminability of moral debate between them. How exactly, then, to explain the genesis of a theory like Prichard’s on MacIntyre’s view? Here in ‘Some More about “Ought”’, and under the influence of Collingwood, no doubt, MacIntyre ventures a socio-historical explanation. Prichard’s account of moral language reflects the self-image of an age in which the naturalistic ground of moral obligation in both its theological and its philosophical forms has been lost. Protestant theological anthropology has eroded the former – human nature is so corrupt that our desires can afford us no reason for obeying what God commands– and Romanticism has eroded the latter, especially the Humean form of the latter

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– human passions and sentiments are not consonant, but rather in conflict, with socially established rules and ends. Intuitionism takes wing, then, as an attempt to salvage the function of past moral language while supplying a new interpretation of its pattern of use: in a post-Protestant, post-Romantic society, one should continue discharging one’s former moral obligations, but with a different reason for doing so. This reason, though, as MacIntyre puts it, is really a non-reason disguised as a reason; it is a taboo which cannot justify itself, which has forgotten the former means of its justification, and which, in the absence of any justification, has the look of superstition about it. ‘Some More About “Ought”’ therefore concludes: The Prichardian or distinctively moral ‘ought’ was a ghost and it is a ghost that still walks in certain quarters, although more and more obviously, like other ghosts, a survival. Yet so long as it survives, morality involves a degree of bluff and deception that can only have the effect of engendering cynicism whenever it is once more expressed. (ASI: 172)

1.4 The Moral Quandaries of the Modern Social Order In his chronologically next essay on ethics, ‘How Virtues Become Vices: Values, Medicine and Social Context’ (1974c), MacIntyre begins for the first time to address directly the relevance of the new social context – that is, the secular, liberal, pluralist society of the modern era – for ethical inquiry and moral argument. The point of this essay is to show not that ethical problems are irresolvable or that there is no rational adjudication procedure for competing moral arguments, but rather that the special social situation of the modern world makes it seem as if ethical problems are rationally irresolvable. It makes it seem indeed as if ethical argument is not rational argument at all. As universalizability theorist opposes feminist rights theorist on the matter of abortion, or as utilitarian physician opposes Kantian-influenced physician on the question of truth-telling with respect to a patient’s medical condition, and as welfarist citizen or politician in the tradition of T.H. Green and Rousseau oppose physician influenced by the thought of Locke and Adam Smith on the matter of government regulation of the medical practice, in each case, MacIntyre observes, logically valid arguments are advanced by the competing parties. Yet neither side is convinced by its opponent, and significantly, there is no socially accepted criteria to adjudicate the dispute. Modern society is in no sense a moral community: it lacks consensus about the nature and ends of the person, and it is inhabited by individuals who deploy ethical theses in moral arguments derived from some past tradition of moral inquiry – theses whose place and warrant in the larger metaphysical scheme of belief of that tradition is often forgotten (1974c: 97–101). Viewed from the outside, it appears as if we have no rational criteria to decide between the rival moral views competing for our allegiance – so either our moral commitments and our means of winning others over to them must be at bottom nonrational, MacIntyre wants to argue, or we will be led to subscribe to a Stevensonian or a Sartrean or a Nietzschean or some other form of non-cognitive theory of moral

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judgement. What MacIntyre wishes to resist here, consistent with his earlier work, is the conclusion that the practice of moral judgement as such must lack a rational ground; he wants to argue instead, that while the moral judgements many modern moral agents make in today’s secular, pluralistic societies often lack any rational grounds, this is a contingent matter. Short History has in a sense already tried to chart how this has come about, and ‘How Virtues Become Vices’ aims to show its consequences for the medical profession. If, the essay argues, rival moral conceptions have rival accounts of human nature and of the human end or ends, they also have, correspondingly, rival accounts of the virtues. But is there not some basic set of virtues proper to the medical profession, for instance, he asks, which constitute it as a profession and which provide it with integrity and continuity throughout the vicissitudes of social and moral change? His answer to this question is no, but it is a no premised on his understanding of the relationship between virtues and their background social order. Virtues, he notes, while constitutive of a social order are also for the most part social order-relative. What members of fifth-century BC Athens account virtues differs from what members of twelfth century Iceland or eighteenth-century Polynesia account the same. Moreover, societies differ in the respective importance, the rank ordering, they give to the more or less similar virtues which they may share: the valorization of courage in heroic societies, for instance, differs from that in a Christian society. MacIntyre does not wish to claim here that there are no universally recognized virtues true of human society as such. He insists, for instance, that in order for a society to be recognizably human, it must have and value dispositions to tell the truth (though to whom, and when, if ever, exceptions are permitted, he admits, will vary from society to society); it must also be disposed to respect the just deserts of others, and to pursue and protect its members, its constitutive social practices, and the overall good of the society in the face of difficulties. So any human society must be founded on and value certain core virtues, such as truthfulness, justice, and courage, however these may be differently construed (1974c: 101–3). The problem with these culturally invariant virtues for moral theory, however, as MacIntyre is aware here, is not simply that they are differently construed by different societies, but that, by themselves, they are insufficient to constitute an adequate moral code for any society. They therefore provide an insufficient basis for a universal and invariant moral code, and are insufficient to act as a standard for adjudicating disputes in a pluralistic society. Only a list of virtues which addresses questions raised by what MacIntyre refers to as ‘an overall interpretation of human existence’ – that is, a conception of genuine human nature and its end or ends – could do this, and the modern Western social order is constituted by rival factions adhering to rival such interpretations. The resulting lack of resources to resolve ethical problems in modern Western society, the essay observes, leaves professions such as medicine in a great bind. The former virtue of trust, for example, between patient and physician now resembles something like a vice: the patient can no longer assume that the physician shares his or her view of the human good and will treat him or her in kind. Yet some

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kind of mutual trust between physician and patient is essential for both: what was once unproblematic has in our new social order become problematic. Likewise, the autonomy of the medical practitioner to pursue her chosen area of specialization may conflict with public needs and the demands of social justice. The value of the autonomy of the medical practitioner must often be a social vice given public medical needs, so the modern social order is faced with another tragic conflict of the right with the right, again illustrating the relevance of social context for the valorization or evaluative ranking of action-dispositions (105–7). This essay ends on a sober note: philosophical theorizing can offer no remedies for the tragic conflicts today’s physicians face in their day-to-day practice and selfunderstanding. But philosophy can help those members of professions like medicine who are faced with tragic conflicts generated by the modern social order to avoid the temptation of adopting false and facile solutions. And, ‘How Virtues became Vices’ adds, ‘the characteristic temptation of the modern world is utilitarianism’ (111). Utilitarianism is, for MacIntyre, as we have seen, a characteristically modern ethical theory which seeks in the face of decisions between rival goods and in the absence of shared evaluative standards to introduce a neutral metric of value so as to eliminate tragedy, promoting instead, ostensibly, the maximization of common utility. But this attempt for MacIntyre is necessarily doomed to failure, since ‘the goods and the rights which define our contemporary conflicts are incommensurable. There is no higher criterion. There is no neutral concept of utility’ (111). It is not clear at the end of this essay to what exactly MacIntyre has committed himself. His argument appears to be that the modern social order generates both irresolvable moral conflicts and pseudo-solutions to those conflicts. Non-cognitive theories of moral judgement fail to capture the moral experience of the ordinary agent, and so do not persuade; commensurability of goods and of rights theories such as utilitarianism ignore the present social setting in which moral agents operate by ignoring the diverse moral traditions and histories which inform those agents’ beliefs and outlook – and in the light of which there is not and cannot be any shared evaluative standard. No shared evaluative standard can in fact be had short of securing a much wider agreement in background metaphysical commitments between the adherents of the rival moral traditions. So, in MacIntyre’s view in ‘How Virtues became Vices’, moral philosophy for more or less uncommitted moderns can at least tell them what it cannot do for them, and urge them away from solutions which disguise the true nature of their predicament. MacIntyre has clearly not yet at the time of this 1974 essay formulated the remedy which his After Virtue writings and beyond will offer. In his next piece of ethical writing, ‘Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective?’ (1977a), MacIntyre attempts to take the preceding argument in a positive direction and to draw up–though this time not in the context of an historical narrative – a list of desiderata for ethical theory after the emergence of the category of ‘the individual’. The starting point of the essay is what identifies as a central feature of human moral experience as such – and one MacIntyre has not previously

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adverted to – namely, our ‘perception of the absolute and unconditional demands of morality’. These demands, he claims in this important 1977 essay, make themselves especially felt when we perceive that we must surrender our lives, or at least risk losing them, in the pursuit of some more-than-personal good (i.e. the kind of good our own deeper self-perfection demands). Patriotic soldiers may be faced with this demand in war, he notes, as might anyone made aware of the atrocities of malign forces in the world such as Nazism. In more quotidian cases, the student taking an exam also perceives the unconditional moral demand not to cheat, as do all humans perceive the same demand when tempted to engage in malicious gossip – a temptation which they must always strive to resist (1977a: 26). If this perception of morality’s unconditional demand is so widespread, as the essay claims, then the challenge to moral theory must be to account for this perception and place it in the larger perspective of human ends and purposes. But MacIntyre wants to argue here that deontological moral theories such as that of Kant and Prichard fail at this task, as do the teleological theories of Aristotle and Mill. Surprisingly, MacIntyre here expresses both new-found dissatisfaction with Aristotelian ethics and new-found admiration for Kantian ethics. His account is as follows, and I will speak in the next paragraphs in MacIntyre’s own voice. Kant, and Prichard after him, were both correct in speaking about the unconditional demands which morality can make on us, and Aristotle and Mill were wrong for giving us no other way to think about moral failure than as a failure in self-realization – a failure in the full development of one’s personality. Morality may indeed demand in the face of human need, or on account of our obligation to resist evil forces at work in the world – or simply, as Plato saw, on account of the obligation to maintain the order of justice – that we abandon our own prospects of flourishing. Failure to measure up to the demands of morality may not be, as teleological moralists like Aristotle and Mill would have it, merely failure to move forward in the direction of our good: it may instead be an act disruptive of the moral order of society – one through which evil enters into the world. Moral failing, therefore, may not be a matter merely for regret – disappointment that one has not become a more achieved person – or for shame – concern about how others might judge one’s failure – but for guilt. By ‘guilt’ here is meant the ill-feeling connected with the judgement that one has broken with the moral order essential to the maintenance of community – and that until one has repented of and atoned for the failing in question, one understands oneself to be a moral outlaw severed from the shared life of the community (1997a: 27–30). Kant saw this categorical aspect of morality (the argument continues), but he failed to see that morality has also a legitimate hypothetical aspect. While it is true that ‘I ought not to do x if I want to be happy’ is not a moral maxim (i.e. where happiness is understood in a purely teleological way), ‘I ought not to do x if I do not wish to incur guilt (properly understood),’ or ‘I ought not to do x if evil is not to enter into the world’ are both legitimate and illuminating moral maxims, though hypothetical in form. The first is agent-relative, the second addresses the social consequences of

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moral actions. Kant erred in excessively separating the content of the moral from the empirical and the socio-historical; thus, his consistent universalizability test is too weak to generate a moral system: it relies both on a very peculiar use of the term ‘law’ (law as self-originating and self-regarding), and it draws neither its content nor its normative force from facts about human nature, particularly as these are revealed in the historical process (e.g. through past moral customs and codes and through positive laws derivative from these; 1997a: 27–30). H.A. Prichard, even while rejecting aspects of Kant’s theory, retained nonetheless Kant’s non-natural ought, and he did so at the cost of making morality seem like a system of taboos without rational grounding. The right and the good are separated by Prichard to the point that considerations about the virtues are thought to have no bearing on the moral life. In the later Kant, however, the Kant of the second Critique and of Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, there is an awareness of the inadequacy of a purely non-teleological system of moral duties, MacIntyre’s argument here notes, and so it is to these which he turns next. Kant’s account of the moral life in these two works specifies, MacIntyre observes, that the moral life must have as its goal not merely moral progress, but moral progress toward a goal: the life of moral virtue crowned by happiness. The demands of moral duty without the reward of happiness would be unreasonable for Kant, and since on his view evil and moral weakness in human nature are both regarded as ineradicable in this life, earthly moral progress must never be thought sufficient. This adds up to the consideration that the moral progress upon which we find ourselves embarked as agents must not terminate with death, but must have its terminus in a life beyond. Thus, the intelligibility of our present moral strivings presupposes the existence of a God who makes possible the immortality that our pursuit of the summum bonum presupposes – a summum bonum which involves, as we are aware, something greater than physical survival, and which may even require of us the sacrifice of our earthly lives. MacIntyre, as he makes clear here, is very attracted by this portrayal of human life as an enacted narrative quest, a unified progress toward a goal in the face of obstacles and difficulties. But at this stage of his thought he draws up short of embracing any of its ostensible theistic presuppositions, and he finds it a still too individualistic way of conceiving the moral life. As to the quest image itself, he is initially drawn to it because it relies on no highly unsatisfactory characterization of our summum bonum – one which would portray our highest good as some (static) ideal state of affairs: ‘quest’ connotes a directed pursuit of some dimly perceived, but as yet not well comprehended, goal. Surprisingly, MacIntyre has yet some particularly harsh words to say about Aristotle’s ethics in this essay. There is in Aristotle, he states, ‘the dreadful banality of the true end for man when its content is finally made known. All those remarkable virtues are to be practiced, all that judgement and prudence is to be exercised so that we may become upper middle class Athenian gentlemen devoted to metaphysical enquiry’ (38). What is more than curious about this objection is its portrayal of the practice of metaphysical enquiry as something static and banal! – a view not common among those who have

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laboured in metaphysical inquiry as Plato or Aristotle, for instance, understood it, or those Jewish, Islamic and Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages for whom it represented and required the supreme exercise of human cognitive powers while excluding at the same time little or nothing else of any other worthwhile human activity. Aristotelian ethics is, for MacIntyre at this stage, apparently too elitist and too complacent before the evils in the world – and too innocent of the dramatic and tragic aspects of human moral striving. But he regards Marx’s utopian communist end-state as a no more suitable summum bonum, nor any other similar earthly utopias – nor the heaven of Christianity. He argues instead here that we should keep the in via characterization of the earthly moral life, present, for example, in the moral outlook of Augustine or Aquinas, but that the pilgrim’s progress which this outlook envisages must have as its goal a temporal end instead of an eternal one. What kind of temporal end? In the first place, MacIntyre does not at this stage wish, with Kant, to take the theistic route toward making intelligible and justifiable the categorical demands of morality. And since he finds the argument between theologians and unbelievers concerning the grounds of religious belief in, as he puts it, ‘a peculiarly contemporary state of unclarity’, he sees the theistic route as an understandable temptation for today’s philosophical moralist, but one that must be resisted all the same (1977a: 42). Against Kant’s individualist rendering of the moral quest, where human history is deemed meaningful qua the sum of individuals’ strivings toward the summum bonum (both in this life and beyond), he urges that we learn instead from the likes of Vico, Hegel and Herder to reverse the relationship of meaningfulness between the movement of history and the individual’s quest. Individualism should be viewed as a stage in the enacted dramatic narrative of humanity now to be transcended; the history of the organic collectivity should be seen as giving sense and purpose to the moral strivings of those individuals who comprise it, instead of vice versa. The summum bonum must be seen to have a social dimension, and as we construct and construe our own enacted dramatic narratives in pursuit of the good and the best, the notion of sacrifice for the community’s benefit must be prominent in our minds – a notion MacIntyre thinks alien to Aristotle and to Mill (for these, he argues, an untimely death, for instance, can be little other than an entirely unwelcome event frustrating one’s moral quest, since it brings to an end that pursuit of eudaimonia, or the-greatest-possible-happiness-for-me-and-through-me-for-others, 38–9). Along these lines, ‘Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective?’ points to certain resources in our collective past which we can fruitfully inherit to aid our efforts at narrative construction. We can learn from the sacrifice of Iphigenia for the house of Atreus in the Orestes and the Antigone, or the intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham for the people of Israel in Genesis, or the stand of the Horatii on behalf of the city of Rome recorded by Livy. In fact, MacIntyre states here, we must learn from these dramatic narratives, as more recently from the Marxist-informed struggles of the Paris commune, if we are to avoid the individualist presuppositions of our own day. We must append our own communitarian narrative to those narratives

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of the past which we inherit, and strive to make an advance where their stories have left off (39–41). Our narrative must satisfy several constraints, according to the essay: it must be true, and not merely mythological (an interesting return to the theme of ‘rational myth’ present in MacIntyre’s earlier writings on Marxism to be examined in Section 2.1 below; although Macintyre acknowledges here that he is aware of the complexity in confirming or disconfirming extended historical narratives, he says nothing of substance on the topic at this stage). The narrative must belong to some identifiable narrative genre (it is not entirely clear why he insists on this – presumably so that in wearing its genre on its sleeve, the truth-claims the narrative makes can be properly interpreted so as to be fairly assessed). Finally, the narrative must give a prominent place to the tragic character of human existence, that is, to the difficulty of satisfying the absolute and unconditional requirements of morality, and to the vulnerability and weakness of moral agents in the face of such demands (40–41). The essay ends with a call for renewed criticism of the individualist framework of contemporary ethical theory and of the institutions that sustain and are sustained by it. It calls also for new initiatives ‘in general moral and political theory and in the philosophy of history’ (43). In his next essay on ethics, ‘Patients as Agents’ (1977b), concerned also with medical ethical matters, but again of much wider significance, we are given a fuller statement of the socio-cultural situation that MacIntyre has consistently argued makes problems in applied ethics today nearly insoluble. For the first time in his ethical writings he employs the notion of incommensurability as understood in the philosophy of science. Moral premises in moral arguments today are described here as ‘incommensurable’: they are deployed piecemeal in social settings which are no longer structured by any coherent, shared metaphysical conception. The result of this is that in the pluralistic cultures of modernity, assertion of moral premise meets counter-assertion of rival moral premise, and there is no neutral court of appeal – no publicly established and defensible set of evaluative criteria – to settle these disputes. Significantly, from this sociological point MacIntyre infers a point about the rationality of the moral views in question. Rational allegiance to a position brings with it necessarily an interest in rationally vindicating that position with respect to its rivals; any moral view that cannot vindicate itself by appeal to defensible public criteria may therefore plausibly be thought to rest on subjective choice alone. The individual’s allegiance to such a moral theory then seems a matter of arbitrariness and unreason, and ‘moral pluralism’ in society looks like another term for the rational confusion that is symptomatic of a culture in which moral argument has become systematically irresolvable (1977b: 197–9 – we have here an evident anticipation of the argumentative framework After Virtue will adopt). Although he does not say so explicitly, MacIntyre is making this point with reference to ordinary moral agents in contemporary Western societies, and not with reference to the small number of academic philosophers who inhabit these. Clearly, any philosopher is capable of affirming ethical premises as part of a larger background

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conceptual framework, and capable of reflectively and critically deploying those premises in ethical argument. But, as is regularly the case given his views on the connection between philosophy, social criticism and praxis – and given his political orientation as a radical democrat – MacIntyre is more concerned about the ethical beliefs of the majority of the members of the social order than about the beliefs of its philosophers tout simple. What solution to this problem then does he offer here? The solution is in the first place a social and a cultural, and not merely an intellectual, solution (and so it is aimed at satisfying the prescription at the end of Short History, noted on pages 48–52 above). It does not call for the reconstruction of some pre-modern form of society, as MacIntyre is frequently charged with seeking: ‘I shall leave that Utopian fantasy to the conservatives’, he states trenchantly here (209). It does call for an up-front recognition that the modern social order is an incoherent agglomeration of the ruins of past moral communities, communities each with a shared system of metaphysical beliefs proper to them. It then maintains that in order for ethical inquiry to progress in rationality, and for the pursuit of the-good-life-for-man to have a chance for success, new forms of moral community must be rebuilt, and rebuilt on some appropriately small scale – a scale smaller than that of the modern nation-state, though amidst today’s nation states’ ideological and social ‘ruins’. The rebuilding of these new communities will require, for MacIntyre, because they are to be new, the elaboration of an ideal-typical conception of community which can serve as a regulative ideal for their construction (1977b: 206–7). What conception of community does he have in mind exactly here? Before specifying this, he gives us first an account of the interconnectedness of tradition, authority, and rationality in community (the filling in of this account will await his later work). Communities, for him, can best be understood in the miniature form they take in the broad family of institutionalized rational practices, and his ideal community is but a social structure composed of these practices in some rationally appropriate, harmonious relation. Thus, a moral community, in its well-ordered and fully developed form, is for MacIntyre but a social structure in which the goodfor-man, as opposed to merely the good-for-man-as-participant-in-practice-x, can be sought: Consider a culture where there is a clear and established view of the good for man and where there is a rational consensus on the hierarchy of human goods. The variety of human practices is normatively ordered in terms of the goods which are internal to them and for each practice there is a profession specifically entrusted with the pursuit of that good and with the cultivation of those virtues necessary to achieve it. … There is a moral division of labor and each part of the society has to repose trust in the other. … The distribution of powers [to respective authorities] is justified by the relationship of professions, goods, and virtues. (1977b: 206)

Before we attempt to unpack this we must ask first what exactly MacIntyre means here by practices? This anticipates a central theme in After Virtue: a practice for MacIntyre is a small-scale-social-entity-with-a-history comprised of: (a) specific

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internal goals, (b) rules or norms which minister to the attainment of those goals, (c) a system of rational authority which presides over the formulation and re-formulation of those goals and norms, and so directs the practice’s activities, (d) goal-directed and rule-governed activities in and through which the goals are sought, and finally, of course, (e) participants who seek their good, in part, in the attainment of the goals internal to the practice. In the context of this 1977 essay, MacIntyre has in mind specifically the practice of medicine, and using this particular example we can easily fill in the blanks: medicine’s internal goals involve the promotion, protection, and restoration of human health; the norms governing the practice of medicine specify what are sound epistemic procedures and expeditious technical means for the promotion, protection, and preservation of human health; its rational authority system is comprised of the recognized proficients in the practice who establish, modify and enforce its norms, and so forth. The specific goals of any practice, the ends internal to its activities, MacIntyre notes, both constitute it as the practice it is and give it identity through time. The rules governing a practice are, as previously mentioned, norms which have been elaborated over time to serve the specific goals or ends of the practice. Finally, those among the participants of a practice who serve as part of its system of rational authority do so because they are in significant contact with the practice’s past history – its evolving standards for achievement and evolving goals. As experienced and established bearers of that past history, they alone are regularly capable of fruitful innovation with respect to the practice’s goals and rules–innovation which the appearance of new and unforeseeable circumstances and situations has called for in practice’s past and will continue to call for in the future. Practices are therefore, in MacIntyre’s language, moral quests extended through time; they are group pursuits of specifiable goods. A practice exists primarily to pursue goods internal to the practice’s constitutive activities; these goods include both the achievement of specific goals of the practice (e.g. the preservation of health in the case of medicine) and the development of the creative powers and abilities of the practice’s participants brought about through the achieving of those goals. The practice of medicine, for example, is primarily about the preservation and promotion of health, but it is also about the self-development of its practitioners via exercise of the medical science and the medical art. Derivatively, practices exist to attain certain goods external to its characteristic activities – goods such as money, power and fame – but the disordered pursuit of these goods has a corrupting effect on a practice as it leads to a diminishing attainment of the practice’s internal goods. Given this understanding of a practice (and MacIntyre takes himself to be describing how practices in good order do work, not prescribing how they should work), ‘authority’, ‘tradition’ and ‘progress’ in the context of practices can be seen as inter-definable concepts. And seeing this, he thinks, we will see why we should steer a middle path between the conservatism of an Edmund Burke, who exalts tradition over and against rationality, and the liberalism/radicalism of a Condorcet and other Enlightenment figures, who exalt abstract rationality over and against tradition

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(201). To belong to a practice and attain a share in the goods internal to it, MacIntyre notes, requires submitting to the publicly established standards for achievement within that practice in its current state and submitting to the publicly established rules which govern and sustain the practice. Evaluative criteria with respect to the practice’s activities are in this sense objective, and not matters for subjective choice or determination; likewise, the conditions for progress with respect to the practice’s goals are subjects only of a trans-subjective measure. In summary, the claim is here: without a tradition of objective standards and rules, no progress; without authority, no maintenance of tradition; without progress with respect to goals and standards, no rationality. What happens then, in MacIntyre’s view, when the objective normative and evaluative criteria which govern a practice and its development are lost? As he notes here in ‘Patients as Agents’, the profession of practitioners which is dedicated to preserving the standards for achievement within that practice and promoting the virtues necessary for the attainment of the practice’s internal goods degenerates into a collection of merely skilled labourers. Authority, which formerly gave purposive direction to the initial consensus about goals and standards within the practice, becomes functionalized and bureaucratized: its directives begin to have more and more to do with managing dissensus about ends and purposes, and imposing uniformity by non-rational means, than with refining rational consensus with respect to ends and purposes. Trust between participants in the practice and between the practice as a whole and members of the wider community breaks down. The larger point MacIntyre wants to make here is that the vaunted ‘autonomy’ of individuals in modern social orders looks more like the unhappy by-product of an unrecognized process of corrosion than it does a positive social gain to be boasted of (210). Such, for him, is clearly the case with the contemporary practice of medicine. Physicians no longer share among themselves a conception of the good life, nor do they share, therefore, a conception of the goals of their own practice. The practice of medicine has become divided and fragmentation of it as a practice threatens. Patients shuttled from one specialist or generalist to the other can no longer presume that their physician’s conception of the good is the same as their own. Trust in the physician, and therefore the physician’s recognized authority, is lessened (207–8). There is no large-scale solution to this problem, the essay concludes, only the smallscale solution of ‘working for a variety of new forms of medical community, each with its own shared moral allegiance’ (212). In his succeeding essay on ethics, ‘Utilitarianism and Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Essay on the Relevance of Moral Philosophy to Bureaucratic Theory’ (1977c), we have one of MacIntyre’s few writings devoted exclusively to an assessment and critique of utilitarianism, so it deserves at least brief attention. MacIntyre also attempts to illustrate in this piece some of the social ill-effects which follow upon the use of utilitarian-style practical reasoning in the corporate world. The bulk of his criticism of utilitarianism is aimed at showing how its utility-maximization principle is not self-supporting, and how, to do its work, it tacitly relies on a set of background non-utilitarian evaluative beliefs and commitments. The argument, then,

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is that utilitarian practical reasoning is and can only be a sub-activity of the kind of practical reasoning needed to manage businesses and corporations – as indeed, one’s own life. MacIntyre’s criticism of Bentham’s self-consciously revisionary theory of morality in this essay (1977c: 220–24) is fivefold, and can be summarized roughly as follows: 1. In order to apply a maximization of utility principle in deliberating about action, one must restrict the range of consideration of the near limitless courses of action available to one in a given decision situation. But the choice of how to restrict the range of one’s considerations cannot itself be determined by the utility maximization principle, because this would simply reinstate the original difficulty: a test of the utility versus disutility of the principle of restriction would also require a restriction of possibilities in order to be carried out. Hence, in our practical reasoning, the utility maximization principle can never be self-sufficient. 2. As Bentham’s early critics recognized, Bentham mistakenly thought that pleasures differ from one another only quantitatively. But it is evident that pleasures are incommensurable, since they are internal to diverse kinds of activities – drinking a Guinness, listening to Bartok, climbing a mountain. Only a prior non-quantitative and therefore non-utilitarian rank ordering of values or goods (and disvalues and evils) can allow us to apply the utilitarian principle. 3. Along a similar line, the Benthamite utilitarian calculus requires that each individual be counted as one, and only one, yet it is plausible to think that relief of the misery of the unfortunate should take precedence over the promotion of the happiness of the well-off: the employment of the calculus requires a prior non-utilitarian decision on this question. 4. The utilitarian principle does not itself specify for purposes of its application what is to be accounted a consequence of an agent’s act. It does not tell us, for instance, to what extent, if at all, I am required in my utilitarian deliberations to take into account as consequences of my contemplated actions the uncoerced responses of others to them. 5. The utilitarian principle does not of itself indicate within what time frame – for example, with respect to how many, if any, future generations – the consequences of my present actions should be assessed. For these somewhat familiar reasons, MacIntyre maintains that, by itself, the utilitarian model of practical reasoning is neither adequate to the task of providing a sufficient set of norms to guide practical reasoning and the moral reasoning such contains, nor is it evaluatively neutral. Therefore, managers and bureaucrats who employ it under the latter guise are deceived. Utilitarianism holds no promise, then, as the solution we should be seeking to the pressing, characteristically modern problem of systematic and seemingly unsettleable moral disagreement.

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1.5 Towards the Formulation of a New Moral Theory By the late 1970s MacIntyre had already begun the first drafts of After Virtue, and during this time he authored a number of important essays on ethical topics which exhibit his progress toward the synthesis which After Virtue represents. The first of these, ‘Objectivity in Morality and Objectivity in Science’ (1978i), is devoted in part to an unusual thesis about the nature of scientific inquiry which needn’t concern us here (namely, that natural science is itself a moral quest), but this essay also sheds important light on MacIntyre’s thoughts about how objectivity and authority are constituted and should function within morals. In this sense, it represents a development with respect to the ethical writings just examined. ‘Objectivity’ begins with a sweeping account of the loss, since the advent of empiricism, of the authority of ‘rules of practice’ (MacIntyre’s term of art: a rule of practice is ‘a rule whose point and purpose is derived from its role within a form of activity which has goods internal to it’; 1978i: 28). In the Renaissance, the mediaeval and in good part the classical world-view, he states here, a close connection was envisaged between the laws governing nature and the moral laws that are to govern human nature. As Robert Boyle will say in the seventeenth century, typifying for MacIntyre this traditional outlook, divine wisdom has established both sets of laws, but whereas nature always operates according to the divine ordinance, human nature frequently disobeys it. According to Boyle, MacIntyre notes, the task of the natural scientist, as of the moralist, is in any event, to discover these laws, these products of divine creative intelligence (1978i: 22). Empiricism, in rejecting the metaphysical theology behind this outlook, was faced with the challenge of relating the stock of universal generalizations about nature and human nature in our possession to our particular experiences of each. But, MacIntyre observes here, ‘Kant showed, and it should have been once and for all, that experience can provide no foundations for the generalizations of physics any more than for those of ethics’ – and from this Kantian lesson, ‘Objectivity’ notes derive the moral theories of Søren Kierkegaard and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1978i: 23). The problem Kant’s first two Critiques pose for ethics, MacIntyre states, is this: how are moral rules to be justified for, and shown as having authority over, the socially contextless, autonomous individual? Once Kant has made the mistake of treating a past set of ethical and natural-scientific generalizations apart from their original context of justification and intelligibility, and once he has rightly rejected all attempts to found them on the basis of ‘experience’ (understood, that is, as the empiricists understood the term), he must devise a new means of justification for moral rules as for generalizations in natural science. In morals, his solution is the postulate of a universal reason which causes convergence between the moral selflegislations of autonomous, free-thinking individuals so that the adoption of shared moral rules results. Kierkegaard subsequently, and possibly on account of reading Hegel, MacIntyre notes, sees the great weakness in this method of justification. Individuals cut off from the authority and the intellectual resources of tradition may indeed elect for rival

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ethical generalizations, each prescribing rival ways of life. Appeal to ‘experience’ cannot determine which of the rival generalizations one should adopt for oneself, and therefore criterionless choice alone can determine our selection according to Kierkegaard. We can see here how by the mid-nineteenth century, on MacIntyre’s account, ethical thinking has come to lose its rational foundation. On the other side of the ocean, MacIntyre notes, anti-foundationalism, represented now by the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, will be arrived at by a different route. Emerson will reject not only the idea of a universal reason causing convergence between the moral self-legislations of individual agents, but will reject the very ideal of an autonomously constructed heteronomous authority. In illustration of this point, MacIntyre quotes in ‘Objectivity’ Emerson’s striking observation in his journals (Journals, 4: 495) that ‘the Distinction of the new age [is] … the refusal of authority’ (24–5). After Kant, ‘Objectivity’ continues, the separation of the rational agent from history and social context becomes more or less complete: the human agent-quaindividual is now thought to stand apart from the rules of practice in activities such as art, law and scientific inquiry, and, absent an objective impersonal reason drawing on common experience, there remain but two ways for him to subscribe to those rules. He can either adopt them on the basis of a free, criterionless choice, or they can be imposed upon him non-rationally by bureaucratic force. What is lost sight of, MacIntyre argues here, is the original and natural warrant for traditional action-guiding rules in practices such as scientific inquiry or portrait painting or law. The rules which govern inquiries in physics, like those which govern the practice of painting, derive their authority from the way they make possible the attainment of the goods internal to these practices: that is, ‘achievements of excellence which exhibit human aesthetic, imaginative, intellectual, and physical powers at their highest’ (28). The rational and impersonal authority of these rules, their objectivity, derives from the past history of the practice: they have proven themselves in the past to be action-guides conducive to the flourishing of their respective practice (27–9). We have here MacIntyre’s first and clearest, if somewhat preliminary, statement on the normative question in ethics: moral ‘normativity’, for him, derives from the history and internal objective teleology, as it were, of practices (we have seen his initial characterization of ‘practice’ already in the earlier essay ‘Patients as Agents’). Entrants into a practice, until they are suitably initiated into the accomplishments and standards for achievement within that practice, are not judges or arbiters with respect to its rules, but rather novice participants subordinate to those rules and subject to the authority of the practice’s impersonal standards. This subordination is, of course, MacIntyre will maintain, a rational subordination: it is entirely reasonable for a novice to take on trust from the experienced that concerning which she or he as yet lacks competence to judge. Only, according to this account, when entrants have passed beyond the apprentice and even the journeyman stage to the master stage are they able competently to judge and fully justify – and successfully to innovate with respect to – the rules of practice.

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A further point MacIntyre argues for in ‘Objectivity’ is that the moral significance of individual members activities in a practice derives not from their unconditioned autonomous choices, but rather from their role in contributing to the evolving history of the practice. Socially recognizable contribution to socially recognized and established standards, not autonomous choice, is the source of genuine value (29). With institutional rules, he notes, the matter is otherwise: these are distinct from rules of practice. Rules of practice and institutional rules, however, are often confusedly identified by modern systems of thought, and this leads to the belief that rules of practice are also matters for subjective choice. Rules of practice, such as in the game of chess, exist and have authority solely to promote the attainment of goods internal to the activity of chess playing according to MacIntyre’s argument. Institutional rules, to follow the same example, rules established by chess federations, are established with the sole purpose of supporting the practice of chess playing and its internal rules. Thus, institutional rules, rules which govern institutions as the bearers of practices, have a different kind of authority; they are more mutable and less objective than rules of practice, less written into the constitutive activities of a practice (28–9). MacIntyre is somewhat sketchy here in drawing the distinction between the two types of rules. He seems to be trying to say that the authority of an institutional rule is largely positive and therefore much more a matter for subjective determination. Rules of practice, contrariwise, have an authority rooted in nature, because they are more closely related to the objective, intrinsic teleology of some activity. There may be many ways to organize the functioning of a laboratory of more or less equivalent value. But the proper way to conduct an inquiry in physical chemistry is something determined by the goal of physical inquiry – representational truth, as MacIntyre would have it – and here physical chemists do not so much decide which rules to observe in their inquiries as submit to discovered norms for success which are intrinsic to their activity. He is clearly trying to formulate in this essay, for the first time really, an account of how objective ethical norms, action-guiding rules for conduct, can be justified, but the essay represents only a first such attempt. It is short on details about the content of rules of practice, and leaves it to the reader’s imagination to fill in the details. For instance, with respect to the practice of physics, rules of this practice would presumably specify things concerning truthfulness in reporting one’s experimental results, justice in assessing the work of peers and in giving due credit to one’s assistants and subordinates, diligence in putting to the question so as to improve upon current recognized achievements in the discipline, and so forth. In another more or less contemporaneous essay, ‘What has Ethics to Learn from Medical Ethics?’ (1978h), the crisis facing modern moral agents as modern moral theorists is revisited, reflection on it provoked again, as was the case with the earlier ‘How Virtues become Vices’, by consideration of the ethical dilemmas facing contemporary medical practitioners. This time MacIntyre does not limit himself to the merely diagnostic, but he begins to offer a suggestion for a concrete remedy

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– one of generalizable value, though it is formulated here with specific reference to the medical practice. When physicians are confronted by ethical decisions, he notes, such as whether or not to inform terminally ill patients of their true medical status, or whether to prolong the life and so the suffering of patients by new technological means, it is natural for them to look to abstract ethical theory for answers. But abstract ethical theory itself is beset by interminable disagreement, and this owing to the distinctively modern way it frames ethical questions (1978h: 40–41). What are the features of modern ethical theory (contrasted with pre-modern or traditional ethical theory) that leave it needing to learn from rather than instruct the field of medical ethics? Re-stating and amplifying claims made in previous work, he identifies these as threefold. First, there is its conception of the moral agent as pre-social, a creature whose features we have already seen MacIntyre at work sketching. The moral agent is viewed by moral philosophy since Kant as an individual who both can and should abstract himself from social role, community and inherited tradition, and from this detached standpoint pronounce upon the moral worth of present social roles, institutions and practices. Moral value is thought to derive from individual self-determination, not from social context and social particularity. Human desire is viewed as pre-social (i.e. as socially un-constructed), and social and institutional links are regarded as almost entirely instrumental to self-realization. Secondly, moral rules are given a prominence which they previously lacked. For Aristotle and the culture for which he spoke, MacIntyre notes, practical reasoning is discussed without specific mention of moral rules. The moral action is the action the virtuous agent would carry out in the particular setting, and no set of antecedently specifiable rules can determine what the right moral action in many such settings is. The post-Kantian moral philosopher, however, is preoccupied with enumerating and justifying universal moral rules, and the moral agent as such (i.e. without a consideration of whether she or he possesses relevant virtues) is viewed as the judge of what rule or rules should apply to a given set of circumstances. Lastly, modern moral philosophy takes as its focus discrete human actions, whereas the focus of traditional moral philosophy was on character and the development of character throughout life as a whole. In treating human life as a whole, the traditional moral philosopher was concerned with specifying the goods of human life as such and their proper ordering one to another. But speculation about the substantive goods of a human life and a holistic perspective on individual human actions drops out of the picture in modern moral philosophy. The moral life, for a modern, is simply the life which respects the constraints of moral rules (1978h: 41). What, then, is the inevitable upshot of the methodology of modern moral philosophy, the essay asks? The answer: interminable and systematically unsettleable moral disagreement between rival standpoints. Why should we think that this is so? Because several centuries of argument between rival modern standpoints has led to no significant progress or consensus in morals. How is this so? Because, MacIntyre claims here, once moral problems are framed in the distinctively modern and individualistic way, there is no recognized rational procedure to determine which

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set of moral rules – whether Kantian, utilitarian, contractarian, or rights-based – should be adopted by the contemporary moral agent. Why, according to MacIntyre, is there no recognized rational procedure for arriving at moral first principles? Here he ventures what he admits can only be a hypothesis, and it is, in effect, this: that moral premises of a Kantian, Lockean, utilitarian and so on sort are deployed in ethical argument independent of their background assumptions and the contexts of justification relative to which they might be thought compelling. Kantian moral theorists, for instance, have now abandoned talk of a noumenal realm, as have utilitarians the tenets of Bentham’s philosophical psychology and epistemology. This deployment of free-standing ethical theses has the effect of masking from their respective adherents (whether moral philosophers of ordinary moral agents) the deeper causes of their ethical disagreements (42). What solution, then, does this essay offer to rectify this state of affairs? The answer: re-conceiving today’s moral problems along Aristotelian lines so that they can be seen either as pseudo-problems or as problems amenable of a publicly sharable rational solution. This would work in the following way. In concrete moral situations, MacIntyre notes, the Aristotelian approach requires us to view moral rules as arising out of social roles and relationships. These roles and relationships are seen in turn as structured by institutional arrangements, while institutional arrangements are predicated on some understanding of how the goods of a human life are to be ordered. The key to eliminating many characteristically modern moral problems is therefore the restructuring of institutions. With institutional change, MacIntyre argues, there is social role and relationship change, and moral rules come to take on a different shape, so many conflict-of-rival-moral-rules situations can be avoided from the outset. He attempts to illustrate how this highly programmatic suggestion might work by considering the case of medical ethical dilemmas, and then by drawing a larger point from these cases about ethical dilemmas generally. Medical institutional arrangements ought to be structured along one of two specified, lines according to his argument: the care provider must be understood as either friend or stranger – friend if he or she shares the same moral outlook as the patient, stranger otherwise. In the former case, roles and relationships will be informed by a common recognition of the authority of the shared goods which constitute the patient–care provider relationship, and informed therefore by a fundamental trust. Physician and nurse, for example, will not be thrust into circumstances where their differing intuitions of the ethical thing to do with respect to a patient will create moral conflicts. Likewise, a patient will be confident that the judgements of her physician are fundamentally trustworthy because framed within the same background conception of the good life as her own. But in health care contexts where patient and care provider lack a shared conception of the good, the relationship between them must be viewed as that between strangers. As is appropriate for such relationships, MacIntyre argues, everything in it must be structured by negotiated and enforceable contract. In this way, contractual constraints will prevent many difficult ethical problems from ever arising.

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The successful implementation of these proposals for the medical ethical realm can then hopefully teach ethics, he states here, that the moral agent is never a ghost, but is always an embedded, socially predetermined actor. Moral agency is exercised in and through social roles and social relationships. From our effective grappling with problems in the medical ethical realm, we can learn that ‘the moral agent turns out to be no more and no less than both the sum and the unity of his roles embodied in a single person’ (47). In consequence, ethical inquiry can re-learn that the question of which moral rules an agent ought to follow cannot profitably be addressed until the prior question has been addressed of what role(s) an agent has and what the nature of her relationships to others is in a concrete ethical situation. Ethical inquiry, therefore, MacIntyre concludes here, on a note of some significance for his future work, must also and inescapably be social and anthropological inquiry: inquiry, that is, about ‘whole forms of life … whole alternative ways of organizing our roles and relationships in such contexts as those of medical practice’ (47). In another essay also written in 1978, in this instance to advise the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in the USA on the matter of ‘How to Identify Ethical Principles’ (1978a), MacIntyre extends the attack on the idea of neutral (i.e. normative commitmentfree) meta-ethical analysis from his earlier work. In addressing this Commission of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, he notes how contemporary philosophers have for some time been seeking to define the moral point of view and to contrast it with the aesthetic or legal point of view, but that they have not reached any clear consensus on the matter and frequently reject one another’s candidate definition of the moral because of the kind of moral principles they take that definition to imply (as Elizabeth Anscombe, he notes, rejected much contemporary Oxford meta-ethics, and R.M Hare rejected Max Black’s and MacIntyre’s own definition of morality, 1978a: 12). This disagreement at the level of philosophical analysis, MacIntyre notes, mirrors disagreement at the level of the thought of today’s ordinary moral agents: our culture contains the inheritances of rival understandings of the ethical or moral. Both these sociological points suggest that the way one decides to define the ethical and the choice of one’s ethical principles come together as a package. Neutral analysis and clarification of what moral agents are doing in thinking, speaking and arguing ethically is therefore a myth, he argues. As this essay unfolds, though, he sketches what, as William Frankena recognized vis-à-vis the soon-to-be-written After Virtue, amounts to nothing less than a proposal, à la Stevenson or G.E. Moore and other significant figures in philosophy’s past, to re-found the science of ethics and reintroduce clarity and coherence into our present use of moral language (see Frankena, 1983). For MacIntyre, re-founding the science of ethics, as this brief report for the US government makes clear, involves our returning to an Aristotelian way of thinking about the ethical. The proposal for a return to Aristotle stated here is premised upon both a methodological observation/argument and two distinct substantive claims.

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As a hypothesis to explain the sociological fact that modern philosophers and ordinary modern agents disagree so noticeably in their definition of the ethical, MacIntyre suggests that both groups are unaware of the degree of scheme of belief plurality in contemporary Western society: something which in good part makes present ethical argument so intractable. Secondly, parties in the debate advance theses from past culturally inherited philosophical standpoints – Kantian, Lockean, Fichtean – without recognizing that these theses were once part of a larger overall scheme of belief, and that, deprived of this larger background context, these theses are deprived of cogency for anyone who does not already accept them. Without ethical argument moving to its background epistemological and metaphysical underpinnings, present ethical debate is reduced to the assertion and counter-assertion of rival theory-laden ethical premises, and so it gets nowhere. Premises in contemporary ethical argument are incommensurable: there is no shared standard against which considerations invoking, for example, a notion of autonomy can be weighed against those invoking a concept of the Golden Rule or against those invoking rights claims (12–13). On the methodological front, then, MacIntyre urges that given today’s scheme of belief plurality, ethical debate must be more explicitly linked with debate about background views concerning the nature of the self, knowledge, and world. Substantively, MacIntyre makes two claims in ‘How to Identify Ethical Principles’. The first is that there is not yet a useful theory-neutral characterization of the ethical as such, so the ethical principles in a given society can only be identified from the standpoint of some normative ethical theory or other: a theory about what ethical principles one should adopt. The second substantive claim is that the theory best suited to serve our ethical purposes is a broadly Aristotelian one, which the essay proceeds to sketch in useful broad strokes, advancing it as a conceptual rival to modern ethical theories. In depicting two ethical ideal types, one classical, one modern, MacIntyre notes as a partial cause of the confusion in ethical discussion today that the vocabulary of the former, particularly in its theistic instantiation, is mixed into our present ethical vocabulary, yet the background assumptions of this classical vocabulary are often rejected (this is a point familiar, of course, to readers of Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal essay, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’; see Anscombe, 1981: 26–41). Before addressing this matter, though, it is better first to treat the broadly Aristotelian way of identifying ethical principles that MacIntyre argues for in the essay. If we consider the class of action-enjoining utterances, he observes, we can distinguish a sub-class of these utterances – a sub-class whose reason for enjoining some action, as in ‘Do x’, is first-person relative. Here the action is enjoined on the basis of an individual’s – or a group’s – preferences, wishes, or wants. If one on the receiving end of this utterance were to ask in return ‘Why should I do x?’, the answer given would be along the lines of ‘Because I (or some other person or collectivity) want(s) you to.’ The reasons for action here are context-dependent, and may indeed lack any force depending on the kind of relation which obtains between the person enjoined to act and the person or persons on the basis of whose wants the act is enjoined.

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Moral reasons for action are of another sort, though, MacIntyre argues, and if we are able to grasp this, he thinks we can see how moral principles as such can be identified. A moral reason for action is both moral and a reason because it involves an appeal to some impersonal standard or authority. In this sense it is not context-relative in the way preference-based reasons for action are. The utterance ‘Do x because it is the just, or the courageous or the right thing to do’ invokes an impersonal standard for an action to measure up to, so it provides an impersonal reason for action (5–7). Since he thinks this distinction is crucial for identifying ethical principles, he also thinks it should draw our attention back to the classical theory of value: a theory which articulates an at least important strand of a past type of social order, namely fourth-century BC Athens (and, in modified form, a number of societies up through the High Middle Ages). MacIntyre identifies Aristotle as the theory’s best spokesman. What are the salient traits of this theory of value? In the first place, it treats the practical life as a seamless whole, and regards the ethical life and the political life as internally related dimensions of that whole. State and society are identified in the Aristotelian picture: that is, political institutions are to be designed to serve common ethical interests and commitments, those requirements of the moral community in subservience to which the political community is to be founded. Law is to be the expression of the community’s ethical values, though this needn’t have totalitarian implications as not everything deemed immoral need be made illegal. Nor, MacIntyre notes, need those who disagree with the common ethical values of the society/moral community be banished or excluded, but neither will they be allowed to set the society’s legal agenda (29). What are the moral values which will be constitutive of this community/political order? These are to be discovered and debated by rational means, but they will have much to do with the characteristic ends which humans seek (pleasure, honour, wealth, knowledge). Prominent among them will be the good of communal participation – participation in associations of friendship and in the political life of the community: no good man who is not a good citizen. Moral training, the reform and disciplining of human desire so that it gives proper due to each of the human goods and seeks none to destructive excess, will be considered mandatory for the young and a prerequisite for good citizenship. Virtues or dispositions habitually to seek and attain the goods of human life will be prized. Happiness will be viewed, not as some psychological state contingently connected to activity, but as that state of being internal to the harmonious exercise of the virtues in their pursuit of the characteristic goods of a human life. The common good of society will be the attainment by each of that happiness which is common to each, namely virtuous-living-in-community (16–20). MacIntyre bids us to consider next how different this theory of value is from that of modern individualism. From the modern individualist point of view, a shared vision of the good life is no longer considered rationally possible or even desirable. Politics and ethics are not to be cut from the same cloth: law enshrines only a part of morality, namely public morality or those set of rules established to

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protect individuals from interference one with another in their private pursuit of the good life and in their exercise of private morality. Society is viewed as constituted out of pre-existent individuals each with their own and very disparate ends/ultimate purposes. The common good of the social order is regarded as something procedural rather than substantive; promoting and contributing to the common good is no longer viewed as the object of each person’s true desire. The content of morality in this individualist social order consists of universal rules largely negative in form, rules which serve primarily to constrain individuals’ actions so as to secure mutual non-interference between members of the social order. This exigence in an individualist social order of interference-prevention and harm-avoidance leads naturally to the conceptual innovation of a contextless and self-evident ‘human right’ – a claim against such interference. Impersonal authority in morals is thought to derive not from norms inscribed in human nature or from inherited roles of past social practices, but from the convergence of the self-determinations of separate individuals. Differing accounts of the justification of universal binding moral rules (utilitarian, prescriptivist, universalizability-theoretic) are offered in this social order, but it will prove impossible to adjudicate between them because human nature as such, and the conditions for its flourishing, are no longer considered as a viable neutral court of appeal. Meta-ethical disagreement will necessarily therefore multiply in this social order and remain inconclusive, yet its participants will be blinded to the cause of the intractable nature of their ethical disagreements. The modern individualist thus views moral conduct as of purely instrumental as opposed to intrinsic value, MacIntyre notes, and typically she or he posits some purely psychological component in human nature (whether sympathy, the passions, an altruistic instinct, fear of death) as the cause of or reason for human moral behaviour – behaviour, that is, which is no longer regarded as of intrinsic worth. Social institutions, too, are also seen as merely instrumental to the achievement of individual ends and purposes. MacIntyre concludes this essay by admitting that this overly broad contrast between the classical and the modern ethical ideal types has its limitations, but that since society today contains a mélange of fragments of past rival moral conceptions, the task of today’s ethicist cannot be that of a neutral analysis – neutral analysis of what, in view of the constitution of today’s social order, must be the confused and incoherent moral consciousness of the ordinary agent within it. This so-called neutral analysis is all too likely to generalize from the very peculiar characteristics of modern society and believe it is arriving at timelessly valid results, results true of the ethical as such, or of human ethical consciousness as such. But this style of analysis, for lack of sociological awareness and historical perspective, is simply denying itself access to or irrationally shielding itself from the challenge of rival modes of ethical outlook and ethical commitment (e.g. of the type this essay has been trying to recover in its elucidation of the classical theory of value). The task for today’s ethicist instead, MacIntyre states here, is partisan conceptual reconstruction: reconstruction which draws upon the fragments inherited from our predecessor cultures as the materials

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for building anew (40–41 – a task, it should be noted, at which MacIntyre’s A Short History of Ethics was already a first attempt). Although he attempts some such reconstruction in ‘How to Identify Ethical Principles’, it is of a fairly restricted sort. His claim is that the concept of ‘virtue’, in spite of its being differently construed by the different moral traditions we have inherited, can serve as the basis for the kind of impersonal authority we need to guide our ethical lives. It can be supplemented by an account of ‘goods internal to a practice’, items also of impersonal authority whose worth too is not a function of individual choice. The new moral theory we are seeking is not to be supplemented by the notion of a contextless ‘right’ for MacIntyre, though: without context (i.e. specification of relationship, role and history of the practice or practices), there simply are no rational criteria available to specify what is or is not a legitimate right, and so rights talk must necessarily become arbitrary and irrational (31–2). As for the invocation of ‘virtue’, this essay argues that there is a core set of these – three, in fact: truthfulness, fairness and courage – which are constitutive of human society as such and can serve therefore as an uncontroversial rational basis for further speculation about the impersonal moral authority of other virtues over personal-cum-social life. MacIntyre does not engage in that speculation here, however, though what he has done here clearly anticipates the central arguments of After Virtue. On the matter of rights discourse per se, the first extended treatment prior to After Virtue of the claim that human rights discourse is rationally unsupportable, and so cannot serve as the rational basis for any universalist ethic, is given in an essay authored about the same time as the previous essay entitled, ‘The Right to Die Garrulously’ (1978g). Here MacIntyre connects thoughts about modern rights discourse with a sociological preoccupation of his which extends back to his early days (see MacIntyre, 1956b, for example): the peculiarity of attitudes toward death in secular modernity. Can, he asks in ‘The Right to Die Garrulously’, a previously consenting adult headed toward a condition of extreme, unrelievable pain, or toward severe brain damage, have a right to have their life terminated? In answering this question he prescinds from considering rights claims qua justified by enactments of positive law, or by the practice of promise-making, and considers instead another widespread form of justification: the appeal to human rights as something natural and therefore universal – an appeal made for instance in the US Declaration of Independence or in the UN Declaration of Human Rights or in Ronald Dworkin’s Taking Rights Seriously (Dworkin, 1976). The point of the essay is to show how the existence claims made on behalf of universal human rights hold no water; the twist in the essay is the claim that a certain right – the right to die in a certain fashion, namely garrulously – can be ascribed to persons inhabiting a certain kind of social order, but a social order conspicuously different from that of cosmopolitan modernity. Why does MacIntyre think we should not believe in universal human rights? Because, as he argues here, no one has yet given a compelling demonstration of

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their existence: claims of their self-evidence are philosophically untenable, and the appeal by philosophers to their ‘intuitions’ is but a stratagem to conceal the arbitrariness and groundlessness behind universal human rights talk. As a hypothesis to explain why human rights talk abounds today, he suggests that it derives from the social and cultural fragmentation which is part and parcel of social modernization. For moderns, he observes, the ties of family, community, neighbourhood and so on have been weakened to the point that they can no longer provide the paradigm for expressing attitudes of care and concern toward strangers. We are forced now to look for a more fundamental basis for respecting the dignity of strangers, and we are left with but the reason that she or he is a human being; in the breakdown of community, human rights discourse so fills a social void and meets a social need. Yet, MacIntyre notes, unless it appeals to revealed or philosophical theology, such discourse also lacks any non-pragmatic rational justification, so it lacks non-arbitrary criteria for application (1978g: 83; this matter is revisited more cogently and at greater length in his later essay ‘Are There any Natural Rights?’; see MacIntyre, 1983b). And rights claims derived from a consideration of abstract humanity tend largely to involve the identification of negative rights to non-interference; they far more rarely have anything to do with motivating us to positive care and concern for persons in need (1978g: 83). MacIntyre concedes in this essay that rights can certainly be said to exist inasmuch as they are the product of positive law or of promises. But there is another legitimate form of rights justification, and here he returns us again to the notion of social practices. Rights can and do exist, he argues, in the context of practices: practices, that is, with their socially established, rule-governed activities in pursuit of specifiable goods internal to those activities (76). The game of chess is an example of such a practice: in chess, for instance, white has the ‘right’ to move first. But what then of, for example, a supposed ‘right to death’? , In contrast with traditional social orders such as those in pre-modern Ireland, Africa, and Asia, or those of various Native American tribes or social orders of the European Middle Ages, MacIntyre notes, there is no ‘practice’ of dying in the modern secular social order. There are therefore no public criteria available for secular moderns for reckoning that one has died well or died badly; neither are there are any warranted natural rights with respect to death. But in traditional social orders, MacIntyre observes, death has a social significance: the marking of an individual’s death is a public and communal event commemorating the deceased’s contribution to the overarching project of the community and signalling the transition of the deceased to a new role in the life of the community (e.g. in spirit or as ancestor). In a traditional society, one can ‘die well’ – that is, one can approach death properly – or one can die badly. Dying well is done by appropriately discharging one’s role in the community in one’s final days: not only paying one’s debts and having acknowledged and rectified one’s errors, but also passing on one’s acquired wisdom as a member of the community, transmitting to the young the past inheritances of tradition of which the elders in every social order are the custodians. If those

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approaching death have a right, then, the essay concludes, it is a right, conferred by the rules of the practice of death in their social order, to die garrulously (80). Although MacIntyre doesn’t argue here for the superiority of the traditional attitude toward death over the modern one, his sympathies with the former are evident and acknowledged. The retrieval of a connection between the event of death and our collective sense of the past and future would help us, he thinks, cure our own present sense of social rootlessness – our perception of being alienated from the past. So he declares himself proud to be ‘mediaeval’ in this specific sense, since the Middle Ages represented a triumph over ensuing barbarism precisely by drawing on the preserved resources of the ancient world. The way forward for us moderns too, the argument goes here, lies in drawing on the at least partially preserved resources of pre-modern forms of society (we anticipate clearly here the denouement of After Virtue). Three such indispensable resources identified in this essay and matter for MacIntyre’s future exploration are pre-modern attitudes towards (a) death, (b) personal identity-in-community, and (c) community identity through time (1978g: 81–3). MacIntyre’s next piece of ethical writing prior to After Virtue, the 1979 essay ‘Corporate Modernity and Moral Judgement: Are They Mutually Exclusive?’ (1979d), flows from his earlier work on corporate cost-benefit analysis which we have examined previously, and extends its central thesis. Though the argument of ‘Corporate Modernity’ is sketchy, even highly undeveloped in places, it represents a development in his continuing preoccupation with modern social and moral fragmentation. He had insisted elsewhere, especially in A Short History of Ethics, that moral beliefs are unintelligible apart from the background social conditions which structure them and provide their specific context of application. In this essay he seeks to show how the new and distinctively modern entity of the corporation introduces powerful and injurious tensions into both the societies in which it is present and the moral lives of those in its employ. His earlier ‘Utilitarianism and Cost-benefit Analysis: An Essay on the Relevance of Moral Philosophy to Bureaucratic Theory’ had argued that the allegedly valueneutral cost-benefit analysis of the bureaucratic manager corresponds in fact to a utilitarian form of practical reasoning, sharing its deficiencies and assumptions. Here he concedes that the corporations employing these managers may also have an Aristotelian dimension to them, since they may require of their white-collar employees involvement in voluntary activities (e.g. trusteeship on boards of hospitals or universities) aimed at promoting the good of the local or the wider community (i.e. the good of man as such). But then, MacIntyre notes, we have the problem of corporations embodying what are really rival and incompatible forms of practical reasoning. MacIntyre wants in this essay to make a further and different, if less well argued, point as well: that in their allegiance to and promotion of on the one hand virtues related to bureaucratic efficiency – impersonality, the routinization of role, team spirit – and on the other hand virtues related to corporate adaptability – personal

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ingenuity, improvisation in the face of unforeseen circumstance, independentmindedness – corporations require of their executives incompatible sets of qualities (1979d: 123). They avoid making their mid-level executives dysfunctionally divided in practice by requiring them to wear, depending on the circumstance, opposed and opposing character masks. But in this way the corporate employee really is turned into a divided self. And disunity of moral life within the corporation is compounded by disunity of life without (this claim about the modern self as characteristically a divided self is revisited more powerfully in MacIntyre’s fairly recent Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture, ‘Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency’; see 1999b). We modern moral agents, MacIntyre observes here, tend to have multiple moral selves: as family members, we may be Kantians committed to duty over inclination; as members of corporations we may be on some occasions Benthamite utilitarians, on other occasions neo-Aristotelians; and, as citizens or politicians, we may often be a-philosophical pragmatists eschewing metaphysical and moral debate in search of short-term solutions to the conflicts endemic in the modern social order – conflicts between the competing interests of family, church, hospital, university and corporation. Fragmentation and disunity and incoherence are within us and on our every side (1979d: 125–9). What, MacIntyre asks, are the prospects today for our recovering unity and integrity in our individual and collective moral lives? Hope lies not, he states, in those types of contemporary analytic moral philosophy which in seeking merely to analyse the language of morals leave everything as it is and fail to see the crucial social and psychological facts about our present disunity and moral incoherence. Nor does it lie in that giving up on an integral moral self which is represented at opposite poles by Erving Goffman’s cynical liquidation of the self into its diverse and incompatible social roles, or by Jean-Paul Sartre’s destruction of the social and historical identity of the self and his identification of the self with its ‘authentic’ personal commitments independent of their content and social embodiment (129– 32). All such solutions, for MacIntyre, are symptoms of the age rather than cures for its ills. What is needed in our fragmented modern societies instead, he argues revisiting points from his very first ethical writings, is the capacity both to understand and rationally to justify objective moral judgements. But neither the corporate self nor the Goffmanian nor Sartrean self are actually capable of making moral judgements: the first because in lacking a concept of essential human nature (i.e. human nature independent of its social and institutional roles), it lacks a concept of the good of man as such which might serve as a critical frame of reference on the present social order and anchor and render coherent moral claims; the second two because they are without the possibility of appealing to those impersonal standards and impersonal criteria for action without which moral judgements are impossible (1979d: 132). MacIntyre is presupposing here, of course, the success of his earlier arguments about the nature of moral judgement which we have examined in Sections 1.1. and 1.3 above.

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The way forward, his argument continues here, is through a creative revival, so he would have us learn from pre-capitalist, pre-modern societies such as ‘ancient Greek city-states and modern Greek highland villages, medieval Christian and Arab kingdoms and Scottish highland clans before 1600, the Sioux nation, the Bedouin of the Western desert, and the Irish of the Blasket islands’ (132). In these societies, conspicuously, he notes, the familial, the social and the political have at least the possibility of existing in harmony and coherence, because each dimension is viewed as inter-related parts of an overarching cosmic order. The same moral principles apply to each sphere of life in these traditional social orders, so that the political realm in them is not a realm for bargaining and pragmatic compromise between rival fundamental moral conceptions. The practice of moral judgement is also possible in them, he adds, because the sine qua non social conditions for the moral judgement are met: namely, a shared overall interpretation of existence, a shared notion of the good for man as such, and a unity between the social, the political and the legal (133–4). By way of elaboration, ‘Corporate Modernity’ observes that in traditional and pre-modern societies, the social order is viewed as a microcosm of a sacred cosmic order; therefore, concepts such as honour and insult, obscenity and blasphemy have the publicly shared and recognized criteria of application which they lack in modern social orders. Honour is that esteem owed to one according to one’s place in the social order, insult the failure to give honour to whom honour is due; blasphemy is any deliberate challenge to the social-cum-divine cosmic order, obscenity any public challenge to the social ordering of sexual relations. Birth and death are not regarded, as in modern societies, as private affairs, but as events in the life of the community, and they are accorded public ceremonial recognition in consequence. The deceased and the elderly are not marginalized or disenfranchised, but play an ongoing role in the life and direction of the society: the collective memory they nourish and sustain is seen as integral to community life. With respect to these pre-modern societies, which MacIntyre thinks provide exemplary climates for the pursuit of the good life, the society of free-market capitalism and its successor society, corporate modernity, should be understood as the exception and the deviant case, not as any kind of presumptive norm (133–4). Unsurprisingly, MacIntyre ends this essay by identifying as the question for moral agents of our time whether they will allow their moral lives to be structured by the peculiar social conditions of the modern world, or whether instead they will try to live them out in some kind of traditional, pre-modern social setting – one by its nature is intellectually and culturally incompatible with its modern counterpart. On the crucial question of how taking this second route is feasible today, MacIntyre remains silent here. Again we look ahead to the work of After Virtue and its followup writings. There are yet three essays worth examining before looking at the set of extended moral arguments in After Virtue. The first of these, ‘Seven Traits for the Future’ (1979b), was a contribution to a symposium on the topic of ‘Designing Our

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Descendants’, and in it MacIntyre gives us an interesting list of prescriptions for the ideal moral agent of the present day, mindful as he is of the way that the list of action dispositions or virtues which are indispensable must vary with environment and social context. This piece provides a handy summary of his ethical commitments at the end of the 1970s. Given the possibility of radical conceptual innovation, he notes in ‘Seven Traits’, the human future remains systematically unpredictable, so today’s moral agent must first of all be able to acknowledge and to live with future uncertainty. In the shadow of that uncertainty, she or he must secondly have a secure base from which to operate, and so must be rooted in the particularity of home, neighbourhood, cultural and/or religious tradition. Thirdly, today’s rightly oriented moral agent must learn how to engage in non-manipulative personal relations in order that her or his rootedness in particularity not lead to prejudice against, and mistreatment of, those rooted in different particularities. Integrity in our inter-personal relationships, demands, MacIntyre observes, that in striving to persuade others to share our point of view, we appeal not to our own preferences as standards in argument, but to impersonal standards for human flourishing (1979b: 5). The fourth desirable trait cited by this essay on right moral agency is a capacity to find a sense of vocation in our profession and in our work. In view of the uncertainties of the future we must learn to discover the unique contribution we can make to the present and the intrinsic value of that contribution, whatever the future may hold. Fear of death is something we must learn to overcome, so the capacity to accept death with a correct attitude is a fifth trait MacIntyre urges we should acquire here. A correct attitude toward our death involves viewing our present life as a link in a chain, a chain in which we should be content to have a finite and particular place – and beyond which we should not desire to encroach (e.g. into what is allotted for the next generation to confront). More controversially, MacIntyre identifies as a sixth desirable trait acquisition of an attitude of hope – a hope that in spite of the very real and intimidating presence of evil in the world, our collective future will improve and good will win over evil. Since, ‘Seven Traits’ argues, there is not compelling evidence to support this desired outcome, the hope we need requires of us belief in an evidence-transcending reality (MacIntyre sounds distinctly like a Kantian-style theist here). Such a belief, he adds, requires us to reject any wholly secular conception of reason: the Enlightenment programme for moral progress through the advance of scientific rationality and the elimination of religious belief has not, he argues, led to the elimination of superstition, but often to its hand-in-hand increase alongside scientific progress (as, for example, in the culture of California today). Religious hope and scientific rationality must therefore become partners for the future (7). Lastly, trait seven: today’s rightly disposed moral agent must possess a ‘willingness to take up arms’ to defend the projects and commitments and values that we hold dear, and which as human history has shown, can never be preserved without the willingness to engage in, and win, armed conflict. With a fine ironic twist, though, MacIntyre ends the essay by observing that the whole bureaucratic idea and project

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of designing descendants is itself contrary to the list of desirable traits for future generations he has been enumerating, so the project should be rejected as entirely wrong-headed. MacIntyre’s penultimate essay on ethical topics prior to the publication of After Virtue, ‘Regulation a Substitute for Morality’ (1980a), is a useful piece for clarifying his views on what exactly is wrong with the modern social order. Taking the social circumstances of the United States, as he frequently does, to typify the moral quandaries of the modern world, he identifies as a deep and unresolvable tension in American society the commitment to two antagonistic and incompatible moral traditions. On the one hand, he notes, American history since the American founding has been shaped by a republican ideal: one in which the polity is viewed as an association of friends with common public aims, in which civic virtue is upheld as a good for each and for all, and in which the creation and maintenance of community is seen as integral to the social and political ordering of things, and law is seen both as an expression of the commonly shared values of the community and as a last resort to punish those who breach those norms that are constitutive and sustaining of community (1980a: 31). Yet there is a second moral tradition present in the American as in other modern social orders, MacIntyre observes – an individualist one. In this tradition, society is viewed as an association of strangers with diverse ultimate aims, motivations, and purposes. The political order exists to protect private interests from encroachment from other citizens, and law is seen not as the expression of any substantive values of the community or as a punitive last resort, but as a system of norms to be obeyed out of fear and self-interest and as an immediate sanction to counteract infringements on the rights of individuals within the political order. Given the tension between these rival and incompatible moral outlooks in modern social orders such as the United States – and given the absence of moral consensus such tension causes – regulation, he notes, becomes the necessary but unhappy means of maintaining some kind of public moral order: ‘regulation is the best we can do … it is a minimal device that has been developed in order to compensate for the grave defects of a culture where the fabric of morality is being torn apart and where the government cannot act in the ways that we would want it to if moral community were a real possibility’ (33). The point here of course is: no shared moral vision, no possibility of moral community – only non-rational bureaucratic management of ideological and value conflicts between balkanized sub-communities. In what is effectively MacIntyre’s final essay on ethics prior to the publication of After Virtue, a contribution to a symposium on the foundations of ethics entitled ‘Why Is the Search for the Foundations of Ethics So Frustrating?’ (1981c), we are given a diagnosis of how and why contemporary moral philosophy must fail in its selfassigned task of reintroducing order, coherence, and intelligibility into our present moral discourse and behaviour – and a brief statement as well of MacIntyre’s own recipe for a return to such order. The essay moves handily from diagnosis of moral

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crisis to aetiology of the crisis to a fundamental criticism of the dominant attempts at resolving the crisis to MacIntyre’s own recommendation for its resolution. He argues first here that the perceived need within a culture to search for the foundations of ethics is itself the sign of a nascent moral crisis in that culture. And in our present culture, he adds, revisiting a frequent earlier theme, evidences of a crisis can also be seen in the incommensurability of the moral premises advanced by protagonists in today’s moral debates. The social order of the modern world is united in its search for a shared secular morality, and yet in contemporary ethical debate among philosophers (as well as among ordinary agents), rival and incompatible means of justifying this sought-after common, secular morality are advanced – utilitarian, neo-contractarian, universalizability-theoretic, intuitionist – but no party has shown itself capable of winning over the adherents of current rival approaches to moral justification, while each typically has been capable of pointing out damaging limitations in the positions of the others. There is a problem of consensus at the level of first principles, so that present moral argument is either interminable – each party vindicating its theory, relative to its own particular premises, against its rivals – or it is too brief, a matter of perceived victory through what is really no more than unjustified assertion and counter-assertion (1981c: 16). MacIntyre returns here to suggesting that an incapacity to convince rivals implies a degree of arbitrariness in the adoption of one’s own theory and its premises. He seems to overstate the point: one clearly can have good reasons for theory x without at the same time possessing good reasons for the inadequacy or falsity of rival theory y, but the thought is meant to provoke a certain disquiet – especially when, as is conspicuously the case today, adherents of rival moral theories x, y, and z inhabit the same social order and live more or less peaceably side by side (which, as MacIntyre reminds us, is something of a novel development in the history of human civilization). Presupposing as he does here a realist theory of truth, MacIntyre is also relying on the thought that as one’s reasons for affirming theory x increase, so should one’s capacity to identify shortcomings in rival theories. Failure to have such critical resources provided by one’s theory implies that one’s reasons for embracing that theory, and perhaps also the de facto warrant for the theory, are suspiciously weak. As to the aetiology of our present moral crisis, MacIntyre now gives this in a more ample form than previously. The social and political order which is the modern world exists as the confluence of past rival moral-cum-metaphysical traditions. These traditions have become disfigured in their encounter with one another to the extent that often their respective adherents no longer recognize themselves as the inheritors of traditions, and with the result that the schemes of belief of which each tradition is a bearer have each lost much of their respective integrity (17). This sociological situation – modern society as a mélange of inconsistent fragments from past social orders and world-views – has ramifications for the modes of inquiry in modern society. As moral premises are unknowingly affirmed and advanced outside of the schemes of belief in which they were once at home – and relative to which they were originally thought justifiable – ethical inquiry has come to be viewed as an autonomous (i.e. self-sufficient, MacIntyre really means to say here) discipline:

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whence the unsurprising failure of contemporary attempts to restore order to our moral discourse and intelligibility and consensus-attaining justification to our moral commitments (22). So on the one hand, MacIntyre notes, for lack of historical information and perspective, present-day moralists of the likes of R.M Hare, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls simply replay the debates of their not fully acknowledged predecessors in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and simply re-enact the inconclusiveness of those debates. Meanwhile, others err in assuming that the ethical is an autonomous realm, and engage in piecemeal, clarificatory analysis of what ‘we’ mean by this or that ethical concept, where the range of the ‘we’ is much more restricted than they are aware or will admit. Or they try to construct an ethical theory by introducing order and harmony into our intuitions without taking sufficient stock of the fact that the modern world is a world of plural and conflicting moral intuitions, and that an appeal to intuitions alone, or to vague and unjustified or purely formal conceptions of ‘being rational’, gives us no rational decision-procedure to handle conflicts between individual rules, nor do they provide us with any means to prioritize our values. Decisions of how to prioritize values today – for example, Rawls’s ranking of liberty ahead of equality – rest instead on nothing more than unjustified and unphilosophical assumptions – for example, spirit of the age conceptions of what a reasonable person would do (17). In addition to this, analytic moral philosophy is often blinkered, MacIntyre notes, by the unargued for liberal, middle-class assumptions of the overwhelming majority of its practitioners. But its uncritical liberalism is all the more unconvincing today when philosophers no longer accept the original epistemological foundations of many liberal beliefs. Few accept any more, he reminds us, Kant’s view of the powers of reason, or Bentham’s philosophical psychology, or the American Founding Fathers’ belief in self-evident moral truths (18). On the basis of these considerations, this helpful summary essay of MacIntyre’s ethical thinking at the end of the 1970s concludes on the following striking note: present-day liberalism is foundationless, a search for its foundations is bound to frustrate (22). Of course, by now many liberal theorists have come to accept and even embrace this conclusion and are engaged in non- or anti-foundationalist forms of moral and political theory construction. What, then, is MacIntyre’s own remedy, circa 1981 at any rate, for this crisis? It is a remedy motivated by an analogy he draws between the state of morals in presentday society and that in eighteenth-century Polynesia. Following anthropologists Fritz Steiner and Mary Douglas, he interprets the ‘taboos’ of eighteenth-century Polynesia – those observed by Captain James Cook and swiftly abolished by the King of Polynesia, Kamehameha II, only forty years later – as moral prohibitions in a society whose members had come to lose a sense of the prohibitions’ original point, purpose, and justification. Today’s moral concepts and moral rules can be viewed similarly, he argues – as fragmentary and no-longer-understood-in-context survivals of past schemes of belief. But what must be resisted quite firmly, he adds, is the temptation arising out of a lack of historical perspective to give some non-

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naturalistic interpretation to the ethical concepts and principles of the modern social order: an interpretation which would have served as a pseudo-explanation for the raison d’être of taboo in Polynesian society. Moral concepts and rules arise out of and serve socially established practices and the institutions which support these practices, and on this piece of moral phenomenology, this account of the origin of moral concepts as such, MacIntyre will be willing to rest his own theory of morality. To the phenomenological claim that moral concepts and rules are spontaneously generated in the unfolding of socially established practices, he will add the normative claim that their warrant resides in the way in which they do or do not effectively subserve the flourishing of such practices. The systematic irresolvability of modern moral argument is explicable, then, he claims here, in the light of the scheme of belief differences which lie behind the rival moral principles advanced by the parties in contemporary moral debate. The hope for rational adjudication between rival moral conceptions (and here again we can observe MacIntyre’s abiding rationalism, his interest in and belief in the possibility of rational consensus in morals) is by a return to a consideration of the background beliefs in the context of which the ethical beliefs were first formed. So the way forward for present-day moral inquiry, he concludes, is by a return to comprehensive moral-cum-epistemological-cum-metaphysical inquiry – a return to ‘the moral sciences’ in Mill’s sense, or Geisteswissenschaften in its German rendering – and an end to autonomous ethical inquiry and analysis. Far from serving as a potential solution to the problem of today’s ethical dissensus, piecemeal ethical analysis and argument is, in MacIntyre’s oft-stated view, but a symptom of that fragmentation of systematic belief-systems – a fragmentation that is in good part the cause of the persistence of moral dissensus. Ethical inquiry must instead become historically informed and trace the meaning of ethical terms back to the original systematic contexts in which they were once at home (1981c: 22). The stage is now set, at least as far as MacIntyre’s ethical views are concerned, for a consideration of the historical narratives of After Virtue and what might be called the After Virtue trilogy.

Chapter 2

Philosophy and the Exigence of Praxis

Marx’s philosophy would necessarily … appear nonsensical except to a person who, I will not say shared his desire to make the world better by means of a philosophy, but at least regarded that desire as a reasonable one. (R.G. Collingwood, as quoted in MI: 37) One key task of philosophy is to criticize other philosophy, not only – even if most importantly – in the interests of truth but also because, whether philosophers will it so or not, philosophical ideas are influential in social, moral and political life. (HM: 7)

2.1 The Appeal of Marx: A First Estimation MacIntyre’s involvement in the Communist party in his youth, noted earlier (see page xvii above), gave rise to a series of intellectual explorations in and around Marxist themes in his early scholarly years. The first of these, a short monograph entitled Marxism: An Interpretation, he authored, remarkably, at age 23. This work was revised and a new introduction added to it in 1968 to become Marxism and Christianity, and a second edition with a new introduction added to this was published in 1995. The first work is written against a background commitment to ‘the possibility of understanding the world in Christian terms’ in spite of the acknowledged difficulties in this enterprise (MI: 5). This commitment is linked to the book’s theme: as in Marxism: An Interpretation, MacIntyre argues that Marxism is a derivatively Christian metaphysics which in spite of its many shortcomings provides the best vehicle for the influence of Christian ideas in the modern world of science, technology, and largescale power politics. (By ‘metaphysics’ here, he means, roughly, a ‘rational myth’, a not fully justified world-view which provides its adherents with an indispensable framework of belief to guide their action and practices; MI: 13, 117). MacIntyre’s enthusiasm for Marxism will abate by the late 1960s, owing to his abhorrence at the consequentialistically justified political atrocities of then Marxist regimes, but his esteem for much of what he will identify as the core of Marx’s thought will remain. He is unwilling in Marxism: An Interpretation to embrace Marx’s atheism, which he sees as an unwarranted, a priori assumption stemming from Marx’s

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adherence to metaphysical materialism and from the restricted notion of rationality Marx inherits from Hegel, according to which, a priori, the practice of prayer and the I–Thou relationship with God it implies cannot be accounted rational. But he finds Marxism superior to the other wholly secular world-view then on offer in the early 1950s, Vienna circle logical positivism, since he notes Marxism has, unlike logical positivism, a sophisticated if finally unsatisfactory explanation of the human religious impulse, and because it treats religious discourse as at least meaningful, if misguided (MI: 9–10). Why, though, MacIntyre’s early attraction to Marxism, which he acknowledges as a Christian heresy, over and above an attraction to some denominational version of Christianity? It has been from the beginning, and remains, his conviction (see MC, 1995: v–xxxi) that Christians need to learn from Marx and Marxist theory about important parts of Christianity which they have a tendency to ignore, forget or suppress. Interestingly, the thematic key to Marxism: An Interpretation is the identification of the biblical parable of the Last Judgment, the dividing of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31–5), as the over-arching framework for the Christian religion. The work then moves to a broad examination of the thought of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx in the light of this parable. As MacIntyre interprets it, the parable concerning the Last Judgment makes clear that Christians must see as the chief task in their life the exercise of mercy and compassion, and the identification and rectification of specific injustices. But they must go about these good works mindful that only at the end of history, and only by God, can evil individuals be identified and separated from the good. So the Christian must approach the redemptive task of combating specific evils mindful that she or he is also born of sin and under judgment – and mindful that the identity of the elect, whether inside or outside the Church, will remain a mystery until it is pronounced upon by God Himself at the end of time. What, then, does MacIntyre think Christians have to learn from Marx as regards this parable? The book answers this question when it has first detailed both deficient historical responses by Christians to the parable and Hegel’s heterodox and innovative interpretation of the parable which will condition the later philosophical work of Feuerbach and Marx. By way of background, MacIntyre notes that Christianity has radically altered our conception of the relation between the secular and the sacred. Whereas in the pre-Christian world the sacred and the secular are more or less identified, in Christianity they are distinguished and their relation is rendered problematical (MI: 11-–2). Every secular order is viewed as defective from the Christian perspective because permeated by sinfulness, and so each stands under judgment before, and is seen as failing to measure up to, the transcendent sacred order. By its radical critique of all theologies of immanence, all identifications of a worldly social or political order with the sacred or with the kingdom of God, Christianity engenders its own kind of atheism: a rejection, that is, of all false gods in the name of the one true God (MI: 12). But after Christianity, the possibility remains for either a bourgeois compartmentalization of sacred and secular, which MacIntyre argues is to be deplored, or an elimination of the sacred while retaining the Christian

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critique of all theologies of immanence. In this second alternative he sees the remote inspiration for Marx’s thought, but first we should examine his claims about the failures typical of dominant strands of historical Christianity. Orthodox Protestants, he maintains, owing to their peculiar and extrinsicist understanding of justification by faith, have tended to a this-worldly passivity before the injustices of this world: they have paid too much attention to the Christ who is to come, and not enough to the Christ who has come – too much attention to individual salvation, and not enough to the redemption of social structures in the present life. Liberal Protestants, for their part, have often been guilty of a this-worldly activism and an un-Christian optimism, forgetting that even the redeemed remain creatures of sin and imperfection and are themselves in need of continual reform and repentance. As for traditional Christian orthodoxy, it, he claims, has been able to balance redemptive action with humble acknowledgement of the sinfulness of the co-redeeming, but it has at times tended to void the mystery behind the identity of the just by identifying them too closely with the community of believers – with those publicly and outwardly engaged in acts of religious observance (MI: 21–2). Hegel’s thought, though, as MacIntyre interprets it and is attracted by it, represents a way of avoiding these mistakes by recognizing the central importance of religious history in the eventual realization of human freedom. Hegel focuses on history and exclusively this-worldly well-being while employing what are derivatively categories of Christian theology: ‘self-estrangement’ (Selbst-Entfremdung), ‘objectification’ (Vergegenstandlichung), and ‘coming to one’s own’ (Aneignung, MI: 21). According to Hegel’s philosophical history, MacIntyre notes, the Greeks attained a happy balance between the secular and the sacred, the transcendent and the immanent, and the individual and the social. But the Jewish religion contributed to human self-estrangement both by making the moral law something external to and standing over and against the human conscience, and by dividing man from man, as the Abrahamic people become wanderers seeking a destiny separate from others. Christ then seeks to restore to the human heart the place of the moral law, but he is rejected by Jewish political society and the Jewish religious establishment, and Christian preaching hereafter becomes aimed at the individual and the other-worldly salvation of the individual. Thus begins a further split between the religious and the political, the sacred and the secular, the individual and the collective (MI: 23–5). We will see how this Hegelian concern with the immanent – and with reconciling the immanent and the transcendent – shapes MacIntyre’s later account of moral goodness. But to continue for now with Marxism: An Interpretation, MacIntyre notes that whereas for Hegel Christianity contains important symbolic truths, it errs (as religions are bound to do for Hegel, since they are borne of human selfestrangement) by objectifying its symbols. Human salvation can be found instead only in philosophy, where reason shows how self-estrangement has dominated the past and how a coming-to-one’s-own can obtain in the future through an interiorizing of the truths of religion. History is thus seen to lead, by a dialectic of opposites, from unfreedom to freedom: it begins with human estrangement from the wrongly objectified forces of nature and society, and it leads us on to a free, enlightened society

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which Hegel identifies with, as existing in its best form at present, the Prussian state of his own day (MI: 25–6). MacIntyre’s treatment of Hegel here has something of a second-hand quality to it and shows a lack of thorough acquaintance with the texts in question. His engagement with Feuerbach, and especially Marx, at this stage of his career is more careful. Unsurprisingly, MacIntyre rejects Hegel’s depiction of history and his identification of the desired political condition of society with early nineteenthcentury Prussia. More fundamentally, he rejects Hegel’s idealistic rationalism. As he states here: ‘What distorts Hegel’s thinking is his refusal to make his thought conform to historical reality. Hegel seeks to deliver man by right thinking. But he claims for thinking an autonomy the Bible never gives to it. Man as a thinker is not autonomous: he belongs to a material world, from which his thinking arises’ (MI: 28). In spite of these criticisms, MacIntyre retains an interest in Hegel’s secular application of the categories of sin and redemption to history, and he therefore values Feuerbach’s anti-idealist appropriation of the Hegel’s legacy. Feuerbach, he notes, rightly rejects Hegel’s idealism – thought is conditioned by being, not being by thought – and rightly stresses, against Hegel, the social conditioning of the individual’s thought (MI: 34). But while attracted by Feuerbach’s as by Hegel’s attempt to reform society through secularizing the Christian message, MacIntyre thinks that both attempts share important shortcomings. Both see the work of social reform as merely a matter of criticism and the triumph of right thinking: ‘Hegel and Feuerbach are quite frankly attempting to realise Christianity in secular terms; both attempt to rid it of myth in order to do this. This leads both of them to see the path of our redemption as through hard thinking. This is an illusion which the Bible does not share’ (MI: 36). It is left to Marx to counteract the excessive intellectualism of Hegelianisms of both the left (such as Feuerbach) and the right, though MacIntyre will see Marx’s approach to this task as conditioned by Hegel’s own system of thought throughout. While he admits that Marx regarded Hegelian theoretical philosophy as the near culmination of the discipline, MacIntyre praises Marx for noticing the gap between the real world of men in the Prussia of Hegel’s time and Hegel’s fanciful and falsifying description of the Prussian social order. And he seconds Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s identification of society with the state – and Hegel’s choice of constitutional monarchy instead of democracy as the most desirable and most rational form of political organization. With Marx, MacIntyre also holds that any granting of political rights by a state which ignores the inequalities of birth, occupation and property does not genuinely serve that society of humans which precedes the state (MI: 46). So Marx, for MacIntyre, rightly looks to realize in the concrete conditions of the present day the society of free, self-conscious citizens of which Feuerbach spoke, and Marx rightly sees that philosophy must change and become an instrument of social practice for this to occur. Philosophy, that is to say, must not merely disclose religious belief as that attempt at fantastical fulfilment of unrealized human aspirations and unmet human needs which it is (as Feuerbach had done); it must concretely identify

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in the society of its time those frustrated aspirations and needs from which religious illusions arise. And it must not merely accurately diagnose the problems which these illusions cause, but actively rectify them. Marx’s vision of history is in this way preferable, MacIntyre thinks, to Hegel’s, since within the structure of the same self-estrangement, objectification, and comingto-one’s-own narrative, Marx’s concern is with the whole of the concrete human’s existence, not merely with human self-consciousness and its realm of abstract being (MI: 37–47). There are other aspects of Marx’s vision of history to which MacIntyre subscribes, particularly Marx’s belief that labour is the key to the human essence and to the movement of human history toward its redemption. He gives in this, his first study of Marx, the following useful summary of Marx’s interpretation of history. In pre-communist society, human labour is commoditized: man is reduced to the instrumental value of his labour, and so is estranged both from his true self and from a proper relation to the material world (i.e. nature) and to his fellow human beings. An economic system of worker-exploitation and unjust private property acquisition is created by capitalist employers in which this estrangement is objectified, and thus disguised. Religious belief is invented to ‘explain’ the mysterious forces in the world which dominate and oppress the working classes. Yet it is those same working classes whose own activity is (unconsciously as yet) the cause of these oppressing forces. The Marx of National Economy and Philosophy (1844) then sees the way forward for mankind as a historical dialectic in which the objectified forces of private property and religious belief are first entirely abolished by way of reaction, the stage of ‘crude communism’, and this to be followed by a culminating and harmonizing stage (socialist society) in which the misunderstood needs which caused religious belief and the institution of private property (with its capitalist/proletariat dichotomy) are properly understood and properly met. Man will be one with man – a state foreshadowed and imperfectly symbolized in the religious depiction of the unity of man with God – and the needs of concrete individual humans instead of those of some abstract mystifying economic system will be met. MacIntyre notes here the parallels between Marx’s envisioned socialist end-state and the realization of the new Jerusalem prophesied by St John the Evangelist in the Book of Revelation (MI: 58). By identifying and seeking to eliminate the concrete causes of human suffering and dissatisfaction in the society of his time (the capitalist society of the mid-nineteenth century), Marx has shown us a way to be faithful, MacIntyre thinks, to the message of the biblical parable of the sheep and the goats: ‘The achievement of Marx here is to have given historical form to a concrete view of what man in society ought to be, of what he is, and of how his own estrangement from his own true being comes about’ (MI: 57). After an identification of the threefold nature of man’s alienation – from nature, from other men, and between social classes – Marx next proceeds (under the influence of the Christian doctrine of the imperfection of the orthodox, MacIntyre suggestively claims) to try to expose the weaknesses in other and past diagnoses of human alienation. This is undertaken in The Holy Family, The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy. Here he argues that past thinkers such as the left Hegelians

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or Proudhon have been limited by their un-self-conscious relation to their own socioeconomic circumstances, while he, Marx, has escaped this epistemic limitation, because he occupies the perspective of the dispossessed proletariat. Having none of the comfortable and distorting illusions which accompany bourgeois life, that dispossessed proletariat is alone able to see reality for what it is. And reality is that human nature is no abstract essence à la Feuerbach: human nature is that ensemble of social relations as they pertain to concrete individuals. The truth about reality, then, lies not in the passive conformity of thought to what is, but in the active effort to make reality into what it should and must become. Self, social reality, and the relation of self to nature (i.e. as constituted by the mode of human labour) must each be altered in order for the self to see the truth about reality. Thought, man’s relation to nature, and man’s relation to himself must change simultaneously; hence the close link between theory and praxis in Marx – a link MacIntyre himself acknowledges and which will become a central preoccupation in his own later work (MI: 60–62). MacIntyre does not accept Marx’s argument for the exemption of his, Marx’s, own theoretical framework from socio-historical particularity, and he begins to adopt a critical stance towards Marx when Marx shifts, in The German Ideology, from the earlier ‘prophetic discernment of the signs of the times’ which had been characteristic of National Economy and Philosophy, to a kind of scientific theorizing aimed at scientifically predictive accuracy and scientific certainty. When Marx is finally led to by and large abandon the concept of alienation (a concept he comes to believe is itself the product of excessively abstract and un-selfconscious theory), MacIntyre begins to register serious reservations with Marx’s thought. Where, then, at this stage of his thinking (in 1953) does MacIntyre stand with respect to Marxism? It is primarily the ‘prophetic’ Marx of National Economy and Philosophy that he thinks is most to be learned from – the Marx concerned with what should be in society, not the Marx of the what-is-and-must-be of The German Ideology and beyond. More generally, MacIntyre thinks that Marx’s hard-headed, this-worldly realism is to be emulated because more than many Christian authors, or so Marxism: An Interpretation has argued, Marx has opened our eyes to the corruption of the powers of this world and to the need for a politics of repentance before political wrongdoing – and for a politics of egalitarian compassion aimed at an improved socio-economic future for all. Marx’s socio-historical anti-idealism, in works such as Das Kapital, has also opened our eyes to the relevance of the material and social conditioning of inquiry and to the reciprocal relation between theory and practice – that practice, namely, often generates its articulation in theory, so a corrupt practice will often generate a rationalizing and corrupt theory, and that worthwhile theory should have as its aim the redirection of practice (MI: 104). MacIntyre therefore shares with Marx the conviction that philosophy should have the practical goal of improving the human condition, and indicative of this is the quotation from R.G. Collingwood which MacIntyre places at the heading of Chapter Four of Marxism: An Interpretation (see page 87 above). He therefore praises Marx’s emphasis on the values of community and commitment to the goods of community

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– values and a commitment which MacIntyre sees as present in some manner in pre-modern society, and which he sees as endangered by the economization of interpersonal relations since the rise of large-scale capitalism. And since he thinks that the Christian Churches have often been guilty of canonizing the socio-economic status quo, he thinks that they have much to learn from Marx about how to overcome such un-Christian complacency. On the negative side of the ledger, Marxism: An Interpretation maintains that Marxism as such has failed us for many of the same reasons that certain strands of Christianity have. In its turn from prophecy (i.e. that moral vision which discerns the signs of the times and bases its epistemic authority on personal moral probity and insight) to science, Marxism, the book acknowledges, has become as doctrinaire and self-defeatingly particularistic as the Christian Churches at their worst have. This early study of MacIntyre’s gives us, then, in summary the following criticisms of Marx’s project: Marx begins in Christian fashion with the aspiration of directing all to freedom and self-realization, yet ends in the Communist Manifesto and under the influence of Engels by seeking the deliverance of one class of men alone, the proletariat. He begins by effectively criticizing Hegelian idealism, but ends in an idealist vein by making assent to his theory of dialectical materialism the key to human deliverance. He begins with a necessarily imprecise but compelling moral vision, yet ends by claiming scientific exactitude and necessity for its tenets. He begins by effectively reawakening Christians to a more faithful understanding and exemplification of the kernel of the Christian message, but he ends in a form of gnosticism which seeks the salvation of the right-thinking alone – and which claims for itself the ability to separate sheep from goats. Finally, Marx, for all his socio-historical consciousness, Marxism: An Interpretation observes, confuses the criticism of religion with the criticism of certain anaemic forms of Christianity of his own time (MI: 82–3, 101–4). Needless to say, no one can read these pages and accuse MacIntyre, even in his earliest days, of an uncritical adulation for Marx or for Marx’s theoretical framework. From the beginning, MacIntyre has seen that Marx and Marxists have wanted to have two incompatible dimensions to their overall standpoint: the comprehensiveness and action-guiding character, but cognitive uncertainty, of a totalizing moral and metaphysical vision, and the falsifiable, hence tentative, hence incapable-ofproviding-a-regulative-ideal-for-action, yet more epistemically justified and precise, deliverances of empirical science. With the former, as MacIntyre notes, there is ‘an instrument for decision’ of uncertain worth because not yet adequately epistemically justified: one which, while it seeks to justify itself as theory, seeks prior justification in practical results – that is, in the transformation and improvement of human life as we know it which will occur when the directions deriving from the prophet’s moral and metaphysical vision are followed. With the latter, however, there can be greater epistemic confidence, but nothing of the scope and vision necessary to guide social improvement, nor the intransigence of commitment necessary to carry out such improvement. So MacIntyre’s fundamental criticism of the Marxist outlook in this, his first serious engagement with it, is that while Marxists have wanted

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scientific credentials for Marx’s vision of society, they have been unwilling to take the necessary step to achieve this, that is, treating Marx’s doctrine as falsifiable, and advancing it as such (MI: 100). While in Marxism: An Interpretation MacIntyre accepts Marx’s critique of capitalism as a critique of capitalist civilization (a civilization, the book notes, which is failing and which has failed in the past both for commoditizing and treating as a luxury the works of the creative and the intellectual life, and for neglecting to develop its own workers’ skills to the full), MacIntyre sees as falsified important parts of Marx’s criticism of capitalist economy. Workers’ conditions in advanced capitalist countries such as the USA, Germany and Britain have improved, contrary to Marx’s predictions, and workers have benefited economically from capitalist surplus (MI: 92–100). The aspiration of Marxism: An Interpretation thus turns out to be a re-thinking, aided by Marx, of the central Christian parable of the Final Judgment, and with this the creation of a new regulative ideal for a humanistic-cum-Christian praxis in the emerging world of science, technology, and large-scale social structures. The goal for action which is advanced at the book’s end is, to summarize, the creation of a selfcritical, anti-utopian, community-based, inclusive (because not social class-specific) political theory and practice of justice, repentance, compassion, hope – and, Marx to the contrary, of prayer. The book ends by calling for the construction of new forms of community dedicated to ‘politics and prayer’, and to an ‘ascesis of poverty and questioning’ (MI: 121–2). After Virtue, almost two decades later, will return us by other routes to a similar vision. What is curious already in MacIntyre’s thinking, and much in evidence in this work, is his strong predilection for ‘rational myth’ – for a comprehensive story about the whole which is rational because self-critical and advanced as falsifiable. This is something many philosophers have ceased to think we can have or should want to have. We will see MacIntyre attempt a brief justification for it in the 1968 emendation of Marxism: An Interpretation, but the 1953 work says little in this regard. He does maintain here, though, that Marx was hubristic in endowing his own rational myth with the status of science, a status such myths can never have: human thought, human rationality always tends to be too abstract, and not to allow for the independence of those structures of power which man in society has created. There is an unpredictability here which is not to be overcome by more human cleverness, but only by a greater humility, by a greater recognition of the limitations of human thought and action. To ask that one’s vision of society shall have the certainty of natural science is always to pass beyond the bounds of that humility. (MI: 71)

On balance, Marxism: An Interpretation is weak on justifying or elucidating ‘prophecy’ as a cognitive tool, weak on motivating the notion that philosophy must have an essential orientation to praxis, and weak also in its argument for the indispensability of rational myth. These three weaknesses are not unconnected, and the work contains diffuse suggestions as to how they might jointly be overcome. This would be by arguing along the line that in order to frame the moral judgements

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(self-obliging, action-guiding principles) which ineluctably inform our behaviour and inform the structures of society, we ineluctably draw on some tacit conception of the whole (i.e. of self, history and nature in their interconnection) which provides the justificatory framework for those judgements and which licenses the ascription of predicates such as ‘good’ and ‘right’ to actions, events, structures and so on. Since, a phenomenological claim, we necessarily employ accounts of the whole – stories or ‘myths’ – to function as moral agents, we are better off: (a) being conscious of this fact, and (b) striving to be critical of our presupposed myth, so rendering it more rational (an irrational myth, MacIntyre will note here, is a superstition; a religious myth is a myth that claims a foundation in history but points beyond itself to God, and it can be either rational or irrational depending upon the way it is maintained by its adherents; MI: 13–14). The theme of ‘rational myth’ is revisited, albeit with different terminology, in a short 1956 piece based on a BBC radio broadcast, ‘A Society without a Metaphysics’ (1956b), and this gives us a fuller account of MacIntyre’s discontent with sodescribed anti-metaphysical philosophy: philosophy which would have us dispense with, as a task that can have no rational grounds, the project of constructing some overall framework for belief, some world-picture, within which to locate ourselves. MacIntyre does not attempt to meet the anti-metaphysicians on their own ground in this piece, or to make any value judgement about their ascendancy; he speaks instead about the consequences of the demise among the general public of metaphysical frameworks such as Christian theology. In addressing the political situation of the time, the Soviet Union of the mid1950s, MacIntyre notes, may have exchanged one metaphysics for another (i.e. Russian Orthodoxy for Marxism), but the West has become a society bereft of metaphysics: In the West we have become increasingly pragmatic in our social morality. We concern ourselves with ad hoc projects to deal with specific ills, we abjure all general nostrums, we do what is at hand and we have no general doctrine as a metaphysical key to open all doors. Our politics are always reformist, never revolutionary. We are apt to praise ourselves in our society for the modesty and realism of our aims. But there is another perspective from which the landscape looks very different. For the loss of a general framework of belief engenders a loss of an overall sense of significance. A striking manifestation of this is the inability of ordinary people to cope with the great moments in their own lives. It is notorious that many to whom the traditional Christian vocabulary is largely meaningless still besiege the church for baptism, for marriage, and for burial. This suggests an inarticulate need for a way of looking at life that will make it dramatic, that will surround birth and death with symbols of imaginative power. We have acquired an adequate morality, but we have lost an adequate imagination. (1956b: 375)

This address has the tone of the ‘So what?’ to it. Secular liberalism has triumphed in the popular consciousness and in the university, but at the price of bringing a doctrine of metaphysical meaninglessness with it. MacIntyre contrasts our condition

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here with members of traditional societies whose lives were endowed by a religious framework with a significance beyond the merely personal. In a traditional society, he notes, individuals come and go, but the society and its aims live on through the contribution of its succeeding members. The emergence of the category of the individual in the modern social world has brought with it greater personal freedom and intensified self-awareness, he admits, but it has brought a diminished sense of the overall significance of the self as well. Interestingly, MacIntyre does not at this stage think that refurbishing the old metaphysics (e.g. the metaphysics of Aquinas, which he mentions specifically) can be the solution to the problem of metaphysical meaninglessness. This is not only because, as he puts it, the rise of analytic philosophy has brought with it standards of clarity and rigour which make us no longer see philosophy as a clash of allencompassing metaphysical viewpoints. It is also because, he states here, the old metaphysical viewpoints have already lost their hold on the popular imagination – a loss that goes hand in hand with the demise of the religious conception of the universe, with its capacity to cast the life of the individual and the social collectivity as dramatis personae playing appointed roles in a grand cosmic narrative (1956b: 375–6). ‘A Society without a Metaphysics’ concludes by arguing that along with the emotional and imaginative impoverishment which an anti-metaphysical intellectual culture and social order brings comes a great social danger. In the void created by the loss of any dramatic framework for life, new overall conceptions promising a coherent view of the whole and a new systematic plan for action are likely to spring up and to command widespread social assent. But they will lack now, as German National Socialism did in the past, any sound rational basis. It is not clear that, looking back today, MacIntyre would be able to claim that this prediction has proved to be true, but it could yet be proved true. 2.2 The Uses and Abuses of Marx’s Thought Even a cursory reading of MacIntyre’s essays on Marxist topics in the 1950s reveals that during these years MacIntyre harboured no illusions about the ideological and dogmatic quality of much Marxist theorizing. It is sufficient, indeed, to read his 1956 review ‘Marxist Tracts’ (1956c) to see that this is so. In this piece he rejects any strict (i.e. deterministic) base–superstructure relation between social order and philosophical thesis – a relation that does not even hold, he observes, between the novel and the social order, as it might more plausibly be thought to. And in the base–superstructure relation deterministically conceived, he sees something which vitiates the bulk of Marxist thought. What is valuable in Marx and what requires the kind of elucidation which Marxists have not given, he notes, are the questions which Marx raises about ultimate belief and its connection to philosophical commitment (again we are in the neighbourhood of ‘rational myth’), plus Marx’s questions about the relation that should hold between a philosopher and his philosophical work

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(presumably MacIntyre means here the theory-practice question as it applies to academic philosophy). So MacIntyre holds that what students of Marx must beware of is the tendency of their master’s thought to engender in them a linguistic-conceptual rigidity and the confidence that Marx’s conceptual scheme has a permanent and irreformable adequacy to it, which confidence gets in the way of factual inquiry (1956b: 369). These same themes are revisited in MacIntyre’s next two highly illuminating essays on Marxist thought, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness I’ (1958b) and ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness II’ (1959a). The effort of the first of these two companion essays is to argue how Marx, properly read, offers us exactly the alternative we need to myopic and piecemeal empiricist politics and to dogmatic, deterministic Stalinist theory. The problem MacIntyre observes that these two opposite views share is a similar, wrong-headed assumption about what would constitute an adequate basis for political theory, and whereas empiricist political theory, subscribed to by a variety of ex-Stalinists and given eloquent voice by Karl Popper, denies that such a basis is available, Stalinist Marxists assert that it is. Both groups, he will argue, overlook an alternative possibility (1958b: 96). For the Stalinist, as he reminds us, a general theory of society is possible because society is like a clock governed by mechanical, deterministic laws. To grasp those laws, with Marx’s thought as a guide, is to know what levers to pull and how to manipulate socio-economic structures and circumstances in order to produce the desired social order – an order whose appearance is in any event inevitable because the terminus of a deterministic process already at work in history. Morality has a consequentialist because means–ends shape to it for the Stalinist: whatever aids in the realization of the socialist state for the Stalinist is morally permissible (94– 6). The Popperian – and the ex-Stalinist, ex-communist, and now liberal critic of communism – denies that history as such has any trajectory, and denies (sensibly, MacIntyre thinks) that human aspirations and wants are a matter for antecedent causal determination. But with his Stalinist enemy, the empiricist liberal underplays the role of human agency in history, and then, against the Stalinist, makes the fatal mistake of denying that the historical process can be a source of moral norms, or can illuminate our present moral condition in any important way. Moral values for the anti-collectivist liberal are autonomous and in no way derivable from fact, historical or otherwise: they are matters for subjective choice rather than discovery. This leaves the liberal in the situation of having no public, socially shared standards to which to appeal to justify his moral positions – for instance, his condemnation of Stalinist atrocities or of nuclear proliferation. Since moral principles must be for the liberal a matter of criterionless choice, this, MacIntyre argues, renders the liberal’s moral stance socially ineffectual and his moral criticisms of perceived injustice are merely quixotic expressions of personal dissatisfaction (94). However, Marx properly read, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness I’ argues, provides a fitting alternative to both this social standard-less, anti-theoretical empiricist liberalism and to dogmatic and morally reprehensible Stalinist Marxism. The key

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to MacIntyre’s anti-Stalinist reading of Marx in this essay is his claim that Marx never intended the base–superstructure relation to be understood deterministically, nor did Marx think that the transition from capitalism to socialism would be along deterministic lines. On this reading, base in Marx, the economic actions and interactions of the members of a social order, furnishes social consciousness with materials for the articulation of consciousness – but without causally determining consciousness. Though aspects of base on this interpretation of Marx may causally determine aspects of superstructure, base as such and superstructure as such come together: they are formally or conceptually linked rather than related as cause and effect (1958b: 98–9). This has the important consequence that, for a Marx so interpreted, the socialist state cannot be manipulated into existence from below by effecting changes in capitalist society’s base. And since according to Marx the hoped for more than predicted advent of socialism would represent the moment when, for the first time in history, the mass of humans would take control of their circumstances instead of being passive before them, then socialist society can only come into existence by a coaeval change in economic relations and social consciousness – with social consciousness taking the lead. Arguing with Marx, MacIntyre states here that we should not abandon the hope of a general theory of society nor disregard the data of history in constructing it, but we should eschew the thought that this theory should subscribe to a deterministic picture of human agency. Human needs and aspirations for all their social conditioning are not socially determined. Marxist historical materialism can serve, then, as a theoretical alternative to liberal individualism and amoral Stalinism if it is understood as a falsifiable explanation of the non-deterministic development of human-self-awareness-in-society – of how, that is, human desires and aspirations have been adversely conditioned in the past by socio-economic circumstances, but how they are yet in the process of greater development and increasing potentiality for full realization. In this case we will have, in MacIntyre’s words, ‘a theory which treats what emerges in history as providing us with a basis for our [moral] standards, without making the historical process morally sovereign or its progress automatic’ (1958b: 100). These considerations will be central in MacIntyre’s mature ethical theory. The second and companion essay, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness II’, turns to history in order to offer an account of how we have ended up in a ‘moral wilderness’ – of how, that is, we have lost our moral bearings because we have lost a sound understanding of the point and purpose of the institution of morality – and of how, aided by Marx, we can begin to find our way out. Assuming as established in ‘Moral Wilderness I’ the importance of a right understanding of human agency for our exodus from past dark times, ‘Moral Wilderness II’ begins with a consideration about the practice of moral judgement in relation to human agency, so returning to a theme familiar in MacIntyre’s first ethical writings.

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As he had argued in The Significance of Moral Judgements, he argues here that moral judgements are instances of human agency, not reflex actions provoked by external circumstances. As instances of human agency, they must be understood in the light of the goals or interests which motivate them, and again MacIntyre argues as a matter of the phenomenology of the moral, that the making of moral judgements is a practice instituted to serve long-term desire-satisfaction. We affirm moral norms as indispensable guides to our actions – actions in which we seek to satisfy our desires in a reasonable and abiding and harmonious way, and in social contexts which are the necessary realm for human desire-satisfaction. If the original connection between moral norms and desire-satisfaction has been lost on moderns, how, MacIntyre asks here, has this come about? In response, he ventures a hypothetical historical explanation. The desires and aspirations for more permanent and long-term goods, which moral norms were established to minister to (because discovered as indispensable for) are not satisfied by the majority of members of a given social order. This leads to a need to reinterpret the moral system in that social order, and such a reinterpretation will move in one of two directions. Morality can either be viewed as a free-standing system of imperatives whose reason for being is not seriously inquired about, or, and more likely, it can be viewed as an alien imposing force whose presence constitutes an obstacle to human fulfilment and desire-satisfaction. In either case, MacIntyre claims, these two different outcomes will be symptoms of an impending moral crisis in a society (1959a: 90). In order to buttress this idealized explanation of the decline of morality in the modern era, ‘Moral Wilderness II’ provides a rough sketch of how that decline has played itself out in occidental history, and the sketch goes as follows. For the Greeks and prior to Christianity, the connection between morality and desire was clearly understood and affirmed; human desire was always kept in the picture when moral matters were being considered. Catholic Christianity, following its biblical inheritance, also maintained this connection: love of God and obedience to Him were seen as directly serving appropriate and informed love of self. But Protestant Christianity changed this by emphasizing the distance between divine and human things to the point of making obedience to God something to be done for its own sake, and not something justifiable from the perspective of human nature. Finally, as the process of secularization slowly undermined the centrality of belief in God, moral norms were increasingly seen as acceptance-worthy whether God were to exist or not (1959a: 91–2). Western morality has thus travelled the following course with respect to a given moral precept x: Greeks – Do x because it will make you happy. Catholic Christian – Do x because God enjoins it as a way to your happiness. Protestant Christian – Do x because God enjoins it. secularized Christian – Do x.

There is for MacIntyre an additional stage in this process, which he adverts to subsequently in the essay; it accompanies the fourth stage above while existing as

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a reaction to it. This further stage involves the reassertion of the rights of desire over and against moral duty – moral duty seen increasingly as something without justification and as mystifying and repressive, or something at any rate to be accepted only inasmuch as it serves personal desire-satisfaction. Protagonists of this stage are figures such as Hobbes, Diderot and, of course, Nietzsche, and their new maxim is: ‘Do x if it will satisfy your personal desires (and only under that aegis)’ (1959a: 92–3). In Marx’s understanding of the moral, contrariwise, MacIntyre sees a great aid to restoring the correct and originally perceived relation between morality and desire. It is Marx’s thought, in particular Marx’s theory of human nature, MacIntyre claims, which can enlighten us to the fact that our individual desires are shared by others. We are each after the satisfaction of desire in a common life: a life in which the recognition of solidarity with others is central, and in which the ‘I want’ and the ‘we want’ can be seen as coincident – a life, therefore, in which desire can be seen as a unifying rather than a disunifying force. Here MacIntyre suggests, following the lines of ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness I’, that we take Marx’s view of the movement of socio-economic history, especially of the rising of the hitherto dispossessed, as a plausible hypothetical explanation instead of, as in its self-description, the discovery of a deterministic process. Past history should be seen as the history of class-divided societies, and past morality should be seen as classrelative because aimed at ministering to class-structured desire. Capitalism should be seen as a socio-economic system that has both made us aware of human possibilities that we did not previously know existed, and has empowered us to a certain extent in the realization of these newly discovered possibilities. However, capitalism should also be seen – and here is the hope, the historical vision, MacIntyre thinks Marx has given us – as an imperfect stage yet to be transcended. We should not think, though, that any objective law will cause this salutary transformation of capitalist society to come about – only a realization or discovery by the working class will: a realization that capitalist society, by its very acquisitory and competitive nature and for all its benefits, divides man from man and subordinates human interests to the interests of an imperfect economic system (1959a: 93–6). With Marx, then, MacIntyre at this stage of his thinking hopes for the emergence of a socialist society: a society with a shared moral vision in which the common element in individual desiring has been discovered, and virtuous life in community is sought by each and by joint co-operative effort. So MacIntyre’s Marx in ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness II’ is a Marx who, in opposition to utilitarianistic Stalinism, upholds moral absolutes: whatever action is seen as attacking the rights and dignity that all humans share must be rejected as morally impermissible. And in its opposition to liberal empiricism, Marx’s theory of human nature can also help us to see that discovery in and through a historical process, rather than individual choice, is the source and warrant for our moral principles. In the new socialist society which MacIntyre envisions here, there will be no means–end morality, and building up the common life will be seen as what corresponds to human desire at its deepest level (1959a: 96–7).

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2.3 A Democratic Culture of Critical Inquiry MacIntyre’s next offering on Marxist topics, ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’ (1960a), was written for a collection of socialist essays, Out of Apathy, edited by E.P. Thompson, and it develops themes in the two preceding pieces more fully. Thompson had organized this volume around the theme of the creation, ‘not of equality of opportunity within an acquisitive society, but of a society of equals, a co-operative community’ (1960a: 3), and MacIntyre’s essay fits squarely within these parameters. Prominent in this essay is the goal of a large-scale revolutionary transformation of society and of social structures (a goal, we will see, MacIntyre has since come to reject), and this is advanced against the liberal aspiration of modest and piecemeal reform. The essay paints a picture of what is wrong with the intellectual and social cultures of Britain in 1960, and MacIntyre turns to Hegel, Marx, and to a lesser extent Freud and the ‘philosophers of the Enlightenment’, for the remedy. The thrust of the essay is that the chains of a passive, complacent reason must be broken, and present-day reason among both the learned and the working classes must be re-emancipated so it can undertake the task of a radical re-ordering of society. For its passionate tone of protest, and for its evocation of the philosopher as rebel and critic, a ‘prophet of hope’, ‘Breaking the Chains’ is somewhat short-winded about what exactly is wrong with the British social order at the beginning of the 1960s. But perhaps this is because MacIntyre could assume a sense for this among the expected readership of Out of Apathy. In his invocation of Marx’s notion of ‘self-activity’ at the essay’s end, though, he is clearly eager that there be an awakening across social classes of the overriding value of rational (and therefore purposive and critical) activity, and part of the essay’s point is to urge university students not to lose their youthful fervour for questioning and contestation, but to preserve it throughout their lifetime. On the problems with British intellectual culture, MacIntyre is much more exact and much more exacting in ‘Breaking the Chains’, given that he thinks that the intellectual class should be drawing on the inheritance of Enlightenment thinkers and leading the way to increased social freedom. Instead, they are for him content with the social status quo, and worse than that, they are busy supplying precisely the kind of theory which stands in the way of freedom’s practical progress. MacIntyre attempts to justify this claim in ‘Breaking the Chains’ by arguing that it was the philosophers of the Enlightenment who first opened our eyes to the connection between freedom, reason, and political reform. Hegel next built on this breakthrough by helping us to see that freedom is both tied to the very essence of what it means to be human and that it must be understood historically: in each age, freedom is an achievement of reason, and each age is capable of pushing back the frontiers of freedom further. Marx then supplied us with the important corrective to Hegel by teaching us that growth in right understanding is insufficient if it does not issue in action and if it is not accompanied by change in social practice. Thus, we have for Macintyre the main ingredients for social progress bequeathed to us by Enlightenment theorists (1960a: 204–9).

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What, though, does MacIntyre argue here has become of British intellectual culture in view of these Enlightenment achievements? It has on the one hand, due to the increased specialization of knowledge and to pragmatic pressures from outside the university, lost any unified concept of human nature, so it has receded from the Enlightenment advance of seeing the links between freedom, reason, human nature, and history. British universities, for example, MacIntyre complains, treat the achievements of past cultures (for instance, in literature, philosophy, and history) as disconnected fragments, and any sense for their vital interconnection and for their vital influence on the present is effectively lost (204–7). While in the human sciences he sees a sense for the unity of human nature preserved, he notes that the work being done there is vitiated by a deterministic conception of human nature and by a loss of awareness of those elements of purpose, intention, and deliberation (Marx’s ‘practical forms of consciousness’) in human action which make it causally inexplicable (217–18). The essay thus calls for a return to that teleological approach to the explanation of human action present in Hegel and Marx, and according to which, ‘to know what someone is doing is to know what ends he is pursuing, what possibilities he is realising. Human history is a series of developing purposes, in which through the exercise of reason in the overcoming of conflicts freedom is attained. To understand a particular episode is to place it within the context of that history’ (200). MacIntyre’s argument here for the need for this kind of explanation is straightforward and will become a central plank in his later work in the philosophy of explanation (treated more fully in Chapter 4 below); a short version of it can be given here. If we take a simple human action like signing one’s name, this action cannot be adequately explained by any causal account of its antecedent and sufficient physical conditions. The same conditions could ‘explain’ very different instances of the same action: for instance, paying a bill, making peace with the enemies of one’s nation, committing oneself to the institution of marriage, and so on. Explanation of human actions which omits their agents’ purposes and omits the social context and conventions surrounding those actions thus fails. Intention, purpose or goals, and social conventions are internal to the meaning of human actions, and in this way such actions differ from mechanical activities: To explain a particular action is to place it in relation to the circumstances out of which it arose and the goal which the agent sought. Stages in a mechanical operation can be explained in terms of the preceding and following stages of events. But they have no goals and they do not respond to circumstance by means of understanding. They simply follow out predetermined paths. (213)

If we are after a general theory of society, which MacIntyre thinks we very much should be and very much thinks we need, the causal and mechanistic route will lead us to a dead end. So, as in his earlier writings on the topic, he urges us to turn to Marx as a theorist who can offer us a way both to combine materialistic with purposive explanation and an account of how the former should shade into without eclipsing the latter. In social explanation rightly conceived we must factor in human agency,

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but we must recognize that human agency will be conditioned by considerations of class or socio-economic circumstance (i.e. by the particular relation of human agents to the modes of production; 218). If a mechanistic general theory of society will not suffice, MacIntyre would also, in ‘Breaking the Chains’, have us avoid the kind of anti-theoretical empiricism then dominant in the English-speaking human sciences – he has in mind here the work of Popper on historical trends (see Popper, 1957), the social theory of C. Wright Mills, and the historiography of the school of Lewis Namier. This approach, he notes, tends to remove all law-likeness from socially contextualized human action and tends to treat the individual as powerless before autonomous social processes. And it is this kind of theory, alongside a very different and mechanistic social science, he argues, which engenders passivity in its proponents and in their actual or potential audiences and so constitutes ‘an ideology of apathy and conformism’ (the anti-rationalist political theory of Michael Oakeshott is also included by MacIntyre here in the category of the excessively passive and ineffectual; 229–30). For social mechanists who treat society as a machine and its members as components lacking the power of self-determination, the discovery of alleged laws of human behaviour leaves the discoverers, themselves components in the machine, with no capacity to change society, but only to understand ex post facto how they have been dominated and instrumentalized by it. But, as we need to learn from Hegel and against social mechanists and anti-theoretical empiricists, ‘Breaking the Chains’ argues, whatever is the product of rational human activity can be understood and can be changed by subsequent human rational activity (230). A general theory of society so conceived must seek to uncover the patterns of reasoning behind social action, the dialectic of reason extending human freedom by struggling against present limits in order to realize new human possibilities. It must seek to understand society by looking at the logical history of the conversations or arguments that have brought its social entities into existence (200). While this will help explain the present shape of society through its past, its value for extrapolating into the future and predicting future social actions will be modest, MacIntyre is quick to add in ‘Breaking the Chains’, and this is exactly as a teleological view of human action would have it: social action often follows where the socially constituted argument leads, and this is not predictable in any highly reliable way. Still, MacIntyre thinks that a general theory of society with its unifying ideas and its account of patterns of social development will provide us with a useful map of past-into-the-present which can help to orient future structural social change – and it is social change we must be after, the essay states, since: ‘the philosophers have continued to interpret the world differently; the point remains, to change it’ (240). What MacIntyre is after in ‘Breaking the Chains’ is a conception of freedom between the positive freedom, as he notes, ‘cherished by Victorian and postVictorian idealists’ – that state of being able to follow reason’s directives, even if heteronomously, to attain one’s self-realization – and the negative freedom ‘cherished by utilitarians’, that freedom to seek one’s own conception of self-realization without external criticism and interference (201). Freedom as means and as end should be the

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goal of social and political organization, he argues here, not happiness or satisfaction imposed from above (positive) or uncritical desire satisfaction sought from below (negative). Human liberation and empowerment through reason should be the goal, not the consequentialist and manipulative means–end morality he sees in utilitarian welfare capitalism, in deterministic Marxism, and in Fabian socialism. This essay re-states the conviction which MacIntyre acquired from Marx’s social analysis – that in a class-divided society there can be no common interest, but only an established-order-serving illusion of one. Interestingly, and of final note in ‘Breaking the Chains’, Sigmund Freud makes a brief appearance as an ally of liberation, since Freud, MacIntyre states here, ‘saw in the rational comprehension of desire a path to freedom’. But Freud does not, he thinks, give us a detailed enough picture of the rational human moral ideal, and his thought offers us not enough help in tackling the systemic social problems behind present unfreedom (231–2). If we turn to a slightly later piece by MacIntyre on a related topic entitled, ‘Against Utilitarianism’ (1964e), and written for a collection on educational goals, we get a tolerably clearer picture of the regulative societal ideal MacIntyre has in mind at this stage of his thinking. In a claim that he has already begun to make in his early ethical writings, he identifies utilitarianism in this essay as the characteristic temptation for modern public morality, a public order plagued by incapacity to agree about the ends of action. Modern moral disputes among ‘primary’ moral systems appear irreconcilable: absolutist premises – for and against nuclear weaponry, for and against public restraint of sexuality, etc. – are advanced, and the arguments between opposing sides continue unabated. The option of turning to ‘secondary morality’ presents itself, a morality which does not proscribe any given action as primary systems of morality do, but permits each action to be judged against an impersonal standard: namely, the usefulness of the action in securing a supposed common interest or general welfare (1964e: 2–3). But utilitarianism comes at just the kind of price that MacIntyre thinks too high in terms of the social vision he has been sketching in his early political writings, particularly because he sees the standard of ‘utility’ to which utilitarianism appeals as an allegedly impersonal metric as something understood in a partisan and self-serving way by the dominant powers in acquisitive capitalist social orders. Since the utilitarian, he notes, deems actions worthy in terms of their instrumental as opposed to intrinsic value, utilitarianism represents for him just the kind of means– end morality earlier writings have argued is inimical to social emancipation and to the self-activity of the masses – the instrumentalization of learning and of labour, for instance, can find an easy justification in it. In addition, utilitarianism takes as uneducable givens those desires whose ostensible satisfaction (quantitatively in Bentham, quasi-qualitatively in Mill) is to serve as the measure for utility. In fact, the capitalist social order moulds these desires and shapes them according to its own image: consumption is treated as an end, and desire is moulded by the dominant economic system to serve the ruling powers of the system. While such consumptive desire-satisfaction is alleged to serve a fictitious, non-class-specific, common

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welfare, ‘Against Utilitarianism’ states, non-consumptive desire is ‘extruded from the public to the private sphere’ (1964e: 3–4). Hierarchy and inequality necessarily result from this: one element in society moulds desire – and profits in the process – while another has its desires moulded and shaped, and so is both paternalistically ‘benefited’ and depersonalized/instrumentalized in the process. The educational order then tends to reflect this social order and to reinforce it by turning out cogs for the machine, he argues, and a bogus version of ‘my station and its duties’ morality is adopted by many, thus turning what a deficient socioeconomic system needs its constitutive members to be in order to survive into a veritable ideal. We have here, he notes, what Hegel identified as the morality of the ‘spiritual Zoo and Humbug or the Affair-on-hand itself’: no individual questions the system which has imprisoned him and separated him off from others, and each gives himself unthinkingly to the task at hand, self-deceivingly finding his realization in discharging that task, and so denying his (complicitous) victimization by that system (14–15). In opposing utilitarianism, MacIntyre thinks we should be promoting, especially in and through education, a ‘democratic culture of critical inquiry’ – a culture in which individuals are educated to see inquiry as an activity valuable for its own sake, and in which they are taught the habit of critical-mindedness. By criticalmindedness here, MacIntyre means a recognition of the importance of impersonal rational standards, and to say impersonal standards for him is unavoidably to say community, equality, and historical tradition. All impersonal standards, he notes, are the standards of some social entity or community, and while each community has its own particular history, before impersonal standards all are equal: critical activity … is not the activity of isolated individuals. It is always exercised inside an academic tradition which is the tradition of some particular society. Unless critical standards claim social recognition, criticism is untrue to its own claims of universal allegiance. But a condition of this is precisely the refusal to make criticism the prerogative of an elite … to make criticism the instrument of one part of society against the other. … [T]o claim such a prerogative for some special class is precisely to restrict the moral openness which critical activity requires. We are all equal before the impersonal standards of reason and there is no brother of whom we are not the keeper. Thus intellectual standards and democratic community need each other. (20)

In this envisioned culture of critical inquiry in which personal appropriation of learning is emphasized and impersonal rational standards are acknowledged and valued, he notes, the undesirable creation of an educational elite and an educational underclass will be made difficult. Education will aim at the rational empowerment of each, and the criticism it promotes will heed the voice of each and exclude the voice of none that can make its case. His claim in ‘Against Utilitarianism’ is that such an arrangement, while democratic, could still provide us with the resources for the criticism of character –for the rational criticism of our feelings, goals and desires, that is – and a critical awareness of how these feelings, goals, and desires are shaped by the social structures which we presently inhabit. So the proposed

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culture of critical inquiry would be, in sum, anti-hierarchical, anti-functional and anti-utilitarian: we have to allow those whom we teach to remake themselves through their activity. And if we do this, we shall be educating those who in the end may help remake society itself. For critical inquiry is not utilitarian; it is not functional; it is not hierarchical … Above all critical inquiry is not an academic retreat; for its maintenance presupposes rebuilding a particular kind of community. (21)

These same themes are treated in his later Richard Peters Lecture, ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’ (1987a), and it is worthwhile looking ahead to this piece to illumine ‘Against Utilitarianism’. In ‘Educated Public’, MacIntyre’s commitment to an Enlightenment educational ideal is made clearer, even as (a central theme, as we shall see in After Virtue), he thinks, in an expression to which After Virtue has since given much currency, the ‘Enlightenment project’ of justifying moral principles without sufficient recourse to natural teleology and history is a failure not to be imitated. As we have seen in ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, there is much in the Enlightenment that MacIntyre admires, and in ‘Educated Public’, authored some twenty-seven years later, he continues to promote the goal of egalitarian emancipation, and he claims to find a noteworthy, partial realization of this ideal in the social order of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. This ‘educated public’, the creation and nurturing of which MacIntyre views as a prerequisite for educational-cum-social change today, must have for him several essential features, as this essay makes clear. It must be a ‘tolerably large’ body, appeal to which may be made by various intellectual protagonists on matters of practical import for the shared social entities which the members of that body inhabit. It must as a public have a common set of normative beliefs in the light of which contentious theses are examined, and its members must be of one mind as to what is to count as an adequate form of rational justification (MacIntyre apparently means to contrast rational justification here with what might be called ‘dogmatic’ justification, justification that proceeds from passive, unthinking allegiance to past beliefs or belief-producing authorities). Finally, an educated public must possess a set of canonical texts which provide the basis for discussion and debate about the social and political order, and this public must form part of a past tradition of authoritative and contentious commentary upon, and interpretation of, such texts (18–19). MacIntyre thinks that Scottish society of the early eighteenth century satisfied these conditions, so that it can serve as a model for a sought-after educated public today. But he is faced with the burden of explaining how and why, in the Scottish case, the existence of this educated public on his description was so relatively shortlived. His explanation for this is fivefold: four of the causes he cites are contingent on the shape of the social order of what he calls post-Enlightenment modernity; one cause is independent of time and place and threatens any social entity which, like an educated public, is driven, even if only in part, by properly philosophical beliefs.

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The demise of an educated public in the Scottish case, he claims, owed much to the last type of cause. The philosophical assumptions of Scotland’s eighteenthcentury educated public, which derived chiefly from the philosophy of common sense of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, were challenged by rival and alien philosophical standpoints, and they proved themselves incapable, for reasons internal to the philosophy of common sense, of withstanding the challenge. MacIntyre notes here that, of course, from the case of this particular educated public having had its philosophical bases undermined, no strong argument to the conclusion that any and every such educated public must suffer a similar fate can be made: the philosophical undermining of the intellectual tradition of any educated public always remains a possibility, and this is as it should be, since a commitment to reason and to the unforeseeable outcome of rational dialectic is an important part of what constitutes an educated public. As to the four other causes of decline of Scotland’s educated public, MacIntyre claims that these all had to do with economic modernization and expansion – and that they still menace the creation and sustaining of anything like an educated public today. The first cause of decline was an economic and population enlargement that tore at the fabric of the small-scale communities which made up Scottish Enlightenment society. Secondly, economic change and the commitment to an emerging global as opposed to local market ended up damaging the civic loyalty and civic virtues of those in the trades and professions, since their loyalties were increasingly demanded by this new sphere of economic activity. Thirdly, economic growth created new social classes – an ownership-employing class, and a labouring class (e.g. in mining and manufacturing) – whose roles rendered them incapable of educated participation in the social order. Finally, growth in knowledge, with its attendant specialization, undermined that commitment to the unity of knowledge and of curriculum which an educated public requires for its shared vision. We recall here that for MacIntyre an educated public must have a common set of intellectual first principles and a teleological understanding of both social roles and of the social order itself. If education becomes disunified, he argues in ‘Educated Public’, it cannot prepare its future citizens to discharge these roles, nor can it properly equip them for debate about the society’s future (1987a: 27–9). Although we move a bit ahead of our story by doing so, it is worth considering here how MacIntyre thinks we should proceed if we wish to reconstitute educated publics today in the face of the inimical forces of, to use the rather grand-sounding term, post-Enlightenment modernity. Consistent with his belief (inspired by Marx) in the close relation between theory and practice, MacIntyre thinks that mere efforts aimed at creating anew some unified curriculum (i.e. educational reform) today are doomed to failure, because the prevailing social conditions will resist the social embodiment of the fruits of any such reformed educational system. Though educators must take the lead in initiating change, he agrees – change which should be, beyond educational, social – educators should primarily devote their energies, according to his argument, to thinking about how new social entities, new small-scale forms of community, can be recreated and can act as the bearers and the embodiments of the

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thoughts and the values made possible by a unified educational curriculum (1987a: 34). In a protest against current defences of the value of the liberal arts, MacIntyre claims here that only liberal education which prepares its students for membership in an educated public can be liberal education for a lifetime. In this sense it is for him no use extolling the end-in-itself value of humanistic and scientific inquiry, if after university graduation, students are fed into employment which requires of them passivity and unreflective, purely instrumental role-playing. Again following Marx, he argues that the educators too must be educated, but the particular difficulty of our day is that inquiry in the moral sciences has taken a serious turn for the worse. Education, according to MacIntyre’s picture, must equip students with the capacity for critical thinking that will enable them to enlarge their powers of reason and so increase their freedom-in-society. But in the modern social order, the role of the educator in the human sciences has become that of a professional expert. Many of today’s moral philosophers, for instance, carry out their inquiries in independence from, and often in ignorance of, prevailing social conditions; they concern themselves with supposedly timeless, conceptual truths about morals and fail to see their work as a series of ongoing contributions to a debate about what shape the social entities of their time ought to take – as Enlightenment thinkers and Kant and Mill and Coleridge and others before them did. In this way they ask questions that are not the questions of the educated members of today’s social orders, and they are often only answerable to, and in communication with, one another. By the restriction of their activities to scholarly forums, they so come to constitute a professionalized elite: [I]n modern society … [t]hinking has become the occupational responsibility of those who discharge certain social roles. The professional scientist, for example. But those topics thinking about which is of general social concern, thought about goods and the good, about the relationship of justice to effectiveness or the place of aesthetic goods in human life, about the tragic, the comic and the farcical not only in literature, but in politics and economics, either are handed over to certain disciplined, but limited because professionalized, specialists, or are dealt with in forums in which the constraints of disciplined exchange are almost entirely lacking. The link which Scottish eighteenthcentury culture forged between the particular responsibilities of particular social roles and the ability to appeal to principles about the general good and to participate in debate about these principles has been broken. The educated public has been replaced by a heterogeneous set of specialized publics. (25)

Moral philosophy in its former sense, MacIntyre thus argues, has now become a narrow, technical, and largely socially irrelevant academic affair, since ‘when moral philosophy [has] lost its social function of articulating the presuppositions of, the debates within, the specific challenges to, specific social groups, there … [is] nothing else left for it to become’ (33). Typical of this impoverishment, he thinks, is the way contemporary moral philosophers treat John Stuart Mill’s so-called ‘greatest happiness principle’ (GHP).

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In his Autobiography, Mill makes clear, MacIntyre notes, that it was in the context of seemingly interminable and irresolvable debates between various firstorder moralities that he, Mill, advanced the GHP. Mill accordingly understood the GHP of Utilitarianism, not as the discovery of a timeless truth about moral value, but as a recommendation for a secondary morality that could help us bypass intractable differences on the level of primary morality. Yet, MacIntyre observes, contemporary academic moral philosophers, conditioned as they are to be specialists set apart from the social order, regularly treat the GHP as if it were advanced by Mill as some timeless, contextless moral truth (32–3). MacIntyre concludes ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’ by stating that the education of the hoped-for educators of a new enlightened public will involve returning them to a study of Greek philosophical and political texts. The argument for this is not given here, but we will see it elsewhere, and we have already seen a partial version of it in his first set of ethical writings. 2.4 Towards a Post-Marxist Ideology of Liberation To return to MacIntyre’s writings on explicitly Marxist themes, in the 1961 piece ‘Marxists and Christians’ one can observe the beginnings of a shift in his position concerning the relationship between the two. By the time of this 1961 essay he no longer considers himself a Christian, and he views himself as a Marxist in a minority sense of the term. The accuracy of this self-identification plays itself out in the essay, and it is clear here, as in other places, that MacIntyre’s first love or ultimate concern has been this-worldly praxis and the radical transformation of society. Since in 1961 he sees Marxism as superior to the British Christianity of the time with respect to the goal of radical transformation, he is more willing to regard himself as a Marxist than a Christian; however, in keeping with what we have already seen in Marxism: An Interpretation, he states here that he has no wish to belong to a ‘Marxist religion’ with its own and parallel structures of enforced dogma, party ecclesiology, eschatology and so on (1961: 37). He wants instead to be a kind of free-Church disciple of Marx – one now willing, as for all his earlier talk of a politics of repentance in Marxism: An Interpretation he was not, to speak of the recent history of Marxism as ‘so defaced by crimes and betrayals that anyone who is not yet disillusioned with Marxism is unlikely to be so in the near future’. Curiously, though, and in a very un-traditional Christian way, he seems willing in 1961 to jettison the specifically supernatural class of beliefs in Christianity for a reconstructed, erstwhile-Christian Marxism, because it seems to him a better instrument to combat what he continues to identify to the day as his primary enemy, ‘liberal empiricism’. (See, for instance, his comment in a 1994 interview: ‘My critique of liberalism is one of the few things that has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my life. Ever since I understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it – and that was when I was seventeen years old’; 1994k: 43ff.).

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What is the shape of the neo-Marxism MacIntyre espouses in 1961? British Christians, he claims, have become complacently pietistic and ecclesiastically minded instead of concerned with the pressing social and political problems of the day, while British Marxists have shrunk to a small, insignificant minority in the university world. What possibility is there, then, he asks, for a synthesis of what is acceptance-worthy in the two? Having earlier noted the affinities between these two Weltanschaungen, he calls these affinities to mind again here. Both are united in their opposition to liberal empiricism, in that both seek an overall view of the world, and both seek to direct the individual beyond his own subjective sphere so that he comes to understand and appropriately occupy his place in the larger social and cosmic orders. Both also oppose the liberal fact–value dichotomy by espousing metaphysical ethical systems – systems, that is, in which finding out how the world is forms an integral part of finding out how we should act. For both, then, he notes, theory and practice are to be united and for both there is an understood continuity between fact-discovery and value-commitment (1961: 34). The problem with Christianity, though, MacIntyre claims here, is its political elasticity: a broadly Christian framework can stand behind the most divergent political commitments and programmes for change (A Short History of Ethics later makes a similar complaint about Christianity’s elasticity before rival philosophical conceptions of ethics, as noted above in Chapter 1). So he argues that the Christianinspired reformer must steer a path between two defective strains in Christian politics: on the one hand that utopian strain which despairs of what MacIntyre now calls ‘the slow, patient tasks of large-scale transformation’ and seeks instead, and self-indulgently, to form separatist communities in which the divine kingdom will be realized on earth (Thomas Münzer is cited as an exemplary theorist of this defective strain of Christian politics), and on the other hand that conservative strain (with Edmund Burke as outstanding spokesman) which sees the state as primarily a bulwark against sin and eschews any goal of moral progress (30–33). So at this stage MacIntyre continues to view Marxism as offering us the most balanced depiction of the imperfectability of human nature. There is a natural evil in man according to Marx, he notes, but this evil is understood as providing a limit against which human civilization can and should push. Humanity is not so weighed down by what it has been that new moral horizons are unattainable for it: ‘ “We are what the past has made us.” No. We are whatever we can make of ourselves out of what the past has given us’ (33). If we turn next to MacIntyre’s later intervening writings on Marxist topics prior to his 1968 reworking of Marxism: An Interpretation, we can see his continuing critical stance toward the varieties of Marxist thought current in the early 1960s. In ‘Trotsky in Exile’ (1963, reprinted in ASI: 52–9), his affinities with Trotskyism are made manifest. He applauds Trotsky’s anti-necessitarian view of the realization of the desired socialist state, and Trotsky’s ability to revise his own thought in the face of new evidence and unforeseen circumstances. But he attacks the ossification and

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dogmatization of Trotsky’s circumstantially inspired thought at the hands of selfstyled Trotskyists (ASI: 58–9). In the 1964 review ‘The Socialism of R.H. Tawney’ (ASI: 38–42), his Trotskyist allegiances are made clearer still, as are the causes of his rejection of British Labour Party socialism. For what he describes as its insularity – its failure to conceive of an international socialist movement, and its failure to confront the capitalism of the big corporation – he sees the Labour Party as but an alternative-in-kind to the Conservative Party. For its identification more with the needs of managers and technocrats than with workers, the British Labour Party, he argues, is but ‘the party of the other half of our ruling class’ (40–41). In ‘Marxist Mask and Romantic Face: Lukács on Thomas Mann’ (1965, reprinted in ASI: 60–69) we can see MacIntyre’s admiration for Georg Lukács’s independentminded Marxism and for Lukács’s elucidation of the concept of alienation – an elucidation MacIntyre finds all the more remarkable for what he sees as its fidelity to the treatment of alienation in those early works of Marx (works to which Lukács did not have access at the time). In expositing Lukács’s account of alienation in this essay, MacIntyre clearly means to endorse it, and it will have a role in his own later work. Drawing on both Marx and Lukács, ‘Marxist Mask’ argues that alienation should be understood in a fourfold way. In the first instance, and prior to a revolutionary transformation of society, man is alienated from himself: instead of his own genuine ends, he pursues ends which have been imposed upon him by external social forces. Secondly, in an alienated condition the order of means and ends is inverted: man works and works in a servile way in order merely to survive, instead of surviving in order to work creatively. Thirdly, in a society of alienation, socio-economic forces are reified and endowed with exaggerated power, autonomy, and permanence: this generates conceptual confusions on the level of theory and blind alleys for inquiry into the good and best life. Finally, the alienated life lacks unity: it is parcelled out into a set of rival and competing spheres, each sphere governed by its own separate set of norms and each sphere claiming a sovereignty which, because of the very divided nature of the self over which it would rule, it cannot possess (65–6). This final aspect of alienation is not well explained in the essay, and could do with a good deal more illumination than is provided here, but on the theme of the disunity of modern life is present throughout MacIntyre’s work in and beyond After Virtue (and MacIntyre’s best recent treatment of it can be found in his 1999 essay ‘Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency’; see 1999b) For MacIntyre, the notion of alienation is a contrast concept: to speak of alienated man is to speak of the possibility of reconciled man. In both Marx and Lukács he sees the ideal of reconciled man as derived from German romanticism’s notion of the artist who does not work but plays. Lukács, he claims, has helped us keep alive ‘the romantic aspiration to embody art in life itself’. But he is to be faulted for his solution to closing the gap between the ideal and the actual, because in his ‘impatience with history, with the slow pace of historical development’, Lukács

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reverts to Stalinist deterministic materialism, and so undermines the value of his own original reconstructive Marxist undertaking (ASI: 68–9). What is apparent at this stage of MacIntyre’s development is his abiding belief, alongside a belief in the reality of alienation, in the need for revolutionary praxis as the sole adequate remedy for abolishing alienation: It was the insight of Hegel, rendered into realistic social terms by Marx (and Marx’s ‘materialism’ consists in really no more than this rendering) that the escape from the contradictions and mystifications thrown up by this philosophy did not lie simply in intellectually dissipating them by greater clarity in conceptual analysis.

In the Hegelian-Marxist view, such conceptual contradictions and mystifications express the incoherences of a whole form of social life. To overcome them, one does not merely have to philosophize more clearly, but to learn how to act in a new way: revolutionary praxis, as characterized by Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach, is needed (67). In another and roughly contemporaneous pre-1968 essay, ‘Pascal and Marx: on Lucien Goldmann’s Hidden God’ (1964, reprinted in ASI: 76–87), MacIntyre makes a bit clearer his commitment to holism and historicism in social explanation, themes we will explore more fully in Chapter 4. He notes here that Marx has taught us that we can only understand how gold can function as a coin, for instance, or how a loom can function as capital, by understanding their place in a whole background network of norm-governed relationships, economic and monetary. Pascal, Hegel, and Goethe, he adds, also grasped this ‘truth about the human sciences’, that ‘the individual object or action is identifiable only in the context of the totality; the totality is only identifiable in the set of relationships between individuals. Hence we must move from parts to whole and back from whole to parts’ (84). But Hegel and Marx have taken us further than this, ‘Hidden God’ notes, by teaching us that individuals can have a false understanding of the social system of which they are parts – they can have false consciousness instead of true consciousness. A criterion, however, is necessary to discriminate cases of the former from those of the latter, and for Marx and Hegel, MacIntyre notes, this is provided by historical knowledge or developmental understanding: Agent A in form of social life S will only understand S aright, and so correctly understand the overall context of his actions, if he understands S as the outcome of the history of the past human actions and choices which produced it (ASI: 84). MacIntyre clearly himself accepts this criterion of true consciousness here. In ‘How Not to Write about Lenin’, authored in 1968 and reprinted in Against the Self-images of the Age (ASI: 43–7), we can see MacIntyre’s sympathy for singleminded pursuit of ‘the revolutionary liberation of mankind from exploitation and alienation’ such as he sees in Lenin. But alongside this is MacIntyre’s admission that Lenin followed a crude utilitarian ethic to win the victory of socialism at any

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necessary cost, and this form of ethical justification is something of which we have already seen MacIntyre wants no part (47). Che Guevara is admired in ‘Marxism of the Will’ (1969, reprinted in ASI: 70–75) for his heroic, self-sacrificing, if tragically flawed devotion to the Marxist cause, but his shortcoming is identified as substituting abstract moralism – Kantian-style invocations of abstract duty and honour – for hard analytic thinking about how the socialist revolution should be carried out in his own social context. This voluntaristic Marxism is not MacIntyre’s Marxism, though he admits that Guevara was trying to make up for lacunae in Marx’s own thought: lacunae concerning the mechanism for, and the form of practical reasoning which would justify, the transition to a socialist society (ASI: 75). About these, MacIntyre continues himself to puzzle, but as yet he offers not his own solution. Interestingly, in two earlier summary pieces, the essay ‘Marx’ for the volume Western Political Philosophers (1964h), edited by Maurice Cranston and an essay ‘Recent Political Thought’ (1966b), MacIntyre acknowledges that Marx’s views on historical inevitability were unclear and possibly inconsistent: while the earlier Marx seemed to deny the existence of historical inevitability, the later Marx seemed to affirm it (1964h: 106–7; 1966b: 191). But what Marx was never about, MacIntyre argues in this essay (something which will later be a point of contention between MacIntyre and neo-Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse), was belief in a top-down or vanguard (versus a bottom-up) socialist revolution – one which would instrumentalize and manipulate the working classes for their own ultimate advantage (1964h: 106). These two short essays underscore the point which MacIntyre had made earlier with respect to Marx’s account of religious belief – that Marx’s views on politico-economic development are significantly flawed, because Marx fell afoul of that which he so effectively criticized in others: the mistake of assuming that the concepts and categories applicable to one’s own time are adequate to social phenomena tout court. We can now turn to Marxism and Christianity, the important revision of Marxism: An Interpretation undertaken in 1968 (in Chapter 8 we will consider the several pieces devoted to Marxist themes MacIntyre has authored since After Virtue to get his considered view on the value and disvalue of Marx and Marxist thought). Marxism and Christianity contains a succinct but important introduction in which MacIntyre avows that in the earlier Marxism: An Interpretation (1953) he had aspired to be as much of a Marxist and a Christian as the two proved compossible, while remaining sceptical of elements of each. In 1968 he states that he is neither a Marxist nor a Christian in the sense of giving his allegiance to any Marxist or Christian organization (i.e. to any particular Marxist party or to any particular Christian Church), but he remains convinced that there are important and original philosophical truths in both Christianity and Marxism which now, more as an external critic, he thinks it valuable to disinter, unpersuaded as he remains by the positivist critique of the epistemic value of large-scale world-views such as these two represent. Once again, he alludes to his belief in the ineluctability of Weltanschaung construction and to its

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tacit employment in practice, but though we still await a carefully worked out case for this thesis, we are not given it here. While the earlier Marxism: An Interpretation was a book by a believer for primarily, but not exclusively, other believers, Marxism and Christianity is an attempt to identify for the general academic public the important philosophical truths of which the Christian and the Marxist traditions are the bearers. It strives to remain mindful, however, as adherents of the two are generally claimed not to be, of the ‘historical relativity’ of Marxist and Christian doctrines and of the tendency of adherents of both traditions to ‘aggressive and defensive responses’ to their critics (MC: ix). Marxism and Christianity has considerably less reference to Christian doctrines in it, and has virtually no discussion of the earlier study’s category of ‘prophecy’. The treatments of Hegel and Feuerbach are streamlined, and MacIntyre’s treatment of Marx in the earlier study is noticeably re-worked. To begin with, Hegel is now identified more pointedly as a bourgeois optimist whose idealist tack (i.e. tailoring reality to theory rather than vice versa) led him falsely to believe that the economic progress caused by capitalism would by a natural process come to serve the interests of all as opposed to merely the few – and to believe more generally that self-interest and related evils would naturally be overcome in the historical process. Such a view MacIntyre, of course, rejects, as he rejects Hegel’s root-and-branch dismissal of myth and image as elements unworthy of any large-scale rationality come of age (MC: 15–17). With respect to Feuerbach, Marxism and Christianity contains a slightly sharper criticism of his restrictive notion of alienation. Feuerbach’s programme of demythologizing religion as the cure for alienation fails to take into account, MacIntyre notes here, that humans are still alienated by other causes and alienated in other spheres of their activity. Feuerbach’s program is also described as being too intellectualist in its approach for aiming to cure religious-inspired alienation by a still too theoretical politics (27–8). MacIntyre continues to hold in Marxism and Christianity that we must look to Marx as a corrective to these aberrant tendencies in Hegel and Feuerbach, and we are supplied now with a notably more cogent treatment of what MacIntyre sees as the inner core of Marx’s thought. As MacIntyre sketches out Marx’s interpretation of socio-economic history anew in this 1968 work, his sympathies for important elements of Marx’s standpoint clearly remain. With Marx, he laments as part of the process of the division of labour the emergence of a professionalized intellectual class – a class whose supposed task is to think for the rest of a society, whose other members are then to be treated as passive recipients of manipulative betterment at the hands of this educational elite. Though he does not state the point outright, MacIntyre appears at this stage to share Marx’s goal of a universal classless society, and one might well query why he remains silent on this, but Marxism and Christianity makes the point more emphatically than earlier writings that Marx in various ways needs to be saved from himself. The humanistic ideal of a classless society in which all social institutions transparently serve the needs of all and of each, for instance, must, MacIntyre states

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here, be viewed as a regulative ideal – and not à la Engels and the Marx of Engels’ influence as an inevitable outcome of the historical process. Part of the effort of the concluding part of Marxism and Christianity is to argue on broadly Marxist premises for a non-deterministic understanding of the historical process. Since Marx had admitted in correspondence to the editorial board of a Russian journal that historical sequences could have a number of different outcomes, why not, MacIntyre asks, reject the idea that a socialist society will be an inevitable outcome? Why not instead, in this construal of the spirit of Marx, treat socialist society as an alternative standpoint to the present social order, one which can both liberate us on the level of theory from that social order’s limitations and serve as a regulative ideal for present and future practice (MC: 85)? This proposal, as he is aware, amounts to a kind of re-Hegelianizing of Marx by giving the notion of alienation in Marx’s later and self-described scientific works, works such as Das Kapital, the prominence it enjoyed in his earlier works. Restating a point from the earlier Marxism: An Interpretation, MacIntyre notes here that Marx’s breakthrough was in adopting much of Hegel’s speculative philosophy, but with a crucial difference. By using it in a way Hegel had not envisaged – that is, as an instrument for critiquing the social order of the present – Marx has shown us how, by being made into something more than a mere correspondence-to-reality-aspiring theory, philosophy can be transformed into an instrument of social practice. And Marx has also shown us why it should serve as such an instrument (MC: 33–4). Marx therefore rightly criticizes, in MacIntyre’s view, the civil society which Hegel defends. Sharing with Feuerbach the vision of a society of free persons in community, Marx rightly faults the Prussian civil society of Hegel’s high esteem for its failure, even while granting political liberties to its citizens, to empower those citizens to use these liberties. All civil orders similarly fail, MacIntyre adds, when they fail to address the more basic question of property relations in society: civic and political liberties without just property relations are chimerical. It is this for MacIntyre which justifies Marx’s call for a radical transformation of civil society in its late-capitalist form. Social institutions must genuinely serve the needs of each and of all, yet they both fail in this task and self-deceivingly and deceptively present themselves precisely as succeeding in it. So free-market capitalism boasts the betterment of the working classes for raising their standard of living, but it fails to address – and prevents from being addressed – the more fundamental aspects of proletarian betterment. Only those who have created and sustained proper egalitarian forms of community – forms of community whose social institutions are genuinely need-serving for all – can carry out this practical versus merely theoretical reordering of society. And these, MacIntyre thinks, are those members of the working class who have both an experiential understanding of egalitarian community and who practice its values daily (this point will be developed more fully in ‘After Virtue and Marxism: A Response to Wartofsky’, 1984l, to be examined in a later chapter). Interestingly, in his slightly later and bitingly critical treatment of the thought of Herbert Marcuse (Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic, 1970b), with which we will conclude for now a consideration of MacIntyre’s Marx-inspired

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writings, the rejection of any top-down, elitist re-education and restructuring of society is reiterated, on this occasion with reference to the issues of truth and rationality. Given its proximity to Marxism and Christianity and its relevance to the section of Marxism and Christianity just discussed, it is worth examining Herbert Marcuse before continuing with the rest of Marxism and Christianity. Because MacIntyre sees himself as one also ‘committed to a radical critique of the existing social order’ (HM: 7), he deems Marcuse’s thought worthy of critical consideration. But he sees himself as much more a ‘radical democrat’ and therefore a more faithful follower of Marx than Marcuse, because Marcuse, he argues, is committed to a Young Hegelian and therefore elitist conception of social reform. This is made particularly clear in Marcuse’s 1967 essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’, he notes. In this piece Marcuse articulates a position according to which, in Marcuse’s own words, ‘truth is the telos of toleration’. MacIntyre vehemently rejects this way of conceiving the matter, and argues instead that rationality, not truth, should be regarded as the telos of toleration. In doing so, he reveals again how much in social and political philosophy he has been after finding a middle position between empiricist liberalism and scientistic or doctrinaire Marxism, wanting to avoid the latter’s deification of the party vanguard, as he puts it, and the former’s deification of the historical process (see MC: 113–14). Rationality, for MacIntyre, is the goal of toleration, because – and here in agreement with Karl Popper – toleration permits politically unfettered criticism of truth-claims, especially those to do with social and political matters. Beliefs, whether true or false, which are not exposed to critical scrutiny and to the possibility of refutation are held as unfalsifiable – and are therefore held irrationally. This manner of holding beliefs creates a habit of mind in their adherents which both disenables them from discovering future truths and opens them up to adhering to future falsities. So, wishing to distinguish his position sharply from that of Marcuse, MacIntyre argues in this short book that the necessary route to societal transformation is through furthering that process which Marx referred to as worker ‘self-education’, that process of the progressive enlightenment and emancipation of the working class which is already inchoately taking place in them. Societal transformation cannot and should not be had by Marcusean elitist indoctrination of the unenlightened many for the sake of the truth, because this would be merely to replicate in another form the Stalinist solution to revolutionary transformation (HM: 89–92). In his repudiation with Marx of any vanguard form of social revolution, and against Marx of any social revolution brought about by deterministic causes, MacIntyre still maintains in this 1970 study of Marcuse that the hope of social transformation can be kept alive. The hope he seeks to foster – and he credits Marx here with helping us keep alive hope as a secular virtue – is of a future social order which will not merely be an improved extension of the present social order as we know it (what MacIntyre describes as the liberal’s version of hope), but one in which alienation in the work and social relations of persons will be largely eliminated, because each will be enabled to seek self-realization through creative work and in social institutions which serve the person, instead of vice versa. This hope is a hope for social improvement, not

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merely in details and in particulars, but in kind. A later MacIntyre will dramatically reduce the scope for this change in kind from the international or even the national to the local and the small-scale. The cognitive basis, MacIntyre thinks, for this virtue of hope is an understanding of the past – of past human possibilities and their realization – coupled with Hegel’s insight that the same social conditions which serve to extend certain human possibilities may also end by frustrating others, so these subsequent social conditions must too, in time, be transcended. Following Marx, MacIntyre observes here that capitalism has greatly extended human possibilities and potential, but as with other past social systems, it must now be transcended for human betterment, and it contains within itself the seeds of its own self-transcendence (the details of capitalism’s failures will be given by him more fully in the 1995 introduction to Marxism and Christianity, as we shall see – strong evidence that his views on the problems with capitalism have changed very little). Returning to Marxism and Christianity, as the book approaches its end, MacIntyre argues, drawing on a consciously tendentious and anti-Engelian interpretation of Marx, that the transition to a socialist society must be: (a) the task of workers themselves in their concrete social institutions; (b) informed by the right goal for change: the re-appropriation of social systems and structures to serve genuine and non-class-divided human needs; (c) at a pace and productive of an outcome neither of which can be known in advance of the workers’ determinations in their concrete circumstances, and therefore (d) in a time and a manner which is unpredictable (MC: 89–92). Most significantly, the hope contained in the self-critical Marxist humanism MacIntyre wishes to promote is one which will – in a phrase which he borrows from Hegel, but which is fundamental to his own intellectual motivations – ‘rescue individual lives from the insignificance of finitude’. It will do this by showing them that through their efforts and personal sacrifices made for social progress in the historical process, they ‘can have some role in a world-historical drama’ and can further the collective human cause (MC: 112). MacIntyre counterposes here this version of humanism with a liberal individualiststyle humanism which he sees as, in effect, unworthy of the name. The moral vision of liberal individualist humanism, he argues, has not enough of the common in it, and it rests the authority of its moral principles on nothing other than individual choice (a constant complaint in MacIntyre’s criticism of liberalism). In rejecting Marxism, as in rejecting Christianity, the secular liberal humanist, he notes, ‘rejects the possibility of constructing any view of the world which possesses the dimensions of Marxism’. Rejected, then, is ‘the possibility of any doctrine which connects moral attitudes, beliefs about the past, and beliefs in future possibility. The lynch pin of this rejection is the liberal belief that facts are one thing, values another – and that the two realms are logically independent of each other … For the liberal, the individual necessarily being the source of all value necessarily legislates for himself in matters of value; his autonomy is only preserved if he is regarded as choosing his own ultimate principles, unconstrained by any external considerations’ (MC: 124).

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The contrast MacIntyre wishes to draw here is with the Marxist and traditional Christian depictions of the person. According to these, the discovery of facts about human nature and human-nature-in-past-society is essential to the adopting, the justifying, and the modifying of moral principles. Self-discovery and understanding of the societal past are sources for morality, and should be considered as determinants of action; in this way, economic man will not be separated from moral or political man (MC: 124). Characteristic of liberal humanism though, contrariwise, MacIntyre observes, is precisely the separation of the economic from the political and the compartmentalization of the social or public domain and the moral domain – a moral domain that is now privatized. So the same liberal politics which has as its ideal the promotion of political equality has also as its consequence the perpetuation and protection of economic inequality (MC: 135). We will delay a treatment of MacIntyre’s final verdict on the strengths and limitations of Marx’s thought until we have examined After Virtue and several pieces subsequent to it. Marxism and Christianity ends by calling for ‘a critique … of contemporary society on the scale of Marx’s critique of classical capitalism’ (140); undoubtedly, MacIntyre’s After Virtue yet to be written represents an attempt at such a critique. But before Marxism and Christianity ends, the book gives us an analysis of the lapse of Marxist figures – Lenin, Stalin, Mao, even Trotsky – into a utilitarian conception of morality. Although he seems aware that the textual basis for this claim is not strong, MacIntyre views Marx himself as an ethical absolutist or as someone who at any rate did not judge present questionable actions and circumstances solely in light of their putative future consequences (MC: 129–30). It is ironic, then, MacIntyre notes, that so many Marxists have adopted a utilitarian form of practical reasoning, since their doing so represents an absorption of a central aspect of that very spirit of the age Marx himself was so keen to criticize. Utilitarianism for MacIntyre is, as we have seen (see pages 104–6 above), a characteristically modern means–end morality which despairs of securing rational consensus on moral norms by arguments drawn from human nature and its history, and looks instead to an allegedly neutral, contextless and timeless standard of value. But for Marx, he reminds us, there precisely cannot be in society in its present state a neutral, non-class-specific conception of well-being: there are instead a variety of conflicting and heterogeneous goods which humans seek depending on the conditioning of their social circumstances. Thus, utilitarian practical reasoning could never have been a recourse for Marx, and for this reason MacIntyre thinks that most Marxist moralizing can and should be disposed of by perceptive students of their master (MC: 128–9). MacIntyre’s final bit of writing on Marxist themes prior to After Virtue is contained in two important introductions to the separate sections of the Against the Self-images of the Age collection, in an epilogue to the same volume, and in an essay authored specially for it and entitled, ‘The end of ideology and the end of the end of ideology’. The first of the introductions is particularly revelatory as regards MacIntyre’s intellectual self-understanding.

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One of the chief problems with contemporary thought, as MacIntyre sees it, is that the necessary and valuable functional dichotomization between detailed critical conceptual work on philosophical topics and the more synthetic and practically significant work of Weltanschaung construction and adoption has in recent times become a substantial dichotomization. Both forms of intellectual work are necessary, MacIntyre notes, both are best done separately, and yet the two stand in need of mutual completion. Detailed conceptual inquiry needs some external criteria of significance for its results; Weltanschaung articulation or construction needs detailed and critical scrutiny of its various constituent parts in order for it to be rational and truth-directed. Human life, finally, taken individually and collectively, requires some rationally justifiable overall conception to direct and co-ordinate its activities and practices (ASI: vii–viii). Yet, MacIntyre notes in the introduction to the first part of Against the Selfimages, analytic philosophers who follow J.L. Austin’s dictum that importance is not important, but truth is, contribute to this substantial dichotomization. By treating as a low priority the work of ideology criticism, they fail to contribute to the task of rendering present ideologies more rational. Conversely, Marxists, Christians, and the devotees of psychoanalysis often go their own way and shield their respective tenets from rational criticism. They thereby deprive their highly socially significant and practically efficacious views of both rational warrant and support and of the right kind of critical and transformative power (ASI: viii). MacIntyre’s own intellectual efforts have clearly long been about bridging this gap. How, though, does MacIntyre understand the term ‘ideology’, for instance, as it is referred to in the essay ‘The end of ideology and the end of the end of ideology’? An ideology, he thinks, has three components: 1. a meta-empirical view of nature and society (e.g. the Christian conception of the cosmos as created and sustained by God), plus some belief about the relation of the component elements of this overall conception to empirical truth claims; 2. (a) an account of how (1) stands with respect to both specific moral values and principles and to action-guiding norms generally (e.g. those governing social and political life), and (b) a set of such norms and values; and, 3. the social shadow cast by (1) and (2): that is, the embodiment of the beliefs of (1) and the norms and values of (2) in the actions and transactions of individuals who are adherents of the ideology. (ASI: 5–7) What MacIntyre thinks needs to be constructed, as he states here, is a rationally selfcritical ideology – or, in his own words and with reference to our present situation, a ‘post-Marxist ideology of liberation’: something which will combine the scope and practical commitment proper to an ideology with the truth-directedness and openness to criticism and refutation appropriate to any rational undertaking. This ideology should be post-Marxist, he states, in learning from Marxism ‘where not to begin’. That is to say, it should consciously avoid Marxists’ tendency toward

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uncritical dogmatizing, and learn from the failure of Marx’s own general theory of society. A suitably post-Marxist general theory will then in his view be conscious of its own socio-historical limitations, and will, as Marx’s theory did not, provide a credible account not only of the means to radical societal transformation but of the sources of the authoritative moral norms to govern social life (ASI: 92, 284). Contrary to some not very well informed contemporary criticisms (e.g. see Hilary Putnam’s criticisms in Putnam, 1995) MacIntyre has long been a defender of the liberal values of free speech and toleration. This is certainly made clear in Against the Self-images, where he speaks of these as integral to the task of rational ideology construction (ASI: 283). But how, then, does MacIntyre handle the obvious objection that the present world has learned hard lessons from its intellectual and social past, and that we are now, if we have been paying attention to history, beyond ideology? In the first place, his account of ideology is meant to be a description of the form any recognizable human society must take, not a recommendation of the form it should take. In this sense it stands or falls as an interpretive description (i.e. assuming that no clear line can be drawn between the empirical and the conceptual, and that there is no way to identify the important facts about a social order that does not presuppose some interpretive conceptual framework or other). Secondly, MacIntyre has an explanation of why precisely an ‘end of ideology’ thesis is so popular in our time – because it is a self-serving stratagem of the reigning ideology of our day, intellectual liberalism. Owing to its peculiar and largely negative character, he argues in Against the Selfimages’ epilogue, liberalism succeeds as an ideology (in his neutral and descriptive sense of the term) precisely to the extent that it can conceal from itself and from others its status as (partisan) ideology. How is this? Because liberalism, he states, owing to its anti-authoritarian, anti-ancien régime roots in the eighteenth century (e.g. in the thought of Jefferson and Robespierre), takes form more through oppositions – for instance, to enforced religious practice, to the denial of suffrage, to alien rule, to censorship – than through affirmations. It lacks a determinate positive vision, so it needs to lead a parasitic existence, attaching itself to various and ever-changing non-liberal economic, social and political structures and bodies of thought: The vice of liberalism derives from the continuous refusal of liberals to recognize the negative and incomplete character of their liberalism. The precepts of liberalism enjoin upon us certain constraints upon our political activities; but they set before us no ends to pursue, no ideal or vision to confer significance upon our political action. They never tell us what to do. Hence no institution, no social practice can be inspired solely or even mainly by liberalism; and every institution or social practice that claims to be so inspired – such as the ‘liberal’ university or the ‘liberal’ state – is always a fraud. (ASI: 283)

In brief, MacIntyre’s view is that liberalism, wishing to succeed as an ideology, must conceal both from itself and from others its overwhelmingly constraining versus constructive character. It must thus present itself not as one among a number of contentious rival outlooks with its own partiality of standpoint, but as a conceptual

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framework which manifestly captures the way the social world, the human person and the world of moral value are in themselves. To sustain its position of dominance, liberalism must then both deny its ideological status and claim that all (other) ideology is dead. MacIntyre notes here by way of illustration the curious alliance between liberalism as ideology and the current dominant mode of Anglo-American philosophy – namely, analytic philosophy – which alliance he has long been in business to attack. Anglophonic analytic philosophers, he observes, are famously interested in uncovering facts about the meaning and use of concepts in a given domain, and about the logical relationship between concepts. Yet, with an ambition to uncover the nature and logic of moral language, for instance, they frequently work with an inadequate historical sample, and they fail to consider both the social sources of concepts and the related phenomenon of conceptual change. This partiality of method serves to shield their essentialist-style claims from counter-example; and, when it is a question of claiming superiority for liberal values and ways of thinking about nature, society, and the person, it spares them the difficulty of having to demonstrate that alleged superiority with respect to conceptual rivals (ASI: ix–x). Because MacIntyre thinks that reason demands that we take seriously the multiplicity of rival, conceptual schemes, elucidating them in their specificity so as to understand and then rationally engage with them, remaining as free from our own assumptions in this task as possible, he also thinks that we need a developed theory of rationality and of vindication to underwrite any claims about the superiority of one scheme to another. The elaboration of such a two-part theory will be the primary concern of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Chapter 3

The Rational Resources of Christianity

The creed of the English is that there is no God and that it is wise to pray to him from time to time. (‘God and the Theologians’, in ASI: 26) There are only three kinds of persons: those who, having found God, seek Him; those who, not having found Him, spend their time seeking Him; and those who live without having found Him and without seeking for Him either. The first are both blessed and reasonable, the last both mad and unhappy, and the second unhappy but reasonable (Pascal, Penseés, fragment 257). This is an age when no one is blessed and reasonable and most are mad and unhappy. The task is to be unhappy but reasonable. (‘Pascal and Marx: on Lucien Goldmann’s Hidden God’, in ASI: 87)

3.1

First Explorations

MacIntyre’s early writings on Christian or proto-Christian philosophical topics bear the marks of the dominance of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy at the time, against which, in various ways, he is struggling. His first effort in this area, ‘Analogy in Metaphysics’ (1950), is an incomplete but suggestive sketch of how the use of analogous language and concepts in metaphysics, versus the univocal language and concepts in logic and mathematics, can be governed by rational criteria and be rationally justified. Reasoning by analogy, he argues in the essay, is an in principle rationally justifiable way of co-ordinating large tracts of experience – and it can be of heuristic explanatory value as well. In a less elaborated way he argues here that scientific reasoning – for instance, Newton’s formulation of the law of rectilinear motion – employs concepts created by analogical reasoning and that the employment of these concepts precedes the scientist’s application of mathematical concepts to physical reality. So logical empiricists are already committed to the rational value of analogy, and what is acceptable in physics should be acceptable in metaphysics. The essay shows a surprisingly good ability in someone not trained in medieval philosophy to understand the workings of a subtle doctrine at the heart of the metaphysics of Aquinas, the analogia entis. It also shows MacIntyre’s first inklings

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that Christian belief may have a large rationally warranted component. He will waver on the matter for some time before firmly adopting this view. His next essay in the philosophy of religion, ‘Visions’ (1955a), is a first offering in the subject area of a subsequent eponymous study: difficulties in Christian belief. The essay attempts to show against certain strands in Protestant and Catholic thought that religious experience – whether via visions, voices, or feeling states – can be neither an originative nor a corroborating source of evidence or justification for Christian faith-beliefs. His argument here is as follows: if belief in the God of Christianity is in question (i.e. belief in an infinite being), no feeling-state, since these are by nature finite, can sufficiently manifest His presence, nor, therefore, can it warrant claims to His existence. While allegedly supernatural voices and visions, as manifestly only signs or instruments of a transcendent, infinite God, cannot similarly be discounted, MacIntyre admits, they bear with them a separate problem: the reliability of inferring from ostensibly manifested effect to unobservable originating cause. The problem with this type of inference, he claims here, following Hume, is that unlike in the case of smoke and fire, or the approach of unseen trains from sound signals, we cannot confirm in any particular instance the presence of an unobservable cause behind its ostensible effects so as to license the inference from effect to cause in future such instances (257). This claim of course presupposes the truth of an empiricist understanding of causation according to which the co-occurrence and co-variance of observables is the hallmark of the causal relation. But all the religious believer need respond to MacIntyre here is that the allegedly preternatural effects in question which are attributed to God are of a kind that only a being of the nature such as God is thought to have could have produced them: they are, that is, uniquely divine effects. But the believer would have to establish on independent grounds the existence and nature of the deity to use such a rejoinder, and this is in part MacIntyre’s point in ‘Visions’. ‘Visions’ does argue, though, sensibly enough, that religious experiences cannot corroborate dogmatic Christian belief, because, at least in the case of Roman Catholicism, spurious private religious revelations can only be distinguished from non-spurious ones on the basis of the concordance of their content with antecedently defined Christian doctrine or dogma. But what authenticates cannot be corroborated by what is authenticated. MacIntyre fails to note here, it must be said, that religious experiences such as visions may perform the work of intensifying or calling to mind doctrine and the contents of prior and independently established public revelation, but this is a separate point. MacIntyre’s next piece in the philosophy of religion, ‘A Note on Immortality’ (1955b), was authored to challenge a view of C.D. Broad then under discussion according to which survival after death is proposed as a possible and plausible explanation for mediumistic phenomena. MacIntyre’s aim here is to discount the rational basis for belief in personal immortality – at least if immortality be understood in some Platonic (i.e. bodiless) fashion. Bodiless survival after death is rejected as a possible explanation on the grounds that for a prediction to be verifiable it must be meaningful, but the notion of non-bodily human existence after death is,

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MacIntyre claims here, meaningless. The argument for this conclusion is, in the first place, that the hypothesis of non-bodily survival after death is by itself insufficiently determinate to serve as an explanation: survival per se could be possible in a dream state, in a state of perpetual sleep (punctuated perhaps by talking in one’s sleep), in some wakeful cognitive state, or in some combination of all of these. But if the state is specified as full and perpetual wakefulness, the problem arises of how to make sense of non-bodily cognition. Non-bodily sensation in this state, MacIntyre notes, would have to be unrestricted because not limited by the causal conditions proper to bodily sensation as we know it. Sight would have to be of all material things, though it would not include that of other disembodied persons (death’s survivors would be thereby condemned to a perpetually lonely existence), and it would have to include the capacity of seeing through all things as well. But to envisage such a possibility seems to traverse the bounds of sense, since constitutive of the meaning of sight in our ordinary experience is its contrast with what is unseen, and this distinction of meaning through opposition seems to break down in the putative case of non-bodily seeing. This is not a very compelling argument. MacIntyre’s point appears to be that without the limitation on an individual’s perceptual field caused by his or her bodily location, sensation would be unrestricted, and therefore unlimited. This does not follow in any straightforward way, and what MacIntyre does not consider here is the possibility, countenanced by Christian philosophers such as Aquinas, that God himself could directly cause disembodied persons to have sense knowledge according to His own designs and within limits He himself determines. But since his purpose in this essay seems to be more discounting a Platonic and non-Christian view of personal immortality, perhaps this oversight is not surprising. MacIntyre‘s next effort in the philosophy of religion is an extended essay, ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief’ (1957b), and a turn from the more Thomistic way of viewing Christian religious belief in ‘Analogy in Metaphysics’ to a Barthian way can be discerned in it. The essay’s avowed purpose is characterizing the nature of religious language so as to know how correctly to determine its logical status – that is, how it stands and how it conceives itself to stand with respect to evidence and argument. Christianity is treated as a test case. The philosophical framework of ‘Logical Status’ as sketched in its Introduction shows plainly what philosophical tendencies MacIntyre was responding to at the time, and especially the influence of Wittgenstein on him (whom he has latterly called the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century). With the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, he rejects any aspiration to lay down a priori canons of meaningfulness: the philosopher’s task is first to observe and classify a posteriori the variety of types of meaningful discourse, and then, and only then, to consider questions of their logical success. Philosophy, as MacIntyre states here in so many words, should be understood as having a descriptive-classificatory and then a critical and normative moment (1957b: 162–4). In order to determine the logical value of religious utterance, the essay first attempts to describe it according to its type, but MacIntyre is soon faced with the

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difficulty that there is no recognized authoritative criterion or set of criteria – among self-described religious believers, for instance – for what is to count as religious discourse. So the tack he takes here is attempting to identify paradigmatic instances of religious discourse, and constructing from these a roughly adequate classification of religious language according to its logical type. MacIntyre’s own philosophical method is well exhibited here, and it has remained surprisingly constant throughout his career: to seek meaning not a priori but a posteriori in the varieties of use, to seek to understand use by understanding its holistic context, and finally, to seek to reconstruct alien context by historical inquiry and historically informed analysis. ‘Logical Status’ uses Christianity as its source for paradigmatically meaningful religious utterance, but before turning to Christian religious discourse the essay tries to meet a style of objection that would undermine its efforts from the outset: the objection that religious discourse, because it is based on incommunicable private experience, is so idiosyncratic as to resist classification with other types of discourse (e.g. aesthetic discourse or moral discourse). MacIntyre’s rejoinder to this objection is threefold: (1) religious language, for instance the language of the New Testament, employs the same syntax as the secular Greek in which it was largely composed: a special illumination might be required for one to believe sentences in it, or to deem them significant, but such illumination would not supply a meaning in them otherwise indiscernible to ordinary linguistic competence; (2) an allegedly private, incommunicable experience which could alone render religious concepts meaningful runs afoul of Wittgenstein’s argument against private language, and (3) if religious discourse was by all other standards meaningless, that is, nonsense said of the inexpressible, believers and theologians could not engage in the practice of assertion and denial concerning religious matters, which they evidently feel the need and the justification to do (1957b: 165–9). MacIntyre’s arguments are undoubtedly a bit too brisk here to be convincing, and he seems to rule out too quickly the possibility of divine illumination. But his point, which could be expressed more adequately than he does on this occasion, is that such an illumination would typically not supply some new otherwise unavailable meaning to the concepts of ordinary language in which religious discourse is necessarily already couched. For instance, one could object to MacIntyre’s claim here by citing the possibility that God might illumine the mind of a believer as to the meaning of some parable in the New Testament. MacIntyre’s response here would presumably be that such an illumination could confer a new significance on a story that must first already be grasped in its own terms, and secondly, that the new meaning supplied would have to be supplied in a language already comprehensible to the believer – save that it might refer earthly realities to transcendent realities. MacIntyre indeed notes that where meaning in religious discourse is imported from beyond the bounds of ordinary experience is in its constant reference to God – as in ‘God loves’, ‘God calls’, ‘God forgives’, so it is to discourse about God that he turns next in search of identifying the distinctive traits of religious language. The problem that ‘Logical Status’ identifies with language that refers to an unobservable God is how its reference is to be secured, and here MacIntyre sees

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the Christian as faced with a dilemma: either the Christian’s discourse about God involves meaningful assertions, or it does not. If such discourse is meaningful, it must be falsifiable, since to assert ‘p or not-p’ is to assert nothing at all. Meaningful (i.e. sufficiently definite) assertion is falsifiable assertion, it excludes something from being the case – something which, if it turned out to be the case, would make that assertion false. Meaningful Christian belief must so admit the possibility of its own falsity, and the problem with this, MacIntyre notes, is that it makes the Christian’s belief in God and the transcendent order look like the adoption of a hypothesis that claims or is in search of empirical corroboration (e.g. in the next life). But the Christian accepts the existence of God and God’s alleged self-revelation with a decisive assent, an assent appropriate to an attitude of worship or complete commitment and devotion, so the meaningful assertion route seems closed to the Christian (170–72). If the Christian then is to exempt her faith beliefs from falsification, she must take the route of denying them meaningfulness. But this rightly seems much too high a price for the Christian to pay, MacIntyre notes, since it turns beliefs that are otherwise informing of her understanding and action-guiding into mere vehicles of emotional expression. At this stage, MacIntyre understandably rejects the solution to this dilemma offered by Richard Braithwaite in Braithwaite’s much discussed work at the time, An Empiricist’s View of Religious Belief (MacIntyre, 1957b: 174–5). For Braithwaite, as MacIntyre notes, Christian religious language (e.g. in the Bible) is best understood as language which in the clothing of transcendent assertion and imaginative fictional narrative embodies a set of moral beliefs, a coherent policy for moral action. If one seeks the meaning of religious language in its use one can see, therefore, that it is not cognitively meaningless: religious language contains moral assertions, which, like all non-hypothetical assertions, are open to challenge, albeit in a way different from regular fact-stating assertions. This solution cannot work for MacIntyre because, as he notes, individuals in the process of conversion to Christianity, as Shatov in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, have often accepted the moral content of Christianity short of taking what they view as the decisive step – affirming the existence of God. Contrariwise, former Christians--many of the Victorians, for instance--lost their specifically religious faith but continued with the moral beliefs which Christianity has always included. Where, then, does the specifically religious lie, according to MacIntyre in ‘Logical Status’? And how should the religious discourse of Christians, for example, be thought of from a logical point of view? MacIntyre’s way out of the dilemma – at this stage of his thinking, at any rate – is by an appropriate characterization of what he calls the ‘religious attitude.’ This religious attitude, as MacIntyre understands it, has two components: (1) a commitment to more or less systematic worship of the perceived deity, and (2) the conviction that this deity – God or the gods – act(s) in the world. With respect to religious worship, MacIntyre claims as a matter of empirical fact that for a religious man or woman, practice always precedes theory; worship therefore precedes doctrine, and doctrine does not direct and find its expression in worship, but rather serves to

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explicate worship’s content. MacIntyre clearly thinks this is a more or less reliable generalization with respect to religion as such, though he argues that as religions have become more heedful of rational criticism, their perception of the object of their worship has changed. The worshipful was first typically regarded as an object in the spatio-temporal world; it next came to be viewed as a higher object or set of such objects, and finally, it came to be regarded as a being in no sense conceivable as an object at all – even as the highest of objects. The great monotheistic religions represent this third stage in the evolution of religious consciousness, according to MacIntyre’s account here, and from this observation he turns to considering the Judaeo-Christian language of worship in particular, a language in which he thinks one can find solid evidence for his claims about the defining marks of the religious attitude. In Jewish as in Christian worship, he notes, man speaks to God, not about Him, though the language of worship does often contain more or less oblique references to divine action in the world. As is manifest, for instance, in the Psalms, man’s language of address to God may be vocative, it may be gerundive-cum-descriptive (‘Great art Thou, O God, and greatly to be praised’), it may contain metaphors of praise and hope in God, and it may ascribe action to God. But it is only in a limited sense factual discourse, and in no sense is it theoretical (i.e. hypothetically explanatory) discourse. Since the encounter with the divine which provokes the posture of worship contains much of obscurity, he adds, theological statement – the theoretical explication, as it were, of worship – contains as much, and eventually more, in the way of a language of denial (negative theology) than of affirmation. The being who is and who is to be worshipped is more unlike than like anything in our experience. What, though, one might ask, is the logical status of theology’s affirmations – for instance, the various ascriptions of actions it makes to God? MacIntyre’s suggestion here is that reference can be secured in these ascriptions if we see the mysterious ‘God’ to whom theological affirmations refer as analogous to a fictional character in a fictional narrative. We have some sense of what it means to say ‘God loves’, as we do when, speaking of the eponymous Waverly in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, we say, ‘Waverly is in love.’ In both cases we cannot verify the truth of the assertion, but it remains intelligible to us because we know what it means to say, using a proper name of a person whose existence is verifiable – Julius Caesar, for instance – ‘Julius Caesar is in love.’ MacIntyre unwittingly falls back here on Aquinas’s doctrine of analogous predication, but he seems unaware of how the metaphysical outlook of which Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy forms a part sits ill with the later and Humean things ‘Logical Status’ will say about the knowledge of God available to us from knowledge we might have of the God–world causal relation. In any event, religious discourse, according to the argument here, constitutes a narrative in some ways like, in some ways unlike, fiction. Like a fictional narrative, religious discourse has a protagonist – God who acts in the world – and the coherence of a plot with beginning, middle and end. Religion is in this sense ‘mythical’, MacIntyre observes: its ‘story’ presents characters in roles – characters whose words

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and example provide the religion’s adherents with imaginative ideals and paradigms to orient their own action, especially in those areas where moral rules are of little or no avail. Religious myth presents itself, and is understood by its adherents, as something to be accepted in toto or not at all. And the divine actions which are its central preoccupation are only thought to be properly intelligible in the context of their relation one to another and of each to the whole, the entire story of divine action in the world shedding light on and giving sense to all particular divine actions. With these points as background, ‘Logical Status’ claims that the question can now be fruitfully raised about how the specific form of discourse which religion employs can be the subject of logical appraisal and assessed for its rational justifiability. Returning to an earlier claim, MacIntyre rejects here the possibility of a cosmological justification of religious belief, since he sees in Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion a definitive critique of this project so dear to Jewish, Christian and Islamic thinkers in the Middle Ages. His own reflections on Hume’s arguments here are overly succinct, but fundamentally ‘Logical Status’ claims that any ultimate explanation of why the world is the way it is must either take the form of a deduction, using facts about the world as premises, or must be an inference to one among a number of competing explanatory hypotheses. The former case is ruled out, he thinks, since deductions by their nature simply draw out material already implicitly contained in their premises, and since God is not and cannot be an item in the world (the God of theism, he means to say), His existence cannot be deduced from it. Neither can religion be based on what is known today as the ‘God hypothesis’, and this, MacIntyre thinks, not only because, re-stating an earlier point, worship excludes the tentativeness which appropriately accompanies anything assented to as a hypothesis, but for two additional reasons. First, agreeing with Hume, ‘Logical Status’ claims that ultimate explanations cannot be regarded as hypotheses because they are not testable: there are no conceivable tests or experiments that could be designed to corroborate any ultimate explanation of why the world is the way it is. Secondly, religion cannot be founded upon the God hypothesis, because were religion based on accepting the conclusion of some ironclad chain of reasoning, it would not then be the free assent of love we know at least Christianity to require. In his own words: ‘If the existence of God were demonstrable we should be as bereft of the possibility of making a free decision to love God as we should be if every utterance of doubt or unbelief was answered by thunder-bolts from heaven. But this kind of free decision is the essence of the Christian religion. So that to argue for religious belief in this way would be to destroy it’ (187). This is a curious and particularly unconvincing claim. MacIntyre is here, as elsewhere in ‘Logical Status’, a bit careless in generalizing from claims about Christianity to claims about religion as such, and he is not nearly careful enough to tell us when he means his statements to apply only to Christianity and when not. In this particular case, however, whatever the applicability of this Hume-inspired argument to other religions, it is certainly false with respect to Christianity. In the New Testament, as St Paul famously makes clear in his Letter to the Romans (for example, Romans 1:20), adequate evidence for the existence of God is not from the Christian

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perspective the issue. The world, St Paul asserts, echoing earlier statements in the Old Testament, testifies abundantly to the existence of a one, eternal, and invisible creator God. The challenge for man is not whether to accept God’s existence, but whether to accept His sovereignty and friendship. This must indeed be, and from the God of Christianity’s perspective as well, a free and uncoerced decision, but it is a decision about self-understanding and the practice of living one’s life, not about belief. The great challenge, according to the Gospels and Epistles, is not believing there is a God, but exercising fidelity to His calling; practical unbelief, which may disguise itself as theoretical unbelief, is much more envisaged as the danger than genuine theoretical unbelief. To accept that God exists neither entails, nor is as costly as, the love of God enjoined by Christian revelation. Only, as Aquinas holds, if we were to experience God directly – which we cannot do by our own unaided cognitive powers – and cease to experience God imperfectly in the mirror of His creation, would we be incapable of not loving Him and would our love in awareness of His existence then be ‘coerced’. But in our present cognitive and conative condition, to know beyond a reasonable doubt that God exists is by no means to love Him. The question remains in ‘Logical Status’ of how MacIntyre thinks that religions such as Christianity can be rationally justified if not by any kind of cosmological inference. His answer is that they can only be justified from within the religious attitude, as moral prescriptions can only be justified from within the moral attitude, and aesthetic values from within the aesthetic attitude. Like its aesthetic or moral counterpart, he claims, the religious attitude is based upon the decision to accept a certain ultimate and self-justifying principle. In the case of religion, homo religiosus bases his distinctive attitude, not on considerations of beauty or of rightness, but on the conviction that events in this life proceed from and return to the hand of God (or the gods) as signs and manifestations of His (their) will (175). How, though, does MacIntyre think that the decision to adopt this distinctive cognitive attitude is linked with membership in an organized religious tradition and linked with the theological discourse that is part of such a tradition? Formally, he claims, to be the member of a religion is to accept some criterion or criteria for religious orthodoxy and authenticity – some rule of faith which establishes the boundaries for proper religious practice and for religious truth: for example, ‘Whatever x declares to be a matter for belief and or religious practice is to be accepted as such.’ Since religion invariably has as its function to guide human action and shape human thinking, religious authority has it as its task to determine which actions or beliefs are enjoined and which proscribed by that religion over which it is the authority (substantively, of course, religions may vary widely in their content). But how, according to MacIntyre, is the rule defining religious authority itself to be logically justified – justified, that is, so that the authority endorsed by the rule might in turn warrant the acceptance of the religion’s myths (i.e. myths which are in most cases unverifiable, or as he has previously argued, incapable of factual support)? Here again MacIntyre has recourse to the experience(s) provoking worship. The authority-defining rule, he states – for example, ‘Whatever x declares to be a matter for belief and or religious practice is to be accepted as such’ – can only be justified

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by some experience that the authority in question possesses transcendent backing, that the authority figure(s) is (are) connected in some reliable way to the God whom the prospective member of the religion already perceives behind the events of his or her life. The words of this authoritative source make the God of prior and partial acquaintance more fully known, and the stories of God recounted by the religious authority are not accepted on the basis of empirical evidence, but on the testimony of that authority. Events in nature and history are not, then, evidence for the truth of these words, but exemplifications of that truth, and adherence to these words is not therefore conditional but total and resolute. The believer worships in and through religious practice the God more fully made known to her by the authority she accepts for her previously adopted religious attitude (189–92). Drawing out a conclusion from this set of claims that is applicable to Christianity in particular, MacIntyre observes that although Christian belief presupposes the truth of certain alleged historical facts whose veracity it is the business of historical inquiry to ascertain – for instance, that after three days Christ left the tomb in which he was interred – Christian belief as such is not based upon the outcome of these historical inquiries. As he notes in ‘The Quest of the Historical Jesus’, the final chapter of ‘Logical Status’, historical inquiry can at best come up with provisional, probabilistic judgements concerning the occurrence of the historical events narrated by the authority for the Christian religion. But since the Christian’s belief is decisive and unconditional, it cannot be grounded in the findings of any such historical inquiries: it must rest instead upon a firm confidence in the epistemic reliability of certain authoritative witnesses. Furthermore, it is not merely events themselves that are at issue in Christian belief – events such as the body of Christ’s subsequent disappearance after its entombment – but metaphysical interpretations of these events, which interpretations lie beyond the purview of historical inquiry per se. So in two ways Christian belief can neither be decisively established nor decisively falsified by historical inquiry. In the face of inconclusive historical evidence and rival metaphysical schemes of belief, the individual is faced with a choice, MacIntyre notes. Nature and history can be for him either cause for ‘conversion’ – for discovery of the transcendent God in and behind nature and history and the adopting of the religious attitude of worship toward Him – or they can be for the individual the occasion of unbelief. If the former, the religious attitude adopted and its attendant practices will have about them all the passionate commitment, the subservient devotedness and lack of objectivity of romantic love – or more accurately still, MacIntyre notes, of married love, with marriage’s presumed resolute and definitive bond. To be religious, finally, according to ‘Logical Status’, is to be consumed by a passion which cannot be rationally justified – since there are no logical principles which can mediate the transition from world to belief in God – but a passion which derives from an experience of ‘the worshipful’ (192–4). The religious attitude, moreover, is a holistic one: to adopt the religious attitude is not, or not merely, to subscribe to a set of propositions, but to accept a dramatic narrative framework which gives context and purpose to each of one’s beliefs and actions. For this reason,

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MacIntyre maintains (in this essay of 1957, at any rate), that religion has more to fear from metaphysics than from positivistic critiques of metaphysics. Metaphysics, he notes, claims an ultimacy for its deliverances, an ultimacy of the sort that can and does threaten the supremacy of the religious framework. Critiques of the legitimacy of metaphysics therefore actually make room for the religious form of life (200– 201). At the end of ‘Logical Status’, MacIntyre avows that his analysis has a very Kierkegaardian-Barthian ring to it, but he has none the less done some significant work of his own trying to justify this distinctive way of looking at religion, and at Christianity in particular. Still, as was noted previously, Macintyre seems unaware in the essay of the tension between its upshot and other more Thomistic points he has made, both in his earlier writings in the philosophy of religion and in ‘Logical Status’ itself. In particular, ‘Logical Status’ has not clarified nearly enough the nature of the mysterious perception of the hand of God behind the events of life, which perception the essay purports to be a cornerstone of the religious attitude, and which putative religious authorities presuppose and address. Is this ‘perception’ a spontaneous and un-formalized inference from created to Creator, from narrative to Narrator, based on a judgement of the metaphysical dependence of the former on the latter? It would seem not, in the view of ‘Logical Status’. Is it then merely an unjustified and unjustifiable commitment – a willful, ungrounded decision to look at self and world in a certain way? If so, this would seem to render religious belief arbitrary, fanciful, and even wholly subjectivistic. Many religious persons, many Christians included, would deny that this analysis fits their understanding of their religious belief. MacIntyre does not consider in ‘Logical Status’ the possibility that the experience of God, independent of any specific inference to God’s existence from the world, might none the less be corroborated by one or several such inferences. To say this is not, of course, to say that religious faith, for example the faith of a Muslim or a Christian, would be based upon these inferences, only that it might receive partial and independent confirmation from them, and significantly, that they might make the religious attitude more rationally warranted than the a-religious attitude. 3.2

Christian Belief and the Challenge of Philosophical Rationality

Difficulties in Christian Belief (1959c) represents the next stage of MacIntyre’s thinking on religious rationality, and its writing coincides with his time as a lecturer in the philosophy of religion at the University of Manchester. Like its predecessor ‘Logical Status’, a good deal of its content is dated now, and though it has even more of an introductory tone to it, for its clearly serious engagement with the then current literature on the subject, and for its comprehensive statement of MacIntyre’s views on the rationality of Christian belief at the time, it is well worth examining. Much of Difficulties’ interest lies in the way MacIntyre problematizes the subject matter: the primary audience of the text is educated Christians, and the authorial standpoint MacIntyre adopts is that of a Christian who is committed to the worth

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of philosophical inquiry and who sees himself as answerable in some way to the verdict of philosophical results. From such a standpoint, he attempts to locate the work’s inquiries between a strong form of Christian rationalism, which views the Christian faith as a solution to intellectual problems, and a kind of know-nothing, anti-intellectual Christianity which forgets St Basil’s memorable quip that ‘the kingdom of heaven is not reserved for fools’ (1959c: 7). The problem the study grapples with is how the intellectually respectable Christian is to handle the difficulties which the philosophical way of thinking poses for the credibility of the Christian creed. MacIntyre’s answer is that while the Christian’s faith does not arise at the terminus of philosophical inquiry properly conducted, still the intellectually capable Christians ought to address the difficulties philosophical thinking has traditionally raised for Christian belief – and this for several reasons. To begin with, Difficulties observes, any comprehensive scheme of belief, any sophisticated theory, may be faced with difficulties or logical predicaments. But this need not forbid one from committing to the theory even while trying to resolve those difficulties, especially when the theory or scheme of belief has to do with matters of substance concerning which some position or other must be taken to guide one’s action and practice in the here and now (for related observations of MacIntyre on this point, see his ‘Comment on “Commitment and Objectivity”’, 1960c). Religious belief, the Christian’s belief, clearly addresses a matter of substance – how one ought to view one’s place in the world, how one ought to live – therefore resolute Christian commitment needn’t await the outcome of difficult and subtle philosophical inquiries which have not, after all, MacIntyre reminds the reader, secured consensus among their participants after many centuries of debate and rational effort. Is Christian belief therefore at risk in the practice of philosophical inquiry according to Difficulties? MacIntyre understands by ‘philosophical inquiry’ here that second-order activity which is a logical reflection on the scope, boundaries and logical success of various first-order disciplines, such as theology, psychology, physics, history etc. The answer to the question is yes. If it could be conclusively shown that Christianity required its adherents to affirm contradictory beliefs, then the Christian would run afoul of the truth of logic according to which to affirm contradictions is to affirm anything whatsoever–that is to say, to affirm nothing cognitively meaningful (DCB: 26–7). MacIntyre of course thinks that such a situation would put traditional Christianity out of business. The Christian’s hope, though, he notes, is that if the difficulties philosophy raises cannot be answered decisively – and he claims to be under no illusion that Difficulties in Christian Belief will so answer them – these difficulties can at least be shown to be tractable and incapable of so shaking the foundations of the Christian’s belief as to become, in John Henry Newman’s distinctive sense of the term, ‘doubts’. Moreover, it cannot be sinful for the Christian to entertain philosophical difficulties, Macintyre adds, because the difficulties which philosophy raises and which this study is addressing – doubts about whether the existence of God is an objective fact or a subjective projection, doubts concerning the compossibility of cosmic evil and divine perfection, doubts concerning the occurrence of miracles – inevitably occur to the believer in the

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counsel of his own mind. So as a believer with philosophical training, MacIntyre sees himself as justified in tackling a number of the better-known of these aporiai, and foremost among them, he thinks, is the problem of evil, so he treats this first. His answer to the problem of evil in Difficulties, the problem of how the existence of evil in the created order is consistent with divine goodness and omnipotence, follows a fairly traditional line. The world of our experience which God chose to create has a certain unique kind of goodness to it: it contains free agents, humans, who have the capacity to make (or unmake) themselves, to develop their moral and intellectual powers, and so attain to a life of virtue, of moral and creative excellence, by overcoming the obstacles to that life. The moral evil for which creatures are responsible is permitted by God, but not caused by Him; it is a consequence of His willing to create beings with free will. The physical evil in the world serves as the resistance factor, as it were, for the development and perfection of human character. Men and women have real problems to confront, catastrophes to overcome, discovered shortcomings in their environment to be remedied, temptations within to lead lesser lives to be resisted, and if they so chose, they can rise to the occasion and perfect themselves morally in the process of confronting both moral and physical evil (36–7). MacIntyre avows that this account of the cause of evil in the world may not satisfactorily account for all the evil we discover in it, but it accounts for enough of it to satisfy our intellectual worries. An element of mystery remains, he notes, but he bids us not to forget St Paul’s reminder that ‘We know in part’ (40–41). On the question of miracles, MacIntyre is over-impressed in Difficulties with Hume’s famous objection which would rule out their very possibility – that all ascertained natural laws involve iron-clad, exceptionless concatenations of cause and effect, so that once a causal sequence is well attested, it can be attributed with the status of a law of nature; thereafter, the testimony of no matter how many credible others to the contrary, a miraculous exception to this law can be considered metaphysically impossible. Though MacIntyre notes the influence of Newton on Hume here, he fails to examine the ontological assumptions which Hume makes and which underwrite this objection and lead Hume to conflate physical and metaphysical necessity. Failing to meet Hume’s view on metaphysical grounds, MacIntyre then tries to salvage the reality of miracles here by treating them as instances where man perceives that God is speaking to him through signs in nature. Miraculous events would then be at least apparent exceptions to natural laws in which impersonal nature is seen to respond to man’s questions or needs in a personal way, thereby instancing for the believer God’s goodness and sovereignty. It cannot be decisively proven, Difficulties states, that such apparent exceptions to natural laws are real exceptions, as opposed to instances of some other as yet undiscovered natural law. But if the events in question cannot serve as conclusive proof of the existence of God, they may still serve believers well (49-50). (MacIntyre’s views on the project of natural theology and on the argument from miracles in particular have, since Difficulties, changed quite significantly, as we will see when we examine at the end of this section his relatively recent essay ‘Hume, Testimony to Miracles, the Order of Nature, and Jansenism’, 1986e).

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With respect to the existence of God, MacIntyre follows a similar and similarly unsatisfactory route. While he sees the ontological argument as an over-ambitious attempt to make the acceptance of the existence of God like the acceptance of the conclusion of a geometric proof, and he sensibly rejects it as unsound for treating existence as a predicate, his remarks on the cosmological and teleological arguments are less cogent. In denying the validity of the cosmological argument, he once again asserts without argument that there can be no inference from observed effect to unobservable cause and forgets that this kind of inference, retroduction, is actually a staple of scientific reasoning (see, for instance, Ernan McMullin’s well-known treatment of this matter in The Inference that Makes Science; McMullin, 1992). MacIntyre rejects the teleological argument, following Hume, because he claims that we would need a set of experiences of worlds being created by God to license invoking the causal relation between God and world that the teleological argument postulates (DCB: 59–63). Again, MacIntyre neither examines nor argues for the restrictive notion of causality which is in play here. As with miracles, MacIntyre thinks that something significant lies behind these traditional metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, but not what it might seem – nor necessarily what believers might think. These proofs are not good as arguments, Difficulties claims, and in this sense, contemporary apologists of religion to the contrary, they are not even worthy pointers or indicators for the believer (since what is fallacious can have no value as a ‘pointer’). They are instead, Difficulties maintains, exemplifications of the religious mindset – mental exercises, as it were, provoked by the religious imagination. The believer (MacIntyre still has said not nearly enough about the puzzling process whereby one ends up a religious believer) cannot think otherwise than that God must exist, so the ontological argument seems sound to her. She is overwhelmed by the thought that the world exists instead of there being no world at all, and so the cosmological argument, with its fatal flaw, attempts to recast this religious conviction in the form of an inference with premises and conclusion. Likewise, the order and beauty in nature and God’s perceived omnipresence in it move the believer to prayer and to hymns of adoration – and move the thinking believer to formulate a teleological argument which does not in fact work (63–4). What grounds, then, can the believer have for his belief if not any form of rational proof? Not, MacIntyre argues in the chapter in Difficulties on religious experience (which is concerned principally with the views of Friedrich Schleiermacher) some universal, although not universally recognized, feeling of absolute dependence – nor any other emotional or perceptual experience. In his earlier essay ‘Visions’, MacIntyre had already rejected this second possibility, and he adds little to those arguments here. But Schleiermacher’s position he confronts with the following contradiction: if this feeling of absolute dependence is to be the ground of all religious belief it must be self-authenticating: it must bear within itself the unmistakable marks of the divine. Yet, faced with incontrovertible evidence, Schleiermacher and his followers have already conceded that this universal feeling is not recognized by all: some mistakenly deny they have it, and some, having it, misinterpret the experience. So,

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MacIntyre asks, appropriately enough, how can a self-authenticating experience be had and not be properly recognized for what it is? Schleiermacher’s position thus contains a contradiction (69–71). Of course, it would be open to someone sympathetic to Schleiermacher’s position to claim that even self-authenticating experiences may presuppose some kind of proper disposition on the part of those who have them – for example, a moral disposition – in order to be perceived for what they are, and MacIntyre does not entertain that rejoinder to his objection here. What rational grounds for religious belief then are left to the believer according to Difficulties if not extraordinary emotional or perceptual experiences, or seemingly extraordinary occurrences in nature, or the fact of the existence of something rather than nothing? MacIntyre waffles a bit here, in part owing to a mistake about the Christian’s attitude toward the existence of God that we have seen him fall into earlier (see pages 129–30 above). The grounds for the Christian’s religious belief are, he states, ‘the works of nature and … that history of revelation which is the Bible … [where God] offers us opportunities for accepting or rejecting him’ (83). But in the category ‘works of nature’, hadn’t he already disclaimed the logical value of inferences from world to God? Not exactly, as Chapter Eight of Difficulties in Christian Belief, ‘Proof and Trust’, goes on to explain. The cosmological argument, say in the form Aquinas gave it (MacIntyre presumably has in mind Aquinas’s tertia via here), is indeed a valid inference, Difficulties claims, but it is not a strict proof because its premise concerning the existence of radically contingent beings is a contestable one. (To clarify MacIntyre’s meaning here, a being can be considered radically contingent if and only if it is dependent on another or others, not simply for the kind of nature it has, but for its very existing, as a desire so depends upon a desiring subject.) MacIntyre’s claim here – that the metaphysical premise that radically contingent beings exist is a contestable one – is certainly uncontroversial enough. As a traditional Christian philosophical theologian like Aquinas would maintain, this premise requires for its reasoned acceptance some understanding of the non-identity of essence and existence in finite beings as the result of ontological inquiry. Any proof then based on this premise would of course not be as readily acceptable as a valid geometric proof based on much more easily comprehensible premises. But what matters, clearly what has mattered to theists of Aquinas’s description, is whether the premise is true according to the judgement of reason. MacIntyre wishes instead in Difficulties to regard the ‘proof’ in question as merely a plausible result, a logically compelling outcome relative to the theist’s antecedent belief that God exists – one which would relegate the premise in question, really, to the status of an article of faith. This would give a virtuous circularity, an internal consistency, he maintains, to the believer’s thinking: she believes that God exists (how or why exactly she believes, MacIntyre has not yet made clear) and that God created the world. She therefore views the beings in the world as ‘contingent’, and then formulates the unimpeachable inference: ‘If contingent beings exist, a necessary being must exist. But contingent beings do exist since we believe them to be created by God. Therefore, a necessary being or God exists’ (80–83).

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This is clearly a revisionary interpretation of the cosmological argument. There can be little doubt that Aquinas, like theistic philosophers before him such as the Islamic thinker Ibn Sina, regarded the contingency of the beings of our experience as an ontological fact, a fact moreover knowable by the deliverances of reason alone, in this case by an insight into the ontological structure of the finite existent as such (for a straightforward and strictly philosophical explication of this putative ontological fact, see, for instance, Joseph Owens’s metaphysical study, An Interpretation of Existence; Owens, 1985) On the matter of rationally grounding one’s faith in the narrative of a supposed divine revelation (e.g. the Christian New Testament), MacIntyre makes a more effective point. Christian revelation, he observes, does not contain teachings in the form of arguments to which we are invited to assent. As Job was to learn, God shows Himself to us through signs to a degree that He sees fit, and He seeks our trust on the basis of those signs. He speaks through His servants to instruct both the learned and the unlearned, and His words are to be taken as trustworthy in the highest degree or to be rejected – but He is not in the business of offering logically compelling-to-all proofs of His existence. Citing the notorious case of Thomas the apostle, MacIntyre notes that Thomas was given, over and above a visual sign of Christ’s divinity, a tactile sign as well. But Thomas still had grounds to doubt that this second sign was any more authentic than the first. As it happens, he chose to trust at the point of the second sign, and on its basis he makes the indispensable act of faith: ‘My Lord and my God.’ Still, the trust a Christian places in the words and teachings of Christ is not without any rational warrant, MacIntyre adds. While in Difficulties he steers clear of addressing the challenging questions raised by modern biblical criticism (difficulties he had already addressed in part in ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief’), he justly notes here that the potential Christian has the moral character of Christ, Christ’s demonstrated trustworthiness, to go on when she asks herself whether or not to believe Christ’s words ‘The Father and I are one.’ Christian belief, then, is and can only be a response of trusting acceptance of the evidence-transcending teachings of Christ based on the perceived trustworthiness of Christ’s character (83ff.). We are in the realm here of first principles, of ultimate decisions, MacIntyre notes. But, as he is aware, and as Difficulties reminds the reader, first principles, though not held on the basis of more fundamental beliefs, can be tested via their implications or entailments and compared with other items which we know or believe we know, so they can receive a kind of indirect corroboration or falsification. Still, at the end of the day, Difficulties concludes, the Christian’s faith has and can have only one rational ground: the credibility of the person of Christ (of course, given MacIntyre’s metaphysical views about causality and contingency at this stage of his thought, only the trustworthiness of a person exhibiting the sign or signs of divinity could provide rational grounds for any set of credible religious teachings). How, then, does MacIntyre think that Christian moral beliefs stand with respect to philosophical criticism? Chapter Ten, ‘Religion and Morality’, attempts to show that there is a properly Christian answer to the famous Euthyphro dilemma posed by

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Plato centuries ago – an answer different from the one given by Kant. Do we do what God commands, and is what He commands right because He commands it, or do we do it because we judge it to be right already and independently of His command? For Kant, as MacIntyre notes, the nature of moral perfection and moral rectitude are deliverances of reason and knowable and binding as such independent of God’s command or will; morality therefore enjoys complete independence from religious belief. For the Christian, in contrast, what God commands cannot but be right for beings whose very nature God created and for whom He wills the best possible end. The God of Christian belief, then, enjoys an epistemic authority which Kant does not grant Him: towering immeasurably over the human level of understanding (which understanding He created), God’s judgment of what is good and best for us should clearly take precedence over our own when the two judgments conflict – and this the Christian realizes, MacIntyre adds. God’s moral authority or trustworthiness has, of course, already to be established for this submission to divine commands to be reasonable. But the Christian (MacIntyre means here the reflective Christian) is one for whom it has seemed established in its reasonableness, since the Christian judges that a good deal of what God commands (for instance, the precepts of the Decalogue) are norms of conduct which his or her unaided human reason has already determined to be sound action-guides in the pursuit of happiness (103–8). MacIntyre will revisit these points in a detailed way in later essays, to be examined shortly. Given MacIntyre’s abiding interest in psychoanalysis, it is unsurprising that Difficulties contains a chapter on religious belief and psychological explanation. MacIntyre takes up the question in this chapter of whether a Freudian-style explanation of the genesis of Christian belief could undermine its plausibility. His answer is a qualified no. Freud’s explanation of monotheistic belief as a neurosis, a defensive and regressive behavioural response to experienced difficulties in one’s environment, may be true of certain instances of theistic, and of specifically Christian, belief, but, MacIntyre sensibly adds, as a causal explanation it fails to address the question of the reasons for Christian belief – that is, the allegedly objective evidence for its truth, and the inferences based upon that evidence. Freud’s explanation, Macintyre notes, can best be an explanation of the rationality or irrationality of the belief of individual Christians, but by parity of reasoning, the same sort of psychological explanation of the causes of belief could be offered of the causes of unbelief, and could prove equally or more damaging to unbelief’s rationality. The sane and psychologically adjusted Christian, therefore, need not fear psychological critique, this chapter maintains (99–100). Before proceeding to MacIntyre’s subsequent works in the philosophy of religion, it is worth considering for purposes of thematic continuity one of his relatively recent works, the previously mentioned ‘Hume, Testimony to Miracles, the Order of Nature, and Jansenism’ (1986e). This essay represents his most considered and complete statement on the rational basis and the rational consequences of religious belief, and it provides us with a kind of resumé of his earlier positions on the subject. The essay

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turns on a disputed point in the exegesis of David Hume, specifically whether Hume maintained in his writings on miracles that it was irrational to believe that miraculous events had ever occurred or could occur, or whether he held instead that miraculous events as such were impossible, and that the conception of a ‘miracle’ was therefore the product of a confused understanding of nature and events in nature. MacIntyre’s interpretation is that Hume argued for both positions, but from different premises – for the first from empiricist premises, for the second from naturalist premises. Hume’s first argument, and one that MacIntyre argues fails on its own terms, is based on Hume’s belief in the primacy of personal experience in knowledge. Given that our personal impressions are for Hume the most reliable source of our knowledge, then the argument against miraculous events is that our experience of the widespread uniformity of nature makes it much more reasonable to believe that miracles we have not ourselves experienced have not occurred than that they have. Our credence in the uniformity of nature outweighs, and should outweigh, any credence we put in the testimony of others to miraculous events. However, as Hume’s contemporary the Aberdeen theologian George Campbell saw, MacIntyre notes, this argument of Hume has a self-defeating look to it. In order for an individual to have a firm conviction that nature is constituted by uniform regularities that are more than local, she or he must rely on the testimony of others concerning regularities in other parts of the world. So it is not the credibility of testimony versus personal experience that Hume can be impugning in his argument, only the credibility of testimony of a certain sort. Here MacIntyre thinks, for reasons he had sketched in earlier work (especially in ‘Logical Status’), Hume’s argument must fail, and fail even with respect to the peculiar tenets of Hume’s epistemology and philosophical psychology. MacIntyre’s counter-argument against Hume is as follows: with respect to persons we know to be of sound and honest character – persons we know in the past to have regularly resisted the temptation to mislead or deceive for the sake of personal gain and who have shown themselves to be careful and scrupulous rational inquirers – the credibility of their testimony (itself exhibiting a regularity in nature, namely the regularity of their character) may well outweigh our habit of belief in the uniform regularity of nature. We might well, therefore, find ourselves believing that testimony, even on Hume’s picture of the nature of human belief-forming processes (1986e: 88–9). MacIntyre thinks that such an argument against Hume is not finally decisive because Hume has a second and more fundamental line of attack against the possibility of the miraculous. Here it is Hume’s naturalistic assumptions which come into play, MacIntyre observes, assumptions which Hume employs in interpreting any allegedly irregular natural phenomena. According to Hume’s theory of nature, on MacIntyre’s reading of it, every natural occurrence must be the outcome of some perhaps as yet unknown natural law. Since this is to rule out of court the possibility that any action or intervention from beyond nature might serve as the explanans of an exceptional natural phenomenon, miracles as the product of any alleged transcendental causation would therefore be metaphysically impossible.

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This, MacIntyre observes, means that the question of the rationality of belief in miracles in the face of Hume’s critique turns on more basic background issues such as the rationality of belief in the existence of God, and the explanatory success of physicalist naturalism in accounting for the experienced phenomena in nature. At the end of the essay, MacIntyre notes that a solid ground on which to challenge naturalism is over the explanation of purposive human action: arguments for the necessity of teleological explanation of human actions are clearly a way of undermining naturalism, and therefore of undermining the naturalistic grounds for denying the possibility of miracles (1986e: 99; in Chapter 4 below, we will see MacIntyre’s arguments for the necessity of a teleological framework for explaining human actions). It is interesting to note here how MacIntyre, in his mature years, returns to asserting the relevance of sound metaphysics for religious faith – a matter over which he wavered in his early days. Where he does side with Hume in this 1986 essay, though, and this in accord with some of his own earlier writings such as ‘Logical Status’, is in the belief that miracles and the testimony on which they are based cannot be the foundation of religious faith (i.e. as opposed to being the foundation of a general philosophical theism, something which is at least epistemically conceivable). For the Jew as the Christian, he notes, the miracles in salvation history are always events that occur in a specific context and embody a specific divine purpose. Testimony to such miracles provides not evidence of God’s existence, but of His purpose and His designs. So acceptance of miracles of this kind on the basis of the testimony of prophets or apostles cannot be for the believer a matter of conditional assent – the kind of assent which the weighing of evidence in a law court or a laboratory, for instance, would license: it must be instead an absolute and unconditional assent owing to the divine authority believed to be vested in the offices or roles such persons fill. However, MacIntyre adds here that if the Jew’s or the Christian’s assent to such testimony is not to be contrary to reason, the testimony in question must be seen to measure up to certain rational standards: it must be internally consistent; it must not contradict what we know about the natural order per se (of course, here, as he is aware, arguments about the adequacy of the natural sciences to explain nature without remainder must return); and it must not conflict with what we have independently good reasons to believe about the divine nature and divine purposes (93ff.). So a rational believer must admit that the testimony she accepts is open to rational challenge, but that unconditional assent to it cannot be shown irrational unless either the person(s) whose testimony she accepts can be shown untrustworthy, or metaphysical naturalism can somehow vindicate itself conclusively. 3.3 The Atrophy of Reason in Modern Christianity In his writing in the years immediately succeeding Difficulties in Christian Belief (1959c) one can observe a discontent emerging in MacIntyre with dominant forms of Christian self-understanding at the time (especially with the dominant forms of

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Protestant theology in the 1960s). One can observe also his growing awareness that the question of how to relate Christian moral beliefs to the social order of the present is not being asked by Christians, and that the question of the relationship between moral theory and the structures of social life is being overlooked by moralists generally, whether theistic or non-theistic. In ‘God and the Theologians’, his 1963 review of the Anglican Bishop John Robinson’s notorious book Honest to God, these concerns are made manifest (1963b). For MacIntyre, Bishop Robinson’s honesty consists in his owning up to the trend towards atheism at work in Protestant theology since Karl Barth. Yet MacIntyre sees Robinson as not only inheriting the weakness of modern Protestant theology, but combining it with two classical and dissimilar forms of atheism: Hume-Russellstyle atheism, for which theism is the result of a set of intellectual mistakes that, it is hoped, proper philosophical education will remove; and nineteenth-century-style atheism, à la Feuerbach, Freud and Marx, for which religious belief amounts to an intellectual mistake of a particular sort – one driven by misplaced hopes and fears, and which will be eliminated once those hopes and fears are appropriately addressed in the social order in which they have arisen. Robinson has not found the resources in Protestant theology to oppose either or both of these types of unbelief, MacIntyre observes, because among the major figures in twentieth-century Protestant theology such resources are not to be found. The trend towards atheism is already implicit in the theology of Karl Barth, who in other respects, MacIntyre will admit, is a bulwark of Christian orthodoxy. Barth’s denial that any human tradition or theology can adequately represent the divine bears within itself the seeds of its own rejection, involving as it does a kind of self-undermining claim (ASI: 15–16). As for Rudolf Bultmann’s Heideggerian demythologizing of the New Testament, it, MacIntyre notes, is in substance, if not in the form of its words, proto-atheistic, and Paul Tillich’s substituting the human response to existence in the form of an ‘ultimate concern’ for a relationship with God as a transcendent Person is but another contribution to the climate of atheism in twentieth-century Protestant thought (1963b: 16–18). MacIntyre expresses in this review undisguised admiration for Dietrich Boenhoeffer, in whose thought he thinks the seeds of atheism are not to be found, but whose theology of powerlessness with its early-and-persecuted-Church-of-thecatacombs-and-martyrs resonance he sees as giving Christians in the world little guidance as to how to use power to serve Christian ends. MacIntyre also, sharing a view common among Boenhoeffer’s critics, finds this theology too contextually determined by Boenhoeffer’s war experiences to serve present post-war needs. The post-war problem for Christians, MacIntyre notes here, is not that the Church is undergoing persecution, but rather the prevalence in the Church of a professed religious belief which often slides into superstition and the magical, and which is often combined with a practical atheism with respect to matters social and moral (18–19). Addressing a theme which will be the focus of his slightly later study Secularization and Moral Change (1967e), MacIntyre identifies here as the chief difficulty facing

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post-industrialization Christianity (in Britain at least) the atrophy of the Christian framework of belief as the framework for society’s self-understanding: ‘Christianity provided pre-industrial England with a common frame of reference, with a sense of over-all meaning and with a pattern which gave form to life. Revolutionary protest from the Levellers to the Chartists could express itself within this pattern just as much as the conservatism of the squirearchy. But industrial society has never been able to accommodate a religious interpretation of its own activities’ (22). We see here an early statement of MacIntyre’s strong dislike for industrial society – something that has remained fairly constant throughout his career -- and of his desire to problematize its ends and values. How exactly he thinks this atrophy of the religious framework for belief occurred, and how the claim that it did occur is established will be matter for his lectures Secularization and Moral Change. But here, based on the above sociological claim, he identifies as the dilemma facing post-industrialization Christian thinkers the choice either of enclosing themselves in some private world of discourse, safe from refutation and dialectical challenge, though without any genuine social relevance as well (the tack taken by many since Kierkegaard and Barth), or that of translating the Christian message into the terms of contemporary secular discourse, and depriving it thereby of its distinctiveness and critical power. The first alternative clearly will not do, he notes, because Christian thought which is entirely self-referential lacks the capacity to trade in the dominant discourse, the publicly shared criteria, of the day so as to be an instrument of social criticism and constructive change. This form of Christianity, to return to a point in his earlier Marxism: An Interpretation, is unworthy of the original incarnational thrust of the Gospel message. The second alternative will clearly not do either, because it tends to turn Christianity into but another form of contentless high-mindedness: the Christian following this second route, for example, will in an over-eagerness to be relevant simply take on all the limitations of the secular liberal ideology of the day (that ideology which we have seen MacIntyre already so intent to criticize). So the challenge for post-war Christianity, as MacIntyre sees it, is embodying in social institutions the kind of values many liberals verbally profess, but whose social embodiment liberalism has proved impotent to secure (the interesting but underdeveloped claim in this book review is that authentic Christianity is better at defending liberal values than liberalism is). MacIntyre so calls for here a rationally respectable, politically engaged, distinctively Christian thinking to perform the social criticism needed by the age, and to give intellectual guidance to the needed forms of social change. By the early 1960s, then, MacIntyre is a kind of would-be Christian without a denominational Christianity, but in his next work in the philosophy of religion, ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’ (1964f), we see him in the process of giving up Christian belief. What he had formerly identified as merely a difficulty for Christian belief – namely the problem of evil – now takes the form for him of a bona fide doubt. ‘Understanding’ is a dense and subtle essay that gives us an early sketch of the theory of rationality he will deploy later in Whose Justice?

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Which Rationality? Its own point of departure, however, is a puzzle about the nature of intellectual disagreement between theists and atheists. The puzzle he bids us to consider is the following. Theists and atheists seem to engage in meaningful disagreement when they make opposing judgements about religious matters, yet their judgements are frequently so diametrically opposed that it may well be doubted whether the concepts contained in their opposing judgements are genuinely the same. This state of affairs (a kind of conceptual dissonance) obtains, he notes, whenever two parties disagree interminably about the applicability of concepts to central features of reality: it is a matter of legitimate doubt whether they in fact share the same concepts. In debates between theists and atheists, it is certainly the case, as he is aware, that parties on both sides often indeed affirm conceptual disparity as the root cause of their disagreements. For example, a certain kind of Protestant will deny that the un-graced can grasp the concepts in Scripture and the creeds, and a certain kind of atheist will deny that religious concepts such as ‘God’, ‘sin’ and ‘salvation’ are meaningful. MacIntyre rejects both these explanations of theistic–atheistic disagreement on something like their own terms. The same kind of Protestant, he notes, who wishes to affirm the inaccessibility of religious concepts to those un-illumined by grace does not wish to affirm what this belief entails: namely that since the non-believer never genuinely encounters Christianity, he never in fact genuinely rejects it. Likewise, MacIntyre observes, the atheist who rejects religious concepts as flatly senseless must have already identified those concepts and attempted to explain their ostensible meaning in order to reject them. It so appears that atheist and believer must share, and yet do not share, the same concepts. In response to the proposed solution that believers and non-believers share the same concepts in non-religious contexts, MacIntyre sensibly points out that many of the concepts at issue in this puzzle are specifically religious concepts – ‘sin’, ‘God’ etc. – and that when the believer employs secular concepts in religious contexts – for example, ‘powerful’ or ‘wise’ as said of God – he does so by way of analogy, by drawing on and extending the non-religious senses of these terms (116). How, then, to resolve this puzzle? As a clue to how it might be resolved, MacIntyre bids us consider a solution to an analogous problem with which social anthropologists have wrestled: the problem of understanding primitive societies. Three solutions to this problem by prominent social anthropologists – and three parallel approaches to understanding religious belief advanced by philosophers – are presented and rejected in ‘Understanding’ before MacIntyre offers his own solution. The first solution to the problem of cross-cultural understanding which MacIntyre considers and rejects derives from the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and has its parallel in the theory of religious language in the work of Rudolf Carnap (Carnap, 1996). Lévy-Bruhl’s primitive peoples, like Carnap’s religious believers, MacIntyre notes, do not strictly speaking have a language based on concepts: primitive man uses words to refer to objects, but his word usage is not rule-governed. Hence, in Lévy-Bruhl’s approach, as MacIntyre reads him, we can empathize with primitive man in the same way we can empathize with the inner world of a bear or a squirrel,

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yet we cannot grasp the logic behind his utterances – for example, his identifying the sun as a white cockatoo. According to this picture, we can only study primitive man as we study other natural phenomena. Similarly, in Carnap, MacIntyre notes, religious concepts are strictly speaking unintelligible as concepts, but intelligible as expressions of feelings and attitudes. In this sense, religious language serves the purpose of, and can be studied as, a species of natural motion. In a claim that is not particularly well developed here, MacIntyre argues that both these approaches fail for each being guilty of a kind of pragmatic inconsistency. Lévy-Bruhl must already have recognized primitive man’s use of a language based on concepts, for example primitive man’s referential intention behind the use of words meaning ‘sun’ and ‘cuckatoo’, in order to find its logic faulty. Likewise, Carnap must have first grasped at least the referential intention in religious believers’ metaphysical language in order to be able to re-describe it as entirely expressive. The point here is that while it is open to either Levy-Bruhl or Carnap to identify primitive or religious language as logically defective, it is not open to them to deny to either the status of a language, even though either or both may not be rationally warranted as languages (117–18). The second approach to social understanding which MacIntyre presents and rejects is that of social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, with its corresponding approach in the philosophy of religion developed by Peter Winch. MacIntyre’s notes that while Evans-Prichard finds a logic in the discourse of primitive peoples, it is one, according to Evans-Prichard, that can only be grasped and justified from within. Bizarre uses of words by primitives – for instance, the Sudanese Nuer’s identification of a bird with a twin – do in fact conform to a rule-governed pattern. When one takes the trouble to reconstruct the social context of primitive people’s word use, one discovers that there are rules for such, and that the content of these rules can be discovered as well. Rationality is thus social context-relative and form of life-relative. To understand is to believe. MacIntyre sees Peter Winch’s theory of the rationality of religious belief as following a similar path, and giving a theoretical justification for that path which would license Evans-Prichard’s anthropological practice as well. For Winch, he notes, logical criteria are not a direct gift from God, but a human construction designed to serve some specific mode of social life and specific social context – science may be one such mode, religion in its varied forms another. The rules that govern different modes of social life are only intelligible and criticizable from within according to Winch, and therefore logic and rationality are social practice-relative or form-ofsocial-life-relative. This approach will not do for MacIntyre because he sees Winch, and EvansPrichard at least implicitly, presenting us with a false choice: either a logic to govern all practices or total relativism. Instead, MacIntyre argues we should learn from a study of the history of social practices that their norms of rationality are often discovered by their own participants to be incoherent or inadequate; these norms or logical criteria are often themselves subject to change and revision from within. If for the participants in a practice to understand a concept is not necessarily to share

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its use, why, MacIntyre asks, should it be so for members of an alien form of social life – especially those whose understanding of rationality may be superior to the form of social life under study? From the standpoint of the present, for instance, to use MacIntyre’s example, we can find the Polynesian use of ‘taboo’ logically defective and our doing so is precisely what is required of us if we are to elucidate its meaning as a concept. To understand may be, for us, as indeed for members of the form of social life whose concept it is, to criticize and to disbelieve. There is yet a third solution to the problem of understanding alien conceptual schemes which MacIntyre thinks sheds light on a right understanding of the matter, but it is one which he also thinks inadequate. It is the approach taken by social anthropologist Edmund Leach (Leach, 1954) with its counterpart in the philosophy of religion in the work of Richard Braithwaite (Braithwaite, 1955). According to this approach, the obscure sayings of an alien form of life are not to be allowed an intelligibility on their own terms, but they are to be interpreted in such a way that they make sense in our terms and from the standpoint of our own scheme of belief. So, in the case of primitives’ unusual utterances about divine spirits, since these utterances are strictly unintelligible from our metaphysical standpoint, they must be treated not as speculative beliefs with truth values, but as ritualistic performances which are not truth-apt. This approach, MacIntyre notes, has its parallel in Richard Braithwaite’s suggestion that, since religious utterances cannot be fitted into the framework of metaphysical empiricism, they should be saved from unintelligibility and reinterpreted as imaginative fictions – imaginative fictions which serve to reinforce a moral way of living by containing a set of perfectly intelligible moral beliefs that give guidance to a certain way of living. MacIntyre’s own approach to the problem of social interpretation draws on these three preceding approaches while, of course, attempting to go beyond them. The position he takes in ‘Understanding’ is this: social interpretation should be, as Winch urges, acquiring an internal perspective on the alien scheme of belief and letting it speak for itself. But it should also be, and cannot help at times but be, critical from the interpreter’s own standpoint – it, that is, may show how and why the alien conceptual scheme is rationally defective. This approach, MacIntyre argues, avoids the danger of unconsciously projecting the interpreter’s own assumptions onto the past and the alien the standpoint of the present, but it also acknowledges that the set of logical criteria of any recognizably human social order has an internal history and is subject to change and modification from within. If conceptual schemes are subject to questioning, criticism, and change from an internal perspective, MacIntyre asks, why shouldn’t the same be possible from an external perspective – as long, that is, as those on the outside make sure they have first understood the subject of their critical interpretation from within its own standpoint (125–7)? What MacIntyre neglects to advert to here, but it is something which will increasingly become a theme in his later work, is how the interpreted may put the interpreter’s own standpoint in question – how the act of social interpretation from the standpoint of the present may require the interpreter to acknowledge ways in which his own, though temporally later, standpoint is rationally defective (an early and brief statement of this can be

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found in MacIntyre’s review of Isaiah Berlin’s Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas; see 1976a). While the material in ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’ provides an important sketch of the more mature theory of interpretation and rationality that we will find later in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, the purpose to which that theory is put in this 1964 essay is to argue why Christian belief must be transcended. At the end of ‘Understanding’, we see a notable change in MacIntyre’s own overall set of beliefs. Having in his earlier writings spoken of the problem of evil for Christian belief – the problem of the compossibility of evil with divine benevolent omnipotence and omniscience – as a ‘difficulty’, he now speaks of it as a matter of full-blown doubt. This is so much the case that he now feels the burden of explaining why such a glaring (as he now refers to it) conceptual incoherence in the Christian scheme of belief could remain, not unnoticed – failed attempts of Christian thinkers and theologians to resolve it, he claims, have abounded – but as something tolerated for centuries without causing the Christian scheme of belief itself to be put into question. His explanation for this so-described unusual phenomenon is of a piece with a general account he advances of the relationship of conceptual change to social change. To begin with, he notes that those concepts which are in part constitutive of a social order – the concept of a divine right of kings, for example – can undergo change when new circumstances (e.g. claimants to the throne) bring the inadequacy of the concept in its received form to light. Alternatively, a concept may be so central to the organization and self-understanding of a social order that its more or less manifest inadequacy (incoherence, unintelligibility and so on) may be seen as tolerable by the members of the social order given the concept’s centrality and the perceived cost of the intellectual-cum-social change necessary to address its inadequacy. Thirdly, Macintyre notes, an otherwise coherent concept may lose application and purpose on account of changes in the social order, just as when technological change in the seventeenth century made horsemanship peripheral, and so rendered the concept of chivalry otiose. Now, with respect to Christianity the claim here in ‘Understanding’ is that the manifest internal incoherence, in the face of inexplicable evil in the world, in the notion of divine beneficent omnipotence and omniscience was something tolerated throughout the Christian centuries because the notion was so central to the forms of description of intellectual and social life in the Christian world. But since the secularization of inquiry and the secularization of the forms of description of social and intellectual life, Christian concepts have become dispensable and their applicability has become questionable. The antinomies, moreover, which in a Christian era were seen as stimuli to further inquiry (in an Ockham, for instance), are seen by thinkers, once secularization reaches an advanced stage (e.g. T.H. Huxley and Bertrand Russell), as incoherences on the basis of which Christianity should be rejected (1964f: 128–9). At this stage, MacIntyre finds himself moving in the direction of the secularized, and there are two different responses he notes that Christians can take to this

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unwelcome state of affairs, both of which he has always wanted to resist. The Christian can, à la Paul Tillich and Simone Weil, take refuge in a religion with its own sui generis logic, where religious utterances function in a closed social sphere. But Christianity can do so, MacIntyre states here rejecting his earlier position in ‘Logical Status’, only at the cost of becoming empty, because its utterances will then be without secular application. Relatedly, in modern secular social orders in which Christian concepts are no longer applicable, Christians can try to keep Christianity alive in Kierkegaardian fashion – by taking refuge in ‘paradox’ and ‘mystery’ or ‘the absurd’ – and in this way avoid facing up to Christian belief’s own internal intellectual difficulties and external social challenges (e.g. the challenges of social embodiment after secularization). But this, MacIntyre argues, amounts to keeping Christianity alive by a kind of slow suicide: ‘It is now too late to be medieval and it is too empty and too easy to be Kierkegaardian. Thus sceptic and believer do not share a common grasp of the relevant concepts any more than anthropologist and Azande do. And if the believer wishes he can always claim that we can only disagree with him because we do not understand him. But the implications of this defence of belief are more fatal to it than any attack could be’ (132–3). The Christian can instead become a rationalist in the mould of Hegel and seek to extract a rational kernel from the husk of religion’s symbolic ‘truths’. This is the direction in which MacIntyre finds himself moving in 1964, and at the end of this essay he as much as identifies himself as a sceptic who, by supplying the former social context in which Christian concepts were once at home, can claim to understand Christian belief better than present-day Christians do – and can claim to be capable, moreover, of showing how Christian belief is rationally defective. There is a significant admission in the closing paragraphs of this essay, however, that the tables could in principle be turned on the sceptic. The believer might prove able to out-narrate the sceptic by supplying a more compelling story about the emergence of sceptical concepts – for example, how these concepts emerged due to a widespread failure to have grasped the relevant theistic concepts, or due simply to a desire not to grasp theistic concepts. The believer might also be able to show that sceptical concepts are the product of a widespread forgetfulness, a forgetfulness itself caused by largely non-intellectual historical contingencies, and so forth. It seems clear, though, that for MacIntyre’s very sparse philosophical, as opposed to sociological, words concerning Christianity’s rational defects in print up to 1964, it is something off the page which has caused him to take this new and sceptical turn in the mid-1960s, a turn which really amounts to a rupture in belief for him. There is also something curiously unsatisfactory about his main criticism of Christianity in ‘Understanding’. On the one hand, he is unsatisfied by Christians’ use of the after-life as a justification for the sufferings and the evil of the present, since he sees this as an easy, unfalsifiable way out for the Christian apologist. On the other hand, he denies that Christianity should be viewed as a testable nostrum subject to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. In Popperian fashion, he wants to argue that if Christianity is not testable, it is empty: Christians may engage in their private rituals and speak the language of religious discourse, but they will be

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otherwise indistinguishable from their non-believing contemporaries. Yet he also wants to deny that Christianity could in principle be empirically corroborated – that, for instance, the right kind of empirical test could establish that Christians’ moral behaviour is superior to that of non-Christians, which test would provide abductive support for the truth of Christianity. As he states in ‘Understanding’: we can always ask empirically: do particular religious practices in fact produce higher standards of behavior? Again we return to the very simple point – are Christians in fact different from other people in our society, apart from their ritual practices? And if they are not what is the point of Christian belief, in so far as it issues in an injunction? Now whether Christians are different or not is an empirical question. Certainly empirical inquiry cannot tell us whether Christianity is true or not. (131)

But surely, against MacIntyre’s position here, it can be argued that at least since St Paul (one need look no further than Paul’s Letter to the Romans), the Christian teaching on grace has maintained precisely this: that ceteris paribus the moral behaviour of the baptised and religiously observant (broadly speaking, their capacity for altruistic behaviour) is notably superior to that of the unbaptised. Significant evidence to the contrary would therefore be grounds for denying the truth of Christianity, and many sceptics have used it as grounds for rejecting the Christian belief in which they were raised (see, for example, the interesting exchange on this point between Charles Taylor and Quentin Skinner in Tully, 1989: 37–48, 222–6) . The difficulty with this kind of empirical test, though, is in having reasonable certainty that its ceteris paribus condition has been met for the purposes of making such inter-personal comparisons: this requires the kind of knowledge of the subjective states of others that it is not at all easy to acquire. Knowledge of a moral agent’s inner states is most easily acquired in one’s own case (i.e. by personal introspection and self-examination – St Augustine’s autobiographical reflections come to mind here), and individuals who convert to Christianity have regularly cited the experience of being morally empowered by grace as empirical grounds for the truth of Christianity. 3.4

Social Change and Christian Unbelief

In his Riddell Lectures at the University of Newcastle in 1964, Secularization and Moral Change (1967e), MacIntyre returns to the themes just examined, but now brings considerations from his work in social theory to bear upon them. Secularization, notably, offers an explanation of the rise of unbelief that is really an alternative to the one defended in the 1964 essay we have just examined. These lectures also have a decidedly neo-Hegelian flavour to them, and their style of sociological analysis treats the social order as matter for analysis neither in terms of material conditions nor primarily or exclusively in terms of constitutive norms and values, but with an eye to the presumed reciprocal causation between the material and the ideal or intentional. Secularization and Moral Change is the first attempt at writing the kind

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of philosophical history which will take full form in After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The central thesis of the lectures is that secularization in Great Britain, the loss of belief in God by individuals and institutions, has not caused, but rather been caused by, social-cum-moral change – specifically by those changes brought on by the urban industrialization of the late eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. There is something of a Hegelian lament behind Secularization; MacIntyre sees in pre-industrialized England a society with socio-economic classes, yet a society with a common and unified, broadly Christian framework for moral and political debate – a framework by which each class was in some sense bound, and to which each, whether Leveller or king (or Charles I), could appeal to defend their rights and legitimate interests. In this pre-industrial society, MacIntyre observes, the civic and religious-transcendent were in some sense merged and existed in harmony, but after industrialization that harmony is damaged. Before urbanization, Christian belief gives cosmic justification and significance to a common civic life, but with urban industrialization there is a large-scale movement of the working classes to the cities, and this changes the relation of a large portion of the social order to Christianity. In the first place, MacIntyre thinks, as the working classes are taken away from their former rural communities, they experience a certain rootlessness: civic life is no longer lived in close connection with the rhythms of the natural order. Secondly, the very break with their original form of community gives them a different sense for the stability of social life and its sustaining traditions. This weakens their allegiance to the idea of tradition. Finally, and most contentiously, Secularization argues, the break with old forms of community leads the uprooted to break with the non-class-specific moral norms which were in part constitutive of the life of their former community. So with urbanization in Britain comes a new classdivided Christianity and a new social order in which class interests are no longer held in check by common moral norms or a common moral vision. Utilitarianism emerges as a moral theory making an appeal to what is common at precisely this time, MacIntyre notes, but all that is held in common in the moral sphere any more are matters of pragmatic co-operation and ‘secondary virtues’ – virtues like honesty, fairness and co-operativeness – which minister to this new pragmatic spirit of getting along (SMC: 12). In these new circumstances, Secularization observes, Christian belief is instrumentalized: appeals to Christian doctrines and values by members of the various classes are undertaken merely to secure their respective, predominantly economic, interests. The Marxist dictum that the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class is falsified: what rules in post-industrial Britain, Secularization claims, is compromise, not the ideas of any single social class. What MacIntyre thinks is conspicuously lost in the aftermath of this fracturing and pragmatic re-ordering of society is the capacity for the society as a whole to debate questions about social and moral ends, questions about society’s ultimate common purpose and justification. Contrary, therefore, to Engels’ prediction in the Preface of his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific that the working classes would eventually become completely

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secularized, MacIntyre argues here that a different process has been at work. While the newly urbanized working classes in Britain are no longer regular churchgoers, they have no particular hostility to organized religion. What they have lost, as their allegiance to the moral norms of their former and community-based rural life has been eroded, is any sense for moral authority in their personal and collective lives. The moral authority that the Churches profess, then, is more something unintelligible to them than the object of their conscious rejection and replacement, just as one who has lost interest in or understanding of a game like chess would be in no way moved by or receptive to authorities on how to excel at the game. Lacking any comprehensive belief-system to replace the religious perspective they have relinquished, the British working classes remain religious in an ad hoc way; they make regular use of the Church for the celebration or commemoration of the great events of life: birth, death and marriage. And the religious framework for interpreting parts of their lives remains, Secularization notes, as do elements of that framework’s vocabulary. This is because the climate of social anomie and the exacerbated forms of class division bred by the Industrial Revolution are also inimical to any comprehensive form of atheism. According to MacIntyre’s arguments here, then, both atheist and theist alike have been victimized by the social change consequent upon urban industrialization, and both need to come up with ways of overcoming its negative effects which have been destructive of any unified moral community: The religion of English society prior to the Industrial Revolution provided a framework within which the metaphysical questions could be asked and answered, even if different and rival answers were given. Who am I? Whence did I come? Whither shall I go? Is there a meaning to my life other than any meaning I choose to give it? What powers govern my fate. The dissolution of the moral unity of English society and the rise of new class divisions lead to a situation where within different classes there appear different aspirations, and different attempts to express and to legitimate these in religious forms. But the compromises and abdications consequent upon the class co-operation of English life produced a situation where it was impossible for any one group plausibly to absolutize its own claims and invoke some kind of cosmic sanction for them – hence, in part at least, the failure of the Labour churches and of Marxism. Yet it was equally impossible to establish or re-establish coherent social unity – hence the failure of Green’s social philosophy. The consequence of this is that there remains no framework within which the religious questions can be systematically asked. … [S]ecularist views of the world provide answers to the same questions as do religious views. A consistent and systematic secularism, if it is the doctrine of a social group, depends upon the possession of a vocabulary by that group in which these questions can be asked and answered. … [Yet] for all classes there are left only the fragments of a vocabulary in which to ask or answer these questions. (SMC: 30)

Interestingly, MacIntyre claims here that the social fragmentation he has been discussing sheds valuable light on the moral debates today between ethical objectivists and subjectivists, the former holding that moral justification obtains when the conditions for the application of shared moral concepts are met – and that such conditions are written into our language – the latter holding that moral

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justification is a matter of concepts conforming to some agent’s freely chosen standard. Whereas both sides regularly hold that their analysis is an analysis true of moral language as such, MacIntyre sees the two analyses as each true of parts of the present pluralistic social order. Where sufficiently robust forms of community persist in the modern social order, he claims, the first pattern of analysis of the use of moral terms is descriptively accurate; where community has effectively broken down so that social unity is almost entirely a function of pragmatic cooperation and the individual finds himself standing before the rival and competing claims of diverse moral communities and moral schemes of belief, the second pattern of analysis is the accurate one (49–52). In the face of this new social situation, highly unfavourable to Christianity –that is, the Christian now faced with the challenge of rebuilding a theistic, non-class-divided moral community – MacIntyre sees two easy and unacceptable routes the Christian can take. MacIntyre re-states again his point about the two false ways forward for Christian life, and we see him still trying to find a middle way between them. The post-industrialization Christian can, he states in Secularization, either retreat into sectarian isolationism and cultural atavism, or he can dilute Christian theology so that it simply takes on the unsatisfactory categories of the present moral and social order. MacIntyre doesn’t offer here his own formulation of an acceptable alternative way forward for Christianity, and this largely due to a doubt that Christianity has in the present age any satisfactory social embodiment. In search of a sociologically aware and socio-critically engaged Christianity and claiming not to have found any on offer, he seems in the mid-1960s inclined to think such impossible – in which case, as he is aware, traditional Christianity would have failed to make good on its particular claims to be true. This philosophical history in Secularization is filled out further in his 1966 Bampton Lectures at Columbia University, ‘The Debate about God: Victorian Relevance and Contemporary Irrelevance’. These lectures were subsequently published in a volume entitled The Religious Significance of Atheism alongside a contribution in kind by Paul Ricoeur. MacIntyre’s own lectures are concerned with the fate of theism and atheism and morals, respectively. They advance a cultural analysis of how religious belief has landed in its present unfortunate state – that is, existing on the margins of intellectual and political debate. The aim of his analysis here is to pose questions rather than to suggest answers, but he thinks that the cultural history which he tries to recount at least in part in ‘Debate’, following on the work of his prior Secularization, is as much bad news for rationalist atheism as for traditional theism. How has religious belief ceased to form a centrepiece of Western culture, the first lecture in ‘Debate’ bids us consider. How is it that the Victorian era was the final era in which the debate about the justification and truth of Christianity, for instance, actually mattered to our social and institutional lives? The key he thinks to understanding the crises which have landed theism in its present predicament is to recognize that the Western theological traditions which have been the bearers of theistic belief were each begun and developed in a pre-scientific culture. Rejecting

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here the thesis of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Lévi-Strauss’s La Pensée sauvage – namely, that primitive thought exhibited a scientific rationality whose results were limited not by its methods of inquiry, but by the instruments of inquiry available to it – MacIntyre argues instead that primitive thought and theistic belief were both importantly pre-scientific for failing to see the method of falsification as intrinsic to the epistemic value of their respective conceptual schemes (RSA: 8–10). As he puts it here, the primitive treats what are anomalies for his conceptual scheme not as cause for the abandonment or the revision of that scheme – with the consequent changes in the structure of primitive society that such might involve – but as things instead to be ignored or suppressed. And so behaves the theist, ‘Debate’ claims, prior to the scientific revolution. Atheism in the West for the theist before the time of Pascal, then, is either a hypothetical possibility useful for dialectical purposes (as for Anselm or for the Psalmist before him), or it is a phenomenon at the margins of the culture which needn’t much be taken much account of – as for example, the academic scepticism of the ancient world. But with the rise of scientific rationality, in which refutability is deemed an important characteristic of acceptanceworthy beliefs, theism faces its first crisis, ‘Debate’ argues. MacIntyre sees the rise of empirical science as posing theism with the following dilemma (the dilemma that he frames here might well of course be queried): theists can either treat their religious beliefs as refutable and so as cast in the form of hypotheses – in which case their theism will become a kind of gainsayable deism; or, they can move in a fideistic direction, as Pascal did at the onset of the crisis precipitated by the scientific revolution. They can then treat their beliefs not as matter for examination before the bar of secular reason and its standards of justification, but as, in the manner of later existentialism, matter for criterionless choice. In this case, though (MacIntyre’s repeats here his familiar point), theism can so become invulnerable only at the cost of becoming culturally disengaged and socially impotent (RSA: 10–11). This first crisis for theism and its sustaining social order, ‘Debate’ claims next, lies in the background of, and is causally related to, a second crisis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a crisis precipitated by the widespread acceptance of refutability as an essential component of warranted belief, not only in the domain of natural science and history but in ordinary life as well. By the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the rejection of Christianity in what MacIntyre calls its deistic form becomes a live possibility, and as deistic reasons for belief are deemed defective, an active theoretical atheism of the form embraced by Feuerbach and Russell becomes possible. From this time and thereafter, MacIntyre notes, Christianity must face the difficulties felt and squarely addressed by Victorian culture. In the transition period from a culture of belief to a culture of unbelief – a culture whose institutions and social structures are no longer grounded in any religious conception – theists and atheists alike, MacIntyre observes, agree about the central importance of debates concerning the rationality of religious belief. But by the time we are well into the twentieth century, such debate becomes a marginal phenomenon. On the one hand, atheism appears to hold the epistemological upper hand, yet on the

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other, the rationalist atheism of the likes of Feuerbach, Marx, Russell and Freud remains a social and cultural failure. Theistic concepts and categories persist in popular parlance, MacIntyre notes, and atheism has failed as yet to produce any adequate replacement for them. In response to this state of affairs, this second epistemological crisis, the Christian, he observes, can engage in a strategy of avoidance and withdraw into a culturally isolated form of life. Or he can, à la T.S. Eliot and others of similar mind, become committed to a culturally alive and culturally engaged Christianity, but one which scorns the present as unworthy of engagement and looks to a culture of the past, some of whose elements at least persist in the present. Contrary to the allegations of critics, this kind of self-conscious archaism and cultural atavism is something to which MacIntyre has never been attracted, and he speaks ill of it here (RSA: 16ff.). The third strategy which MacIntyre sees as available to the Christian is one Secularization and Moral Change had treated in some detail prior, and he alludes to it now only in order to reject it. Christian thinkers can attempt to isolate kernel from husk in Christian belief so as to present a form of Christianity (usually a moral doctrine without a metaphysics of the supernatural order) which would be entirely acceptable by prevailing secular epistemological standards. ‘Debate’ argues that such an attempt is doomed to failure – and on two fronts. On a first front, any attempt to translate an alleged kernel of Christian belief into acceptable-without-remainderby-secular-reason terms must necessarily fail, since such a strategy of ‘translation’ would merely change in advance the meaning of terms in the first language – the tenets of traditional Christianity – and translate them into an already-acceptablefrom-the-perspective-of-the-second-language-form into the second language. The doctrine of the four last things, miracles such as the resurrection and so forth, would be re-conceived even before their meaning was re-cast into a new idiom, Macintyre notes, and Christianity would in this process lose its distinctive outlook and its distinctive capacity for social and cultural criticism. Christianity can only be kept alive in this way, he states, at the cost of evisceration: ‘The new theologies … turn out to be symptoms of the very disease for which they profess to be the cure’ (29). To show how this ‘isolating of kernel from husk’ strategy of contemporary Christian theology must fail, this time on another front, MacIntyre launches an extended argument for the conclusion opposite that expressed in the famous dictum in Dostoevsky that ‘without God everything is permissible’. In a novel and highly suggestive thesis in these Bampton Lectures, MacIntyre argues that far from being a precondition for a proper understanding of morality, Christian belief is only fully intelligible and only apt to be accepted in a culture that already possesses an adequate understanding of the nature of morality. Conversely, he maintains, in a culture which has lost the right understanding of the institution of morality, Christianity must necessarily lose its appeal. Any attempt, therefore, to rescue Christian belief from secular rejection by reducing it to a moral doctrine is necessarily wrongheaded: morality does not need Christianity to bolster it as much as vice versa. This conclusion lies as an assumption behind much of MacIntyre’s later thought, so the argument which seeks to establish it deserves careful scrutiny. We can consider

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it while examining MacIntyre’s writings devoted specifically to Christianity and morals. 3.5

Ethics and Christian Theism

MacIntyre begins the second half of ‘The Debate about God’ lectures by identifying as the specific difference of the Christian moral system its putative transcendent source and inspiration, and more specifically, the constant reference it makes to the divine will. For the traditional Christian, he notes, the will of God gives one a new and specific moral reason for action, since this will is deemed to be an infinitely beneficent one and since God’s dictates are seen, consequently, as manifestations of His paternal care. However, the new reason for action these dictates provide will be unintelligible, MacIntyre notes, if the notion of a moral reason for action itself is not already properly understood. To grasp a moral reason for action requires that one have a prior understanding of the meaning of moral law and of that moral authority which is definable in terms of moral law. ‘Debate’ thus puts forwards a thesis about the origin and the original character of moral beliefs tout court, a thesis about the genesis of systems of traditional morality and the self-understanding of their adherents. For MacIntyre, moral beliefs, beliefs about personally and socially obligatory norms of conduct, arise spontaneously in human communities as the members of those communities are engaged in the process of coming to understand both their individual nature – the needs, wants, and goals of that nature – and the nature of the collectivities (family, social practice, political society) of which they as individuals form a part. Moral norms are rules which are socially established to minister to the fulfilment of those discovered (or perceived) needs, goals and wants, whatever form these latter are taken to have (MacIntyre of course acknowledges here that traditional societies have moral systems of varying substantive content). A moral reason for action, then, in a traditional society is a reason to act which is in accord with, or promotes, one’s good-as-a-member-of-society. For such persons, MacIntyre argues, the good is always prior to the right. Moral norms, he next claims, are taken by members of traditional societies to be immediately justified – that is, they are thought not to be in need of, because more certain than, any theoretical justification that could be given for them; and, they are taken to be both true (i.e. in a realist sense of the term – a faithful representation of how the world in itself is) and as forming together an inter-locking system that is, at least in general outline, complete. Plato and Aristotle are, for MacIntyre, the thinkers whose theoretical reflections capture most aptly the practice of this traditional moral outlook (RSA: 35–7). So far, according to ‘Debate’, the ideal-typical form of traditional systems of morality. Christianity enters into the world, Debate’ next maintains, when traditional systems of morality are not only in place, but are the only kind of moral systems in existence. Christian theology builds upon these while bolstering and reshaping them.

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How, according to the account here, is this so? The member of a traditional social order, Macintyre claims, views socially established and publicly sanctioned moral laws as serving his own needs and interests. Law is thus conceived as ministerial and derivative. A public law merely sanctions a genuine interest-serving norm of conduct, so law is deemed to have authority and to provide members of its society with an additional reason for action: a reason for action that is in part negative, the punitive dimension of law, and in part positive, since law is also taken to have the pedagogical function of both informing the individual of what is in his or her genuine interest, and of aiding him or her in the pursuit of that interest. Anything not serving the perceived interests of the members of a social order would be viewed by them, MacIntyre claims, as indistinguishable from an arbitrary fiat or set of fiats. This is because law in the traditional social order, he argues, is deemed authoritative only inasmuch as it seen to serve the purpose of what is independently and previously judged to be ‘right’ – only in as much, that is, as it is deemed to be a dictate of reason rather than an arbitrary dictate of power (RSA: 35–7). In accord with his earlier writings on the history of ethics, MacIntyre notes here how the Christian system of ethics presupposes just such an understanding of law and morality. God’s law has authority for the Christian because it gives her the additional reason for action that He, her Creator, has from an immeasurably superior epistemic vantage point re-affirmed and sanctioned a pre-existing norm of conduct by His positive command. Since this command is believed to arise from God’s omniscience and His perfectly beneficent interest, it is deemed to be authoritative and acceptanceworthy in the highest degree. Christian moral belief thus works by means of a pre-existing moral consciousness: divine laws are perceived and accepted as laws because, crucially, they are seen to conform to the pattern of familiar, rationally authoritative secular prescriptions. Christian belief also, MacIntyre argues here, makes the traditional form of morality more intelligible: members of traditional societies typically think that their system of morality, whether it be shared by other societies or not – and though it be possibly deficient in some of its details – is true for all humankind. The Christian doctrine of creation underwrites this belief, since according to it there is a one unitary human nature created by God and therefore but one system of moral beliefs true for all humans (RSA: 38). What, then, does ‘Debate’ suggest that we make of our culture’s widespread retreat from Christian morality since the beginning of the modern age? MacIntyre adds here to the extended answer he gave to this question in The Significance of Moral Change by extending his account of the rise of moral secularism further back in time. Aware that he is greatly simplifying matters, he cites in ‘Debate’ two main causes of the decline of Christian moral belief. The first comes from within the Christian theological tradition itself: it is the Reformers distrust in the cognitive and conative powers of fallen human nature. The extreme distrust in the case of Luther, for instance, of humans’ perceptions both of their needs, wants and desires, and of the requirements for the satisfaction of those needs, wants and desires, undermines from one end the traditional pre-modern conception of an intrinsic link between law

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and morality. Extrinsicism in the theology of justification encourages antinomianism in socio-economic and political matters; moral motivation becomes increasingly other-worldly – the fear of hell, the hope of heaven – and increasingly detached from this-worldly desire satisfaction (39–40). Putting additional pressure on Christian morality and subsequent to this theological innovation, according to ‘Debate’, is the rapid social change which economic modernization brings with it: a change that brings rival ethical belief systems into contact with one another and that gives the individual qua individual an increasing prominence. As ‘the individual’ emerges as a category in the modern period, confidence in the unity of human nature is lost; a perceived multiplicity and diversity of human needs, values and wants begins to overwhelm the former widespread sense for the unity of human nature. Whatever biological basis that unitary nature is seen as having is now thought to be almost limitlessly plastic before the conditioning of culture. Moral notions such as ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’, Macintyre notes, become increasingly separated from their embeddedness in kinship relations and social roles; contractual relationships are rendered overly abstract and are impoverished in the process (40–43). Kant, on MacIntyre’s interpretation, inherits and gives an articulate voice to these social developments by making the choice of the rational individual, the rational individual cut away from historical process and social context, the source of moral authority. The moral law is no longer the discovered and publicly enshrined, or the divinely enjoined, but the individually chosen and the legislated-for-oneself, as Kantian law is the maxim the rational individual prescribes for her- or himself. Utilitarianism, then, fails to address this social re-shaping of moral consciousness by modernization, ‘Debate’ observes, since it presupposes that there is some homogeneous set of human needs, wants and goals to which, in the utilitarian sense of these terms, ‘happiness’, ‘utility’ and ‘pleasure’ refer. By the twentieth century, hope for agreement in morals is naturally given up on by many philosophers, and emotivism emerges as a theory to explain both the new interminable disagreement in morals, and why convergence of moral beliefs is not possible. So, in a different way, does Sartrean existentialism emerge, ‘Debate’ adds – another characteristically late modern theory of morality (44). Where, then, does theism, and specifically Christian moral belief, stand with respect to these modern and late modern developments according to ‘Debate’? It is quite plainly undermined by them. By a socialization process that is driven in part by urban industrialization, the modern individual no longer believes in the notion of a moral authority external to his own judgement and choice – so the moral precepts of Christian revelation and Christian theology are necessarily uninviting to him. As goes belief in the authority of moral tradition, so goes openness to belief in the moral component of Christian revelation and in Christian revelation itself: no traditional society with a shared conception of the good enshrined in law, no disposition to believe in a transcendent law which lays down prescriptions for both a this-worldly and an other-worldly common good. In the face of modernizing social change and the breakdown of moral communities and the traditions which sustain those

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communities, theist and atheist alike face the challenge of trying to reconstitute a community which will enshrine their moral beliefs. It is on this problem-posing note that the argument of ‘The Debate about God’ concludes, as had the argument of Secularization and Moral Change before it (RSA: 47). Two more subsequent pieces of MacIntyre on Christian belief and ethics are yet worth examining here. The first of these, authored in 1979, was an invited comment on a symposium of theological ethics, ‘Theology, Ethics and the Ethics of Medicine and Health Care: Comments on Papers by Novak, Mouw, Roach, Cahill, and Hartt’ (1979k). It provides some helpful clarification of MacIntyre’s views on the merits of Aristotelian ethics, and also of the nature of the distinctive contribution he thinks Christianity should make to moral philosophy. This piece signals the beginning of his attempt to formulate a credible neo-Aristotelian moral theory – a theory whose philosophical credentials are independently established, and one which he thinks, for that very reason, a credible Christian moral theology can avail itself of. In the light of his earlier work on Christian belief, MacIntyre identifies in this symposium comment as the task for today’s religious, and more specifically, today’s Christian ethicist, the following: (1) to articulate what exactly is distinctive about the Christian approach to ethics; (2) to criticize the dominant secular systems of ethical theory and practice from that distinctive perspective, and (3) to show what the specific ramifications of the religious perspective are for questions in applied ethics, such as the ethics of health care (435). This statement of the agenda for contemporary Christian moral philosophy is but an echo of the call in his first writings for a rationally self-assured, sociologically informed, and critically engaged Christian thinking. At this stage MacIntyre still speaks of this undertaking as something to be hoped for, not as something he has yet undertaken – or that he thinks others have much undertaken yet either. More and important remarks follow in this piece on the precise shape that Christian ethics should take today. MacIntyre observes that there is a natural affinity between biblical ethics and Aristotelian ethics in that both are teleological but nonconsequentialist. The covenant that God establishes with His people in the Old Testament and brings to fruition in the New is based upon an understanding that God, as creator of the human race, has a wise and beneficent plan for humanity – one which destines human nature to fulfilment through observance of a moral law which He has revealed. The Christian way of life so has an inbuilt teleological structure to it – one akin to the teleological structure in the ethic of desire-transformation (i.e. via the acquisition and exercise of the virtues) one finds in Aristotle. Also, in their views concerning human acts both the Christian and the Aristotelian, see certain acts as intrinsically defective and impermissible, MacIntyre notes: the Christian because such acts, necessarily and whatever their consequences, damage the person and turn him away from seeking his created telos; the Aristotelian because such acts are considered intrinsically contrary to various virtues whose exercise is held to be constitutive of the good and the best life (i.e. and not a mere means to that life as an end). An Aristotelian (unlike a consequentialist in the tradition of John

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Stuart Mill, MacIntyre might have added here, since a utilitarian also believes in the importance of the virtues and in some form of an objective rank-ordering of goods) does not use as a decision procedure for how he ought to act the calculation of the consequences of his contemplated actions. He looks instead to the intrinsic qualities of the actions – to their per se effects on his character and on the community of persons within which and through which he must pursue his good (437). Christianity, of course, MacIntyre notes, needs philosophy as an instrument, both to incarnate its message in non-biblical cultures, and more fundamentally, to ensure that the contents of Christian revelation itself are properly understood. So philosophy must elucidate for the Christian the meaning and the inter-relation of key ethical concepts such as ‘law’, ‘virtue’, ‘moral authority’ and so on, and consistent with his earlier writings, MacIntyre argues here that Aristotelianism is as yet the best candidate for this task. Kantianism is not, he argues, because of the peculiar understanding of the autonomy/heteronomy distinction in Kant’s moral theory which a Christian must find unacceptable. MacIntyre reminds us again in this review essay how Kant’s well-known rejection of a theistic-based ethics is based on the errant argument that either we follow a moral precept enjoined on us by God because on prior and independent grounds we know that precept to be morally reasonable – in which case the divine injunction is superfluous – or we follow it solely because God commands it, in which case we cease to follow it for a moral reason. But the Christian, MacIntyre notes, slightly sharpening his earlier answer to the Euthyphro dilemma, is bound to believe that the divine pronouncement of the moral law adds a good deal of weight to the law’s authority, because God’s epistemic authority far exceeds that of the human reason which He created. Human rational autonomy for the Christian is a created autonomy, and given the non-fallibility of human reason, even in its own sphere, a law God utters to his human creation far exceeds in rational authority a law some human creature utters to herself or himself. A divine command to a rational creature is an injunction that that creature act in a way most in accord with the fulfilment of its own nature – and so, from the Christian point of view, and necessarily, MacIntyre observes, there is nothing heteronomous in such a command (436). The final piece of MacIntyre’s writing devoted specifically to ethics and Christianity which invites examination is his 1986 article ‘Which God Ought We to Obey and Why?’ (1986e). This article, in attempting to develop in a systematic way the earlier and somewhat fragmentary views on the subject we have seen MacIntyre defend, gives us his most complete and considered statement on the relation between ethics and theistic belief. It also shows him in the post-After Virtue stage of his career out of the camp of theological fideism and solidly in the camp of a theological rationalism of the Thomistic sort. The main purpose of the essay is to argue that the foundations of any rational system of ethics cannot lie in any putative divine commands. In accord with the essay’s title, MacIntyre advances in it two necessary conditions that any belief in divine ethical prescriptions must satisfy in order to be rationally warranted: (1) a right identification condition – we must know which of a number of

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competing deities’ prescriptions we should heed, and (2) a justification of authority condition – we must possess reasons for treating those prescriptions as not merely prudentially advisable, or advisable because backed by a force we have reason to fear, but as rationally obligatory. MacIntyre sees these two conditions as jointly entailing that no knowledge of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be had exclusively on the basis of some divinely revealed standard. So his claim is that for any religious believer (and he has Christians most in mind here), a pre-theological grasp of the meaning, and an at least partial awareness of the application, of these terms must logically and morally precede his or her acceptance of any divine commands. It must logically precede the commands so that the commands be intelligible; it must morally precede them because the believer cannot accept divine prescriptions for a moral reason unless he or she already knows what a moral reason is. His argument for this claim is as follows. Harking back to a point in his earlier ethical writings, he notes that any unreflective believer who accepts an ethical precept solely because she judges it to have been commanded by God opens herself up to the Freudian-style criticism that, in so acting, she is merely heeding the voice of a deified superego. It may well be that the believer is carrying out an action which on other grounds could be judged good and just, but her fideistic attitude of mind supports the counter-factual conditional that if the deity in question had commanded any act that is by all accounts a wicked and iniquitous one, she would have performed it as well. And this at least should serve to make the fideistic attitude of mind, and the divine command ethical systems presupposing it (such as the system of William of Occam, for instance, MacIntyre notes), rationally suspect (1986e: 360–61). MacIntyre is of course aware here of the religious motivations for the fideistic approach. He acknowledges that believers such as Occam, and later and in a different vein, Karl Barth, have not wanted the transcendence of the divine nature to be conditioned in any way. They have wanted it to be understood that, in laying down His prescriptions for His creatures, God cannot be bound or constrained by any standard external to Himself. But this perceived way of safeguarding divine transcendence, MacIntyre argues, has unhappy consequences from the religious perspective itself, and he skilfully draws these out here. The Occamist approach to moral authority, he notes, is analogous to the legal positivist account of legal authority. In both cases, mere de facto sovereignty and the power to enforce duly promulgated prescriptions are thought to be the necessary and sufficient conditions for the constitution of authority. Authority is not a function of conformity to some independent rational standard, but rather something internal to the notion of sovereignty-backed-by-sufficient-power. The problem that this lands the legal positivist theory with, however, is that in a time of political instability the theory gives us no conceptual resources rationally to decide between the legitimacy of two rival political regimes of roughly equal power. Analogously, on the fideistic Christian view of moral authority, the Christian is bound to obey God and not satan only because God happens to be more powerful than His angelic adversary. But this, MacIntyre observes, seems to run counter to much of what is contained in Scripture on the subject of the divine nature. In particular (a point made in one of his earlier

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writings: see RSA: 34–5), it makes it difficult to make sense of satan’s tempting of Christ in the desert on the basis of his, satan’s, self-ascribed capacity to grant Christ power over all the kingdoms of the earth. So divine sovereignty is preserved by this fideistic approach, MacIntyre notes, in a manner which blurs the distinction between God and the prince of darkness to the point of blasphemy (364–5). MacIntyre admits that in view of this objection, the divine command theorist can offer a modification to his theory. According to the modified theory, God might command us to do something which we judge on other grounds to be wicked (e.g. acts of deliberate cruelty performed for their own sake), but which command we would have reason to heed anyway on the basis of other things we already know about God – for instance, knowledge we have of His beneficence and loving concern as it has been manifested to us on other occasions. This modification would amount to admitting that we do have pre-theological grounds for judging acts good or bad, right or wrong, whereas in the Occam-style account, the good or right-making property of acts would lie exclusively, definitionally, in the divine will. MacIntyre rejects this modification of divine command theory as not modification enough, because he sees it as leaving the God of Judaism or of Christianity insufficiently distinguished from Zeus or Jupiter. With respect to these pagan deities, he notes, one might have had reason to obey their commands and reason to regret having to obey them, but the reason for regret would be thought weaker than the reason to obey. But that Yahweh commands some act for the Christian or the Jew – as the story of Abraham and Isaac, MacIntyre thinks, makes clear – is reason for them to perform the act and to perform it without any regret justifiable by reason. For the Jew, as for the Christian, what God commands is eo ipso the best thing that could be done in the circumstances, all things considered. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as He is presented in Scripture, is a God obedience to whose precepts cannot and should not leave one with a divided mind (362–3). The plausibility of MacIntyre’s argument here quite obviously rests on matters to be decided by scriptural exegesis, but he is willing for it so to rest, as he thinks his claims about the God of the Old and the New Testament will hold up upon an examination of the relevant scriptural texts. The concluding point of his argument, in any event, is that for a theistic divine command ethics to meet the aforementioned identification condition (i.e. the ‘Which God?’ condition), it must admit there is some pre-theological knowledge of and criteria for moral rightness. But it must also admit some pre-theological knowledge, he argues, if it is to meet the second, the justification of obedience, condition. MacIntyre’s argument here is, it must be said, a bit more slippery. He wants to distinguish extrinsic prudential reasons for action, whether born of fear of bad consequences or hope of reward, from intrinsically obligatory reasons for action. We cannot, he holds, have a reason to obey a divine law as law unless we view it as more than a prudential directive, but as something instead which demands our obedience and is therefore obligatory. But we can only be obliged by that which derives from a properly constituted authority, he argues, so it is to the concept of rational authority that he turns next. The explication of this notion along with the

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claim that the concepts ‘good’, ‘justice’, ‘law’, ‘rational authority’ and ‘the divine’ are inter-definable bears most of the weight of the argument. MacIntyre envisages a process in three stages whereby obedience to putative divine commands might become rationally justifiable: in a first stage, the concepts ‘good’, ‘justice’, ‘law’, ‘rational authority’ and ‘the divine’ are grasped in their interdefinability, and then in two succeeding stages they are systematically extended and modified by their application to a range of new and hitherto unrecognized objects, persons, and states of affairs. To lay out his argument here, in the first stage, he notes, members of a political community learn to call ‘just’ those actions which respect the deserts of community members to honours, goods, rewards, and offices in view of their contribution to the overarching good of the community. A just law is a law which prescribes the kind of actions necessary to preserve and maintain relationships of reciprocity and desert between the community and its members and between the individual members themselves. The authority of a law or of the action of a law-giver is deemed rational if it serves this end. The common and overarching good of the community is regarded as the harmonious joint pursuit of the good by the community’s members in and through their practical activities and their theoretical inquiries. The culminating good of this common good is the contemplation by the members of the community of that for the sake of which all activity and practice exists – and toward which all activity and inquiry is ultimately and implicitly directed: the first and divine cause of all things. This activity of contemplating God in His work is seen as the most complete and fulfilling of human activities, and the activity meant to crown and direct all the others. We have here, MacIntyre notes, an ideal-typical community of the sort envisaged by Plato, and especially by Aristotle. It represents an advance in understanding over a previous Homeric-type society in which justice is imperfectly understood, because Zeus and the gods are seen as committing acts which, by intuitive and highly plausible human standards, seem gravely unjust. This is human reason’s first correction in the notion of the obedience owed to divine precepts. About the god of this PlatonicAristotelian sort, little positive can be said, but what can be and is said is that this Platonic-Aristotelian deity does not commit unjust acts. In a second and not necessarily temporally subsequent community (nor one, on MacIntyre’s view, that need have evolved out of this first type of moral-cumpolitical community), there is also in place a rudimentary conception of justice as desert, but there is a different understanding of the divine nature. God is thought to enter into dealings with humans, to make contracts or covenants with them. In as much as members of this second type of community become aware of the conceptual relationships that exist between the notions of law, rational authority, the good and the divine nature (i.e. understood in the same way as these notions are understood in the first type of community), they are naturally be led to subject the actions and transactions of their God to evaluation as regards His justice. This is an appropriate thing for them to do, since Yawheh, the God of this second community, bids them so to evaluate His actions: He declares Himself a faithful covenanter and a wise and entirely trustworthy partner.

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But, of course, members of the second community will be working with a different conception of the divine than their counterparts in the first community. First of all, they will see community type one’s conception of God as deficient for failing to recognize that He can enter into dealings with humanity. Secondly, they will see that when human standards of justice are applied to God, this must be done in a special way: God does not enter into partnership with man as an equal, as Job learns in his travails with the workings of divine providence. This concept of justice will then have to be modified and extended when applied to the actions of God. Members of community type two will also see that community type one’s notion of the good and the best life should be modified so that its summum bonum is reconceived. The highest good of the political community should be thought of not merely as the contemplation of God the unmoved mover and first cause of all things, but as friendship with Him as wise and beneficent creator of all things who offers friendship to a humanity which He created and over which He therefore has rational authority as law-giver (365–69). With this account in hand, MacIntyre thinks he has the resources to resolve the conundrum which the theist (and the Christian in particular) faces when she wishes to safeguard divine transcendence without at the same time making divine legal authority appear arbitrary. How is it then not presumptuous and improper for a believer to judge divine commands with respect to their reasonableness? According to the story above, believers in a community of the third type can give an account of the reasonableness of the divine commands which does not submit those commands to some standard external to, or independent of, the divine nature. They can even admit that the standard according to which God’s commands prove reasonable is one formulated and formulable by non-believers, or even non-theists. They need simply argue that the standard for justice by which God is judged is a standard discovered by human reason, but a standard discovered because it is one which God, in creating human reason, Himself created. In this way, the believer can maintain – the crux of the argument in this essay – that for God to be just and reasonable in His actions, according to the best human standards for these, is simply for Him to be Himself. He answers to no external necessity or condition in so being and acting, He simply exemplifies His own nature. And God so created human reason that when it is properly functioning, it formulates standards for right action which capture, in part, features of God’s own nature. As MacIntyre states: ‘God, it turns out, cannot be truly judged of by something external to his Word, but that is because natural justice recognized by natural reason is itself divinely uttered and authorized’ (370). The essay thus concludes that only a God who can measure up to, even while transcending, our best standards for justice and reasonableness is a God we should choose to obey and whose precepts should be seen as obligatory for us. And this, MacIntyre thinks, is a conclusion from which no clear-thinking theist should shrink. For the theist to maintain otherwise, he points out, would be either to commit her to the incredible position that we do not choose to obey or disobey God, He chooses in us and for us, and yet if He hasn’t chosen obedience for us we are still obliged to obey Him even though incapable of doing so; or, it would commit her to the

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conceptually incoherent position that God can reveal His precepts to us in words and concepts which are our own, yet which are inapplicable to Him when drawn from a source other than His own self-revelation (366, 370–71). Casting a glance back now, and before we consider his work on the explanation of human action, the question of the terminus of MacIntyre’s explorations in the philosophy of religion can be addressed. We have seen him move from a broadly Thomistic position – Christian belief has a rational warrant, part of it is rationally demonstrable, part of it is not, but none of it is contrary to reason – to a more Wittgensteinian and Barthian position according to which religious belief and discourse are thought to belong to their own self-enclosed form of life – a form of life for the adoption of which there can be no reasons external to that form of life itself. Then we have seen him move back to a Thomistic-style religious rationalism in which knowledge of self, society and nature are thought to incline one towards – that is, to open one up without determining one to accept – Christian revelation and to form part of Christian theological understanding. Revealingly, the seeds of MacIntyre’s later return to his first more or less Thomistic approach to the philosophy of religion are there to be seen in the new Introduction to his 1957 essay ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief’ which he authored for the essay’s reprinting in 1970. In this later introduction he notes that his former view of the religious attitude as a unique and self-referential form of life distorted the traditional form of Christianity whose internal logic it was that essay’s primary concern to elucidate. It also left him with insufficient conceptual resources to distinguish that attitude common among traditional Christians of accepting Christianity as true (i.e. in a non-Pickwickian sense of the term) from the mere entertaining of a rationally unjustifiable set of beliefs on the basis solely of its aesthetic appeal and imaginative power. The revisionary presentation and defence of Christian belief advanced in the 1957 ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief’ is rejected by 1970 as a ‘false and dangerous irrationalism’ (1970d: xi). The only form of Christian belief which MacIntyre will come in his later writings to see as tenable is that of the moderately rationalist sort as subscribed to by Thomas Aquinas – and he remains of this mind today.

Chapter 4

The Explanation of Human Action: Psychological, Social and Historical Considerations 4.1

Psychoanalysis and Explanation

In keeping with his conviction that philosophy has an essential orientation to praxis and to social criticism, MacIntyre has had a keen interest in psychoanalysis since his earliest days, and this owing to a judgement that it represents an important component of the self-image of the age. Since some of what he maintains on the subject is relevant to what he holds on the explanation of human action more generally, we will examine his writings on psychoanalysis first. As was the case with his work on topics in the philosophy of religion, MacIntyre shared with other philosophers in the mid-twentieth century the interest of determining the logical status of claims in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis (see, for instance, the papers of R.S. Peters, Stephen Toulmin, and Antony Flew reprinted in MacDonald, 1954). His most sustained effort in this vein is his 1958 study The Unconscious (1958a), but more of his mind is revealed in two short reviews of psychoanalytic studies (1964a; 1965a) and in two articles for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Carl Gustav Jung’ and ‘Sigmund Freud’ (1967f). His most considered judgement on Freudian psychoanalysis is in his 1968 piece, reprinted in the Against the Self-images of the Age collection and entitled ‘Psychoanalysis: The Future of an Illusion?’ MacIntyre tends to see psychoanalysis, particularly of the Freudian and Jungian sort, under three different guises: (1) as ideology and ersatz religion for a certain segment of the intelligentsia (a view somewhat unique to him); (2) as pseudo-science (a view shared by many analytic philosophers at mid-century and since), and (3) as heuristically valuable psychological theory, plausible in part (Macintyre admits being persuaded, for instance, of ‘Freud’s essential and unassailable greatness’; UN: 5). We can examine these perspectives from back to front, beginning with a treatment of The Unconscious, which envisions psychoanalysis particularly in the third way. The Unconscious has a Rylean flavour to it, and MacIntyre goes about some laboured and not particularly convincing attempts at the book’s end to attack what he sees as a quasi-Cartesian mind–body dualism in Freud’s thought. But the bulk of the work is an impressive attempt to introduce cogency and conceptual tidiness into Freud’s effort at constructing a unified theory of both normal and abnormal

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human behaviour – a theory that is both drawn from and drives Freud’s psychiatric practice. That MacIntyre thinks there is a good deal to be learned from Freud is evident from his gentleness and reserve in The Unconscious in discussing the more exotic and implausible applications that Freud makes of his evolving theory of human behaviour to art criticism, religious practice and so on. But the main aim of The Unconscious is to get to the theoretical heart of Freudianism, and mutatis mutandis, to that of other well-known forms of psychoanalytic theory, and clearly MacIntyre thinks there is something valuable to be found at the end of the search. As noted in an earlier chapter (see page 104 above), he sees Freud finally as a valiant defender against scientism, and with novelists such as Tolstoy and Proust, of the essentially human – of the human capacity for self-discovery/self-knowledge and for consequent emancipation from sub-human dependencies (UN: 93–8). What he sees of value in Freud can best be elucidated by examining it in contrast with the worries philosophers have had, and which MacIntyre shares, about the scientific credentials of psychoanalytic theory. The fundamental worry has been that the metapsychology of psychoanalysis is a pseudo-scientific because imprecise and unfalsifiable dogma, and that this both undermines the authority of the analyst in clinical contexts, and disallows, on the account of many analysts themselves, the strictly pragmatic possibility of therapeutic cure. This is because, as MacIntyre notes, a good many analysts have held as a prerequisite for cure that their patient come to understand and to believe the particular psychoanalytic theory which they as analysts follow. By understanding and embracing the theory, the patient is meant to attain that self-knowledge which the form of psychoanalysis in question sees as the sole efficient cause of a lasting cure. But, as MacIntyre notes, a false theory can only accidentally yield knowledge (in this case, self-knowledge), and it certainly cannot yield knowledge of the ‘knowing why’ versus ‘knowing that’ sort (ASI: 34). MacIntyre maintains that Freudian doctrine can be rescued from this otherwise fatal objection, because he thinks that, in principle, even if the matter proves very difficult in practice, Freud’s theory of behaviour can generate hypotheticodeductively certain testable and therefore falsifiable tenets. In order for this to be seen possible, though, MacIntyre thinks that one must first grasp Freud’s theory of behaviour as a whole and in its inter-connecting parts, especially in its innovative, inter-definable concepts such as ‘the unconscious’, ‘repression’, ‘abreaction’, ‘neurotic symptoms’, ‘psycho-traumatic events’ etc. (UN: 15). Of particular interest here, he notes, is Freud’s journey from a neuro-physiological form of explanation of abnormal behaviour to a psychoanalytic explanation of the same – a psychoanalytic explanation which in the end sheds light on how even normal human behaviour should be understood. With respect to this journey of Freud’s, MacIntyre offers the following explanatory story. As is widely acknowledged, Freud discovered in his early work on hysterical paralysis that behind the failure of therapeutic treatment based on causal, physio-chemical manipulation of different parts of the patient’s brain lay a false understanding of the genesis of such a condition – not the physiological, or at least the exclusively physiological, but the mental, not the patient’s biochemical

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condition, but his or her ideas were often the cause of the infirmity. This led Freud, while not initially abandoning the mechanistic and materialistic psychology of mental ideas and primary and secondary neuronic processes that he had formulated in attempting to provide neurologists with a systematic account of psychology, to posit the existence of an unobservable realm of the mind, an unconscious mind engaging in unconscious processes. Under the influence of his early work, though, Freud conceived this unconscious mind as functioning in a deterministic way similar to that of the neurologically governed conscious mind. MacIntyre will raise questions about the coherence of Freud’s deterministic assumptions with one of the important upshots of Freudian behavioural theory generally, and he will challenge Freud’s more-or-less articulated view that ‘the unconscious’, a substantive, is a hypothetical explanatory entity. But the scientific respectability of Freud’s inference to the unconscious, properly conceived, he argues, should not be doubted: it represents simply an abductive inference to a better explanation of the causes of certain forms of overt human behaviour. In positing an unconscious mind (or unconscious processes at least) as the explanation of hysterical paralysis, Freud’s inference, MacIntyre notes, conforms to a standard pattern of scientific explanation: one which seeks to link observable to observable via an unobservable process (UN: 14). A traumatic past event causes an emotional shock whose pain, or the quantity of it, cannot be borne at the time, and so the emotional-ideational complex related to the event, the ‘mental idea’ in Freud’s early terminology, is repressed or buried away secure from the conscious life. Until this pent-up emotion is suitably expressed or ‘abreacted’ by a process in which the patient’s resistances to calling the past idea to mind are overcome, this repressed idea or emotion serves to cause neurotic symptoms in the patient’s behaviour, including maladies such as hysterical paralysis. The ‘unconscious’ is then the realm of the mind inferred to exist by Freud as the place of repressed memories and emotions (MacIntyre suggests there is a Cartesian influence behind Freud’s topographical manner of conceiving the unconscious). It is also the realm of those mental processes of which the patient is per se unaware: processes such as his repressing of a traumatic ‘idea’, his resistance to the recovery of the idea, and so forth. Freud rightly therefore, Macintyre maintains, saw that unconscious events can cause neurotic symptoms, and that we must accordingly broaden our search for the necessary and sufficient causes of certain aspects of human behaviour and character traits (e.g. hysteria and obsessional neuroses, various mature character traits, dreams) – that is, we must broaden our search beyond a strictly neurological inquiry to a non-reductive psychological inquiry. Understood in this way, MacIntyre observes, Freudian theory has a very sound scientific justification. Freud has in the first place helped us to see: he has helped us in the identification of inexplicable behaviour whose inexplicability and irrationality has for the most part escaped our notice. This, for MacIntyre, is Freud’s descriptive achievement, and here he follows Wittgenstein in seeing Freud as an observer of human nature very highly to be praised (UN: 72). With respect to Freud’s explanatory or theoretical achievement, though, he expresses reservations. Freud’s theoretical

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concepts certainly refer to hypothetical entities and processes, MacIntyre admits. But whether they need refer to hypothetical entities is not clear, since Freudian metapsychology itself is incapable of determining the ontological status of its referents (UN: 71–2). (For an extended argument of why this must be so, and for an interesting argument that Skinnerian behaviouristic psychology is in the same boat as Freudian metapsychology, see MacIntyre’s later, ‘Post-Skinner and PostFreud: Philosophical Causes of Scientific Disagreement’; 1987b). This is something MacIntyre claims that Freud, with his reference to the Unconscious as a Kantian Ding an sich and his deterministic assumptions about causality, was unfortunately never entirely clear about. Whether Freud need be followed in treating the unconscious as a place in the mind and as a genuinely explanatory entity, MacIntyre doubts. The reason for this doubt is not made entirely clear, but it seems to be that at the time of The Unconscious, MacIntyre did not think a dualistic psychology defensible. So he argues here that it matters not for the success of Freudian-style therapy whether an unconscious mind actually exists: what matters only is whether unconscious processes, approximately along the causal lines envisaged by Freud, are legitimate descriptions, as opposed to explanations of types of human behaviour. And MacIntyre clearly thinks they may well be, but he fails in The Unconscious, to say how the description/explanation distinction should be understood here for his claims to be compelling. The gist of his argument, at any rate, is as follows. In characterizing the behaviour of inanimate substances, such as salt, mere inductive enumeration of instances acquired by observation is all that is needed to license the ascribing of properties or dispositions to those substances – all that is needed, for instance, to license ascribing solubility in water to salt. But this method can never be adequate for ascribing dispositions or tendencies to human agents. We may observe a consistent pattern of what we take to be crass ambition in the actions of a person, but until we know the motive(s) from which he is acting, to which we lack observational access, a large element of uncertainty must remain in our judgement about his dispositions and tendencies. That motive, obscure to us and informing those actions, could, for example, be altruistic. It may well be at times, MacIntyre notes, acknowledging a familiar and important point from Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, that an individual’s motives are not explicitly formulated by him and are more reliably sought as embodied in the actions he characteristically performs. He may act out of routine or out of second nature or out of a virtual intention; he may also be self-deceived or insincere. But what we need, MacIntyre argues, in order to have solid confidence in the explanation we give of his actions, is an avowal on his part of why he is doing what he is doing. If he has not consciously or explicitly formulated an intention prior to the actions, we need to know the intention he would in honesty ascribe to them after the fact. It is his intention, implicit or fully conscious, which makes those actions the kind of actions they are. So, to explain human actions we need both an accurate description of the acts which constitute behavioural regularities and an at least hypothetical avowal. But

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Freud, MacIntyre notes, by directing our attention to a certain type of hitherto clinically unclassified psychological processes which render individuals incapable of honest avowals concerning the genuine motives or intentions informing their behaviour, has persuasively altered our confidence of being able to explain human actions in many cases. In certain specific cases, the avowal we would need to give an adequate explanation of an action to be explained is the one which would only emerge at the end of a successful psychotherapeutic process. Freud’s achievement, then, lies in suggesting (i.e. on the basis of both more or less significant evidence and a respectable form of scientific argument) that many types of human behaviour which seem to have a strictly causal explanation are actually covertly purposive: they can only be explained by means of the individual’s submerged and consciously unavailable reasons. This makes it the case that altering such behaviour in a longterm way by causal manipulation is not possible; only a change in an individual’s intentional states, a change of which the individual must in an important sense be the agent, can bring about long-term behavioural change. MacIntyre maintains that this entire explanatory story can be told with the help of Freud, and can hold up to critical challenge, without the need to posit an entity such as the unconscious mind, since such an entity would serve no additional explanatory purpose. Perhaps under the influence of Ryle and or the later Wittgenstein, he overlooks a fairly obvious point here (for some useful Wittgensteinian background on the point, see, for instance, Monk, 1990: 405–7, 448–9). There is a good reason why someone who found Freud’s ‘description’ of the unconscious, to concede MacIntyre’s point, compelling might well see that this description strongly implied some kind of mind–body dualism. The realm of the unconscious is a realm inaccessible to any physical interventions on the individual’s brain or nervous system. It is not physically localized, and on Freud’s own developed account and contrary to his residual deterministic assumptions, the unconscious is finally accessible only by the right kind of stimulus being applied to the individual’s intentional states (i.e. the therapeutic process) and by the free decision and action of what must be, to use a non-Freudian term, the individual’s non-physical or transcendental self/transcendental ego. So, to believe that therapeutic cure can only come about through agent causation is to have good reason to think of ‘the unconscious mind’ as a part of a mind which is, qua capable of agency, entitative and qua physically uninfluenceable and uncoercible, non-material. In view of this oversight, it is interesting that in The Unconscious MacIntyre will highlight, along with other philosophical commentators on Freud, the tension between Freud the psychologist of the purposive – the Freud who extended our understanding of the purposive beyond the sphere of the consciously purposive, and who thereby extended our sense for the range of human responsibility – with Freud the psychological determinist who at one level denied the possibility of agent causation while at a deeper level was committed to it by his own theory (UN: 90– 91). Can psychoanalytic theory, then, lay claim to scientific status? The Unconscious was relatively optimistic about this, but MacIntyre’s 1968 essay ‘Psychoanalysis:

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The Future of an Illusion?’ is less so. Of course, he is aware that all forms of psychoanalytic therapy are not of equivalent logical status and value. The scientific advantage of Freudian psychoanalysis over its Jungian rival that MacIntyre acknowledges, for instance, is that while both theories may be based on a priori and therefore unrevisable metapsychological concepts, Freudian theory lends itself much more readily to testable predictions about the correlation it posits between various psychological incidents in childhood and patterns of adult behaviour. Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, contrariwise, is an entity of ambiguous ontological status (Is the collective unconscious, MacIntyre queries, a place in some sense inhabited by archetypes? Are these archetypes capable of independent agency?). It is also an entity whose existence can only be established by its explaining just those events whose existence first led it to being postulated, but it accounts for no other events which might provide independent corroboration of its existence (1967f: 296). With respect to Freudianism as a scientific theory, MacIntyre still in this later essay maintains that it has significant confirmation problems; in fact, the final chapter in The Unconscious, ‘Theory and Therapy’, had already detailed these. There are problems, he notes, with verifying a patient’s memories. There are problems also with the over-determination of neurotic symptoms and resultant difficulties in adjudicating between rival theoretical explanations of the same cure. Finally, there is the pragmatic problem of getting analysts to devote time and energy to devising falsification scenarios for psychoanalytic practice, given the pressing demands on them of alleviating patients’ symptoms and suffering. In the end, MacIntyre sees Freud’s great contribution as both opening our eyes to the connection between childhood incidents and adult personality traits/patterns of behaviour, and as advancing, on the basis of theoretical speculation which must constantly be criticized (as Freud, MacIntyre adds, was aware far more than Freudians have been), various therapeutic techniques and a therapeutic process to help the individual come to grips with, and attain some measure of peace and self-control with respect to, his or her present in light of his or her past. The prospects for some measure of scientific confirmation of psychoanalytic theory and practice are there, MacIntyre finally thinks, but he does not venture to predict in his writings on psychoanalysis whether, with the passage of time and sufficient experimental sifting, such confirmation will indeed be forthcoming. How then does MacIntyre think the high degree of confidence bordering on religious faith which so many intelligent people have in a theory that is so highly unconfirmed can be explained? With respect to the popularity of psychoanalysis in its ideological (in the pejorative sense of the term) form, Macintyre offers a sociological explanation, and it is best to let him speak for himself here: False or unjustified assertions have been propagated in our time with the power of almost omnipotent states to back them up; beliefs now usually discredited but once plausible have often survived into our own age. But I know of no other example of a system of beliefs, unjustified on the basis of criteria to which it itself appeals, and unbacked by political power or past tradition, which has propagated itself so successfully as Freudian orthodoxy. How did it do so?

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Consider the following vocabulary: adjustment, conflict, integrate, relate, relationship. … It is … the vocabulary of a segment of urban, middle class intelligentsia whose cultural situation deprived them of large-scale theory at the same time as it made large-scale theory a necessity to them. The scepticism of an earlier generation had deprived them of religion. The history of our own time deprived them of Marxism and in so doing of their hold upon the public world of political ends. The intellectual may be socially valued for his functional utility; but otherwise, his arena is increasingly that of private life. He needs to make his own experience intelligible: an image of the public world as the mere projection upon a larger screen of the private rages and longings, hopes and fears which circumscribe him. The intolerable character of his condemnation to private life is relieved by the overpersonalization of that life. The ideology of personal relationships invokes a public sanction in the closed system of psychoanalytic theory. And a whole vocabulary of personal relationships enables psychoanalysis to appear, not as one more questionable theory, but as the unquestionable framework which gives life meaning (ASI: 34–5).

4.2 Action Explanation, Logical and Causal In his interest in preserving a space for logical explanation (roughly, explanation by reasons instead of causes, i.e. antecedent, non-rational efficient causes), MacIntyre’s first writings on the theory and explanation of human action centre on showing, against behaviourist-minded psychologists and philosophers, why the facts demand that such a space be preserved. ‘Determinism’ (1957a) is the first such effort, and the arguments in it are buttressed by those in his later ‘Purpose and Intelligent Action’ (1960d). The current threat to a robust conception of human freedom and the role of reason in human life that such freedom presupposes does not, MacIntyre thinks, arise from natural science as much as from the more recent successes in the explanation and prediction of human behaviour in psychology and the social sciences. He has in mind here disciplines such as social psychology, developmental psychology, learning theory, and some parts of psychoanalytic theory. In view of these successes he sees us faced with a dilemma: either in expectation of the wholesale success of causal explanation in the human sciences we must give up what Aristotle recognized as a key mark of free agency – namely, the ascribing of praise and blame to human actions and human character – and we must recognize that the moral life is an illusion; or we are compelled to engage in the anti-scientific hope that the aspiration to explanatory adequacy by means of causal explanation in the human sciences will remain unmet (1957a: 28–9). MacIntyre’s subsequent writings on human action can be seen as attempts in various ways to escape this dilemma. The 1957 essay ‘Determinism’ offers the first attempt at a solution, though its concern is with the problem of free will – a problem directly relevant to matters in the explanation of human action. The claim of this piece is that there are three approaches to human psychological freedom which must be rejected. There is first a kind of naive introspectionism which rests its belief in the reality of free will on the commonsense, subjective awareness we have of its presence. MacIntyre rejects this route for being too a priori and for discounting without sufficient argument the

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increasingly broadened scope of successful causal explanation in the human sciences we have witnessed in the twentieth century. Rejected also as a way to establish the possibility of human freedom is the appeal to indeterministic physical causality. Physical event randomness certainly undermines any belief in universal causal determinism in the physical order, MacIntyre notes, but with randomness comes absence of responsibility, and without responsibility human acts cannot meaningfully be thought owned nor therefore be thought free. So physical indeterminism cannot deliver us the grounds for any belief in human freedom. Compatibilist accounts of human freedom cannot be the solution either for MacIntyre, yet of the mistaken solutions they are for him the most interestingly false, since in requiring a revisionary understanding of the term ‘free’ they shed light on the kind of solution he thinks the problem requires. A particular foil for MacIntyre here is the version of compatibilism defended by Antony Flew in Flew’s 1955 essay ‘Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom’ (see the New Essays in Philosophical Theology collection co-edited by MacIntyre and Flew, 1955a: 144–69). On Flew’s picture a paradigm case of the applicability of the term ‘free’ to a human act is a case of two young adults who having fallen in love decide to marry and who make this decision in the absence of any external pressure. Their choice of marriage is a free one, Flew maintains, even though, and whether they realize it or not, their choice is entirely determined by events in their respective pasts. On Flew’s account, we can and do call the choice in question ‘free’, because had the same persons chosen otherwise they could have acted on this choice without being externally constrained. MacIntyre’s response to this position is that Flew in trying too hard to refute determinism has missed the point of what our belief in human freedom requires to be the case if that belief is to be both meaningful and justifiable. In our use of the term in ‘free’ in ordinary language, he argues – for example, in our saying ‘x was free to do y’ – we mean not merely that if x had wanted to do y he could have. We mean that, all things considered, x could have chosen to do y, even though in fact he chose to do z instead. So we mean that x was capable of choosing to do the y he didn’t do. But this capacity for choice-of-alternatives-in-the-moment-of-decisioneven-given-one’s-past-causal-history is ruled out according to Flew’s account. As MacIntyre observes, Flew’s notion of freedom amounts to saying that, for any act z of agent x, the varying of x’s past causal history could have caused x to choose some action other than z, but in the varying of past causal input to get a different act output there is no space left for the sovereignty of the human agent over his act (1957a: 32–3). MacIntyre tries to preserve this space and defend a libertarian conception of freedom by introducing the notion of ‘rational behaviour’ and the related notion of a ‘logically relevant consideration’. Behaviour is rational, in MacIntyre’s view here, if and only if it can be altered under the influence of a logically relevant consideration. A logically relevant consideration is, roughly, a reason the acknowledgement of which gives one a motive to vary one’s choice of action (in this sense, MacIntyre is willing to hold

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that reasons shaping one’s actions are ipso facto causes, but causes of a special kind: ‘rationally effective’ versus what he might have called ‘coercively effective’ causes; see 1957a: 37–8). Examples he gives of such logically relevant considerations are things such as: the discovery of new evidence which gives a textual scholar reason to change the dating of a manuscript he is working on; the discovery by a pedestrian that the beggar to whom he is about to give money is only a beggar in disguise; the realization that the object floating in the water that one is about to jump in and rescue is a log and not a human being. How can we know, then, whether the behaviour of an individual in a given case is rational or not? On MacIntyre’s definition, behaviour is rational if and only if the cause(s) of its alteration are, or would be, logical considerations, and he admits that this criteria for the rationality of action is more a public than a private one – the rationality or irrationality of an agent’s action, for instance, may be obscure to the agent. Also, reflection will be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for rationality: actions on impulse may qualify as rational according to this criterion because, as in one of the examples above, a bystander might have, depending on whether she judged this to be a suicide attempt or not and depending on her views on the morality of suicide, immediately jumped into the river to save what was apparently an imperilled swimmer which she subsequently perceived to be a log. The reasons informing such an instantaneous action would be implicit. In a different vein, MacIntyre notes, one can reflect before acting and yet ignore a good number, most, or all logically relevant considerations with respect to that action, so reflection will not be sufficient to make behaviour rational. On this account, the rationality or non-rationality of an action can be tested in cases where we know that the causal influences on the agent have remained more or less constant (i.e. non-logical causal input is roughly invariant): if in such circumstances the agent’s behavioural output varies, we will know that this is due to the acknowledgement of logical considerations and that the behaviour in question is consequently rational behaviour. In responding to objections to this account, MacIntyre rightly notes that rational behaviour may well be predictable behaviour: a good deal of rational behaviour derives from allegiance to fixed principles, and if this allegiance is unchanging, much of the behaviour deriving from it will be predictable. So he introduces the useful distinction between causally predictable and logically predictable behaviour. Logically predictable behaviour differs from the former in that it is determined by the agent, rather than determined for the agent. In rational behaviour one acts for a reason; in non-rational behaviour one’s actions merely flow deterministically from one’s causal circumstances. Where then does this account leave us? MacIntyre thinks that with it we have the elements of a picture which will allow us to accommodate and welcome increasingly fine-grained and broadened-in-scope causal explanations from psychology and the social sciences without fearing that these explanatory improvements will endanger our belief in the human capacity for self-determination – or that they will encroach upon the realm of logical explanation. Facing up to what he considers

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the determinist’s most powerful objection, ’Relativism’ considers whether, in time, learning theorists, for instance, might be able to give causal explanations for all our rational allegiances and deliberations, so that with a sufficiently detailed knowledge of an agent’s intellectual past plus knowledge of the present exciting causes of her rational behaviour (i.e. the range of logically relevant considerations placed before her in a given instance), one might be able to causally explain and predict even that rational behaviour as well. His response to this objection here is rather weak. He first notes that on the phenomenological level, the process of rational deliberation involves more than a mere response, even a calculative response, to external stimuli; he next notes that to describe all of what one would grant as rational behaviour in causal terms would be to elide the very distinction in view of which the notion of causal explanation was first introduced. But so to respond is merely to dodge the force of the objection. The causal theorist would want to take MacIntyre’s concession that logically relevant considerations are genuine causes of an agent’s action, and then try to give an account of how, for agent x of intellectual history h, some set of (albeit special) such causes lead him ineluctably to do y. Curiously absent from MacIntyre’s work here is any mention of the order of volition or any use of the phenomenology of valuing (i.e. not merely weighing logical considerations, but weighting them), and this is what is needed to do the full work in arguing for the kind of agent causation he both wishes to defend in this essay and thinks the facts of human behaviour call for. As the essay never quite fully states, ownership, not unpredictability, is the key feature of free actions. The arguments of his next essay on the subject, ‘Purpose and Intelligent Action’ (1960d), dovetail nicely with those of ‘Determinism’. This later paper was a contribution to a symposium on psychological explanation, and in it MacIntyre attempts to illumine some of the unacknowledged conceptual limitations of empirical psychology, with special reference to the presuppositions behind human intelligence testing and measurement (as then practised). Concerns in the paper link up with his earlier thinking on the explanation of action, because the main thrust of the paper is to give an account of the nature and uniqueness of human intelligence and then to draw several conclusions from this about the challenges facing action explanation. How and why exactly, MacIntyre asks here, is human intelligence unique? He proposes a threefold (but, as he admits, not exhaustive) classification of kinds of intelligence. Intelligence type 1 is the capacity to carry out the steps in a routine or recipe to attain a specified end. The agent possessed of this type of intelligence must be capable of rule-recognition in the process, that is, the agent must be capable of distinguishing instances of rule-following from instances of rule-breaking in the routine – and so must be capable, in principle, of repeating the routine’s performance; however, an agent of type 1 intelligence need not be capable of giving justifying reasons for the procedure it follows. Intelligence type 1 is that intelligence operative in, for example, the solution of an arithmetic problem, MacIntyre notes; it is predicable of machines, animals and humans.

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With respect to the second and higher-order type of intelligence, an agent can be said to possess intelligence type 2 only if it possesses the ability to know how to match the rule-following skill or technique exemplified by intelligence type 1 to some purpose external to the goal of the skill or technique in question. So agents with intelligence type 2 are capable of matching skill to second-order end or purpose, as it were. An instance of this would be using the technique of flattery to irritate someone whom one knows to be suspicious of adulation. In exhibiting this kind of intelligence, purpose is not worn on the surface of the performance as it is in the case of actions which exhibit intelligence type 1. So an observer in this example of an exercise of intelligence type 2 might judge that the (malicious) flatterer was unintelligent for failing in his apparent purpose of ingratiation. It is not required of an agent of whom type 2 intelligence is predicable, MacIntyre observes, that that agent successfully employ the technique in question – or even possess the requisite level of technique – only that the agent be capable of the mental act of considering the suitability or unsuitability of the technique in the light of some higher-order purpose. So an ape resorting to a variety of trial-and-error techniques to attain some fruit, though failing in each of these, would exhibit this type of intelligence. Intelligence of type 2, in MacIntyre’s sense therefore, is predicable of both animals and humans. The third and, MacIntyre holds, distinctively human type of intelligence is the capacity to choose higher-order purposes, purposes external to those goals internal to routines, techniques or recipes. Intelligence type 3 presupposes the possession of the first two types of intelligence and amounts to its possessor’s ability to set up and to seek purposes of the right number and kind suited to the technical abilities which she or he possesses. To exhibit this kind of intelligence is to be capable of reflective choice of ends, and this requires capability of language use: that activity in and through which alternatives can be formulated and represented to oneself as alternatives. Intelligence type 3 is unavailable to animals for their lacking adequately sophisticated language capacity, as it is to machines, because even though computers may ‘say’ things, MacIntyre notes, they are not language users in the sense of being able to put the same form of words to different uses – for instance, in the telling of lies or the making of jokes, that form of language use which presupposes the possession of higher-order purposes (1960d: 92–3). Behind this account of intelligence lies the somewhat controversial thesis that the notion of intelligence is parasitic upon that of reflective deliberation. MacIntyre argues that the paradigm case from whence the concept ‘intelligent’ is derived is that case where a human agent consciously deliberates before acting, and embodies in his action the results of that deliberation. ‘Intelligent’ is then a quality which can be ascribed ex post facto to any act or agent by someone who is in conscious possession of the rules or principles which the act both embodied and which the agent followed in acting. As MacIntyre notes here, before Aristotle, human beings syllogized, and often syllogized correctly; but after Aristotle we are able to call their logical behaviour intelligent – and assess it with respect to its degree of intelligence – because we have come into conscious and explicit possession of the logical-rules-aimed-at-an-

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outcome which valid human reasoning implicitly follows. A consequence of all this, he observes, is that humans, as alone capable of a reflective grasp of the rule-governed procedures their actions can and do embody, are paradigmatically intelligent beings; animals and machines can be called intelligent only by an analogical extension of the term (84–5). The moral of this story about the different senses of ‘intelligent’ and about the paradigmatic sense of the term (a moral which MacIntyre directs at experimental psychologists in particular) is that while mechanistic explanation may suffice to explain behaviour of intelligence type 1, it can never be adequate in explaining behaviour of intelligence type 2, nor a fortiori of intelligence type 3. In the actions of intelligence type 2, some higher-order purpose must be invoked by the explanation, and the problem for the explanation is discerning this purpose, since it cannot be read off the performance itself. Where is the purpose to be sought and how is it to be found? MacIntyre thinks that in ascribing second-order purpose, we can and do work backwards – that is, we explain the actions of animals on the basis of explanations we have framed for human actions. What route, though, he asks, can or do we follow in the case of human actions? There are in general, he observes, four types of purposive human behaviour with which we are confronted: (1) ‘ordinary’ purposive behaviour, where the agent acts according to a socially recognizable purpose, but one known authoritatively by her or him alone; (2) neurotic behaviour, where the purpose for which the agent acts is one which she or he could be brought to avow through something like a psychotherapeutic process; (3) self-deceiving or un-self-aware behaviour – acts, for instance, motivated by envy, jealousy, or romantic attraction – where external observers familiar with the character of the agent may actually have a better access to the agent’s motive than the agent her- or himself, and finally, (4) abnormal human behaviour or behaviour whose purpose is discrepant with respect to any recognized purposes in our social order, and which behaviour, in as much as we cannot recognize its purpose, must be regarded by us as irrational, and possibly insane. Animal behaviour, MacIntyre notes, will typically conform to this first type of human purposive behaviour: behaviour according to socially recognizable norms and patterns. But since the purposes driving animal behaviour will be, for animals, a matter of instinct and not of deliberative choice, we can, by analogy and anthropomorphically, assign categories to their behavioural patterns and speak of animal ‘play’, or ‘courtship rituals’, or ‘friendship’, and so on. Still, in the animal case as in all human cases, MacIntyre observes, any purely physical explanation of the behaviour (e.g. that of the kind a neuro-physiologist might offer us) will necessarily not tell the whole story. It will be unable to factor into its explanation the higher-order purpose of the behaviour: a purpose that is in part constitutive of the behaviour itself, and which, though a crucial element of the behaviour, is something which lies beyond the methods and purview of physical explanation. In bringing the arguments of this essay to a conclusion, MacIntyre states that if psychology is to be adequate to its subject matter, it must function as a hybrid discipline: ‘Psychology is

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a border-line subject. It hovers between the mechanisms of the neuro-physiologists and the roles, functions and ideal types of the sociologist’ (95–6). In a subsequent essay from this period, ‘A Mistake about Causality in the Social Sciences’ (1963a), MacIntyre continues his attack on reductive explanation in the human sciences. In this case, his concern is with the influence on social theorists such as Weber, Pareto, and Engels of empiricist views of causality of the sort found in David Hume and John Stuart Mill. Throughout the essay he is striving to articulate his own view of the relationship of belief to action, an effort continued in two subsequent pieces, ‘The Antecedents of Action’ (1966c) and ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ (1967d). These later essays, however, will modify his view in ‘Mistake about Causality’ in important ways. In ‘A Mistake about Causality’, MacIntyre observes that in the work of social theorists such as Weber, Pareto, and Engels there is an initial overstatement of the causal independence of belief from action, which in the course of time each of these thinkers softens into a kind of facile interactionist account of their relation. Weber, who, MacIntyre notes, does so much in his work to emphasize role of rationality in the genesis of action, admits in later work that in his earlier studies such as The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he was merely investigating one direction of the causal chain. Similarly, Pareto and Engels both move from bold statements about the epiphenomenal or wholly dependent character of beliefs with respect to actions to later qualifications which attribute a power of agency to belief and systems of belief. In each of these cases, MacIntyre thinks that the way of initially conceiving beliefs and actions is the source of the problem and represents a conceptual confusion which vitiates the undeniably valuable empirical contributions social theorists such as these have made to our understanding of human behaviour. Often, he notes, social theorists view actions and beliefs, in the spirit of Mill and Hume, as independently constituted, and thereby as externally and contingently related items (1963a: 48–9). If one wants to ascribe a causal relationship between Calvinist theology and forms of socio-economic life in the Low Countries, for instance, one must, in subscribing to a Humean understanding of the causal relation and a Millian understanding of how one can ascertain that this relation obtains, confirm that in similar social orders in other parts of the world (e.g. India, China), material conditions ripe for the emergence of capitalism were present and yet that capitalism did not emerge. Calvinist beliefs, therefore, the theorist holds, can be cited as the cause of capitalism with some measure of confidence. ‘Debate’ argues that this approach amounts to a kind of explanatory overkill. There is a direct and internal link, MacIntyre wants to claim, between beliefs in Calvinist soteriology and the socio-economic behaviour which capitalism embodies. Perceiving this link, one need not step outside Calvinist belief to assert its causal relation to capitalistic activity. How then, alternatively, does MacIntyre suggest that the relation between beliefs and actions should be understood? – Not in a behaviourist fashion, where to believe x means – and means without remainder – simply to be disposed to do y. Nor does he think, as has been noted, that beliefs and actions should

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be viewed as two wholly discrete entities, like two billiard balls, capable of impacting upon one another. Beliefs and actions clearly are, and must be, distinct entities, he argues, since they can have different sets of predicates applied to them. Beliefs, for instance, may be called probable or improbable, true or false; actions cannot so be called. Actions can be said to be prompt or dilatory, effective or ineffective; beliefs (as opposed to the action of forming beliefs or of believing, he would no doubt add) cannot be so described (1963a: 53–4). MacIntyre notes as a clue to understanding the relationship of beliefs to actions the relationship that exists between words and meaning. As words are expressive of meanings, so actions are expressive of beliefs. The key to seeing this, he maintains, is to see the contrast between human actions and human happenings. When an explanation of some bit of human behaviour is called for that can be given in exclusively causal terms – that is, by stating the antecedent necessary and sufficient physical conditions whose causal relation to that bit of behaviour instances some general law – we then have the case of a human happening. No human agency is involved in such cases (e.g. the case of a nervous tick), and we have not an action, but something that happens to a human agent. Here the constant conjunction method of ascertaining that a causal relation obtains has application. In contrast to this, though, he notes, are cases of human behaviour where purpose is involved. In the case of a head movement the same physical movement which the nervous tic involved could also instance a nodding of the head in giving an affirmative answer to a question. In such a case there would be human agency because we have a purposive event, an acting for a reason. A purely physical explanation of this act will necessarily fail, because it will not even identify the explanandum for what it is – a purposive-act-in-a-social-context-embodying-some-conventional-and-sociallyrecognizable-meaning. Constitutive of human actions, then, MacIntyre holds, in accord with his earlier essay on the subject, are human purposes, and the task for action explanation is to identify the specific purpose among a range of possible and available purposes that an action expresses and in part embodies. Here, and as he had stated earlier in ‘Determinism’, the crucial task will be trying to ascertain the description under which the agent himself performed the action (and to which description the agent may or may not himself have the most direct access). However, and in significant contrast to his earlier ‘Purpose and Intelligent Action’, MacIntyre goes further here in ‘Mistake’ and speaks of how we must factor in the social dimension of intention and purposive behaviour. Since action descriptions must be conceived by an agent in the form of words, and since language is a public possession, our task in explaining human actions can be simplified by delimiting the stock of action descriptions available to an agent in his or her particular social order (58). Important here, MacIntyre observes, will be our discrimination of whether the social order to which an agent belongs is, borrowing the language of Henri Bergson and Karl Popper, either open, closed, or open but tending toward closure. As ‘Debate’ notes, the conceptual horizons of a given society may be in flux owing to debates internal to that social order, or to discovered incoherences or anomalies in

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the society’s constitutive conceptual framework, or to instances of the breaking of socially established rules by members of that society, and so forth. If these sources of ideological friction are permitted by a society it will be an open one; if it presently or in the future resists or seeks to overlook or suppress these causes of conceptual change, it will be closed or tending toward closure (63). The explanation of action will finally then be, MacIntyre claims, the explanation of human choices--and here the theorist has as materials upon which to draw both accounts of the agent’s dispositions and accounts of the prevailing forms of action and meaning conventions behind actions available in that agent’s social order. When it is a question of an agent ostensibly acting for a socially established reason (or set of reasons) which is (or are) in accord with a socially established rule, the theorist must further assess whether that action is genuinely in accord with the rule or not. So he must assess the truth or falsity, reasonableness or unreasonableness, of the belief behind the action relative to its social framework. In this sense, MacIntyre concludes in ‘Mistake’, even strictly sociological inquiry cannot be value-free (62). His point here, plainly, is that adequate sociological explanation cannot dispense with an assessment of at least the internal rationality of an action, that is, the action’s conformity or non-conformity to the rules internal to its social context. In his next essay on action and explanation, ‘The Antecedents of Action’ (1966c) we can see MacIntyre attempting to cover the gaps in his theory of action in the area of volition noted earlier, and this will lead him to modify the account of human action given in the essay just discussed. ‘Antecedents’ thus forms an important plank in his considered theory of action explanation because, while expressing sympathy and partial agreement in it with Gilbert Ryle’s (Ryle, 1949) and A.I. Melden’s (Melden, 1961) influential criticisms of the notion of a human faculty of will, MacIntyre seeks to steer a middle course between their anti-volitionist accounts of human action and the volitionist accounts of the same deriving from medieval philosophy and perpetuated by, among others, as he states, Hobbes, Hume and Kant. Ryle, as he notes, famously rejected the notion of occult volitions serving as contributing causes of human actions, because he regarded such volitions as explanatorily superfluous. Ryle had argued that in attributing actions to human agents, our descriptions of these actions need make no reference to unobserved and publicly unobservable acts of will, and that, moreover, in applying criteria to assess the quality of performance of human actions, we do not and need not take the realm of volition into account. A.I. Melden in his turn had argued that to invoke a faculty of will as a physically uncaused cause whose agency is required for anything that is to count as a human action is to involve oneself in an infinite and vicious regress. Is the act of will behind the human bodily action itself free and uncoerced? Then it too must have as its cause some prior volition, and so on. MacIntyre accepts this dubious argument of Melden, and he concedes part of the force of Ryle’s objection (1966c: 207–9). The position that he thinks one should not embrace is one which, in seeking to safeguard human agency from nonlogical antecedent determination, denies that human actions can have causes in

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the proper sense, and proposes instead a dual-aspect model for explaining human actions. The point of departure, however, for this rejected view, or family of views, MacIntyre accepts – that physical movements and human actions are extensionally non-equivalent. The same physical movement may be present in writing a cheque, signing an autograph or ratifying a contract, as he is aware. And on the other side of the coin, the action of ‘paying one’s debt’ may involve handing over coins, posting a cheque, and so on. Concerning the nature of actions versus events, MacIntyre also accepts a further consideration adduced by dual aspect theorists: namely, that the logical form of ‘Why did your arm move?’ differs notably from that of ‘Why did you move your arm?’, this being a clear indication of the difference between actions and physical events. With regard to the former question, a wholly causal explanation is sought and regarded as adequate; in the latter case, the question invites and requires an account invoking purpose, intention, motive and so on. In the former case, ‘Why did your arm move?’, a perspective-independent answer is possible; in the latter case, ‘Why did you move your arm?’, the first-person perspective is indispensable: the agent’s avowal of purpose is essential to answering the question. In the former case, the answer to the question could be the subject of predictions without conditions: that is, the account put forward could embody a Humean law-like generalization; in the latter case, the answer as candidate for a future prediction would have to be conditional, since it would require knowledge both of the agent’s intentions and of his tendency to follow through on the intentions he forms. Finally, in the former case there is a space for the question ‘How do you know?’ – for instance, one might have been anaesthetized at the time and answer that one saw one’s arm move in a mirror, or that someone else in the room told one, and so on. In the latter case, there is no space for this question, because there is no standpoint for knowledge of actions as purposive other than that of the agent’s own ordinary consciousness, actual or virtual. As an agent, the purposes behind one’s actions are self-established and they are, as such, immediate objects of knowledge for one. From considerations such as these – considerations which MacIntyre finds compelling as far as they go – the dual aspect theorist will claim, he notes, that nothing which can be considered a human action can be the subject of causal explanation or can be thought to have some externally related cause. The purpose, motive, or intention whose presence makes a mere human happening an action is internally related to that action and embodied in it. Causes can therefore have no place in capturing the action aspect of the physical movements upon which that action supervenes. Here, against a dual-aspect account of human action, and rejecting his earlier position in ‘Mistake about Causality’ which we have seen above, MacIntyre seeks to stake out a middle ground position. He does this by citing examples of human behaviour – genuine actions, he will argue – which do have assignable externally related causes. The first is a case where the action of another person – the giving of advice, for instance – affords an agent with a reason for action. If the second agent acts on the basis of the first agent’s action, the latter will have served as the

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cause of her purposive behaviour (MacIntyre also notes that any agent, in her own deliberation, may similarly give herself a reason to act, and this considering of a reason will function as the cause of her actions). A second case might be where some external source acts as a contributing cause, a necessary but insufficient condition, of some instance of human behaviour, and so again furnishes us with an example of a caused human action. To use MacIntyre’s example here, one’s being mildly intoxicated might incline one to react violently to verbal insults. Lastly, one might think of the case where losing at cards inclines one in the short term to anger and illtemperedness, and here again, MacIntyre claims, we have something external – an event – serving as the cause of what is uncontroversially a human action (206–7). His point behind these examples is to try to show how a two-stratum view of the explanation of human behaviour is faulty, even though it has the justifiable motivation of preserving a space for human freedom. What he thinks is needed, both to save a space for human liberty and to do justice to the facts about human behaviour, is to admit that humans engage in activity which may have contributing antecedent physical causes, while also acknowledging that humans have the capacity to: (a) recognize this form of causal influence on their actions, and (b) intervene successfully to alter it. If we keep this in mind, he thinks, we can admit the validity and the value of natural scientific inquiry into the antecedents of action while simultaneously maintaining, in view of the human capacity to deliberate, resist physical pushes and pulls, decide, intend and so on, that there is a human power of self-determination. For MacIntyre, this way of thinking about human action has two merits: it preserves our sense of human freedom without paying, in the face of the numerous counter-examples of caused human acts, the volitionist price of building into the notion of human agency some mysterious, unobservable volition. It also avoids behaviourism and determinism, he claims, because it sees in such familiar activities as deliberating, deciding and intending the manifestation of just that power of selfdetermination volitionism has been eager to defend. Surprisingly, at the end of ‘The Antecedents of Action’, MacIntyre holds that traditional so-called volitionists such as Hobbes, Hume and Kant can be read as authors who would endorse the account of human freedom and action which he has been developing and defending in the essay: If we read Hobbes, Hume, and Kant as characterizing not the necessary prerequisites for something to be classified as an action but as characterizing the type of action which one must be able to perform on occasion if one is to be classed as a responsible and a rational agent at all, then the arguments of Ryle and Melden become irrelevant. For the acts of will are, as the traditional authors clearly state, the familiar and unassailable processes of resolving, deciding and intending, and not the mysterious and occult ‘volitions’ with which Ryle and Melden make so much play. (225)

Before proceeding to an examination of his next relevant essay on the subject, ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ (1967d), it is worth noting a few of this last essay’s shortcomings. MacIntyre seems as yet unclear in his thinking about how to characterize the process

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of acting for a reason. As noted earlier, he is willing to consider a reason coming from another source, or arising out of an agent’s own deliberations, as straightforwardly a cause, and yet he has said not nearly enough about how this concession does not play into the determinist’s hands. In ‘Antecedents’, as in his earlier ‘Determinism’, he follows Stuart Hampshire in maintaining that behaviour may be largely predictable without ceasing to be free and rational. He also maintains that causal reasons, so to speak, have a singularity about them which by and large prevents them serving as one of the two terms of a Humean-style generalization. Reasons for action, then, on his account, tend to be portrayed as sufficient rather than necessary and sufficient conditions for action. But he hasn’t yet told us the precise way we should think about the causal role of reasons, and part of the point of ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ will be to make some attempt at this. On Melden’s infinite regress argument against the possibility of acts of volition serving as the necessary and sufficient conditions of a free human action, it is surprising, given MacIntyre’s sympathy with the thought of Aquinas even at this stage of his career, that he does not invoke the Thomistic rejoinder to the argument. For Aquinas, as for other mediaeval philosophers, the faculty of will, like the faculty of sight, for instance, is a causal power. Once it is presented with its appropriate object, assuming the person of whom it is a faculty is in a conscious state, it is capable of acting, and when it acts, it is in its own line of causality (efficient causality in this case), an uncaused cause. There is no regress problem here because the faculty is not itself uncaused or self-caused simpliciter: it comes into being with the person of whom it is a faculty. When an extended object of suitable proportions in a sufficiently diaphanous medium enters our visual field (and our power of sight is functioning properly, is physically unimpaired, and so on), we see it; likewise, we can and do will to pursue some object or course of action, as Aquinas argues, when the intellect or faculty of reason presents us with one or several possible objects of choice (e.g. several competing courses of action). These possible objects of choice are each possible specifying causes of the will’s activity – another way in which the will, though uncoerced, should not be considered entirely uncaused in Aquinas’s view – but they are, in Aristotelian language, formal and final causes of volition, object-goals, not its efficient cause. In the case both of sight and volition there is heterogeneous and originating causation at work. The faculty of sight exercises itself on the sense percept, the will exercises itself on the object of possible choice. In both cases we have a reciprocal form of causation taking place between active power and specifying object-form. But the important difference between these two cases is that human sensation is largely spontaneous: we see, for instance, what is visible to us automatically (that is, and significantly, unless we will not to see by averting our gaze), whereas the act of will, volition, can be spontaneous but needn’t be. We can withhold assent, delay decisions, continue deliberating and weighing – and weighting – options, so the originating causal power of the will, its power as an uncaused efficient cause of action, stands out more clearly. This property of ‘causally-undetermined-in-the-order-of-efficientcausality’ (but not uncaused or self-caused in the order of existing) belongs per se to

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the faculty of will, and since the will as a faculty has this uncoerced power to select from among the objects proper to it, it is free by nature. That is, any given act of the will is per se free, so there is no place for a regress problem to get started. MacIntyre therefore overlooks the fact that the will and an act of will alone is necessary to bring to an end the process of deliberating, considering, weighing and so on in which practical reasoning engages – including that deliberating, considering and weighing that is necessary to resist or alter the rational causal influence on one’s choices ab extra, which capacity MacIntyre takes to be the hallmark of human agency. Here, as elsewhere in his work on human agency, MacIntyre contents himself with arguing for human freedom more on the basis of its marks or manifestations (the ‘resolving, deciding, and intending’ in the quotation above) than on the basis of its root cause. The good bit of philosophical psychology necessary one must engage in to get to that root cause he does not attempt. To proceed, though, to ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ (1967d), this is a truly seminal essay in MacIntyre’s thinking about the explanation of action, and it sets the agenda for much of the rest of his work on the subject, as more generally for his subsequent work on the theory of practical rationality. As with the previous essays on action and explanation, it is written in the Wittgensteinian spirit of a conceptual inquiry into the foundations of a discipline, and here it is the discipline of social science which is in question and the matter of how to think and not to think about the task and the results of social scientific inquiry. In a somewhat characteristic way, MacIntyre seeks in ‘Social Science’ to balance considerations from two opposing views which he sees as setting themselves up in too sharp a contrast with one another. The two views in question on this occasion are those of Peter Winch in The Idea of a Social Science (Winch, 1958) and Emile Durkheim in his study Suicide (Durkheim, 1951). Before he seeks an adjudication of the differences in social scientific methodology between Winch and Durkheim, MacIntyre examines another methodological dispute, this one between Winch and Bronislaw Malinowski (see Malinowski, 1952), and in the course of doing so he puts forward his most complete account yet of how action explanation should be understood. First, we can consider his interpretation of the Winch–Malinowski dispute. By way of background simplification, for the Winch of The Idea of a Social Science, famously, social scientific explanation is a matter of acquiring an internal perspective of the customs, beliefs, and practices of a social order, and in the work of explanation, the social scientist aspires only to present in a more complete and explicit way the explanations of those social practices and entities which a sufficiently informed native of that social order would give. For Malinowski, contrariwise, social scientific explanation should proceed much more along the lines of providing an external corrective to the explanations of an ideal native informant. Part of the social scientist’s tasks, in Malinowski’s view, as MacIntyre notes, is not only to describe the beliefs, norms, and practices of a social order, but to describe how and why these often only ostensible norms and social rules are actually flouted by the society’s

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inhabitants. So the requirement to identify and explain the discrepant over and above the rule-governed gives an added dimension to the social scientific task. MacIntyre agrees with Malinowski here, and in the course of saying why, he develops his own account of action explanation a stage further. At first we traverse familiar ground: Winch had begun by contrasting the experimentally established correlations yielding predictions of the natural sciences with the logical explanations, of limited predictive value, which it is incumbent upon the social scientist to give. Agreeing with this, MacIntyre notes how the natural scientist seeks to formulate generalizations linking observables and seeks the confirmation of these generalizations in experience. The social scientist, however, is confronted with an unobservable, the motive or reason behind an agent’s actions. The link between agent’s intentional states and his observable actions cannot and need not be established observationally, but it can be yielded by the agent’s testimony and or by a perspective on the agent’s world from within. So the social scientist’s task, MacIntyre holds, is to ascertain what the motives or reasons behind the agent’s actions are, and in order for the social scientist to do this without reading his own concepts, categories, act descriptions etc. into the social order which is the object of his study, he must first determine what the available stock of concepts, act descriptions, rules, and so on are in that social order. So far, this account of action explanation is entirely in accord with the earlier account we have seen MacIntyre put forward in the earlier ‘A Mistake about Causality in the Social Sciences’. But soon the two accounts diverge owing to MacIntyre’s changed conception of acting for a reason. We have seen him earlier entertain the idea that a reason for action can be understood as having a causal role in the production of the action. Now he says why he thinks this is so, and how saying it is so need not involve one in mechanistic reductionism. One need merely, he maintains in this later essay, distinguish between the reasons actually available to an agent in deciding how she should act, and the reason effective in her choosing this action. While conceding that reasons are internally linked to their corresponding actions, he adds here that the possession of a reason is something separable from an action, so it is capable of serving as the action’s cause: the possessing of an effective reason as an event in consciousness can function in a causal story about how the action is produced, and is the way MacIntyre thinks the alleged divide between causal explanations and logical explanations or explanations according to rule-following is overcome (1967d: 215–16). Illuminating in this regard, he thinks, is the case of post-hypnotic suggestion. If hypnotism is in fact possible, he notes, a subject might perform an action under post-hypnotic suggestion – walk out of a room, for instance – yet he might supply some other reason or reasons as the explanation for this action. Here, the possession of a covert reason is serving as the cause of an action, and MacIntyre thinks this type of case may shed light on certain non-hypnotic cases – cases where, for instance, the effective reason or set of reasons behind an action may be obscure to the agent, and so, from the social scientist’s point of view, it can best be determined by the

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framing and testing of causal generalizations which link hypothesized reasons with the actions internally related to them. There is a further point that MacIntyre wants to argue here against Winch’s account of social scientific method. If, even with the matter of the unconscious psyche aside, agents do not always have a secure grasp of their reasons for action, then the first person perspective only enjoys prima facie authority in the explanation of action. This permits, or even requires, the social scientist to employ Marxist notions like ‘false consciousness’ and ‘ideology’ in explaining social behaviour. Agents in society S may claim to be following rules a, b, and c in their behaviour, but in reality their behaviour may be guided by rules x, y, and z. And another important point falls out of this – a point which MacIntyre also sees Winch’s account as unable to accommodate. Since false consciousness may be present in a social order which lacks the concept ‘false consciousness’, the social scientist may not only be permitted but required to use concepts and categories drawn from outside that social order which is the object of his study. Winch’s approach has, on MacIntyre’s view here, two additional shortcomings The first is its tendency to regard all sane human acts as actions guided by some rule, that is, actions for which there is some criteria of rightness or wrongness with respect to their performance. But with respect to casual acts such as going for a walk or smoking a cigarette, MacIntyre asks, can such criteria be thought to exist? Can such actions therefore be regarded as rule-governed in the appropriate sense? He concedes that Winch, in his concern with rules, has in mind their relevance with respect to larger tracts of coherent experience. But even in these cases, he points out, rules may function in diverse ways. As an example, MacIntyre notes here that the rules associated with the occupational roles an individual may take on – that of a head waiter, for instance – don’t so much causally affect the individual’s activity as constitute it, just as the rules of chess govern/constitute the chess player’s activity. Yet the constitutive rules of a role – the rules for a monk in a monastery or for a private in the armed services – may also constrain, and so causally affect, the individual’s actions. This being the case, MacIntyre argues, the mutual exclusivity of rule-governedness and of causal agency in Winch’s picture of the social must break down (and MacIntyre points to the findings of Erving Goffman’s study Asylums in support of this conclusion; 1967d: 119–20). Also missing in Winch, and for a related reason, MacIntyre thinks, is attention to social inhabitants’ modes of being and of undergoing. An individual in a society is not merely what she or he does or what rules she or he follows, but what that individual’s identity is as pre-constituted via a socially established and socially recognized ordering of status (1967d: 123). It is at this stage that MacIntyre finds it helpful to bring in Emile Durkheim’s contrasting methodology, particularly Durkheim’s observations in his noted study Suicide. Whereas Winch, as MacIntyre reads him, tends to make the social rules consciously held by individuals something constitutive of social life, Durkheim, he notes, treats social rules as structural facts which precede the individual’s awareness of them and constrain his or her actions. It is between these two approaches that

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MacIntyre thinks the social scientist should operate, so he conceives the social scientist’s task as fivefold: (1) to identify the rules the agents under study ostensibly follow; (2) to determine what rules these agents actually may follow, contrary to what they profess; (3) to determine the causal regularities that may be exhibited in the correlation of status, role and occupation with the non-rule-governed behaviour deriving from these; (4) to determine the presence of certain cyclical patterns that may be present in social orders as such, and finally, (5) to try to determine what the inter-relation of these four sets of systematic regularity in any given case may be (122). Everything hinges here, MacIntyre notes, on how the explananda of the social scientist is characterized, and in ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ he is now prepared to put his own normative account of social science methodology forward (123–30) – an account upon which his subsequent work in social theory and other topics will draw heavily. Social scientific method should proceed, he holds, in three stages. In the first stage, the social scientist must seek to identify the beliefs, concepts, and reasons in the possession of the agents in the social order under study, and this identification must precede the identification of the structural and institutional causes of those agents’ behaviour. So MacIntyre bids us here to consider certain social scientific studies of the day which link the prevalence of single-room dwellings in a section of the society with suicide. If an observationally established correlation between these two is to be illuminating and to explain anything – which indeed MacIntyre concedes it might – it must first be established that in the self-understanding of the agents in question, it is the same action that is being correlated with what we know to be the same structure. Until we can be reasonably certain that we are dealing with the same action, and what exactly that action is, the correlation of suicide with single-room dwellings is not an explanans but yet a further explanandum for the social scientist to consider (126–7). The chronologically second stage of social scientific inquiry is the representation of the social agents under study in their own terms and according to their own concepts and categories – paying due attention to potential differences between the conceptual scheme of the social scientist himself and that of the agents in question. If such differences are not attended to at the beginning of the inquiry, MacIntyre observes, the social scientist will deny himself the possibility of genuine explaining. This is because agents’ beliefs about themselves are identity-constituting: an important part of what agents are is what they think themselves to be. If these beliefs are not properly identified, social explanation will clearly fail. Similarities between beliefs and practices must therefore not be assumed, but only discovered ex post facto. MacIntyre thus sees Durkheim’s Suicide as a paradigm case of social scientific theory failing to respect agents’ self-understanding. Durkheim, he argues, owing to his theoretical presuppositions, assimilates in Suicide the giving of one’s life in battle to inspire one’s fellow troops to the taking of one’s life to avoid the personal and collective disgrace of a court martial. Yet while both of these action types are for Durkheim cases of suicide, MacIntyre notes, they are quite clearly not the same act. In the former case, the individual acts knowing, but not intending, his own imminent

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death; in the latter case, the agent acts intending his own death. So the possibility of a homogeneous explanation for these two rather different acts is dubious. The chronologically third stage of properly conducted social scientific inquiry, in MacIntyre’s considered view, is the establishing of what the roles, statuses, and occupations of the social order under study are, and how they are correlated with, and constitutive of, various forms of human behaviour and types of action. These considerations, as noted earlier, MacIntyre sees as conspicuously left out of Winch’s account of the social scientific task. If the social scientist has conducted her inquiry in these three stages, MacIntyre thinks that there are still two things she must do – both of which will involve her in some form of normative assessment, and the requirement of which will make it impossible for her to conceive of her work as value-free (MacIntyre thus returns to a frequent claim in his earlier work, a claim made more convincingly here). The social scientist must determine whether the beliefs, categories, rules for action, etc. which ostensibly constitute a social order are (a) consistent with one another, and (b) actually followed or not in given instances. Both these tasks involve a normative assessment of the internal rationality of a social order, he argues, and are integral parts of the social scientist’s explanatory task. At the end of ‘The Idea of a Social Science’, and in a final attempt to distinguish his position from Peter Winch’s, MacIntyre holds that there is a further area of inquiry for the social scientist, one requiring her to engage in yet another form of normative assessment (Whose Justice? Which Rationality? will later treat this matter in a detailed and quasi-systematic way). MacIntyre notes how Winch’s position about the uniqueness and radical heterogeneity of forms of social life tends to preclude the possibility of any external normative assessment of form of life A from the standpoint of the ‘logic’ or evaluative standards of form of life B – or indeed from the perspective of any form-of-life-independent standards. So, in Winch’s view, witches exist according to the standards of the Azande conceptual scheme; according to that of modern science, they do not, but there is no contradiction between the one perspective and the other, nor can one perspective claim rational superiority over the other except relative to the standards of its own conceptual scheme. MacIntyre thinks that this view about heterogeneous forms of justification which form a law unto themselves cannot be correct, because it would require a strong form of incommensurability between the concepts constituting those schemes of belief. His counter-argument is as follows. The Azande or the seventeenth-century Scot asserts ‘There are witches’; the modern sceptic asserts ‘There are no witches.’ Under pain of holding that contradictory beliefs can both be true, a Winchian must admit that they are speaking about untranslatably different subject matters. But the translation of terms from one conceptual scheme to another is a very common occurrence in our experience, and happens regularly, so Winch’s position must be false: Consider the statement made by some Zande theorist or by King James VI and I, ‘There are witches’, and the statement made by some modern sceptic, ‘There are no witches.’

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The Roots of MacIntyre’s Thought Unless one of these statements denies what the other asserts, the negation of the sentence expressing the former could not be a correct translation of the sentence expressing the latter. Thus if we could not deny from our standpoint and in our own language what the Azande or King James assert in theirs, we should be unable to translate their expression into our language. Cultural idiosyncrasy would have entailed linguistic idiosyncrasy and cross-cultural comparison would have been rendered logically impossible. But of course translation is not impossible. (129)

So MacIntyre thinks that what we need to learn from Winch’s position is to proceed with caution in our work of synchronic or diachronic cross-cultural comparison, respecting the differences first. But we must then see that the ex post facto construction of comparative lists and typologies will be meaningless if it does not serve some broader theoretical purpose (an anticipation of the work of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?). MacIntyre acknowledges here that some forms of functional explanation may be called for at this stage. Different societies may have differing rationalizing explanations of various of their constitutive social practices, yet their roughly similar practices may actually serve the same human needs and purposes, and so be explained more fully and more adequately at a functional level instead of from the agents’ perspective alone (for MacIntyre’s view on when and how theoretical explanatory authority can trump agent authority, see his introductory comments to Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, 1970e: esp. xvi–xvii). Of greatest theoretical interest in social scientific inquiry, ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ holds (and again we anticipate the developments in Whose Justice?), is the work of external normative assessment. Here the work of cross-cultural comparison subserves an inquiry into whether one society’s form of rationality is superior to another’s. The desideratum that emerges from the arguments of ‘Social Science’ is for an account of the logic of this external normative assessment. As MacIntyre notes towards the end of the essay, present-day Africans are, and may be, faced with a choice between Azande-like rationality and the rationality of the modern scientific world-view. How and according to what standards can their choice be rational? We will postpone a consideration of MacIntyre’s answer to this until we examine Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. In the build-up to After Virtue, two pieces remain which are centrally concerned with the nature of action explanation: ‘Rationality and the Explanation of Action’ (1971d), an essay authored specifically for the Against the Self-images of the Age collection (and written by MacIntyre in all likelihood to tidy up his earlier work on the subject examined in this section thus far), and ‘Hegel: On Faces and Skulls’ (1972e). The Hegel essay is part of a collection of interpretive pieces on Hegel which MacIntyre himself edited, and the volume is aimed at separating off the Hegel of fact from the Hegel of fiction. However, MacIntyre clearly has great affinity for Hegel’s understanding of the relation between reason and human action, so his own essay in the collection is more than expository. Indeed, in After Virtue we will see him

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introducing and endorsing some of the Hegelian themes he treats in it. First, though, we can consider the slightly earlier ‘Rationality and the Explanation of Action’. The point of departure in ‘Rationality’ is a central topic in historiography and comparative social science, namely the ascription of rationality or irrationality to the beliefs of members of either predecessor or of very heterogeneous social orders contemporary to one’s own. As MacIntyre notes at the beginning of the essay, it is a matter of fundamental importance for the social scientist and historian whether the actions she wishes to account for are reason-based or not. If reason-based, they will be explicable only in light of the norms of rationality and the rational procedures responsible for their formation; if irrational, they will be explicable only in the light of social or psychological causal processes which bear only a contingent and external relation to them as actions. How to determine into which of the two categories a given action falls? To answer this question, MacIntyre puts forward three sets of theses, one about the epistemic qualities of beliefs, one (which we have seen previously) about the relation of beliefs to action, and one, finally, about right method in explaining actions. The third thesis about right method develops points in ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ and gives MacIntyre’s most comprehensive statement on social explanation prior to After Virtue. As for the thesis concerning beliefs, MacIntyre notes that while it is foolish for historians and social scientists to engage in the construction of facile, Victorianstyle narratives of the progress of reason, it is no less foolish for them to withhold ascribing truth or falsity to the beliefs of societies which they are studying. Truth or falsity are timeless properties of beliefs; the judgement that a belief is true or false need not be made or warranted from any particular point of view: it is nonstandpoint-dependent. True or false is true or false for each and for all. MacIntyre is, of course, presupposing a contentious theory of truth here which he largely abstains from arguing for – but to which he will return in his later work. In the context of this essay, he wishes only to maintain that social scientists may call the beliefs of their objects of study true or false, as long as they can make good on the claim that this ascription of truth or falsity is a standpoint non-dependent one – so long, that is, as they can produce the requisite argument showing this to be the case. The matter is entirely different, he holds, with respect to the predicates ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’. Here, our concern is with truth relative to background assumptions, and plausibility relative to the state of background information and knowledge at the time the belief was formed; it is also with procedures of belief acquisition, whether arbitrary and non-intellectual (e.g. owing to social or psychological pressures) or non-arbitrary and norm-governed. In this sense, beliefs may clearly be true but irrational, or false but rational. So MacIntyre claims that the seventeenth-century belief in witches, for instance, can be regarded by the historian as irrational, not because it was false, but because it was inconsistent with other beliefs and criteria for rational belief available at the time (1971d: 248). In distinguishing rational from irrational beliefs, he notes, the social scientist’s concern must be with whether such beliefs were formed on the basis of reasons or not, and so with whether these beliefs are regarded by those who hold them, or have

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held them, as open to refutation and rejection or not. The social scientist will also have to pay heed to the conformity of a social order’s beliefs to certain canons of rudimentary logic, such as the principle of non-contradiction – principles which, MacIntyre thinks, may plausibly be thought to be features of human rational thought as such. And since ascriptions of rationality or irrationality will regard things like entailment or implication or consistency relations between beliefs, it will not, he notes, be possible for the social scientist to ascribe rationality or irrationality to a system of beliefs as a whole (MacIntyre, 1971d: 250). Following anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, MacIntyre also maintains here that fundamental to the social scientist’s task will be the classification of the genre of utterances in the social order under study. This repeats a claim from his earlier work – namely, that care must be taken in social scientific inquiry not to read the classificatory divisions of the social scientist’s own social order into those of an earlier or a primitive society. The social scientist must be particularly wary, he adds, of taking as fact-stating discourse what is not – or of taking beliefs as representational which for those holding them serve no such purpose. For example, the myths in a given primitive society may wrongly be construed as a feeble attempt at representational (e.g. scientific) discourse. Equally, MacIntyre notes, magical techniques in an alien society may falsely be interpreted as proto-technological when they are for their practitioners nothing of the sort, but instead forms of enacted wish-fulfilment. Since primitive and past societies often work with, relative to us, very undifferentiated forms of discourse and classifications of discourse, the social scientist wishing genuinely to understand must respect this and take this into account in her judgements about belief rationality or irrationality (1971d: 249–53). Sharpening and condensing claims from his earlier ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ and ‘The Antecedents of Action’, MacIntyre notes in this later essay that actions are expressive of beliefs and can be individuated only by reference to the antecedent belief states of which they are an expression: no identification of the intention behind and informing the action in question, no accurate identification of the action (253–4). With this in mind, he thinks that the social scientist or historian is faced with four different types of explananda: (1) actions that are rational with respect to rational background beliefs; (2) actions that are irrational with respect to such beliefs (as in cases of weakness of will); (3) actions that are rational with respect to irrational background beliefs (for instance, stockpiling food and weapons in view of a belief of an impending alien invasion, my example), and (4) actions that are irrational with respect to irrational beliefs. This essay provides the resources for a comprehensive depiction of the social scientific task and for an identification of what is, pace certain positivistic understandings of social scientific inquiry, its great challenge. At the cost of some repetition, but for the sake of a useful resumé, we can summarize here MacIntyre’s views in this and the earlier essays, eliminating the inconsistencies between them. To explain the actions of members of an alien social order, the social scientist must first seek to identify the network of background beliefs which informs those actions. She must do a careful a posteriori classification of the genre of the

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inhabitants’ utterances – utterances which are in large part the evidence for the beliefs characteristic of the social order. In doing this, she must make sure that she is not reading into the object of her inquiry a classification of speech acts or of forms of discourse from her own social order. Once she has ascertained the background beliefs which in all their differentiated or undifferentiated variety inform the actions of agents in the social order, she must then seek to determine which of these beliefs are causally effective in producing the actions she wishes to explain: agent testimony will be indispensable here. And because it is a network of beliefs that lie behind the intention which a given action expresses, she will seek in vain for psycho-physical laws which would connect discrete beliefs with discrete actions (254; more on MacIntyre’s criticism of behaviourism will be given in Section 4.3 below). But further necessary work still awaits her. Since there are two general types of action explananda she may confront, rational or irrational actions, she will have to determine into which of these two categories a given action falls, and her initial determination of this will require a judgement that is not, and cannot be, valuefree (255–6). Drawing on a suggestive analogy with logic, where to describe an argument as fallacious is also and inescapably to judge it evaluatively, MacIntyre notes that when the social scientist is seeking to identify an action as rational or irrational, she will be inquiring as to whether it is in conformity with or deviates from avowed social norms. In her description, she too, like the logician, will be making an evaluative judgement here. If actions deviate from socially established and socially shared norms and are in consequence irrational, she will have, in the cause of this deviation, another item to explain. Finally, she will need to assess the rationality of the causally effective beliefs in the background of the action to be explained. Here, MacIntyre argues, social science cannot avoid becoming philosophical: the only way for a social scientist to make a judgement about an alien society’s moral, scientific or religious beliefs is for her to judge the logical appropriateness of the reasons – the evidence and the arguments – which members of that society possessed for holding those beliefs. But this, MacIntyre maintains, adding a very important element to his theory of social scientific inquiry, is simply to engage in a form of philosophy. So, as he concludes in ‘The Explanation of Action’: It follows that … the philosopher cannot be merely an external commentator on the social sciences; for philosophical arguments will actually enter into and forge critical links with the sociologist’s explanations. The expulsion of philosophy from the social sciences – or at least the restriction of philosophy to post eventum comment on the social scientist’s concepts and procedures – turns out to be another lost positivistic cause. (259)

Before moving to a consideration of MacIntyre’s attempted refutation of behaviourism, it is worth examining the essay he authored slightly after the last essay mentioned above, ‘Hegel: On Faces and Skulls’. MacIntyre’s main concern in this piece is with the criticisms Hegel advanced in Phenomenology of Spirit against the then aspiring sciences of physiognomy and phrenology. MacIntyre will reconstruct these criticisms and enlist them, in effect, in the service of a critique

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of contemporary attempts to explain human action without remainder by means of physiological structures and processes. Though the empirical science has changed much since Hegel’s day, MacIntyre notes in the essay, the conceptual purpose to which empirical findings have been put by many theorists in the human sciences since has remained rather constant. And what he sees as particularly advantageous about Hegel’s criticisms is that they do not rely for their force on any presupposed Cartesian-style mind–body dualism. How, then, does MacIntyre think Hegel can enlighten us about human agency? – In the main, by his account of what the nature of character traits are in a rational human agent. MacIntyre sees three points of Hegel on this topic as salient. The first is Hegel’s contention that, contrary to the claims of the phrenologist and the physiologist, character traits are not fixed, but mutable dispositions for action. Given the power of reason, any human agent can, when he is aware that his actions are beginning to manifest and or to reinforce a certain trait of character, view that trait in terms of its desirability with respect to social, religious, or moral norms, and so decide to try to alter or remove it. This power of rational self-criticism liberates the agent from the determinacy of character dispositions: judging what she is by what she is not, the agent is always capable of altering the form her character may take presently (1972e: 232). A second point Hegel makes which MacIntyre thinks we can still learn from is his observation that human agents have a capacity for behavioural dissimulation: by means of overt behaviour, we can feign the possession of a character trait we do not in fact possess. Thirdly, and most significantly for MacIntyre, there is Hegel’s observation that even as a disposition to action of a certain kind, a determinate character trait necessitates no specific action, because the action dispositions of a rational agent are always actualized in context-dependent ways. So, paraphrasing a discussion in the Phenomenology of the explanation of an act of murder, MacIntyre regards approvingly Hegel’s observations about the adequacy of certain proposed dispositional explanations: A given murderer, for instance, commits his crime because he fears his own humiliation by losing his beloved. If we are to look at the traits and other qualities manifested in his action, they do not include a disposition to commit murder, but such things perhaps as a general intolerance of suffering, a disposition to avoid specific kinds of humiliation, his love for the girl, and so on. The same dispositions might explain precisely to the same extent the same person’s outbidding others in giving to a deserving cause in order to impress the same girl. But just this fact puts in question the use of the word ‘explain’. (228)

Of course, an action theorist of a reductivist physicalist sort has an objection to this argument, and MacIntyre’s response to this objection gives the nub of his position on why explanation in the human sciences must differ from that appropriate in the natural sciences. The reductivist physicalist, he notes, wishes to cast explanations of human behaviour as empirical generalizations in the form, (x) (fx -> yx) or (x) (fx -> fy), where the values of variables f and y are property-ascribing predicates. The

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reductivist thinks, therefore, that he can defend himself against the argument that the actualization of action dispositions is something context-dependent and contextsensitive. What we need to explain any given instance of human behaviour, according to the reductivist, is simply the conjunction of the agent’s action dispositions (i.e. the disposing causes of his behaviour) plus the set of properties of the specific circumstances in which the action occurred (i.e. the exciting causes). But here Hegel, MacIntyre thinks, can remind us of a crucial point about human rational choice. Human reason typically judges of those particulars which comprise the circumstances of action with respect to their very singularity and hence irrepeatability. Such judgements cannot be cast in the universal form necessary for scientific explanation: A particular historical situation cannot on Hegel’s view be dissolved into a set of properties. One reason for this is that such a situation has to be characterized in terms of relations to earlier specific events and situations. There is an internal reference to the events and situations that constitute its history. So the English revolt against Charles I not only has as key properties specific relations to particular acts of Charles I, but responses to situations in the past as recent as acts of Elizabeth and as far off as the Norman Conquest. Now, to respond to a particular situation, event, or state of affairs is not to respond to any situation, event, or state of affairs with the same or similar set of properties in some respect; it is to respond to that situation conceived by … the agents who respond to it … (229)

The point of this argument is that humans often judge of the properties of circumstance, not as sets of property types, abstract universals, but as properties-in-relation-totheir-antecedent-causes, that is, as concretized universals. Given the indefinite and antecedently unspecifiable set of relations a given circumstantial property may possess, or be judged to possess, it is qua concretized universal an irrepeatable universal. As such, it is unamenable to any natural scientific-style explanation. As MacIntyre sees it, there are at least three important lessons on action explanation that we can learn from the Phenomenology. One concerns the point just made, that historical knowledge is far more valuable for explanation in the human sciences than is natural scientific knowledge of physiological structures and processes. Natural scientific inquiry can inform us about the physical conditions and dispositions to action of the body, but it cannot account either for rationally self-critical agency nor for the human capacity to judge and respond to concretized universality. Put differently, natural scientific inquiry can tell us nothing about two salient and distinguishing features of human activity: the relation of that activity both to self-consciousness and to historical consciousness. A second and related lesson that we can learn from Hegel for MacIntyre is that the rationally self-critical agency embodied in human action is constituted itself by a linear logic: later episodes of human action presuppose, and are intelligible only in the light of, earlier episodes. MacIntyre adds here, unsurprisingly, that we can and should acknowledge this without our accepting what it does not on its own entail: Hegel’s extravagant thesis about the Absolute and the convergence of all historical sequences on some single rational goal. The third lesson MacIntyre

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thinks we should learn from Hegel on this topic is that actions deriving from rational human consciousness cannot, even when they are manifestly ordered in pursuit of determinate goals, be the subject of the kind of accurate predictions sought for in natural scientific inquiry. This is because human rational agency is, even while goaldirected, self-critical: through rational self-criticism, humans modify their goals in via, and so modify the course of their actions. Thus, adequate explanation of the majority of human actions can only be had retrospectively (234–5). Before proceeding to MacIntyre’s extended treatment of the relevance of historical context for social scientific inquiry, we should examine first his writings specifically devoted to a critique of the philosophical behaviourism driving reductivist programmes in the social sciences. There are two pieces of central importance on this topic which we can examine in turn, ‘Emotion, Behavior, and Belief’ (1971d) and ‘Behaviorism’ (1978b). 4.3 The Refutation of Behaviourism By ‘behaviourism’, MacIntyre has in mind that family of views which maintains that the link between inner psychological states (such as emotions) and specifiable overt behaviour is internal and conceptual. Behaviourism can be understood, none the less, in a variety of ways, as he is aware. It can be understood as a semantic thesis, a thesis about the meaning of emotion terms, such that ‘Smith resents what Jones did’ means nothing other than some statement or set of statements about Smith’s behaviour. More weakly, it could be the semantic thesis that ‘Smith resents what Jones did’ is true if and only if certain statements about Smith’s behaviour are true. Or it could be an ontological thesis: ‘Smith resents what Jones did’ does not mean what some set of statements about Smith’s behaviour does, but the ascription of resentment to Smith is nothing other than the ascription of certain actual behaviour – or a disposition to such behaviour – to him. In its weakest form, behaviourism could be understood as the thesis that, while it is not the case that ‘Smith resents what Jones did’ is true if and only if some statement or set of statements about Smith’s behaviour is true, it is generally the case. And when it is not, a special explanation of the exception is called for. MacIntyre’s criticism of behaviourism will amount to a rejection of each of these variants and so of the entire family of views. Why does MacIntyre argue that emotion must be something other, and something more, than overt behaviour? Why, if it is conceded that emotion is not overt behaviour, can it not be thought of as merely a disposition to certain specifiable-inadvance forms of behaviour? By using the emotion of resentment as an example, MacIntyre thinks that one can show both the irreducibility of emotion to behaviour or behavioural dispositions, and also, consequently, the enormous obstacle to the project of explaining and predicting human behaviour on the basis of causal laws or generalizations that would link observables to observables. The kernel of his argument is, as one might guess, that the relation between emotion and overt behaviour is external and contingent, not internal and necessary, and that a simple

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examination of behavioural manifestations of the emotion of resentment will suffice to show that this is so. To stay with MacIntyre’s own examples, Smith, an academic, is resentful of what he judges to be a superficially critical review of a work which he has written recently. This review has been authored by a colleague, Jones, with whom Smith has been friendly. This feeling of resentment certainly disposes Smith to behaviour, but the possible types of overt behaviour it disposes him to are unspecifiable in advance. Resentment may lead him to avoid casual interaction with Jones (e.g. to cross the street when he see Jones coming his way), or to buy up all of Jones’s favourite fruit at the local market, or to ensure that Jones is not invited to a social event at which he thinks Jones would like to be present, and so on. The list of possible behavioural outcomes of Smith’s resentment could go on endlessly, and each of these courses of action could be thought by Smith to be a suitable outlet for his resentment – or each could be simply the spontaneous external expression of that resentment (1971d: 231–3). There is therefore no predictive route from Smith’s experienced emotion x to form of behaviour y, because there needn’t be anything intrinsic to the physical form of any of the y’s that determines their relation as effects to x as cause. Given the status of emotion x as a mental cause, we cannot predict Smith’s buying up kiwi fruit at the market from his having the emotion of resentment; and, given that deliberate human actions do not wear their meanings on their surface, we cannot retrodict from Smith’s having bought all the kiwi fruit at the local market to his having resentment towards Jones. As MacIntyre puts the point in more lapidary fashion in the his encyclopaedia entry ‘Behaviorism’ (1978b), since the truth-conditions of ‘Smith resents what Jones did’ and ‘Smith’s having bought all the kiwi fruit at the market’ are not the same, the two statements cannot be logically equivalent, so any emotionbehaviour identity thesis must be false (1978b: 112). Another angle from which to view the shortcomings of behaviourist theory with respect to the emotions, MacIntyre thinks, is in the matter of how emotions are individuated from one another. As he observes, two different emotions, fear and gratitude, may have an identical or near-identical subjective phenomenological feel – a dry throat, a rising pulse, a throbbing temple – and yet they are easily distinguished by the subject experiencing them. The means of their distinction is no doubt the differing belief states which generate them – for instance, in the case of the emotion of fear the belief that someone is engaging in aggressive behaviour towards one, or in the case of gratitude, the belief that someone has done one some large and unexpected favour. Can the behaviourist concede this point about the individuation of the emotions and keep behaviourism alive by giving a dispositional account of belief, so that to believe p is simply to be disposed to act in a certain set of specifiable ways? MacIntyre argues not. Part of the behaviour to which belief would have to dispose one would be verbal behaviour: to believe that p is certainly to be disposed to assert that p and deny that ~p. But the act of asserting that p, MacIntyre observes, is distinct and distinguishable from the physical act of merely uttering p. To assert that p is,

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inter alia, to give one’s hearers to believe that p, and also to evince one’s own belief that p. In so presupposing the concept of intention and the act of intending – which act itself presupposes the act of belief – verbal behaviour such as assertion cannot be that to which beliefs are reducible (1971d: 235–6). As MacIntyre is aware, there is a fall-back position for a science of human behaviour theorist. The behaviourist might maintain that we can at least in principle discover the meaning behind, the intention which informed, various types of overt behaviour, because an honest and sincere avowal by the agent of his intentions can deliver it to us. While acknowledging special cases such as self-deception, where agents may have less understanding of their intentions than an informed observer, MacIntyre denies that for standard cases such avowals could ever form the basis of scientific knowledge about human behaviour. Since we never have direct access to another’s emotions, he notes, we can never begin an inductive generalization linking the agent’s report of his intention-cum-emotional state with its actual embodiment or expression in action. Since we cannot confirm in any one given instance the truthfulness of an agent’s avowal about his inner state, we are never entitled to any certainty that his avowals are to be trusted. Yet, MacIntyre adds, it is of course indispensable that we frame generalizations about other agents’ sincerity, relative transparency, predictability, fidelity to various socially established norms regarding the expression of emotion, and so on. This is because we regulate our own emotional life in large part on the basis of the emotions – gratitude, fear, anger, joy – that we take other agents’ actions to embody. But there remains an ineliminable agnosticism in our interpretations of other’s behaviour which scientific theories of human behaviour can do nothing to remove or reduce (1971d: 241–2). What must be bad news for a strong project of social scientific explanation (social scientific explanation on the model of natural science) is, MacIntyre thinks, no less bad news for Goffmanesque social explanation, according to which a ‘self’ standing behind social roles and the behaviour needed to sustain such roles is regarded as an anti-scientific myth. Since physical movements, MacIntyre observes, both in themselves and according as they fall under socially established and recognized types, are almost entirely plastic before the shaping activity of human intentions and purposes, overt behaviour according to patterns of established convention can be as much a vehicle for the expression of emotion as for its concealment: over large areas I can sometimes have no way of knowing what you feel. Any performance of behavior by you, no matter how extended, may be a pretence at the service of some further unrevealed intention and emotion. . . . [Behaviorists] may have underrated the extent to which we are very often opaque to each other a great deal of the time. Misunderstanding and not understanding are at the core of human life, a fact perhaps standing in the way of the project of scientific inquiry about human beings, even if we view it as an obstacle to be circumvented rather than as a final barrier. (1971d: 242–3)

MacIntyre’s considered argument against behaviourism can be summarily re-cast in the following form:

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1. Emotions are a central feature of human experience and behaviour. 2. The same emotion can be embodied in or expressed by unspecifiably many different types of physical action/overt behaviour, therefore, 3. Emotional states cannot be identical with behavioural states or with dispositional states to any narrowly specifiable type of behaviour. 4. We have no direct access to the emotional state of other agents, so we can never corroborate their avowals about their emotional states, therefore, 5. We can never have certainty about the emotions informing overt behaviour. So, from (3) and 5): 6. No comprehensive set of law-like generalizations linking agent cause with behavioural effect can be formulated. 4.4

Historical Context and the Limitations of Social Scientific Explanation

If the hope of assimilating social scientific explanation and prediction to natural scientific explanation and prediction cannot be borne out by following the behaviourist route, there are reasons, MacIntyre thinks, why other and similar routes likewise cannot be followed. Three of his essays in the early 1970s, ‘Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?’ (1971d), ‘Predictability and Explanation in the Social Sciences’ (1972c) and ‘The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts’ (1973b), attempt to spell this out. The first essay, which might have been re-titled ‘Scepticism About a Science of Comparative Politics’, is a sharp attack on the idea that the knowledge-claims advanced in the field of comparative politics, as it is currently practised, enjoy a scientific as opposed to merely a common-sense or folk rule-of-thumb status. Why not, MacIntyre asks, scientific knowledge in the sub-discipline of comparative politics – a sub-division which enjoys such a position of prominence in political science departments? He takes it, conventionally, as the mark of natural scientific inquiry – which he treats as the paradigm of scientific knowledge – that, when successful, such inquiry yields law-like generalizations such as: ‘All metals in standard conditions expand when heated.’ These generalizations are distinguishable from accidental regularities in that they support corresponding counter-factual conditionals: ‘If any metal were to be heated it would expand.’ In the natural scientific cases also there is regularly a body of well-established theory to back up these lawlike generalizations, so that the odd discovered counter-example – for instance, typemetal in the case above – does not necessarily undermine the generalization’s lawlike status. Now the problem that MacIntyre sees with the putative generalizations of comparative politics is that it is exceedingly difficult to be certain that their terms refer to genuine cross-cultural social kinds. His argument is as follows. We cannot start our comparative work on the basis of some allegedly common ‘political attitude’,

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because, as Wittgenstein pointed out, human attitudes can only be characterized by means of their referents, and not vice versa. One can only speak of a shared political attitude if there is some institution, or practice, or set of these common to human-life-in-society as such which would constitute the realm of the political. But, notoriously, it is very difficult to prove that there are any such common institutions or practices. In the first place, any institution or practice must be, as a social entity – for example, a rank in the military, or a form of currency in an economic system – partly constituted by the beliefs of its inhabitants. We cannot be sure that two by outward appearances similar institutions (e.g. ostensible political parties) are of the same type unless we know that their respective inhabitants share the same understanding of that ostensibly common institutional type. In the case of Africa, for instance, MacIntyre notes, alleged political parties are frequently more like mass religious and social movements, which Western political parties almost never are (1971d: 263–6). When it is a question of the behaviour which partly constitutes practices, again, he argues, we must proceed with care. Physical movements under-disclose their guiding beliefs, so we mustn’t trust that largely similar behavioural action types (i.e. action types identified mostly on the basis of a common pattern of overt behaviour – for example, ‘voting behaviour’) can serve as a basis for the sought-after law-like generalizations. Actions that are ostensibly the same may be significantly different if the agents engaged in them do not have the same understanding of what they are doing, and this even if they share the same linguistic description of the act – an act, for instance, described across languages as ‘casting a vote’ (264). So we have much reason to doubt whether many comparative political generalizations are actually trafficking in genuine cross-cultural variables. As with his work on social scientific theory, MacIntyre leaves open the possibility here that functionalist comparative political analysis may have some promise – that is, a cross-cultural analysis of ostensible political institutions and practices premised on the thought that these are generated by and minister to certain invariant needs of human nature as such. But he claims that present political science is a long way from being in possession of and able to justify the account of human nature required by such a method. On his account, then, is specifically political empirical inquiry of no use at all? He states here that it is of genuine but modest value, because it can provide the best generalization-like information available to us about particular political institutions. But this information will not be of sufficient scope to be scientific; it will be in the form of Machiavellian-style ‘for the most part, but …’ maxims, as opposed to Hobbesian-style laws of human social behaviour, where the laws in question would be identical in form to the discovered laws governing planetary motion. It will be information that differs in quantity but not in kind from that available to the ordinary political agent (269–76). What, though, of the possibility, as Marx and Marxists have hoped, that comparative politics could form generalizations about the attempt to act on what we know by prior means to be the same intention of social agents – for instance, the intention of starting a revolution or of instituting some programme of economic reform or of civil law? Here again MacIntyre thinks that the peculiar character of

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social particulars represents an obstacle to the production of anything like scientific knowledge of the social world. His argument here rehearses earlier claims and points in the direction of his subsequent work in the theory of explanation which we will examine shortly. In order, he observes, for law-like generalizations about the initiating of social revolutions, for example, to be formulated we would have to be sure that the conditions in which the shared revolutionary intention sought embodiment were identical in the relevant ways. But in order for us to know this – in order for us to know that the initial conditions of an intended type of action were constant – we would have to know the antecedent conditions of the social institutions motivating that intended action (a revolution, in the example given). That is to say, we would have to have much social and institutional historical background knowledge. Therefore, if comparative political science is to move in the direction of being genuinely scientific, it must have recourse to historical inquiry: Marx asks … why, when someone aspires to perform the same actions as a predecessor in some earlier cultural period – as the English Puritans aspired to be Old Testament Israelites or the French Revolutionary Roman republicans or Louis Napoléon to do the deeds of Napoleon I – the actions should be so different. A full answer to Marx’s question would provide a genuine staring point for historical comparison, but such an answer could only be provided by first writing the history of each of these episodes. (272)

However, for comparative politics to be so beholden to history is really, MacIntyre thinks, to eliminate the possibility that it produce scientific knowledge. This is because historical determinism is, and has been shown to be, false, and also because although the study of comparative historical trends (i.e. recurrent cross-cultural historical patterns) may give us the necessary conditions for certain sorts of action to take place, it never gives us the sufficient conditions. There is yet a further reason why MacIntyre thinks that scientific political knowledge of the more restricted form sought by Marxists is unavailable. Even, he observes, if we were to ascertain that the initial conditions of some social action were relevantly similar, we must remember that social settings are in part constituted by the beliefs of social actors. But human beliefs are necessarily unstable under reflection, so we could never in principle presuppose that stability of initial conditions of context which is necessary for the formulation of law-like generalizations regarding political actions (273–4). It is in MacIntyre’s mind the weight of this set of considerations which undermines the scientific knowledge-claims of alleged political experts and undermines their consequent claims to technical political expertise in the name of forms of political engineering. But he also thinks these considerations show that any claim to valueneutrality in comparative political inquiry is fraudulent. The claim to valueneutrality, of course, might be a way for the political scientist to rescue his claim that he possesses knowledge different in kind (and not merely in quantity) from the ordinary political agent. The political scientist attempts to make good on this claim by noting that whereas ordinary agents regularly explain the success or failure

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of political actions by recourse to the evaluative language of moral psychology – a political agent failed because he was cowardly, or succeeded because he was unwilling to commit injustice – he, the political scientist, makes no such recourse, and thus his analyses have an objectivity which those of ordinary agents lack. To claim this, though, MacIntyre notes, is to beg an important question about the causal structure of the social world, and is precisely to take up a contentious evaluative standpoint. The political scientist would prescind from questions about whether a given regime is legitimate or corrupt, or a given case of political leadership just or unjust, and consider only whether a political regime is believed legitimate by its subjects, or whether a given action or person is regarded as just by members of a certain social order. But this, MacIntyre observes, would be unwarrantedly to assume that all causal power in the social world resides in appearance and in the intentional states of its inhabitants, and that no power resides in reality: it would be to assume that no causal power resides in the intrinsic qualities of political institutions, agents, or actions. To assume this would be to beg the question of justice against Plato and in favour of Thrasymachus and to preclude a form of explanation along the lines that a political institution came undone because it was morally corrupt – a possibility which no theory-neutral standpoint could rule out in advance (277–9). In a subsequent essay, ‘Predictability and Explanation in the Social Sciences’ (1972c), MacIntyre makes a further attempt to refine the central thesis of ‘Comparative Politics’ and to spell out more precisely why social events are not apt for scientific explanation. The key claim in ‘Predictability’ is that in order for some subject matter, some collection of particulars, to be a candidate for scientific explanation, these particulars must exhibit regularity in their behaviour – a regularity for which theoretical explanation then seeks to account. In this way, for instance, the planetary motions explained by Kepler’s laws, and aspects of the behaviour of gases were accounted for by the equations of Boyle and Dalton. But the problem MacIntyre identifies with social particulars – social classes, political parties – is that their behaviour fails to exhibit any predictable surface regularity for which a scientific explanation could then account. We have already seen him point out the peculiar feature of social entities: that they are in part constituted by the highly mutable beliefs of social agents and are therefore essentially unstable entities. Of course, one might think this form of instability is explicable if one thought that the changes in social agents’ relevant beliefs were predictable, but this essay offers three reasons why they are not. The cumulative weight of these considerations is meant to show that the concepts which have application in the social world have an open texture or porosity about them which is more fundamental, more radical, than the open texture possessed by empirical concepts which have application in the natural world, such as ‘gold’. MacIntyre does not make himself sufficiently clear about the nature of opentexturedness in this essay, and he will try to elucidate this notion further in his next essay, ‘The Essential Contestability of Social Concepts’. But what he says in the earlier essay ‘Predictability’ is that with the concept of gold, for example, as with other empirical concepts, we cannot specify in advance any set of necessary and

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sufficient conditions for the application of this concept beyond standard conditions. The greater problem with social concepts, though, is that we can never assume that we know what the standard conditions of their application are. Given the instability of social particulars we cannot demarcate in advance the boundaries of social concepts so as to be able to distinguish to what they do and don’t apply, or what would count as a counter-example to their application and what not. There are three arguments made here about the unpredictability of social agents’ beliefs; each is meant to indicate a distinct source of unpredictability behind belief-change, and hence a distinct cause of the explanatory intractability of social particulars. The first argument relies on the claim that, as historical inquiry reveals, in any rational tradition – in any communal undertaking of reason extended over time – there is always the possibility of conceptual innovation or innovation of genre. Matters of innovation are precisely matters that cannot be specified in advance, because to be able so to specify them in advance would be already to possess them. From the standpoint, therefore, of our present way of thinking, we are forced to be agnostic about the course of future ways of thinking. Innovations in theology, technology, portraiture, choral singing and so on are ipso facto things that cannot be seen within our present horizons; behavioural change flowing from such conceptual change will thus necessarily be unpredictable (1972c: 7–8). A second source of belief-change unpredictability arises, MacIntyre argues, from decision-theoretic circumstances. Agents are regularly unable to predict what their future decisions will be, even on the basis of inductions over their past decisions. The respective strength of their motives, desires, preferences and so on are often obscure to them until after they have made a decision. What, though, he asks, entertaining an obvious objection, if some agent B were able successfully to predict agent A’s future decisions? Might the problem then be remedied? No, he argues, because B would lack knowledge of his own future decisions and a fortiori lack knowledge of how any of the consequences of those future decisions would affect A’s future decisions, so damaging his capacity to predict A’s future decisions. What, though, of cases where the predicting observer’s actions have no effect on the agent who is the subject of the prediction – could the agent’s behaviour then be predicted, he asks? Here MacIntyre introduces his third consideration, drawn now from game-theoretic circumstances. There are often situations in social life, he notes – those faced by lovers, diplomats, poker players, generals etc. – where changes in a social agent A’s belief are predicated on a calculation of what other relevant social agents believe, and what they will predict that A will believe about their beliefs, and so on. Here, deception, dissimulation, surprise and so forth are always possible. In the most rudimentary example, agent A does precisely what he thinks agent B would expect him, on the basis of past behaviour, not to do. And since advantagemaximizing decisions, MacIntyre observes, are regularly not simultaneously available for all the relevant social actors in a decision situation (which, if they were, would simplify and make predictable the decision procedures of those agents), then systematic unpredictability must reign over large tracts of the social world.

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Could an observer, a political scientist, for instance, surmount the unpredictability arising from the perspective of any agent or any set of such agents? No again, MacIntyre argues. Though an observer might possess information superior to that of the participants, the decision-unpredictability in question might simply be, and often is, a function of the way the participants are situated. The ramifying unpredicability of one agent’s beliefs with respect to another is a function of the situation, and being outside the situation provides no difference-in-kind help to social prediction. Faced with all these forms of belief unpredictability, MacIntyre holds that we presently possess no conceptual apparatus to subsume changes in belief under lawlike generalizations so as to make the social particulars, of which these beliefs are partial constituents, apt for scientific explanation. We presently possess no such apparatus, and as MacIntyre acknowledges and as is entailed by the very first of his three arguments for unpredictability, we can in the present neither prove nor disprove the possibility that we might some day acquire the apparatus and the corresponding capacity. But these arguments are intended to show that we do not presently possess it, and that it is an illusion, possibly an interest-serving or ideological illusion, for social scientists to claim or to act as if we do (Section 4.5 below will take up these points further). The moral of the story again is that historical inquiry and the form of explanation proper to it are more at the heart of the social scientific task than are the kind of activities in which natural scientists, especially on a positivist construal of their work, engage. Even in the work of the natural scientist, MacIntyre thinks (more will be said about this in his later ‘Towards a Theory of Medical Fallibility’, examined below), a historical perspective on the particulars whose behaviour is to be explained has its place. But the natural scientist can have more confidence in his explanatory idealizations which abstract from the contingencies of history, because he can much more easily track the identity of natural particulars through time and discern predictable patterns in their behaviour. With social particulars, as MacIntyre has argued, the matter is otherwise: the unpredictable rational activity which is partially constitutive of their natures can only be identified through the construction of a historical narrative – an account, that is, of how the social agents’ intentional states, which make those particulars in significant ways what they are, have evolved over time. To explain social particulars’ behaviour is possible, MacIntyre thus claims, but only by entering into the argument which plays an integral role in constituting them. History, on his view then, turns out to be the queen of the human sciences: once we have understood the true grounds for rejecting the view that social behavior is explicable in the way that natural events are, there turns out to be no way of characterising the relevant particulars which is not ineliminably historical and that the continuities through space and time of social life have to be understood in terms of specifically historical categories. Sociology, political science and – more contentiously – perhaps both economics and psychology will turn out to be less fundamental disciplines than history. (1972c: 13)

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The next essay on and around this topic attempts, as its title, ‘The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts’ (1973b), indicates, to refine this argument further, and adds something by way of clarification. MacIntyre notes here that certain social concepts are inherently problematic in a way that natural concepts are not; they are ‘essentially contestable’, whereas natural concepts like ‘amino acid’ and ‘Christmas pudding’ are only ‘essentially incomplete’ (1973b: 2–3). The point of this distinction, filling out his earlier argument and drawing here on claims of Friedrich Waismann and Hilary Putnam (see Putnam, 1970), is that natural scientific inquiry yields us a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of concepts, but that this set is essentially incomplete because closed only by agreement of the community of scientists. This provisional and temporary closure is to avoid potentially indefinite debate about matters of fact. Empirical descriptions are thuswise essentially incomplete. But with social concepts, MacIntyre notes, there is a further complication. In the case of natural science, concepts are often derived from and refer to the observed law-like behaviour of natural particulars. With a law-like generalization in hand, the natural scientist is then able to subsume natural particulars under a concept, such as ‘planet’ or ‘gas’, and in the future he can systematically extend the range of that concept due to new experience. In social inquiry, however, MacIntyre argues, we never have reliable core generalizations in hand from which to construct albeit incomplete concepts of social entities such as ‘family’ or ‘political party’ and so on (1973b: 4–5). In reconstructed form, and recapitulating earlier work, his argument here is as follows. With natural particulars, we have a stable, circumscribed set of dispostional properties which are responsible for certain law-like and therefore predictable forms of behaviour by those particulars. Observation of this behaviour permits us to construct law-like generalizations about the class to which these particulars belong and so to treat certain features of the particulars under study as normative for membership in that class. With such core generalizations in hand, we can then determine what are counter-examples to the application of this class concept, and we can then extend and modify the concept, making it responsive to discovered features of future such particulars. With social particulars, however, MacIntyre observes, we are dealing with natural particulars – for example, bits of metal, pieces of decorated cloth – plus beliefs and actions related to those beliefs. We are dealing with a belief, for example, in the symbolic value of established currency, or in an authority structure in a military unit; we are concerned with a tendency to save up those bits of metal, or to obey commands given by a person dressed in a certain way. So why exactly do we not have here, according to MacIntyre’s argument, the stability of particulars necessary for their subsumption under a common concept? MacIntyre is careful to distinguish two types of social practice and of corresponding social concept: those practices in which there is a high degree of consensus in the constitutive beliefs and derivative actions which comprise the practice, and those in which there is not. With respect to the first, he thinks that an uncontestable social concept can have application: the compound of natural particulars plus beliefs and actions of social agents is relatively

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stable – its condition of existing may even be a high degree of social consensus, as in the case of a monetary system or a system of contract law – so the application of a shared concept to the particular can be uncontroversial. With respect to the latter case – for example, a family, the Tory party, the Royal Society – he claims we have here a social practice of contested and contestable shape, since the belief-cum-derivative action component of the particular has a large element of dissensus present in it. This dissensus is, of course, rooted in an at least provisional consensus about certain other matters, and institutionalized forums for debate in these type of practices provide them with a minimum principle of continuity through time. But, all the same, instability reigns in them, MacIntyre notes; argument may cause the component beliefs and their corresponding actions to change, so altering the social practice in question, the social particular. From this, he takes two things to follow. First, since the argument under the pressure of which the belief-action component in a social particular may change involves a process of reason – with all the potential for transformative creativity that such bears in it – the argument’s future course is unpredictable; and, since it is under-determined in its outcome by any laws, the argument is also ex post facto unretrodictable. Where behaviour is not rule-governed, he observes, we cannot for comparative purposes even form hypothetical, testable generalizations about a social particular. Secondly, when it is a question of determining whether a given social particular of the unstable kind is the same at time t* as it was at time t, there is no evaluatively neutral or commitment-free way of answering this question, precisely because there are no uncontroversial criteria of identity for the social practice – only partisan criteria drawn from one contested or contestable way of thinking about the social practice or other internal to that practice (2–6). To use MacIntyre’s example, if a social scientist wishes to answer the question of whether the Tories of 1680 as opposed to 1880 constituted a political party, she will have to enter into the debates which shaped the development of the Tory political movement in that period and then take a side. Judgements of continuity, as he notes, are predicated on judgements of identity: judgements of social practice identity are matters for normative debate and commitment, and in these neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. MacIntyre’s concern here is again with the threat of ideological, or covertly interest-serving, social theorizing, and he cites as a potential case in point the use to which social scientists might put a noted study on the relation between freedom of expression in a society and the amount of education available in it. He has in mind here the 1963 study of social scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba. One might, he notes, draw on Almond and Verba’s attempt to show there is a statistical correlation between levels of education and freedom of expression in a society, and then formulate the cross-cultural causal generalization that an increase of the first will precipitate an increase in the second. One might claim for this generalization scientific corroboration and scientific objectivity. But this, MacIntyre argues, would be to ignore or disguise the fact that concepts such as ‘education’

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and ‘freedom of expression’ have no stable and uncontroversial extension and intension: What counted as a prima facie counterexample to this thesis [of the causal link between education and freedom of expression] and what counted as a conclusive (relatively conclusive, if you like) counterexample would depend entirely on the criteria for defining freedom of expression and education. Do we include Catholic seminaries? Or Hedge schools? Is Socrates’ teaching included alongside that of Arnold of Rugby and that of Froebel and Montessori? Rival decisions to exclude or include will depend on rival understandings of education. Moreover such rival understandings will entail not merely decisions to include or exclude but decisions as to what are to count as central and what marginal, and our treatment of prima facie counterexamples is necessarily affected by this allocation. If this is ignored … then we shall covertly introduce a normatively ordered understanding of education under the guise of neutral inquiry … even more obviously so in the case of the concept of freedom of expression. (8)

MacIntyre is not unaware that there are at least two potential ways around the problem of conceptual contestability. One he had alluded to in his earlier essay on comparative politics: it would be to go the functionalist route and classify social particulars under social kind terms by identifying them as expressions of certain common and determinate pre-social human needs and functions. But this, as he notes, would not be to remove the problem of contestability: functions have no significant naked existence, but exist only in some socially constructed form or other. Which particular social construction are we then to take as normative or paradigmatic? In the words of the title of his later work, whose justice, which rationality? We might begin by treating our own social constructs as paradigmatic and normative, but we might for factual and evaluative reasons be forced to recognize and to admit that they are neither. And, as MacIntyre wants to insist in this essay, our present normative commitments will shape and structure the way we write the history of any given social particular – the history of the Royal Society, for instance – or the history of any ostensible social kind – the history of science, for example (7). He also considers here the possibility that the social theorist might operationalize her social concepts, eliminating partisanship by definitional legislation. She could stipulate what ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘education’ were to mean, formulate lawlike generalizations, and then test them across a range of similar social particulars. But this, he observes, would merely be to reinstate partisanship and contestability at an earlier stage of the inquiry, not to escape it. In a trivial form of conceptoperationalizing, the social scientist could, by means of highly narrow definitions, protect her generalizations about voting behaviour or political party structure from counter-example at the price of rendering their range of application negligible. If she engages in a less trivial form of operationalizing, she must face up to the question of the empirical adequacy of her concepts: her operational concepts will then stand or fall as recommendations for how particulars are to be classified and understood. Their status will remain contestable, and they will also have to prove themselves against rival classificatory schemes and categorizations (1973b: 8).

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The essay ‘Causality and History’ (1976d) is MacIntyre’s next attempt to show the relevance of history and a, so to speak, historically conscious ontology for understanding and explaining human actions. In order to follow the train of thought in this essay, though, it is helpful to examine first his slightly earlier piece ‘Towards a Theory of Medical Fallibility’ (1975c). Despite its unindicative title, this earlier essay contains some of MacIntyre’s most important work on the theory of explanation. In the essay, he and co-author Samuel Gorovitz are seeking an account of what it means for a medical practitioner to err, and how inter-definable concepts such as harm, culpability, sanctions, and compensation should be understood to apply within the medical practice. We can prescind from examining MacIntyre’s conclusions on these specific matters and look instead to the background considerations and arguments on the nature of explanation which are deployed in the essay in order to underwrite the proposed theory of medical fallibility. What is of much interest here is MacIntyre’s proposal for a new and revisionary way of interpreting the work of natural science, one which is both partially anti-Aristotelian and contrary as well to views of science dominant during the Scientific Revolution. MacIntyre claims in ‘Medical Fallibility’ that theories of scientific inquiry, no less in the seventeenth century than in the thought of Aristotle, have tended to restrict their concern to science’s trafficking with abstract universals and to science’s way of understanding and explaining particulars by subsuming them under law-like generalizations: generalizations in which the properties of those particulars are exhibited as deriving from the kinds which the particulars instantiate. Overwhelmingly, he observes further, the form of science that has served as the basis for theories of scientific inquiry has been that science concerned with particulars as mere bearers of universals or as kind instances (1975c: 15). This lop-sided way of understanding scientific inquiry, he argues, has in the area of the applied sciences led the scientific community to see error in scientific practice, the medical practice for instance, as resulting either from: (a) ignorance of the present state of the corresponding theoretical science (e.g. materials science or neuro-physiology) – a failure, that is, yet to have grasped the relevant laws governing the subject domain, or (b) from the incompetence of a practitioner –that is, either inferential errors he may have made, for instance in drawing conclusions from empirically established laws, or wilfulness in acting contrary to or beyond the scope of present knowledge in the science in question. MacIntyre wants to argue that there is a third source of scientific error, one which arises from our necessarily fallible grasp of those particulars with which certain sciences are centrally concerned. The implication here is that faulty theories of science have occluded our vision of that concern with the particular which is clearly characteristic of a number of forms of theoretical science – sciences such as meteorology, veterinary medicine, and environmental biology. MacIntyre’s argument here hinges on the claims that: (a) there are really two types of particulars with which science is concerned, and (b) orthodox philosophy of science is unable to account for knowledge of the second kind of particular: a knowledge which scientists working in a number of domains undoubtedly both seek and possess.

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To begin with, by ‘particular’ MacIntyre means something which, as he states, ‘occupies a region of space, persists through time, has boundaries, has an environment, has peripheral and central areas, and characteristically can split into two or more parts’ (16). This way of understanding particulars means to include as members of its class, collectivities such as crowds, forests, cities and so on. While he concedes that any particular is constituted and persists through time by the operation of physical and chemical mechanisms, he denies that this makes all particulars apt for subsumption under a set of law-like generalizations. Particulars instead, he claims, should be understood as coming in two sorts: to use terms which are not his own, predictable particulars and anomalous particulars. Examples of predictable particulars would include things such as ice cubes and molecules. With respect to these sorts of particular, law-like generalizations, capturing their constituting and sustaining physico-chemical mechanisms do have application: for example, ‘Roasted ice cubes melt.’ This is, for MacIntyre, the realm of ‘impeccably reliable’ generalizations. But by way of distinction, there are also, he argues, anomalous particulars – things such as salt marshes, hurricanes, and higher primates. Of these we have not, MacIntyre argues, any set of impeccably reliable generalizations, because the constituting and sustaining mechanisms of these particulars on the basis of which such generalizations are framed are too bound up with complex and variegated histories – histories of which we could only be knowledgeable, as he puts it, ‘under conditions of omniscience’. To use his example in this essay, meteorologists are aware that every hurricane is unique. They are unique because each is in interaction with, and partially constituted by, a set of environmental factors which are themselves imprevisible, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Though everything in the behaviour of a hurricane and its impinging environment may be law-governed, we are never able fully to grasp the relevant law-like mechanisms: Certainly everything that occurs to and in a hurricane or salt marsh is law-governed, but because we never know what historically specific interactions may impact on such historically specific particulars – for example, because of melting icebergs, flocks of migrating birds, changes in the temperature of deep sea waters, and so on – we never know in advance which the relevant law-like generalizations will be (even if we know them all) and which the relevant boundary conditions are. Indeed, in order to have such knowledge, we would need to know in detail what the behavior would be of each potential influence on our subject of inquiry. To understand perfectly the behavior of a given hurricane, we would need to have perfect understanding of the polar ice cap and of the gulf stream. But these, too, are particulars interacting with their larger environments. … We thus cannot have a perfect knowledge of our hurricane, short of having a complete understanding of all the laws that describe natural processes, and a complete state description of the world. In short, perfect knowledge of that one particular hurricane is unavailable except under conditions of omniscience. (16)

To the objection of the orthodox theory of scientific knowledge, namely that any law-like generalization requires for its application a knowledge of both the initial

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conditions and the boundary conditions impinging on the particular to which it would apply, MacIntyre’s reply should be obvious from the above. With anomalous particulars, unlike with predictable particulars such as ice cubes, he will say, we have no impeccable way of separating boundary conditions from standard constituting conditions. Contrary to what is the case with molecules, for instance, when we are dealing with anomalous particulars we lack the control of boundary conditions and of variables provided by an experimental setting. We have no way of mapping anomalous particular A from time t to time t* because we have no thorough grasp of the extrinsic factors which are, and may be, affecting the internal mechanisms of A during that time interval. We can only formulate probabilistic or ‘characteristically and for the most part’ generalizations and be content with these, while fully aware of their fallibility. If the upshot of this argument is that even in the non-human realm our capacity for the explanation and prediction of particulars’ behaviour is congenitally limited, the subsequent essay ‘Causality and History’ argues that, when we take into account human actions and their causal contribution to events in nature, that capacity is limited further still. In ‘Causality and History’, MacIntyre wants to resist what he depicts as two opposed extremes in interpreting the challenges facing social explanation: the first is the view that no genuine causal knowledge can be had in the human sciences because its generalizations differ significantly from those of the natural sciences; the second is the view that the kind of explanation in which the human sciences traffic differs from that of the natural sciences because the human sciences are concerned with a distinct type of cause. MacIntyre’s strategy in this, one of his final essays on the human sciences prior to After Virtue, is to try and find a stable middle ground between these two positions, remaining all the while cognizant of the special difficulties in explaining human actions which his earlier work had addressed. His line of argument in ‘Causality’ begins by noting, against the second view above – the ‘unique causation in the human world’ view – that we often ask what the cause of some event in the world is, leaving open, and meaning to inquire, whether human agency is involved or not. ‘Cause’ is thus understood by us in a univocal sense, and we have no difficulty in answering the question of what caused some event in the world without multiplying senses of ‘cause’. Against the first position, which urges a distinction between natural scientific and social scientific generalizations, he argues that social scientific inquiry does on occasion seem to yield causal knowledge: rapid increase in the money supply in a modern capitalist economy after a period of undue expansion does characteristically cause an increase in unemployment; an increase in the detection rate of modern urban crime does typically decrease the crime rate (1976d: 138–9). The point here is that while this is causal knowledge of a less reliable sort than that which has become increasingly available in natural scientific inquiry (e.g. physics and chemistry), it is still an instance of such knowledge. By invoking a richer notion of cause, one different in important ways from the empiricist understanding of causation which derives chiefly from David Hume and John Stuart Mill, ‘Causality and History’ hopes to show what legitimate expectation we can have for the fruits of social inquiry.

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How does MacIntyre characterize this errant or excessively narrow empiricist understanding of cause which yields pseudo-solutions to the problem of social scientific knowledge? It has, he thinks, three features. First, it conceives of the causal relation as holding primarily between event or state types, and not between particulars. Second, it views all causes as either necessary and or sufficient conditions for effects (where necessity and sufficiency are regarded as inter-definable terms, so that, with respect to effect E and cause C, C is a necessary condition of E iff E’s obtaining necessitates the obtaining of C; and, C is a sufficient cause of E iff C’s obtaining necessitates E). Finally, this narrow empiricist understanding of causation pictures the causal relation, whether between types or between their particular tokens, as essentially dyadic. Why will this understanding of causality, which MacIntyre admits has wide but not exhaustive application in the natural world, not do for the social world – or the social world in interaction with the natural world? His answer is a bit cumbersome in ‘Causality and History’, and drawing on points made in the earlier ‘Towards a Theory of Medical Fallibility’, he might have put things more simply. The human sciences, he observes, are regularly concerned with understanding and explaining singular events and singular processes as such – for example, the outbreak of World War I. But this is much less a concern or an exigence in natural scientific inquiry (again, though, he adds here, and as ‘Fallibility’ had argued, this depends on the form of natural scientific inquiry in question). Social events, or social events that cause natural events – to use his example, the synthesis of mercuric oxide in a laboratory – very often do not instantiate any known or knowable causal law. Mercuric oxide, he observes, may have been synthesized in a laboratory because a chemistry professor quarrelled with his wife after breakfast and so arrived too late to work to correct the lab technician’s misunderstanding of previously given instructions. Social inquiry could uncover the causal chain behind this event, yet the causal knowledge it yielded would lead neither to the discovery of any law-like causal generalizations nor even to knowledge of a causal recipe for the production of the effect in question (1976d: 143–4). MacIntyre takes this to show that the concept of cause has wider application than that of a necessary or sufficient condition, and he thinks the case of the confused laboratory technician merely illustrates in a vivid way what happens regularly in the world of nature as well. So, in a further example, he cites the natural event of a boulder careening down a mountainside across a path and killing a mountain cat. Up to the instant of impact, no prior event could be thought to be the sufficient cause of the death of the mountain cat in the precise way that it died. We are in the realm here, he notes, of the accidental confluence of different causal sequences – a confluence with respect to which causal laws can have no more than probabilistic application. (This is, of course, a familiar Aristotelian point: see, for instance, Aristotle’s Physics, Book II, though MacIntyre does not mention Aristotle here.) How, then, does MacIntyre think that we should characterize the logical status of the causal knowledge obtainable in social inquiry? He claims that, in the first place, we must broaden our understanding of the causal relation and view it as quadratic

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instead of dyadic. The account of causation in H.L.A. Hart and A. Honoré’s wellknown Causation and the Law (Hart, 1959) is an influence on MacIntyre here, but his account self-consciously goes beyond theirs. The four terms of the causal relation on his proposal are: (1) the background conditions or the process(es) already under way in the world prior to any causal intervention external to these; (2) the intervening causal agency; (3) the effect of this intervention, and finally (4) the effect that would have obtained with respect to the background process(es) without the causal intervention in question (1976d: 147–8). The difference between this account and the Hart-Honoré account is that MacIntyre thinks the background processes must be understood as belonging to a number of distinct types. Background causal processes need not instantiate, for example, lawlike causal sequences or causal orders such as the movements of the planets, but might involve non-causal sequences such as moves in a chess game. Moreover, even when we are able to ascertain that the processes which comprise our background conditions do embody causal sequences or orders, we must, he thinks, take note that causal bonds come in varying strength – three types of strength, in fact. There are first, he notes, irrefragible casual bonds, such as the connection between pressure, volume, and temperature in the gas law equations: to alter one element in this type of causal order is necessarily to alter the other two elements in a specifiable way. Next, there are contingently immutable causal bonds such as those captured in the laws of Newtonian mechanics. These laws specify the behaviour of planet A relative to planet B assuming the non-interference of some third entity, which intervention almost never occurs in the case of planetary systems. Lastly, there are causal bonds of mutable and unknown, but in principle knowable strength, as MacIntyre thinks most causal bonds in the social world are (e.g. the causal bond between social class and educational opportunity; 1976d: 150–52). Only, he argues here, when we are in possession of knowledge of the precise form of background causal process are we able to determine what difference an ostensible causal intervention would make or has made with respect to it. Only then, therefore, are we able to determine what is or has been the efficacious causal mechanism behind a specific effect in the domain of that process or processes. Our casual explanations will then take a hierarchical form, which is to say, they will rank the causal contribution of certain processes above that of others and specify one intersecting causal process as background condition relative to another as effective agent. With some justification, MacIntyre takes these considerations to show both that there is often an asymmetrical relation between causal recipes and causal explanations (as in the case of the synthesis of mercuric oxide cited above), and that many causal relations in nature and the social world do not instantiate any causal laws. MacIntyre’s interest in ‘Causality and History’, as the essay’s very title indicates, is to draw out the implications of the arguments above for historiography. He therefore concludes in the essay that so-called causal pluralism, the historian’s belief that significant historical events should be assumed to have a set of necessary

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and jointly sufficient antecedent causes, sits ill with an adequate understanding of causality which the essay has attempted to sketch. So-called causal monism of the sort proffered by Marxist and other ‘partisan’ historians does not sit ill with this fuller understanding of causality, he argues, and therefore it can only be refuted empirically and in the field of historical investigation, not ruled out of court because philosophically unrespectable. On the contrary, he sees the arguments of this essay philosophically to favour monistic and hierarchical causal explanations of the Marxist and partisan historian type. As he notes, when one no longer thinks of causal relations exclusively as law-instantiating relations between on the one hand a set of necessary or sufficient conditions, and on the other hand some outcome or event, one no longer sees causality on the additive model (i.e. as a process whereby a sum of weights eventually tips a scale). One recognizes instead that it is possible for events, particularly events in the social world, to have certain sovereign supervening causes: causes which, on account of the crucial difference they make to an ongoing process, may be thought the sole effective cause of those events (154–8). An increasing appreciation for the historical component to social explanation and interpretation, soon to be a prominent theme in After Virtue, is in evidence also in a short review of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method which MacIntyre authored in 1980 entitled ‘Contexts of Interpretation’ (1980h). Interestingly, this piece also contains some important and underdeveloped asides on the topic of truth and inquiry that are worth examining briefly, but it is first worth considering what MacIntyre claims to have learned from Gadamer and the hermeneutic tradition. In the essay, MacIntyre shows broad sympathy with Gadamer’s criticism of the Cartesian and post-Cartesian epistemological subject. What we have in the encounter of human mind with a text (or indeed with a work of art, he states, agreeing with Gadamer) is not the meeting of an ahistorical subject with a selfdefined object or artifact, but the intersection of two histories: the history and the associated preconceptions of the interpreting mind, and the history of the creative process behind the text or artifact. The notion of an interpreting mind that can escape its own historical conditioning is, like the notion of the ‘text-in-itself’ or the ‘work of art in itself’, he holds, a modern philosophical fiction (1980h: 42–3). Although he does not think that Gadamer has escaped fully the influence of Kantianism, he sees Gadamer’s work on the historicity of reason as indispensable in liberating us from the influence of Kantian transcendentalism, and not only in aesthetics, but in the philosophy of nature, ethics, and theology as well: It was in general the work of Kant to try to exhibit the contingent distinctions and categories embodied in the thought and practice of his own age, not as the historical outcome of a development that might have been otherwise, but as the timeless and necessary forms of all human experience. … [I]n the course of showing that the concepts, theories and beliefs of eighteenth-century physics, morality, theology and aesthetic theory could not be derived from either rationalist or empiricist premises … Kant accidentally canonized so much of the physics, morality, theology and aesthetic theory of his own age. (1980h: 43)

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MacIntyre sees in Gadamer’s work, in Gadamer’s building upon and reinterpreting the work of thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Hegel, Dilthey, and Heidegger, the vindication of a bold thesis concerning the narrative nature not only of human understanding, but of justification and vindication as well. This is a thesis which MacIntyre will soon attempt to develop on his own terms in ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science’, which we will examine next. But here, as MacIntyre puts the point succinctly in reflecting on Gadamer’s achievement: ‘Hegel was right and Fichte was wrong; we cannot enjoy the outcome of the history of thought without reappropriating that history. … The history of ideas turns out to be the queen of the sciences’ (46). There are also in this review several interesting observations on the matter of truth and inquiry. MacIntyre endorses here Gadamer’s pre-modern way of thinking about human cognition, according to which mental representations are not external but internal to the objects of mind. Truth, then, is not to be conceived as a relation between linguistic items (such as statements or sentences) and states of affairs or facts in the world, because we have no way of attaining to states of affairs or facts that does not already involve the use of language. Our grasp of things in the world is therefore always in some sense theory-laden, MacIntyre observes here, and in this vein he finds useful Gadamer’s work on mimesis for elucidating the realist conception of truth. Gadamer, he notes, teaches us that mimesis (e.g. in tragic drama or portraiture) does not involve a copy of the representatum, but the more or less adequate and well-defined appearance of it instead. Similarly, mental representations of things in the world are not like photographic likenesses of the original, but ways in and through which the original manifests itself – just as, to use the portraiture example, Rembrandt teaches us things about the human face which we were incapable of seeing, or unwilling to see, prior to his paintings having disclosed them to us (44). This way of thinking about the mind-world relation requires an entirely antiCartesian and anti-Baconian way of thinking about truth and access to truth, MacIntyre notes. Truth in the first instance, on this view, is not some goal to be attained at the end of a process and by means of following a sophisticated method of inquiry; instead, it is something with which we begin and the possession of which enables us to construct methods that will lead to the discovery of further truths. So MacIntyre thinks we should learn from Gadamer’s work that what we first need in theoretical inquiry is not the possession of the correct method, but rather methodological naïveté – methodological naïveté so we can see the truth that we already possess and without which our future cognitive strivings would be impossible: ‘method is not the path to truth, but [rather] a prior grasp of truth in human understanding … [that is,] prior acts of understanding and interpretation which render … into appropriate form the materials to which methodological rules [a]re to be applied … is a prerequisite for any fruitful method’ (42–3). Though his own thoughts on these matters are underdeveloped here, MacIntyre will return to a treatment of the mind–world relation and explore its relevance for the theory of rationality in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (and his most advanced treatment

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of the subject can be found in the 1994 essay, ‘Truth as a good: a reflection on Fides et Ratio’ in TP: 197-215.) MacIntyre’s final piece on explanation prior to After Virtue, ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science’ (1977d), is one of the most powerful pieces he has authored, and it contains the seeds of his solution to the problem of rationality and relativism which he will develop later to full effect in Whose Justice? The central concern of ‘Epistemological Crises’ is with the theory of rational theory choice, and MacIntyre thinks that on this topic there are rather close parallels between what is the case in social explanation and what occurs in natural scientific explanation (hence the linking of the concept of dramatic narrative in the essay with debates in the philosophy of science). The heart of the essay is a characterization of the phenomenon of an ‘epistemological crisis’, MacIntyre’s term of art meant to denote the discovery of a significant inadequacy in one’s scheme of belief and interpretation. What more, exactly, does MacIntyre mean by an epistemological crisis? A paradigm example of such for him is the predicament Hamlet finds himself in upon arriving back from Wittenberg. Hamlet is besieged by radical interpretive doubts regarding how he should construe the events at Elsinore of which he has been a part. Are those events to be construed along the lines of a revenge saga, or a competition for power, or a Renaissance courtier’s drama? And whom is he to believe? – His mother? His father’s ghost? Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern? Without a decision regarding interpretive scheme, MacIntyre notes, Hamlet does not know what to regard as evidence for what is really happening. But without knowing what to treat as evidence, he cannot decide which interpretive scheme to adopt. This predicament, MacIntyre notes, is provoked by Hamlet’s discovery of the inadequacy of his past scheme of interpretation – the narrative which he had constructed to make sense of his place in Danish society and his relation to his family. Hamlet is now faced with the task of reconstructing that narrative, showing both how and why he came to adopt it, and why it must be modified in the face of contravening evidence. The demands of truth here undermine what was formerly intelligible but what seems in the present light to be false – and they threaten Hamlet’s continuing intelligibility to himself and to others. Under pain of a mental and social breakdown, MacIntyre observes, Hamlet must now construct a newly intelligible narrative – one which can reconcile his past scheme of interpretation with newly discovered truths (1977d: 454–5). MacIntyre sees this case as paralleled in natural science by the revolution in mechanics and astronomy wrought by Galileo. Galileo’s scientific accomplishment, he argues, should be seen first and foremost as a narrative accomplishment and but a particular if striking instance of the strong claim for which this essay wants to argue: that social and natural scientific reason is subordinate to historical reason. Galileo’s scientific breakthrough, MacIntyre thus claims, was not merely a matter of ‘appealing to the facts’ against the excessively a priori theories of Ptolemy and Aristotle. Instead:

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The Roots of MacIntyre’s Thought the superiority of Galileo to his predecessors … is that he, for the first time, enables the work of all his predecessors to be evaluated by a common set of standards. The contributions of Plato, Aristotle, the scholars at Merton College, Oxford, and at Padua, the work of Copernicus himself all fall into place. Or, to put matters in another and equivalent way: the history of late medieval science can finally be cast into a coherent narrative. Galileo’s work implies a rewriting of a narrative which constitutes the scientific tradition. For now it becomes retrospectively possible to identify those anomalies which had been genuine counterexamples to received theories from those anomalies which could justifiably be dealt with by ad hoc explanatory devices or even ignored. It also became possible to see how the various elements of various theories had fared in their encounters with other theories and other observations and experiments, and to understand how the form in which they had survived bore the marks of those encounters. (1977d: 460)

It is not difficult to tease a theory of theoretical rationality or of rational theory choice out of these and related remarks, and this will become a central concern in MacIntyre’s later work. For now, in summary, his view is that a commitment to truth, to acknowledging how things really are as opposed to how they merely seem to be from some limited point of view, is a prerequisite for rationality. To be committed to truth (i.e. in the sense of full and complete adequacy of mind to reality) as a regulative ideal for belief and inquiry is to regard one’s present beliefs as in some sense provisional: fallibilism is then a requirement of rationality because there is (though MacIntyre does not use these precise words) an internal and conceptual connection between rational inquiry and truth as a regulative ideal. A rational as opposed to an ideological commitment to truth requires of one an openness to future deliverances of reason undermining one’s present beliefs: it requires that one recognize as possible the future necessity of forming new beliefs – if, that is, one is to be faithful to the goal of veridical representation (perfect conformity of mind to world) which drives inquiry in the first place. A tradition of rational inquiry is then a collective inquiry extended through time in which the discovery of an acute inadequacy in the tradition’s scheme of belief (i.e. an epistemological crisis) will lead its adherents to an awareness that the tradition’s newly revised scheme of belief may at any time in the future be similarly discovered inadequate. Thus, to be an adherent of a tradition of rational inquiry is to be a fallibilist. MacIntyre notes that until adherents of a tradition of inquiry have undergone an epistemological crisis, they will tend to dogmatism; if an experienced crisis within their tradition is not properly handled or satisfactorily resolved, their tradition of inquiry may turn to scepticism or at least to instrumentalism – that is, to a giving up on the realist goal of understanding how things are in themselves (which goal MacIntyre sees as native to any form of human inquiry, as pp. 459ff. of ‘Epistemological Crises’ make clear). MacIntyre observes that this way of viewing the conceptual links between rational inquiry, truth, tradition, theory, epistemological crisis, and narrative needs to be contrasted with the account of the same – the misdescription of the same, as he would have it – which derives from Descartes. When Descartes, he notes, finds himself in the midst of an epistemological crisis, a perception of the present

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inadequacy of his past beliefs, he fatally overreacts to this state of affairs by losing his hold on the context, the historical process of reason, through which his past beliefs have come to be put in question. He then sets himself the humanly impossible task of overcoming doubt as such once and for all (458–9). As MacIntyre sees the matter, rational doubts about the veracity of one’s beliefs are always context-laden. Doubt always has a history and a context, so it can only be overcome on a case-by-case basis by attending to its specific origin and cause. Yet Descartes, he notes, in his overly ambitious attempt to overcome scepticism, is forced to conceal from himself the history of his own sceptical doubts – their origin in developments in the late medieval philosophy in which he was schooled. Instead, then, of becoming a philosophical Galileo and reconstituting the tradition in and through which those sceptical doubts had arisen – showing, that is, why they had arisen owing to past inadequacies in the competing conceptual schemes within the shared tradition of inquiry, and showing how they can and must be met – Descartes contrives a supposedly self-referentially justifiable, ahistorical method for refuting scepticism. This pursuit of an illusion, as MacIntyre would have it, blinds us to the historicity of reason and to the narrative structure of belief intelligibility: no reason to prefer new beliefs to past beliefs without a common standard of acceptance-worthiness applicable to both; no rationality in the move from doubting set of beliefs or theory A to accepting set of beliefs or theory B without the possession of a narrative exhibiting B’s explanatory superiority with respect to A – without an account, that is, of how A formerly seemed adequate to its subject matter, but how it can be seen now, with the superior cognitive resources provided by B, as in fact a partial, limited, and perhaps distorting representation of that subject matter. So to move rationally from A to B, MacIntyre reminds us, always requires on our part an openness to discovering inadequacies in B which may revealed by some equally unforeseeable future development of reason. This essay, thus, contains the outlines of a solution to the problem of the threefold incommensurability of theories adverted to in the work of Thomas Kuhn on the history of science (Kuhn, 1970) – a solution which MacIntyre elaborates in the course of rejecting Kuhn’s way of handling the problem. The threefold incommensurability in question obtains, MacIntyre notes in commenting on Kuhn’s account, when between rival scientific theories there is: (1) a disagreement concerning what the crucial test experiments are which a successful theory must pass, and (2) the use of different concepts by the respective theories, and hence (3) systematic and intractable disagreement between them about how their shared data is to be characterized. The upshot of this state of affairs is that competing theories look in the same direction, yet they see different things. How, then, is any rational adjudication between them possible? In the face of the problems posed for rational theory choice by the discovery of theory incommensurability so understood, MacIntyre argues we should steer a middle path between the seeming irrationalism with which Kuhn has famously been associated (according to which the move from theory A to rival theory B can

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only occur by means of a conversion experience, an intuitive seeing of the matter in an entirely different light), and the quasi-historical rationalism of Imré Lakatos. According to Lakatos, MacIntyre notes, the choice between competing theories can rationally be licensed only by a method of rational reconstruction of each candidate theory’s history: the theory which is able to demonstrate superior historiographical capacity, both indicating and accounting for the inadequacies of its rivals, thus establishes its theoretical superiority tout court (Lakatos, 1974). With Lakatos, and against Kuhn, MacIntyre is for, as he puts it, ‘embedd[ing] … the theory of scientific rationality … in a philosophy of history’. Against Lakatos, and with Kuhn, though, he thinks that rational theory choice must be premissed on real history, not on the rational and to an extent fictional reconstruction of past theoretical episodes: It is more rational to accept one theory or paradigm and to reject its predecessor when the later theory or paradigm provides a stand-point from which the acceptance, the lifestory, and the rejection of the previous theory or paradigm can be recounted in a more intelligible historical narrative than previously. An understanding of the concept of the superiority of one physical theory to another requires a prior understanding of the concept of the superiority of one historical narrative to another. … [And] it matters enormously that our histories should be true. (467, 469)

It is this contextualist, historiographical theory of rationality and of rational justification which MacIntyre thinks can best incorporate that lesson taught us by the failure of positivist or empiricist programs in the philosophy of science since mid-century: namely, that any set of observations is compatible with any one out of an infinite set of generalizations. Where evidence underdetermines theory, a theory or explanatory scheme can show its superiority with respect to rivals by its capacity to construct a veridical historical narrative exhibiting those rivals’ partiality and onesidedness – as well as, of course, their relative plausibility. MacIntyre will soon see this understanding of theoretical rationality and rational superiority as having direct application in the domain of practical reason. 4.5

Social Explanation and Ideology

As with his writings on psychoanalysis, MacIntyre’s concern with social scientific inquiry has been not merely to expose its limitations, but also to show how its knowledge claims may be put to ideological use. The philosophical critic’s task, in MacIntyre’s understanding, is not discharged by simply refuting substantive claims in various forms of inquiry, but also in showing how the institutional embodiment of these ideas can have negative social consequences. This is centrally the concern of ‘Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution’ (1973a) and ‘Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority’ (1979i). ‘Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution’ has a structure similar to the slightly earlier ‘Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?’ (1972f), but in this case

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MacIntyre’s aim is debunking the epistemic pretensions of positivistic social science and disclosing behind these pretensions an interest-serving motivation. His target here also, though, is theorists of ideology and social revolutionaries – fellow critics of positivistic social science. He accuses these of a similar ‘epistemological selfrighteousness’, a similar claim to occupying an uncontaminated epistemological access to social facts or to having a privileged way of seeing of the social world free from the lens of ideological distortion. Unsurprisingly in view of his earlier work, MacIntyre maintains here that ideological distortion in our perception of the social world is unavoidable and insurmountable, but that we can protect ourselves from its damaging influence by being aware of it and struggling against it. We are all, as interpreters and predictors of the actions of other social agents, operating rather in the dark: we are all forced both to interpret and predict the behaviour of others on account of the practical exigencies of our own short- and long-term decisions, and yet we are forced to acknowledge that the classificatory and interpretive schemes which we use in this task are highly imperfect. This essay gives a helpful resume of the epistemological challenges MacIntyre sees as facing any human intelligence when it confronts the social world as both interpreter and agent. We have seen most of these arguments before, but drawing on some observations from a review of Richard Bernstein’s Praxis and Action (1972b) which MacIntyre authored around the time of ‘Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution’ as well, we can see how in the early 1970s he delineates his theory of the explanation of action a bit further. As he notes in the Bernstein review, in order for an action to be understood and explained it must first be properly described. Physical action descriptions underdetermine human actions, since a human action – the kiss of Judas, for instance – is comprised of bodily movements informed by a specific mental intention or set of intentions. To explain human actions fully, therefore, one must construct a hierarchy of supervening explanatory accounts, each telling part of the story. The first level of explanation should contain an account of the physical states, the physico-chemical events and the physiological happenings behind and partly constitutive of the agent’s action. The second level should give an account of the agent’s instrumental reasons, intentions or purposes: those descriptions under which he performs the action in the pursuit of certain ultimate or sought-for-their-own-sake goals, aims, purposes, or intentions. The third- and final level of explanation would be an account of those ultimate aims, intentions or purposes, and the conjunction of the first, second and third stratum of explanation would then yield a fully adequate explanation of the action (1972b: 739–40). Clearly, MacIntyre sees as the great challenge in explaining a given action ascertaining the instrumental and ultimate intentions informing the physical movements of the action – and determining the relation of these intentions one to another. In this realm of inquiry, as he observes, the complexity of the task multiplies very quickly: human intentions are derived from a set of background beliefs, and these beliefs themselves fall into a variety of categories. Enjoying pride of place are

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those beliefs of the agent in and through which he represents to himself what he is doing or will be doing in the action undertaken; on account of the social character of language, MacIntyre notes, egocentrism here is impossible: most of the ways an agent describes his action to himself will be a function of the social order he inhabits and its stock of available action descriptions. Next, behind this set of beliefs proximate to the action will lie a network of other more remote background beliefs: beliefs about how his overt behaviour is likely to be interpreted or supplied with a set of determinate intentions by others; beliefs about whether and how the contemplated action, if occurring in an institutional context, will be supplied with a socially established meaning (as a move in a chess game or the ticking of a box as a voting procedure). In addition, and in the background, there will be beliefs about how the contemplated action fits into the continuously revised narrative the agent has constructed concerning himself and the salient episodes of his past life – a narrative which will also include as an integral part the interlocking sub-narratives he has composed of the lives of relevant others in his social world, sub-narratives with which every rational human agent ineluctably operates (1973a: 328–31). The explanatory challenges here are evidently immense, MacIntyre is quick to observe, and again he gives us a handy summary of previous work and a handy background source for his own future work in social explanation. Overt actions do not wear their intentions on their surface; while these intentions may even be obscure in some measure even to the agent (owing to the possibility of self-deception or bad faith and so on), they will necessarily be obscure from a third-person perspective. Even if the set of intentions informing an agent’s action could roughly be determined from the outside, there remains the problem of establishing the hierarchical ordering between the members of the set –which of the intentions are instrumental, that is, and which are ends in themselves (whether relative or absolute ends in themselves). To paraphrase one of MacIntyre’s familiar examples (1973a: 329): Does John garden in order to exercise and because the doctor told him to do so? Or does he garden in order to annoy his wife and for exercise, but having forgotten or disregarded the doctor’s instructions? Even where we may have a good deal of observational data establishing behavioural regularities on the part of some agent, MacIntyre notes, we are still largely in the dark with respect to interpreting any one of his actions. There are, for instance, the wrinkles familiar to game theorists and poker players, where agents may, in their future behaviour, knowingly subvert predictions based on their past patterns of behaviour – or purposely act contrary to the ways they have good reason to believe others would expect of them. Also, as an agent’s conceptual framework is altered by learning or by conceptual innovation, he becomes capable of acting in the future in a way different than he was capable of in the past. On top of all this, MacIntyre reminds us, there is the possibility that irony, pretence, ambiguity, deceit, and the practice of joking may give a different meaning to overt behaviour which is otherwise reliably interpretable as un-ironic and ingenuous.

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It is the combination of these difficulties which presents an enormous epistemic challenge that every social agent-cum-social interpreter faces as she or he confronts the social world. How, then, MacIntyre asks, could the social theorist have a clear advantage over the ordinary agent in the task of explaining the actions of other social agents? Only, he answers, if she were in possession of a theory of human behaviour which provided the deep structure to the highly baffling social phenomenon, detailed above, with which every ordinary agent is confronted. Could the theorist ever come into possession of such a theory and so surmount the intractable epistemic problems facing ordinary agents? Could the classificatory schemes of social scientists ever come to enjoy special epistemological status deriving from an alleged scientific objectivity? No, MacIntyre argues, and drawing a parallel with uncontroversially, scientifically bona fide theory in the natural sciences, ‘Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution’ tries to give a decisive argument against the possibility of a social science on a strict construal of the term. Again the considerations are familiar here, but with that added bit of sharpness to their formulation. As he thinks the history and philosophy of science has taught us, the core of a genuinely scientific theory is a set of tested, law-like generalizations explaining singular phenomena and predicting their occurrence in the following form: ‘If ever an event or state of affairs of type A occurs in standard conditions, then an event or state of affairs of type B will occur.’ Given an adequate knowledge of initial conditions, and a knowledge of the obtaining of singulars of type A, such a generalization will enable us to predict the occurrence of singulars of type B. Prediction and explanation will therefore be isomorphic: to test the explanation will be to test the prediction. Such a theory will also have within it the means to distinguish between genuine counter-examples to its law-like generalizations – which will require a modification of their scope or possibly even their abandonment – and anomalies which are explicable by independently corroborable auxiliary hypotheses, and which are not, therefore, counter-examples at all. There will also be behind the theory a community of inquirers able to reach a largely rule-governed consensus on its epistemic status, and there will be institutions devoted to trying to ensure that the theory is transmitted and employed in such a way that the true aims of science, as opposed to other adventitious aims, are served by the theory (333–4). Now MacIntyre thinks that social science can meet none of these conditions so that (a) the social scientist is ineluctably faced with the same kind of epistemic challenges as the ordinary social agent, and (b) social scientists can neither legitimately claim, nor do they deserve, any expert knower status with respect to the social world. All claims to such status are therefore interest-driven and unwarranted, MacIntyre will argue, and any elitist pretensions in the field of social explanation, whether of a revolutionary or of a manager or of a theorist of ideology, are similarly discreditable. None has, and can have, access to the deep structure of social phenomena; none has, or can have, a privileged window on the social world. Why exactly does MacIntyre think that the right kind of generalizations are unavailable to social inquiry, though? Because, as in a variety of ways he has argued

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previously, social life is, from any human point of view, unpredictable. The best generalizations that any human inquirer can construct will necessarily be of the form: ‘Whenever an event or state of affairs of type A occurs, then an event of type B will occur, unless (1) intelligent reflection by the agents involved leads them to change their ways, or (2) unpredictable factors deriving from creative intellectual innovation intervene. But a generalization like this, he notes, is precisely one which cannot meet the testability requirement; it is therefore one which cannot claim for itself any scientific status. The scope of this form of generalization is so indeterminate that any possible counter-example to it could be handled by riders (1) or (2), and, crucially as he notes here, there would be no way of determining whether a given counterexample was a genuine one or not (334). So MacIntyre’s conclusion in ‘Ideology’ is that the unavailability of any scientific generalizations to social inquiry means also that it cannot satisfy the third condition for bona fide scientific status: that the epistemic status of its tenets be subject to a largely rule-governed consensus among the community of social inquirers. The essay ends by sounding a further note: it follows that the type of rational consensus as to past achievement and future horizons that characterizes the natural scientific community cannot be available to the social scientific community, and to the degree that such consensus exists, it will not be rational, but a matter of something else, perhaps of academic politics. (335)

This tendency to ideological deception and self-deception in much social scientific inquiry is treated further in MacIntyre’s later ‘Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority’ (1979i). Here, the ineliminable presence of conflict, argument, and unpredictability in social structures and in the social world as such (arising out of, among other things, the essential contestability of social concepts) is re-emphasized, but significant for later developments in his thought, MacIntyre notes at the end of this essay that traditions are those social entities which are able to persist with identity through time by ‘hold[ing] together conflicting social, political, and even metaphysical claims in a creative way’. They will, however, he adds, always remain liable to breakdown, because if they are guided by reason, their future course will be unpredictable and non-rule-governed, and future rational conflict in a tradition may be of a fundamental sort: it may cause the tradition to lose conceptual coherence and the coherence of shared intellectual and value commitments even after it retains the husk of shared organizational structure. The social structures of such an erstwhile rational tradition, moreover, he further observes, cannot be rationally directed, only bureaucratically managed (1979i: 57–8). Turning to the central preoccupation of ‘Social Science Methodology’ – the absence, or at least marginalization, of the phenomena of conflict and unpredictability in both the theory of organizations and in much social scientific theorizing – whence, MacIntyre asks, this absence? This essay wants to argue that the absence has an ideological cause: organizational theorists and social scientists (and the bureaucratic managers formed by their textbooks) are engaged in an interest-serving concealment of both institutional conflict and of the unpredictable course of rational argument,

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which items are constitutive of any social entity as such. The theorist engages in the concealment or marginalization of these phenomena, MacIntyre states, because to acknowledge them would be both to undermine her unwarranted claim to technical expertise and epistemic authority with respect to the social order, and, importantly, because it would diminish her access to a good deal of public funds. Many bureaucratic managers also engage in a similar form of concealment, he argues, because they rightly sense that rational conflict is by its nature unmanageable; its acknowledgement would therefore be damaging to their self-image as competent technocrats fundamentally in control of their organizations. So MacIntyre sees defective organizational theory and defective organizational practice here standing in a symbiotic relationship. Aware of the multiplicity of senses given to the term ‘ideology’, he specifies his own sense for purposes of this argument. By ‘ideology’ he means a set of beliefs which are partially true, but which are maintained as the whole truth, and which are maintained in practice, if not necessarily in principle, as beyond refutation. The danger of ideology so characterized is of course that it represents a deceiving and a defensive simplification of some subject matter, whereas genuinely scientific beliefs, in contrast, are acknowledged by their adherents to be only partially true, are thought to be in need of vigorous criticism, and are thought likely to require considerable modification under the force of counter-evidence and counter-argument (48–9). How, then, does MacIntyre think that much social scientific work is ideological in character? He sees ideological social science as having the following structure to it. First, it construes the social world as constituted by discrete, independently identifiable variables: this renders the social world amenable to statistical analysis. It next holds that these variables are identifiable in an objective, evaluatively neutral way – which is to say, one can uncontroversially determine which group’s concepts in the social world are to be taken as normative, and which are to be taken as marginal and deviant. This move enables the social scientist to run roughshod over the contestability of social agents’ concepts and to employ interpretive categories which fit with her own preconceptions. The goal in such social science, one which we have already seen MacIntyre argue is unrealizable, is the construction of law-like generalizations on the model of the Feigl-Hempel interpretation of natural science. As he had remarked earlier in ‘Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution’, the social scientist cannot defend this aspiration to formulate law-like generalizations applicable to the social world by the fall-back position that she is, after all, seeking only probabilistic law-like generalizations. The problem with this defence, MacIntyre observes, lies with the belief that statistical correlations could ever yield any causal knowledge, whether of probabilistic or non-probabilistic causal links, at all: No set of purely statistical premises is adequate evidence for any genuine causal conclusion. This must be the case, for given any correlation between any two given sets of items, no matter how strong – it may be perfect if you wish – the truth of the statement which asserts that correlation is equally compatible with the truth out of any of an infinite set of statements which relate the items causally, and the truth of any one member of the

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Where, then, is the parallel MacIntyre sees between ideological social science and bureaucratic authority? The social scientist is convinced that the knowledge she can arrive at by her methods will yield causal knowledge of social laws, which knowledge can then be used to beneficent manipulative effect. But many managers’ management techniques are formed by textbooks written under the influence of this kind of social science. They therefore approach their managerial task thinking that the matter over which they must exert control is composed of discrete variables of stable, readily identifiable sorts, and that their classificatory schemes for these variables are of a largely uncontroversial and evaluatively neutral sort: for example, ‘anyone and only those who satisfy criteria one to five qualify for welfare; cases of type three to seven must be dealt with by officers of at least grade four; actions involving expenditures of between n and m dollars must be reported under suchand-such headings’ (54). They also think that managerial failure (i.e. inability to ‘manage’ conflict and reconcile interests by the use of causal knowledge) is due either to a failure in the manipulative employment of that causal knowledge, or to the prior failure of not having yet formulated the relevant laws to guide their exercise of bureaucratic authority – or, possibly, to a failure in execution: a failure to have properly organized their material by means of the appropriate classificatory schemes. MacIntyre’s argument, then, is that an ideological construal of the data disguises from this kind of manager the true challenge of his task, so that errant theory here re-shapes practice in an undesirable and distorting way (54–6). MacIntyre’s efforts at Ideologiekritik will continue, but for now, having explored the streams of his early thought in ethics and the history of ethics, in social and political philosophy, in the philosophy of religion, and in the theory of explanation, we can proceed to examine their confluence in After Virtue.

PART II The After Virtue Project

Chapter 5

The After Virtue Synthesis Why did MacIntyre choose to write a book of the sui generis character of After Virtue (1981g)? The answer is given straightaway in the book’s Preface: ‘a growing dissatisfaction with the conception of “moral philosophy” as an independent and isolable area of inquiry’ (ix). Once we have learned from history and social anthropology of the wide variety of moral schemes of belief, he states, we can no longer be content with facile a priori accounts of the language of morals of the sort that have dominated analytic philosophy since mid-century. As we have seen in A Short History of Ethics, and as he is aware here, in breaking out of the straitjacket of what are really parochial accounts of the moral by canvassing, and with normative as opposed to merely descriptive interests, the wide variety of moral schemes of belief in Western thought, one inevitably finds oneself constructing contentious narratives about the rise and decline of past ethical systems and standards. Short History represented one such narrative. A particularly contentious claim of Short History was that in modern social orders it is no longer possible rationally to appeal to common moral standards, and that this represents a kind of moral calamity. Necessarily, in order to construct such narratives one must have certain ethical evaluative criteria already in hand; dimly aware of this at the end of Short History, MacIntyre is fully aware of it by the time of After Virtue, which represents an attempt to make those criteria explicit and provide a more explicit justification for them. It is a justification, though, which will still be in important part historiographical. After Virtue’s aim, then, is the articulation and defence of a standpoint within the cosmopolitan post-modern social order upon which a moral agent today might base his or her actions and evaluative judgements, and from which he or she could critically evaluate the wide variety of alternative such standpoints, especially those offered by traditional societies in civilization’s past. After Virtue is in this way the natural follow-up to Short History and represents a kind of manifesto for those who share MacIntyre’s belief that our present moral predicament can and should be understood in a historical light. As it incorporates much of his thinking in those areas of philosophy beyond the strictly ethical, areas we examined in Part I of this book, it is beyond being critical and exegetical, constructive, and even as it links up with his past work on philosophy and praxis it will avowedly reject any straightforwardly Marxist solution to the social, moral, and political problems attendant upon social and economic modernization. As MacIntyre notes in the Preface – nothing new to attentive readers of his earlier Marxist writings – Marxism is, for him, a solution too conditioned by the modern liberal individualist standpoint that it exists to critique for it to serve as an adequate solution to modernity’s endogenous problems.

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Evidences of a Present Moral Crisis

The main body of the book begins with a touch of great imaginative and dramatic flair. Chapter One, ‘A Disquieting Suggestion’, invites us to imagine a scenario concerning the demise of science whose characteristics will enable us to understand our present moral predicament. According to the fictitious scenario, the scientific community is held to blame by the general public for a series of environmental disasters. In the resulting backlash, the teaching of science is banished and scientific materials, instruments, archives and so on are destroyed. Science continues to exist only in a ruinous state: the collective memory of the justificatory history of its past achievements and any awareness of its present horizons are effectively lost. What remain are fragments of scientific theories – concepts and theses, parts of experiments and segments of theories – disconnected from their historical and justificatory contexts. We are to imagine, none the less, that an attempted revival of science, forgetful of science’s past, takes place. An attempt is made to revivify the surviving fragments of science in practices calling themselves ‘physics’, ‘chemistry’ and ‘biology’. But because the practitioners of these disciplines are now ignorant of what science formerly was, they are under the illusion that in these resuscitated practices genuine science continues. Terms like ‘neutrino’, ‘mass’ and ‘atomic weight’ are employed in these practices without a clear understanding of the conditions for their application. Debates based on premises containing rival and incommensurable senses of these terms abound. However, since the use of the terms is in each case governed by canons of coherence and consistency, and since the originating contexts of discovery and justification for the terms has been lost and forgotten, no one is able to get to the bottom of disagreement in ‘science’, and argument proves to be rationally interminable. Subjectivist theories of scientific knowledge abound to explain this state of affairs, and these, in turn, generate opposed defences of the objectivity of ‘science’. MacIntyre invites us to consider that something very much like this fictitious epistemic cataclysm in science has actually occurred in the field of morals – that, in other words, owing to a dramatic rupture in our historical past, the language of morals has fallen into a grave state of disorder. We (MacIntyre presumably means here those in the industrialized and developed West) have lost our theoretical and practical comprehension of what morality once was, and so unwittingly possess only the simulacra of morality. Our present moral debates are therefore systematically unsettleable, and lacking historical consciousness of the genesis of our present moral predicament, we are unaware both that and why our debates have this character. Hence the thesis about the cause of the present dissensus in morals in the West upon which the book hinges. A point should be noted from the outset about this thesis: MacIntyre is addressing first and foremost a social problem. The book’s aim is to diagnose that problem, offer an explanation of how it arose, and offer a solution to it. The book then moves to address a failure at the level of theory by past thinkers – a failure which is

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responsible, he will argue, for the disheartening state of present moral discussion, whether between theorists or between ordinary moral agents. The point of departure for After Virtue is therefore socio-historical, and the constructive, straightforwardly philosophical arguments made in it are offered as warranted relative to a diagnosis of social and moral pathology in our present culture – and in remedy of the findings of that diagnosis. Before trying to justify in detail the very bold claim that serves as the book’s archstone (as William Frankena pointed out in a notable review, see Frankena, 1983: 584, MacIntyre’s effort in After Virtue amounts to nothing less than a proposal, à la Kant or Bentham, to re-establish the discipline of ethics in its present form on a new rational basis), MacIntyre is aware that he must give some initial motivating grounds for accepting it. How, for instance, is it possible that an event, and a subsequent cultural crisis of such enormous proportions, has gone undetected -- and un-commented upon by, for instance, philosophers and historians and those cultural critics of a radical bent? Analytic philosophy, After Virtue maintains in a claim familiar from the first chapter of Short History, lacks the resources to see the problem, because it is concerned primarily with elucidating the conceptual structure of given bodies of thought and generally lacks or eschews any awareness of the historicity of concepts. Phenomenology is also too preoccupied with the given to see what is given in the light of its contingent historical genesis. Thus the explanation why practitioners of these two presently dominant styles of philosophical thought in the West have missed the problem. What, though, of intellectual and cultural historians? MacIntyre is equally categorical here: academic history, with its scrupulous distinguishing between fact and value, and with its self-conscious espousal of supposedly value-free methods, is less than two centuries old, he notes. But on account of its eschewal of any strong narratives of progress or decline – any narratives explicitly informed by evaluative standards – it is the product of the very catastrophe (MacIntyre’s term) in question. Little surprise, then, he claims, that it has been unable to see that catastrophe for the great setback it is and has been. What then of radical cultural critics of the present, whether on the left or on the right? These, as MacIntyre portrays them – it would be helpful if he cited some specific names here – are claimed to think that, whatever else may be wrong with the present social order (even everything else), the possibility of appeal to common moral standards still exists. This MacIntyre’s guiding thesis is in business to deny, and so he claims that radicals at either end of the political spectrum have not been critical enough: the assertive use of moral terms and the rhetoric of moral reform both lack the necessary social matrix, the shared overall social outlook, which they would need to have a chance for success (AV: 4). The promise of After Virtue is that it will attempt, in deliberate imitation of the philosophically informed history of Hegel and R.G. Collingwood, to construct a narrative of decline, an aetiology of the present disorder in the field of morals. The fact-fittingness and explanatory power of this narrative will then purport to serve as the warrant for the free-standing evaluative criteria presupposed and employed by

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the narrative. Hence the peculiar nature of the book as a work of philosophy, and in this case, of moral philosophy. We have not here straightforward argument for philosophical theses, but rather contentious social and intellectual history seeking to justify philosophical theses abductively – theses which can, MacIntyre must admit, also be the subject of some measure of direct and independent justification or criticism (a point to which we will return). The structure of the book’s over-arching argument will be that: (a) the historical and explanatory narrative of social and moral decline it contains is highly plausible, and b) this narrative is informed by certain evaluative principles, and finally (c) these evaluative principles which jointly constitute a substantive theory of practical rationality are highly warranted – more warranted than known rivals – because of the plausibility of the narrative which they underwrite. So the hope is that the book’s central argument will exhibit an informative or virtuous circularity, its main selling point being the illumination it provides of the moral predicament in which we currently find ourselves. As regards the descriptive claim with which the book begins, how exactly does MacIntyre think that profound confusion in our present moral discourse manifests itself? It is first of all, and this an empirical claim, interminable, so that in disputes about matters such as abortion, the requirements of distributive justice, and the licitness of war, it shows no signs of rational resolution. There is no moral consensus in our present culture, and moreover – here a more conceptual claim – there is systematic dissensus. Perfectly valid rival moral arguments contend with one another in public forums of debate, but the premises of these rival arguments are incommensurable: they employ different and inconsistent evaluative and normative concepts. Moreover, there are at present no publicly available rational means to decide between these rival and inconsistent moral premises. This, MacIntyre suggests, should give us significant pause. The parties in contemporary argument presume to be appealing to impersonal and objective moral criteria, yet they cannot succeed in convincing their opponents on rational grounds. Does this not suggest, he asks, that they themselves lack compelling reasons for holding one set of moral beliefs as opposed to another? Systematic rational interminability of debate in this sense, he argues, implies what is really (an at least partial, he ought to have said) arbitrariness in belief. It also suggests a lack of understanding by participants in contemporary debates of the way in which moral beliefs are rooted in a whole network of background metaphysical beliefs, so that in order to be rationally convinced by moral argument, one typically has to buy into a whole background metaphysical picture. Again, he claims, it is typical of moderns that they are the unwitting victims of fragmentation and loss of context. The premises in contemporary moral argument derive from historically diverse and rival metaphysical conceptions – whether, for instance, from the thought of Aristotle or Rousseau or Machiavelli or Adam Smith. But these conceptions themselves give articulation and direction to rival social orders and rival forms of social life – whence the incommensurability of the moral premises derived from the one or the other.

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Another feature of contemporary moral discourse which reflects this rootlessness, he maintains, is the way in which opposed protagonists in today’s moral arguments take themselves to be appealing to impersonal standards – the very language in which they couch their arguments reflects this – and yet somehow it fails to occur to them that there are no longer any publicly available shared moral standards. MacIntyre is not very clear on this point: he seems to want to implicate both ethical theorists and ordinary moral agents in this ignorance, and to explain it in either case by their lacking a historical perspective on the present. He certainly maintains that theorists are particularly guilty of wanting to treat ethical matters in independence of the larger background issues in metaphysics and the theory of human nature. Much of MacIntyre’s proposal to restore order, coherence, and the possibility of rational progress to moral debate in contemporary culture will therefore centre on two, as it were, procedural recommendations. The first is that, given the confluence of rival moral cultures and the consequent cultural fragmentation of which we are the inheritors, we must recover a historical perspective and a historical form of self-awareness. The second recommendation is that we must understand ethical differences in the light of larger background differences in overall conception or scheme of belief. Significantly, MacIntyre’s interest here – and this will drive his entire self-described ‘After Virtue project’ – is with an epistemic and dialectical solution to present moral conflict as opposed to a pragmatic political solution. His interest, at any rate, is certainly with at least moving in the direction of an epistemic solution. The first task MacIntyre sets for himself, given the bold argumentative framework he has constructed in After Virtue, is, sensibly enough, trying to discount the obvious rival explanation to the confusion in our present moral discourse with which the book began drawing our attention. Why not think rather, for example, that this confusion requires no special historical explanation, but that it is endemic to moral discourse as such? Moral debate is always rationally interminable because there are no objective facts of the matter to which it can appeal; moral judgements are simply expressions of subjective preference or feeling, and so no effort of reason can resolve moral disputes. Thus the explanation the emotive theory of ethics offers. MacIntyre dispatches emotivism briskly here with a condensed version of arguments he has made at greater length in earlier places (see pages 19–23 above): the emotivist understanding of moral language cannot account for that form of moral utterance which appeals to impersonal criteria and standards in contradistinction to subjective preferences, wants etc., and it cannot give other than a vacuously circular account of what it is that distinguishes specifically moral sentiments of liking or approval from non-moral such sentiments (AV: 13). The interesting question which MacIntyre wishes us to consider here is why emotivist-style theories (he sees the emotivist theory of C.L. Stevenson as but one case in point), so implausible upon rational reflection as he has it, emerge at all. His recourse in answering this question is again to a historical form of explanation, and we are given a three-stage explanatory scheme for the emergence of an emotiviststyle meta-ethical theory, which scheme MacIntyre takes, or appears to take, as

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applicable across a wide range of times and places. Chapter Two of After Virtue will then maintain that in the intellectual historical narrative it provides of the evolution of meta-ethics in England following upon late nineteenth-century secularization (i.e. meta-ethical theories beginning with G.E. Moore and H.A. Prichard and continuing with the influential emotivism of the American C.L. Stevenson) this scheme has a confirming instance, and the evaluative principles presupposed by it are given a kind of abductive support. In the first stage, as this scheme has it, rational appeals to impersonal moral standards are made in a given social order and made successfully: moral judgements are seen as justified by being logically derivable from those impersonal standards, and the standards themselves are thought to be both capable of rational justification and to be de facto rationally justified. In a second stage – and now we have decline – rational appeal to these standards is no longer socially successful, because of an emerging and widespread belief that this is impossible. The impersonal standards and the practice of rationally deriving moral judgements from those standards have, for a variety of possible reasons, fallen into disrepute. In MacIntyre’s own words: ‘there are [now] unsuccessful attempts to maintain the objectivity and impersonality of moral judgments’ (AV: 19). Finally, in a third stage, emotivism emerges as a plausible account not of, as in its self-description, the meaning of moral terms, but of their use. Both theorists and plain persons find themselves using moral terms whose context of justification they have either forgotten or which is lost to them. They find themselves in the habit of making appeals to impersonal moral standards whose existence, on a reflective level, they disavow. Since they no longer grasp the original point and purpose of inherited moral terms, their use of these, as in ‘this is a wicked act’, is indeed only persuasive for them, because they take morally evaluative terms such as ‘wicked’ to have a merely subjective warrant. This new use to which moral terms are put, MacIntyre claims, disguises from moral agents the original and genuine meaning of these terms, and in so doing it makes emotivist meta-ethics look compelling (or, and this is not properly spelled out when it is mentioned by After Virtue later, it makes attractive subjectivist or voluntarist meta-ethical theories such as those of a Nietzsche or a Sartre; MacIntyre tends to use ‘emotivism’ here a bit carelessly as a family resemblance term for varieties of non-cognitivist meta-ethics). The argument underlying this explanatory scheme has a curious structure to it, because it flows from MacIntyre’s belief in the way pre-reflective practice can drive, though not determine, reflective theory. The argument is not so much that moderns have considered the merits of a former style of ethical thinking and have found it wanting. It is rather that various historical contingencies, forces of social change, have caused them to lose hold of a way of thinking which formerly seemed cogent to them – or at least seemed cogent to their ancestors – and that, given these forces of change, it becomes natural for them, as members of a now modified social order, to find appealing and compelling on the level of reflection more or less accurate theoretical representations of what is in fact an increasingly impoverished ethical practice. Historical awareness can show us, or so After Virtue will argue, that this

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new form of ethical practice is both impoverished and impoverishing, and thus the recourse After Virtue will have in later chapters to pre-modern modes of ethical theory and practice. But why need the truth of this explanatory historical hypothesis warrant the particular version of cognitive ethics which MacIntyre has yet to articulate? What of the many analytic philosophers who have not found emotivism as a theory of moral judgements true? These, as MacIntyre is aware, constitute a counter-example to his thesis. If moral philosophers in the aftermath of Stevenson, Ayer, and Carnap have not found the forms of emotivism these theorists have advanced convincing, he will claim, it is largely because they have seen that moral judgements are and can be used in logical chains of inference, which strongly implies that they have cognitive content (a point famously made, as he notes, by Gottlob Frege and, in a related way, by Peter Geach). But, and here MacIntyre’s argument becomes bolder still, rejections of emotivism have, for lack of historical awareness, been victimized by part of the same socio-conceptual phenomena that caused emotivism to emerge and to appear plausible in the first place. The argument now becomes a bit sketchy and quick: MacIntyre’s targets are R.M. Hare and the broadly Kantian theories of John Rawls, Alan Gewirth, Alan Donagan, and Bernard Gert. Hare’s prescriptivism, MacIntyre argues, is in part the victim of the confusion behind emotivism, because Hare’s is a cognitivism of a very limited sort. In arguing that moral judgements can be and are logically derived from moral principles, and that such principles can themselves be logically derived from other more general principles, while the first and most general principle cannot be so derived, Hare has put criterionless subjective choice at the foundations of ethics. He has in this way, MacIntyre thinks, fallen victim to forgetfulness of the possibility of full ethical objectivity (20–21). We see here, recalling his earlier agreement with Hare at the end of Short History, that what MacIntyre was once persuaded by concerning the unavoidable subjectivity of a summum bonum (see pages 46–52 above), he is no longer, and this, as the pages of After Virtue yet to come will reveal, represents a decisive moment in MacIntyre’s own development. As for those in the broadly Kantian camp, MacIntyre promises later detailed counter-arguments. The point for now is that their failure to derive objective impersonal moral norms from abstract principles of practical rationality is again to be attributed to the limitations of an ahistorical approach. What is not made explicit here, but lurks beneath the surface of the text, is that the Kantian type of approach is deficient as a theory of the origin of moral concepts. Moral concepts arise in social orders, MacIntyre thinks, from sources other than the structure of practical reason, and for missing this, Kantian-style rationality theories of morality are ad hoc constructions due to break down. We can move now to his criticisms of the culture of emotivism. Chapter Three, ‘Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context’, begins with a point that has been one of MacIntyre’s significant contributions to contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophy: that, in his words, ‘a moral philosophy … characteristically presupposes a sociology’ (23). On this particular occasion he might

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have made his meaning clearer, but we are given some gestures in the direction of an explication and justification of what is an important tenet in his own moral theory. A moral philosophy implies a sociology because it refers a particular account of moral agency – a conceptualization of agent desire, intention, purpose and so on – to the embodiment of that agency in some real social world. Hence a moral theory has an implied social content, one that puts flesh on the theory’s merits or inadequacies. In the past, MacIntyre notes, the great moral theorists like Plato, Kant, Mill, and even the early emotivist Hume understood this point, and they drew out the social implications of their theories. But in modern moral philosophy since G.E. Moore, this has ceased to be the case. Chapter Three attempts to spell out the social implications of emotivism, showing both what the social implications of emotivism would be were it true – or at least believed to be true by many – and what they have in fact been since emotivism has enjoyed currency in the general culture. MacIntyre is here, as in other areas of his work, drawing on a belief in the reciprocal causal relation between theory and practice: cultural tendencies have caused ordinary agents to adopt an unsophisticated emotivist ethic, theorists of morality lacking historical perspective have given articulation and cogency to this ethic, and the dissemination of the theoretical form of the ethic has reinforced its practice among both ordinary agents and theorists. What, MacIntyre asks, is the outstanding characteristic of the social content of emotivism? Since emotivist theory provides no conceptual space for the giving of external and impersonal reasons for action, the answer is a culture in which the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative personal relationships is abolished, and in which, in consequence, what is of central importance is not impersonal normative rationality but the psychology and sociology of persuasion. Is the loss of this distinction generally a feature of our culture? In order to indicate that the answer to this question is ‘yes’, and how it is so, MacIntyre deploys one of his suggestive conceptual innovations, that of a social ‘character’. A ‘character’ in his stipulated sense is a personality type which occupies a particular kind of social role, one imbued with and constrained by certain widely held (in its social order) background moral and metaphysical beliefs. A character in this way both legitimates and embodies a moral ideal within a given social order, and if the character is controversial, it will at least, given its relation to a significant portion of the background social order, be a focal point of controversy and a point of reference for social discourse, whether pro or con. Examples MacIntyre gives of characters are the Public School Headmaster, the Engineer, and the Explorer in Victorian England, or the Prussian Officer, the Professor, and the Social Democrat in Wilhelmine Germany. Returning to emotivism, if the theory were true, he claims, the social realm would be construable as an arena of individual intersecting wills, each in search of its own subjective satisfaction. Rational argument about ends and moral argument itself (i.e. as opposed to their simulacra) would be thought impossible, and the sole concern for social structures in the culture would be with the efficient enabling and the coordinated realization of individual satisfaction. As he puts it:

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If emotivism is true … evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others. I cannot genuinely appeal to impersonal criteria, for there are no impersonal criteria. … The sole reality of distinctively moral discourse is the attempt to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and choices of one another with its own. Others are always means, never ends. (24)

William Frankena has objected here that MacIntyre does not consider the possibility that an emotivist theory could be altruistically as opposed to egoistically oriented (Frankena, 1981: 583). But this is to miss the point: MacIntyre would no doubt respond, in Marx’s self-education vein and with evident justification, that manipulation, even for alleged betterment. is still manipulation, still an infringement on the dignity of persons. Since there are no impersonal rational moral standards for the emotivist, MacIntyre argues, the emotivist conception of the self is as of one that sets its own action-guiding standards. This self is, in consequence, an omni-critical and standpoint-less agent, one bound by no public evaluative criteria except inasmuch as and for as long as it chooses to adopt them. The emotivist self as such can neither be defined nor evaluatively judged in terms of the practices it de facto participates in or the social identity it would be thought to have in view of its social particularity (i.e. its past history in its native social order and the social roles it presently occupies). Neither, MacIntyre notes, can this self be thought to have any rational history: an emotivist must reject as fictitious any given telos of human nature as such, the expeditious movement towards which, by participation in social practices and the proper discharging of one’s social roles, would make a human life achieved and successful. Since social identity cannot thuswise be thought constitutive of the self for an emotivist, MacIntyre sees in Sartre’s theory of the socially evanescent and entirely egocentrically constituted self the fitting theoretical articulation of embodied emotivist social agency (33–4). In emotivist theory and practice, he notes, moral agency is that capacity exercised, not from within a social role or practice and by successful initiates, but by the self, any self, when it steps back from the demands of tradition, social role, and social context and determines from an abstract and allegedly universal standpoint whether it should perform a given action or not. This, MacIntyre argues, using in certain ways an unfortunate description, is an entirely ‘democratized’ moral agency: a moral agency any minimally rational agent can exercise without the prerequisites of prior pedagogy – without, that is, the cultivation and training of the agent’s perceptions and judgements from within a practice and by initiation into that practice. MacIntyre will have more to say about this when he discusses the tradition of the virtues later in the book, but his use of the term ‘democratic’ here is inappropriate in as much as he wishes to describe himself, as we have already seen, as a radical democrat. A better way to put the point might have been to say that with an emotivist conception of the self, the notion of moral agency is rendered indiscriminate – or some word to that effect – since, for the emotivist, the successful exercise of moral agency is and can be something entirely credential-less.

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MacIntyre notes here that there is the sharpest contrast between this indiscriminate and indiscriminating conception of moral agency, which maintains the sovereignty of individual moral choice and is the source of the individualizing tendency in modern culture, and the exaltation of bureaucratic and instrumental or means–end rationality, which is the source of an opposed collectivizing tendency and is motivated by the need to manage the anarchy of individual desire and choice. Here we return to his notion of a ‘character’. As three outstanding characters of our time, MacIntyre cites the Aesthete, of whom Henry James is considered to be an outstanding portrait artist, the Weberian Bureaucrat, and the Therapist. In each of these cases, MacIntyre argues, we have a social role which in its functioning assumes that ends must be taken as given and cannot be the subject of reasoned discourse or contestation. The modern Aesthete, as MacIntyre identifies him, drawing on past depictions by Henry James, Diderot, and Kierkegaard, is a wealthy, bored ne’er-do-well who sees nothing of the common in his pursuit of the good and so who spends his days trying to stave off boredom by instrumentalizing others in pursuit of his privately established and subjectively constituted ends. The second character, the Therapist, is but an apt and indispensable instrument in the life of an emotivist self. The Therapist dispenses advice which scrupulously avoids reference to the realm of ultimate purposes – his advice is aimed simply at helping the emotivist agent effectively channel her energies and cope with the difficulties along the way in her pursuit of subjectively chosen and purportedly rationally unscrutinizable ends. The third character, the Bureaucrat, claims no wisdom or competence with respect to larger purposes and ends, but only knowledge of how to match means and resources efficiently in order that those unscrutinized and rationally unscrutinizable purposes and ends be attained. In bringing these considerations together, After Virtue observes to notable effect the following paradox at the heart of an emotivist social order: in it the individual is simultaneously and in different respects deified, as it were (i.e. regarded as entirely self-constituting and socially unaccountable), and yet instrumentalized by an elitist cadre of technocratic specialists. What an emotivist social order gives with one hand it takes away with another, thus a contradiction at the heart of the emotivist social order which dooms its constituent members, especially its non-technocratic members, to frustration. What MacIntyre thinks we should be after instead, as we know from his earlier writings, is a democratic culture of critical inquiry: one in which ends as well as means are the subject of constant public rational scrutiny and debate – a debate, moreover, which can and should only take place from within determinate practices in that culture and between successful initiates in those practices. An important part of After Virtue’s argument thus far has been that the emotivist concept of the self and the emotivist social order are the products of a process of social and moral decline, a decline itself precipitated by a variety of historical contingencies. Having given a critique of emotivist meta-ethics and the social shadow cast by it, After Virtue returns to the mode of historical narrative, attempting both to

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tell the story of the decline and to open our eyes to various resources for amelioration in our collective past of which we may be forgetful or simply ignorant. 5.2 The Crisis in its Historical Causes Chapter Four of After Virtue works backwards from what MacIntyre sees as the representatively flawed account of the nature of ethical obligation in Søren Kierkegaard’s Enten-Eller of 1842 to the roots of that failure in prior attempts to put ethical beliefs on a new rational footing by Kierkegaard’s predecessors Kant, Hume, and Diderot. Why, After Virtue asks, this disquiet about the foundations of ethics in Kierkegaard? And why Kierkegaard’s Enten-Eller as a watershed in the selfunderstanding of modern moral agency? The answer is, because of the large-scale social and ideological changes rooted in the anti-rational tendencies of Protestantism, tendencies which bore within them the seeds of secularization. It is also due to the emergence of a novel and distinctively modern understanding of science – and of philosophy in relation to science newly conceived. What we have taking place in the Protestant north of Europe and spreading to other places, particularly to France, in the period roughly between 1630 and 1850, MacIntyre argues, is the birth of a new secularized Christian culture: one in which the sphere of the ethical – as distinct from the legal, the religious, or the aesthetic – is thought to enjoy a kind of autonomy and to which is thought to correspond a new concept, albeit one with unstable and evolving meanings, the concept of ‘morality’. The historical connections drawn in this chapter are sketchy, but as best as one can make out, MacIntyre’s argument here is that as Protestant Christianity, especially in Germany and Scotland, becomes increasingly secularized the general public no longer sees religious belief as the source of legitimation for moral beliefs and action. Though the content of moral beliefs changes only gradually and in relatively small measure, a new form of justification is sought for these beliefs, a secular justification. But now, and crucially, it is thought that this wholly rational form of justification must proceed without the former resources of teleological explanation, and this owing both to perceived advances in our understanding of nature brought by the scientific revolution and to the Protestant mistrust of the capacity of fallen reason to understand the design and purpose of human nature accurately. According to MacIntyre’s narrative here, a slight re-working of the prior corresponding narrative in A Short History of Ethics, this particular set of episodes in the history of occidental ethics begins with the attempt of the Enlightenment’s leading philosophers to provide a new foundation for the morality inherited largely from Christianity and from moral traditions in the ancient world. The first signal failure in this undertaking, as MacIntyre sees it, is that of Hume. He credits Hume with seeing that moral judgements cannot rest entirely on determinations of reason: moral judgements move us to act and in so doing they make essential reference to our passions and desires – our empirical nature. But Hume takes the extreme route, he notes, of trying to base moral judgements entirely on the movements of the

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passions, with moral judgements serving merely as the external expression of the passions and as their servant. For MacIntyre, Hume’s emotivism, or expressivism as it has later come to be called, shares the pitfalls of other and later members of its Enlightenment genus, but it has a special difficulty which Hume in part recognized. If, as the theory has it, the justification for moral rules is to lie entirely in their effectiveness in subserving our passions, and if reason has no other function or power in moral agency besides this, then we are left with the difficulty of knowing how we should rank order those passions, and why, but purely for reasons of preference, short-term satisfactions should be foregone in view of longer-term ones. If on this matter reason must be silent, MacIntyre notes, the possibility is left open for rival and opposed rank orderings of the passions – rank orderings, for instance, of an ego-hedonic or nationalist or classist or racist sort. Hume’s well-known attempt of positing an innate causal mechanism of sympathy in human nature to bridge the gap between the largely traditional precepts of morality Hume wished to defend, and the voluntaristic moral psychology in his theory, represents, After Virtue argues, merely the ad hoc invention of a philosophical fiction. Denis Diderot, Hume’s contemporary and Enlightenment fellow traveller, is credited by MacIntyre, especially in view of Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, with recognizing even better than Hume the difficulties in trying to found moral beliefs on the passions. Yet, for all his critical acumen, Diderot fares no better in his own moral theory. Like Hume, After Virtue notes, Diderot is largely a moral traditionalist, and like Hume, he looks to the desiring element in human nature as such to provide the foundation for morals. But he ends up engaging in the self-inconsistent enterprise of trying to distinguish the desiring tendencies of healthy natural man from those of corrupted and deformed conventional man, so introducing the very rational distinctions, the very criteria of reason, to which he is not entitled by his theory. With both Diderot and Hume, After Virtue states, we have a bit of philosophical sleight of hand at work: both covertly introduce a normative standard for human flourishing which their moral theories otherwise deny them and lack the resources to generate. They then use this normative standard unwarrantedly to exclude orderings of the passions which they dislike, as Hume excludes the passions of ‘enthusiasts’ and Catholic ascetics, and Diderot those of certain bourgeois elements of his own society. So theirs is, in effect, a parasitic and theoretically distorting espousal of much of traditional morality. The subsequent failure of Kant, in MacIntyre’s view, to found morals entirely on reason and to discard the passions and inclinations as sources of moral justification then prepares the way for Kierkegaard’s illuminating theoretical portrayal of the quandary facing moral philosophy, now newly conceived. Critics have found MacIntyre’s treatment of Kant here, as in Short History, concise, to say the least. But MacIntyre can defend this brevity by saying that the objections he makes to Kant’s moral theory are decisive, and that they have not been met by Kant’s defenders. As he had done in Short History, he tries first here to identify the spirit of the Kantian enterprise, and then to point out its defects. The spirit does on any account

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fit rather neatly with MacIntyre’s identification of the broader ‘Enlightenment project’: to find those moral rules binding on all rational human agents as such and to which obedience is owed if humans are to be true to their nature as rational agents. Moral rules in Kant, MacIntyre reminds us, are clearly to be distinguished from legal rules or aesthetic or religious precepts or eudaimonistic hypothetical injunctions. And Kant, moreover, in seeing in the te&loj of happiness or eu)daimoni/a a shifting and imprecise norm for action-guidance, explicitly rules out the traditional form of teleological justification familiar to Aristotelians and to Catholic theology. He is in this way, for MacIntyre, a paradigmatic moral theorist of the culture of the Enlightenment. That Kant will in the second book of his second Critique indirectly reintroduce the notion of teleology via a postulate or presupposition of pure practical reason, and that he will thus employ a form of teleological justification for his ethical system, is partial vindication for MacIntyre of one of the central arguments of After Virtue: that the precepts of traditional morality in the Western tradition draw their raison d’être from, and can only therefore be adequately justified by means of, a teleological scheme (56). As to the objections to Kant’s ethics in After Virtue, they differ somewhat in emphasis from those given in Short History. MacIntyre had previously given reasons why a universalizability test for moral maxims must fail, namely, because such a test is excessively formal and lacking in critical teeth. Here he concedes that Kant thought his first formulation of the categorical imperative (the formulation regarding the universalizability of practical maxims) could be seen as endowed with content in virtue of its equivalence to an additional formulation of that imperative: ‘Always act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of others, as an end and not as a means.’ But he retains two objections to Kant’s system of ethics. The first concerns the matter of how this second formulation is to be justified, since there is good reason to think that it is not merely a paraphrase or logically equivalent formulation of the first formulation, but a derivation therefrom. There is, for example, no rational inconsistency in one willing to universalize the maxim ‘Let everyone except me be treated as an end’ or the maxim ‘Let everyone including me be treated as a means’, yet willing these maxims leads one into conflict with the second formulation of the categorical imperative, and this indicates the logical nonequivalence of the two formulations (46). This leads to a second objection to Kant’s means of moral justification. While MacIntyre concedes that the second so-called formulation of the categorical imperative referring to ends and means is more promising as regards content than the first, it is still, he holds, crucially lacking in this area. Thus, he notes that while it may be immoral – it is immoral according to the precepts of traditional, teleologically justified morality – to act according to the maxims of egoism, this is not because these maxims flout the norms of pure practical reason, but because they lead to a thwarting of the flourishing of human nature holistically conceived – reason and passions and desires and interests – a thwarting which is what immorality on the traditional conception amounts to. Kant, as other Enlightenment theorists before him, MacIntyre argues, must tacitly draw on some theory of empirical human nature

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and some normative standard for the flourishing of that nature – items to which Kant is not himself entitled given his aspiration to justify morality strictly on the basis of norms of pure practical reason. Without this standard, he is unable to give us a reason why we should treat others as ends and not means, and unable to give necessary content to the end versus means distinction in our other-regarding actions. So, MacIntyre concludes here, only by presupposing a widespread adherence to conventional morals and by being parasitic on such an account can Kant’s theory function – and in Kant’s own era, he notes, it was of course Christian belief which furnished the content and motive for the second formulation of the categorical imperative. Following Kant, After Virtue turns to Kierkegaard, and for MacIntyre the final and telling episode in the cycle of modern (i.e. anti-teleological and universalist, though largely conservative) moral theory’s failure. MacIntyre sees Kierkegaard as a witness to the failure of a consistent Kantian moral theory – a theory, that is, which attempts to derive all of morality’s normative content from the resources of pure practical reason – and as both portrait artist and exemplar of the new and emerging modern moral agent: that agent which sees itself as divided between rival and opposed conceptions of the moral life, between which conceptions, she or he thinks, reason cannot adjudicate, and to any one of which allegiance can be given only by a self-constituting act of criterionless, non-rational choice. In MacIntyre’s reading of the Enten-Eller narrative, the author Kierkegaard who lies behind the work’s pseudonymous author is portraying with great imaginative and literary skill through the fictitious characters ‘A’ and ‘B’ the ethical predicament of our time: systematically unsettleable and interminable debate between rival and incommensurable ethical conceptions. In A we have the aesthetic ethic of the pleasureseeking egoist, in B the life of commitment and fidelity to self-transcendent and impersonal moral norms, and in ‘author/editor’ Victor Eremita we have the portrayal of A or B as each capable of appealing to us only on the basis of criterionless choice. One can only be given a moral reason to follow the path of B, but to accept such is already to be on B’s path. Similarly, one can only accept an aesthetic rationale for action if one is already determined to view aesthetic concerns as sovereign over ethical concerns, in which case one is already on the path marked out by A. Ethical argument is thereby doomed, according to Kierkegaard’s portrayal in Enten-Eller on MacIntyre’s reading, to interminability and rational undecidability. MacIntyre does not think that Kierkegaard was altogether without understanding of the classical and pre-modern conception of the ethical: it is simply that Kierkegaard put this conception on a new basis, and this new foundation for the ethical implicated him in a decisive turn away from the classical understanding of moral obligation. Formerly, MacIntyre observes (he will give the historical case for this later in After Virtue), moral precepts had the character of hypothetical injunctions. They were construed as action-guides aimed at the education, criticism, and transformation of the desires of untutored human nature – action guides which it was thought necessary to heed if one wished to attain to the state of full human flourishing. In this way, the authority of ethical precepts was regarded as something entirely objective and

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impersonal, something intrinsic to those precepts given their relation to essential human nature. But Kierkegaard, owing to the confusion of his age, MacIntyre holds, deems ethical authority as something given not by the objective conditions for the flourishing of essential human nature, but as something with which the precepts of traditional morality – which Kierkegaard himself follows and wishes to commend – must be endowed with by an act of agent choice. The authority of traditional ethical precepts concerning matters such as marital fidelity, promise-keeping, truthfulness, benevolence and so forth is not something intrinsic to those precepts and matter for the discovery of reason, but something with which they must be endowed ab extra by human decision. Writing, MacIntyre argues, in a time in which authority has fallen into widespread suspicion and disrepute – and conditioned almost entirely by a Kantian view of the scope of reason – Kierkegaard formulates for the first time a theory of radical choice and so decisively severs the traditional and traditionally understood connection between authority and reason (42–3). In this sense, Kierkegaard, for MacIntyre, instead of providing a remedy for modern moral theorizing’s deficiencies, simply inherits its problems and falls victim to its distinctively deficient understanding of the ethical. In failing, like his Enlightenment predecessors before him, to provide society at large with a new rationally compelling basis for the precepts of traditional morality, Kierkegaard, After Virtue argues (here making a very striking sociological claim), contributes with his predecessors to the academicization of philosophy, especially moral philosophy. Philosophical theory has failed its native social order; it has shown itself unable to fill the void left by a largely abandoned religious rationality with a universally acceptable, secular means of rational justification for society’s inherited, pre-reflectively held ethical beliefs. It comes then deservedly to be viewed as something accessory to the cultures of modern Western civilization, and its discussions move now to the margins of society, where MacIntyre states, to the present day and for lack of historical perspective on the problem, ‘Kierkegaard, Kant, and Hume do not lack ingenious, academic disciples in the debate between whom the continuing power only of the negative arguments of either tradition against the other is the most significant feature’ (50). Meanwhile, the argument of After Virtue continues, in the broader culture, and less reflectively, the same systematically inadequate moral conceptions, truer in what they deny than in what they affirm, are advanced against one another so that moral debate among ordinary agents in the present time acquires those characteristics of interminability, shrillness, and seeming arbitrariness in commitment which the book began by noting. As regards the negative value of modern moral theories – their ability successfully to refute one another – MacIntyre advances another intriguing intellectual-historical hypothesis: that as the weight of the successful negative aspects of modern moral theories is increasingly felt by theorists as well as by ordinary agents, both begin to despair of rationally grounding ethical beliefs and settling ethical disputes by appeals to human nature, and Hume’s misgiving about any possible logical link between fact-stating discourse and evaluative discourse comes to be regarded as the discovery of a logical law – a law concerning the underivability of moral conclusions from factual premises.

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We have seen MacIntyre argue previously against the idea of the fact–value gap, but his arguments here are sharper and more extended. ‘Ought’ conclusions, he notes following Arthur Prior, certainly can follow logically from ‘is’ premises, as in the inference: ‘He is a sea captain, therefore he ought to do what a sea captain does.’ If, as is open to the modern moral theorist to respond, no moral ought can follow from any ‘is’, then MacIntyre thinks a different point can be made concerning the possible senses of ‘moral’. It is the distinctiveness of functional concepts that facts about their application to particulars in a kind can entail evaluative conclusions about those particulars. So, from factual premises concerning the inaccuracy and the cumbersome size and weight of a watch, MacIntyre notes, the evaluative conclusion ‘This is a bad watch’ can be entailed. There was a time, he notes, specifically in the classical predecessor culture of modernity, in which what moderns mean by ‘moral’ was covered by what pre-moderns meant by ‘good’. Human nature as such was thought to have a function, whether theological or metaphysical or simply social (or all three together), so that in the social orders of this predecessor culture, facts about the characteristics of particular persons were rightly thought logically to entail ‘morally’ evaluative conclusions. From facts about the behaviour of a person qua soldier or qua citizen or qua mother, morally evaluative conclusions were seen to follow, because the moral was taken to denote that which is obligatory toward others in respect of one’s socially established role in the shared social and cosmic order. Modern moral philosophy, in part following upon, in part precipitating, changes in its native social order, attempts, After Virtue notes, to dispense with the classical teleological framework and its notion of a human end – whether this end be understood metaphysically or theologically or socially (by human end here, MacIntyre means that fully realized state of human nature as such, progress towards which is made by human nature in its unrealized and untutored state through action in conformity with action guiding, character shaping norms). Moderns reject any social role teleology or metaphysical teleology or theological teleology, and in consequence they construct a new social category of the ‘individual’, the invented identity of the emerging modern self. We have here, MacIntyre claims, a ‘decisive moment of change’, one viewable either ‘as loss or liberation, as a transition to autonomy or to anomie’: [the] loss of traditional structure and content was seen by the most articulate of [Enlightenment] philosophical spokesmen as the achievement by the self of its proper autonomy. The self has been liberated from all those outmoded forms of social organization which had imprisoned it simultaneously within a belief in a theistic and teleological world order and within those hierarchical structures which attempted to legitimate themselves as part of such a world order. (60–61)

How has this decisive moment of change in moral agents’ self-conception played itself out socially? Here MacIntyre thinks there are two main strands of a story to be told, each strand relating to one of the two opposing pulls experienced by this new and modern self. On the one hand, this autonomous self wishes to be sovereign over its own moral choices and actions, so it wishes protection from the encroachment of

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corporate bodies or from other individuals, and it wishes to have these subservient as much as possible – and to bend them if necessary – to its own desires. It wishes, in short, their compliance with its own subjectively chosen plans and purposes. From this tendency and its social consequences, MacIntyre holds, we have the origin of modern rights discourse, and we have in good part the widespread appeal of the Kantian tradition in ethics. Kantian ethics has enjoyed prominence, MacIntyre thinks, because of its attempt to supply that categorical element in the inherited and partially rejected pre-modern ethical tradition – a categorical element formerly supplied by the commands of God or by the inbuilt teleological structure to human nature or by the perceived obligations of social role with respect to the order of cosmic justice. In the opposing direction, according to the argument here, we have the perception by the autonomous self that other autonomous selves share the same circumstances as it, so that in order for the social order to be more and other than an arena for the anarchic pursuit of individuals’ desires, some set of rational criteria must be devised which favour the social and the collective over the individual and can keep the activities of individual autonomous selves within acceptable bounds. To this pull, MacIntyre claims, corresponds the utilitarian tradition in ethics, and it owes its widespread appeal to the perception that utilitarian theory can meet this bureaucraticmanaging-of-the-collective need. Of course, MacIntyre thinks that neither of these two traditions in ethics can succeed rationally in their self-appointed tasks; the fact that they go about their business separately is a sign of the fragmentation and of the loss of a wholeness from a former ethical age. And the fact that they are incompatible enterprises points for MacIntyre to a fatal contradiction at the heart of the individualist social order, dooming it to long-term systematic frustration. The social contradiction he has in mind here derives from what he argues is a fatal incoherence in the very conception of the autonomous self. This self wishes unconditional sovereignty, full and final authority, over the action-guiding norms to which it submits; and yet, given that it is a human self, it is a self whose very structure requires it to seek satisfaction in a social order comprised of other such autonomous selves. These two demands cannot be met consistently: Contemporary moral experience … has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arise from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited. (68)

Interestingly, MacIntyre’s argument here is that, in its first phase and with its goal of reconstituting ethical consciousness for the culture at large, modern moral philosophy was bound to seek some rational means of justification for this, since without an appeal to reason former ethical beliefs could not be thought of as anything other

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than unwanted survivals from a past era of darkness and superstition – and continued adherence to these beliefs would be thought untenable except as expressions of prejudice, unthinking habit, self-interest or hypocrisy. So we have a conservative attempt by moderns rationally to justify held-over ethical beliefs, and this along two different lines. The utilitarian tradition, as MacIntyre notes, will seek a new form of teleological justification for those beliefs, which is psychological instead of metaphysical, and the Kantian tradition will look to provide a new and different source for the categorical dimension of the ethical in the structure of practical reason itself. Returning to the intellectual-historical narrative in After Virtue, MacIntyre notes that in the utilitarian strand of this history we have Jeremy Bentham, conscious of the revisionary nature of the task he will undertake – that of giving a new meaning to traditional ethical concepts and a new status to moral rules. The problem that Bentham’s teleological form of justification will land him with, though, MacIntyre notes, is how moral normativity can be generated out of the new and innovative hedonic psychology to which Bentham adheres, according to which the sole motivation for all human action is pleasure-attainment and pain-avoidance. Bentham, MacIntyre notes, had hoped for programmes of social and political reform led by enlightened minds who perceived the connection between human motivation and utilitarian morality – reforms in which social institutions would be created which would direct the actions of even the unenlightened so that the greatest utility of the greatest number would be served. But even granting the truth of Bentham’s dubious monistic theory of motivation, MacIntyre argues, there is, as the later scrupulously self-critical utilitarian Henry Sigdwick was to note, no logical link between an agent seeking to maximize his own pleasure and minimize his own pain and the directing of his actions so that in and through them the pleasure of the greatest possible number of others is maximized and their pain minimized. Even with Mill’s later refinement of the hedonic theory of motivation, according to which pleasure can be qualitatively differentiated and ranked, there is, MacIntyre notes, no binding rational connection between egohedonic motivation and the altruistic precepts of utilitarian morality. And, moreover, one may see as falsified in one’s own case the empirical claim that a life lived according to the greatest happiness principle will maximize one’s own happiness, as MacIntyre thinks Mill himself discovered after finding himself on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There is, for MacIntyre, the further and fundamental problem with utilitarian theory that it relies on a conceptual fiction to generate its claims – the concept of a monistic ‘utility’. Here he simply re-states the argument we have seen previously about the incommensurability of goods and the pleasures attendant upon their attainment, adding now a further point about the incommensurability of life-plans. There is no way quantitatively to assess the pleasure derived from drinking Guinness compared to that derived from swimming at the beach, and no way quantitatively to compare the happiness of the life of a monk with that of a soldier. Thus, the notion of a general and impersonal metric of ‘utility’ or ‘happiness’ is a conceptual fiction

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which, however useful to worthy social causes it may have been in the past, remains a fiction, and so something available for ideological deployment (64). With Henry Sidgwick’s avowal of the rational unjustifiability of utilitarian moral precepts, and his embracing of the avowedly groundless and heterogeneous intuitions in the consciousness of ordinary moral agents as the rational basis for morality, we have, for MacIntyre, the beginning of the end of the utilitarian programme. Moore will inherit this view, he notes, without acknowledging it, ‘presenting his borrowings with his own penumbra of bad argument in Principia Ethica’ (65), and his disciples will celebrate Moore’s discovery as a liberation from the prejudices and confusion of our social past and its benighted moral traditions. The way will now be paved for the emotivist critique of ethical judgements as nothing but disguised, reason-less expressions of personal preference or sentiment, and the work of Ayer, Stevenson, and Carnap on the question will now appear plausible. For analytic philosophers rightly unwilling to accept that moral judgements have no cognitive content, there remains the possibility of recourse to the broadly Kantian programme in ethics. But, MacIntyre argues, this programme for beginning with an autonomous self denied recourse to nature and history as sources for its moral norms must attempt the impossible task of constructing those norms out of the resources of pure practical reason. And in view of this impossibility, MacIntyre adds, this alternative programme in moral theory must have recourse to a different yet characteristically modern conceptual fiction, that of ‘human rights’. Critics such as Samuel Scheffler have objected to MacIntyre’s dispatching of varieties of contemporary Kantian ethics in the early pages of After Virtue on the basis of a criticism of one sentence of Alan Gewirth’s Reason and Morality (see Scheffler, 1983; Gewirth, 1968: 63), and there is clearly some justification to this complaint. The point, though, of MacIntyre’s treatment of Gewirth and of the crucial argument contained within the sentence in question is to show that there is a critical lacuna at the heart of those contemporary Kantian-inspired accounts of morality which try to derive morality from pure practical rationality. MacIntyre is simply taking Gewirth’s account to be one of the clearest, most advanced, and most rigorous of these, and judging that its failure strongly implies the failure of less impressive attempts in kind. Gewirth, as MacIntyre notes, argues that presupposed in the exercise of rational agency – of rational volition – is the will to possess some measure of freedom and well-being as prerequisites for that agency. To want to act as a moral agent, I must implicitly desire a certain amount of autonomy and well-being for myself. This much MacIntyre concedes. What he rejects is the move whereby Gewirth infers from this implicit need written into the exercise of robust moral agency a right. Gewirth, of course, as MacIntyre notes, wishes to claim that there is an entailment from my possession of a right to the possession by all rational agents like myself of a similar right. What MacIntyre sensibly questions is how need as such, even need for what is a genuine good for the agent, can ever entail a right as such, when this entailment is alleged to obtain a priori and independent of any specific social context with its specific history. Rights claims by human agents, MacIntyre argues,

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are only intelligible and justifiable within particular pre-existent social orders with pre-existent social practices which establish rules concerning obligations and entitlements. Without reference to these, or without reference to the will of God, as MacIntyre will say on another occasion (see 1983b), rights claims are arbitrary, ungrounded claims based on an ideological fiction. Without the proper social context, he concludes pointedly in this section of After Virtue, the making of a rights claim ‘would be like presenting a check for payment in a social order which lacked the institution of money’ (67). If the attempt to re-ground the precepts of traditional morality on a new teleological or categorical basis is an impossible task doomed to failure, it is not surprising, After Virtue observes, that modern moral discourse is thick with the rhetoric of protest and indignation and with strategies of unmasking various deceitful and self-deceiving claims to moral objectivity. Disputes between rights theorists and utility theorists are undecidable – and those adhering to contextless, ungrounded rights implicitly recognize this, MacIntyre notes. Their rhetoric of protest has a shrillness to it because they realize there are no rational standards by appeal to which they can convince their opponents, so they voice indignation in defence of their rationally ungrounded preferences in the hope that it will be non-rationally persuasive. In the charges of bluff and hypocrisy levelled by a succession of ethical schools of thought against their predecessors, MacIntyre sees further confirmation for one of the main theses of After Virtue: that the failure of the Enlightenment project successfully to combine a commitment to autonomy with a commitment to the objectivity of moral rules has made non-cognitive theories of morality seem compelling: Each of the contending protagonists of modernity, while for obvious reasons unwilling to concede that the claim … that they offer a rhetoric which serves to conceal behind the masks of morality what are in fact the preferences of arbitrary will and desire … is prepared to make it about those against whom they contend. So the evangelicals of the Clapham Sect saw in the morality of the Enlightenment a rational and rationalizing disguise for selfishness and sin, so in turn the emancipated grandchildren of the Evangelicals and their Victorian successors saw Evangelical piety as mere hypocrisy; so later Bloomsbury, liberated by G.E. Moore, saw the whole semi-official cultural paraphernalia of the Victorian age as a pompous charade concealing … arrogant self-will … and so in precisely the same way D.H. Lawrence ‘saw through’ Bloomsbury. When emotivism was finally proclaimed as an entirely general thesis about the nature of moral utterance, it did no more than generalize what each party in the cultural revolt in the modern world had already said about its particular moral predecessors. Unmasking the unacknowledged motives of arbitrary will and desire which sustain the moral masks of modernity is one of the most characteristically modern activities. (71–2)

Returning to the three ‘characters’ of the emotivist culture of modernity mentioned earlier, MacIntyre sees each of these as dramatis personae in the charade of insincere modern moral discourse, that ‘theatre of illusions’, as he calls it, which comprises modern morality. These too each live off fictions: the aesthete that his malaise derives from something other than his entirely aesthetic approach to life; the therapist that

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theoretically devastating criticisms of the effectiveness of his therapeutic techniques are no cause for him to discontinue practising them, and the manager that he possesses a stock of well-confirmed, law-like empirical generalizations about human behaviour which endow him with the requisite epistemic authority to claim expertise – and, more self-deceivingly still, that his employment of these generalizations (to manipulate the behaviour of others in order that they attain rationally unexamined ends) is a morally neutral one. Before After Virtue attempts to offer a remedy for the problem of profound disorder in the field of contemporary moral discourse, MacIntyre devotes two chapters in the book to the limitations of predictive knowledge in the social sciences. There is not much by way of new material in these chapters, other than a number of interesting historical observations. They provide mostly a streamlined reworking of his previous writing on the explanation of human action, and present in more compact form arguments for the systematic unpredictability of human action as something stemming from, to repeat the points: the possibility of radical conceptual innovation, the unpredictability of our future decisions, the game-theoretic character of social life with its indefinite reflexivity, and the causal power of adventitious contingencies. We have already examined these arguments; one interesting addition to them here, though, is the claim that they would each establish the systematic unpredictability of human action even if a strong version of determinism about human agency were true. In illustration of this claim, After Virtue invites us to consider an ensemble of computers at some future advanced state of computing science – computers which are co-operatively linked and able to simulate wide ranges of human behaviour, while their own behaviour is entirely mechanically and electronically determined. Even these, for all their predictive capacity, he argues, would be unable to surmount the unpredictability in themselves arising out of their own potential for radical conceptual innovations, their own future decisions, their own tendency to engage in game-theoretic strategies of behaviour with respect to one another, and their own liability to be affected by wholly adventitious contingencies – power shortages, for instance. The point of this thought experiment is to show how even if a physicalist ontology with respect to humans were true, systematic unpredictability in the social world would still reign, because were it true, humans could be regarded as the computers in the thought experiment in question. In moving on to Chapter Seven of After Virtue, ‘Fact, Explanation, and Expertise’, MacIntyre tries to establish here, for the first time really, a deeper motive behind this strong programme of prediction and explanation in the social sciences which seeks law-like generalizations adequate to explain human behaviour. The Enlightenment, as we have seen him argue, was much about the rejection of Aristotle’s metaphysics of entelechy with its teleological scheme for the explanation both of human action and of change in nature. For Aristotle, as MacIntyre notes, the efficient causes of natures needed to be comprehended within the framework of the final causes of those natures – their characteristic ends, goals, or purposes as established for them according to their natural kind. Accordingly, human behaviour, for Aristotle, contrary to the

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standpoint of the modern philosophy of the human sciences, can never be adequately explained mechanistically. It can only be explained by identifying the goals, ends, and purposes which motivate it: that hierarchy of the goods characteristically sought by human agents. So, on the Aristotelian picture, inquiries in the human sciences cannot be thought a separate enterprise from moral philosophy, because according to the Aristotelian way of thinking there are facts about what humans should value: facts about which goods habitually pursued in which rank ordering lead to the full development and realization of the person. To explain human action is therefore to identify the intentions, reasons, purposes and so on that drive it and that lead to the flourishing or the demise of the human agent; it is thus to employ the evaluative vocabulary of the virtues and the vices in a descriptive capacity (81–2). Similarly, MacIntyre might have added by way of example here, one cannot explain the life of plants except by using evaluatively loaded terms such as ‘wilt’, ‘thrive’, ‘flourish’ etc. In contrast, the modern project in the human sciences, MacIntyre notes, is a mechanistic and deterministic one – one for which, as Kant recognized, human action in accord with moral imperatives or principles of duty must be regarded as something inexplicable and unintelligible. For much of analytic philosophy after the modern period, After Virtue notes, a central problem becomes reconciling the language of reasons for action, motives, purposes, acting for principles and so on with the vocabulary of a mechanistically determined system. MacIntyre thinks that the two discourses should never have come apart, and that this problem of reconciling vocabularies is a pseudo-problem arising out of an inherited, incoherent conceptual scheme. In a world-picture, he notes, which understands the need for teleological explanation, there is no such division to reconcile, there is rather a causal hierarchy to be comprehended (81–4, and we can recall here his earlier work on the right manner of explaining human actions treated in Chapter 4 above). In W.V.O. Quine’s formulation of the conditions for a genuine mechanistic social science in his Word and Object (Quine, 1960, esp. Ch. 2), MacIntyre sees corroboration for his own thesis of its impossibility. Quine in Word and Object, as MacIntyre reminds us, lays it down that for social science to succeed on the model of natural science, it must purify its vocabulary of all traces of intention, purpose, and motive. Intentional states, since they are non-truth-functional, inhibit the formulation of law-like generalizations, and token mental states (such as ‘believing x’ or ‘fearing y’) frequently present classificatory problems, since there are many borderline and contestable cases of type instances which are undecidable as to their proper classification. MacIntyre of course holds that since the mechanistic programme in social science would require such exclusions to get going, so much the worse for it as a programme: in damagingly simplifying its subject matter in such a fashion it would be doomed to explanatory inadequacy. And, in the more cogently reductionist theories of mechanistic social science of the twentieth century such as Quine’s, as well as in the drama of many forms of twentieth-century social life, MacIntyre sees but the re-enactment of the failed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social scientific programme of the likes of Diderot and Condorcet.

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As he notes, the empiricists of the Enlightenment thought they were justifiably discarding Aristotelian teleology as a false and distorting theoretical framework so they could devote themselves instead to the observation and classification of uninterpreted ‘facts’. What they were actually doing, MacIntyre notes in agreement with much contemporary philosophy of science, was un-selfconsciously and selfdeceivingly replacing one interpretive theoretical framework with another, since as most philosophers of science now agree, at the level of scientific (versus ordinary or pre-scientific) observation there are no theory-neutral facts. But by inventing the notion of pure undistorted facts, MacIntyre observes, seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury empiricism was buttressing the conviction of the aspiring mechanistic social science of the time that the world of fact is value-free. In explaining our current assumptions about morals and the human sciences, After Virtue offers the following genealogy: the Enlightenment’s rejection of the tradition of teleological explanation and the Protestant and Jansenist rejection of Catholic teleological morals spawned the mistaken, unrealizable ideal of a mechanistic social science. This ideal animated the work of social reformers in the nineteenth century such as the Saint-Simonians, Comte, Mill, and the early Fabian socialists. This work of social reform with its ideals of practice led in turn to the legitimation of the authority given to civil servants, technocrats, and managers in countries of the developed West – an authority which finds its theoretical articulation and defence today in the work of sociologists and organization theorists. Finally, present-day managers and technocrats are educated in professional schools by this theory, and they enter the world of bureaucratic practice equipped with a ready theoretical justification for the bureaucratic ‘expertise’ they will deploy. Thus the state MacIntyre thinks we are presently in: on the level of theory, a bifurcation of the human sciences and morals (along with much ingenuity in attacking the pseudo-problem of how to fit them together); on the level of practice, a social order populated by a good many social structures and ‘characters’ which live off philosophical fictions that neither have been nor can be rationally justified. How now a remedy for this state of affairs? 5.3

Resources for the Restoration of Rational Moral Discourse

One of the central claims of After Virtue thus far has been that the modern world, set against the pre-modern world from which it breaks decisively in the period of the Enlightenment, is comprised of social structures Weberian in nature. This is the rather sweeping and seemingly overstated claim with which Chapter Nine, ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle?’ begins (109). What MacIntyre means here is qualified in the chapter’s subsequent pages: first of all, that in the not entirely conscious selfunderstanding of those wielding power in contemporary social structures, it is commonly assumed that questions about ends and ultimate purposes are not matter for rational debate, since there is thought to be an irreducible variety of values and ways of life that individuals may choose to pursue, and no way of rank ordering or

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rationally deciding between these. Secondly, those who wield power in these social structures legitimate that exercise of power by claiming to possess expert technical knowledge concerning the ordering of means to predetermined ends. Earlier in the book, MacIntyre had noted Weber’s conscious espousal of the point which Nietzsche was later to make with devastating effect and so bring to a close the cycle of so-called ‘modern’ moral philosophy: that the ends of human action are not matter for rational debate, but for subjective choice alone. MacIntyre adds the surprising claim here, not well substantiated, that Marxists have not really, as they have thought, undermined Weber’s theory of the nature and legitimacy of social power, but have succumbed to it instead. Though he goes on to say a bit more about this in Chapter Nine of After Virtue, we have to reach back into his earlier work on Marxist topics to make full sense of the claim. The great danger of Weberian-style justifications of bureaucratic authority, he has maintained, is that they legitimate a seemingly neutral and innocuous, but actually quite harm-engendering manipulation of the behaviour of those subordinate to that authority. Yet, as MacIntyre has previously argued (and here we recall his earlier criticisms of the dominant interpretations of the letter of Marx), Marxism has itself by and large opted for a means–end morality justifiable only to, and sustained by, a manipulative party elite. And further (and here After Virtue does give us some background support for the claim that Marxism is too much a product of the age to give us the critical help we need), the Marx of the German Ideology and the Engels of the Anti-Dühring were precisely taken in by the unsatisfiable desire for a mechanistic social science, a social science comprised of a stock of law-like generalizations about human behaviour to be put at the service of large-scale social engineering. MacIntyre has in mind here the Marx-Engels theory of ideology – a theory, he holds, which for positing a mechanistic deterministic connection between the material conditions and class structures of society and its thought-content or ideological superstructure, was, in the guise of diagnosis and remedy for the ills of the age, yet another one of its symptoms (110). It is not difficult to guess now what role Nietzsche will play in MacIntyre’s narrative – that of the prophetic unmasker. Nietzsche brings to the task of examining modern moral theory and its social embodiments, MacIntyre observes, a genealogical awareness that serves him well in detecting the presence of surviving cultural fragments from the civilizational past – fragments whose point and purpose is no longer properly understood, and which therefore must be the subject of only a questionable justification by their adherents. Nietzsche is thereby able to detect the failed pretensions of modern moral theories to anchor their moral claims in something impersonal and objective; he sees modern moral thought for what, despite its aspirations, it can only be – a set of failed claims to objectivity masking a subjective will to power: In a famous passage in The Gay Science (section 335) Nietzsche jeers at the notion of basing morality on inner moral sentiments, on conscience, on the one hand, or on the Kantian categorical imperative, on universalizability, on the other. In five swift, witty and

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cogent paragraphs he disposes of what I have called the Enlightenment project to discover the rational foundations for an objective morality and of the confidence of the everyday moral agent in the post-Enlightenment culture that his moral practice and utterance are in good order. (113)

Nietzsche also, as MacIntyre is quick to note here, realizes that the problem of the disorder in our moral vocabulary must be addressed. But one of the main points of the remainder of After Virtue will be to argue that Nietzsche’s solution to this disorder, his call for a transvaluation of values (i.e. a re-definition of our sense of good and bad in accord with the new-found awareness of our status as sovereign and self-legislating moral agents who cannot and need not have the support of objectivity to back up their moral thinking) must appear compelling unless it can be shown that the pre-modern approach to the ethical should never have been rejected by the thinkers of the Enlightenment in the first place. In some of Nietzsche’s own solution to the modern moral predicament, MacIntyre sees things both philosophically preposterous and morally dangerous, but in Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the sources of the predicament he sees something intellectually powerful. Nietzsche’s is a prophetic irrationalism, he maintains: prophetic for foreseeing the social consequences of moderns’ failures to establish claims to moral objectivity, and prophetic for giving us at the level of theory a way of thinking about the self, morality, and the social order which members of the modern social order will increasingly come to adopt. In this vein, MacIntyre cites the social theory of Erving Goffman as a prime twentieth-century example of what happens to the way we think about ourselves and our ordinary transactions with other selves once the aspiration or pretence to objectivity in moral claims has been abandoned. Social interaction and success à la Goffman, After Virtue notes, is entirely a matter of successful self-presentation. The self is not measurable against any objective, impersonal standard, so it enjoys no dignity independent of the regard given it by others: the self is its socially constituted identity. Honour and regard are thought not as by-products of the good achieved, valuable in a derivative way, but as ends in themselves to be sought for their own sake in the absence of any objective standards of achievement (115–17). In the contest between systems of moral thought today, MacIntyre thinks that the battle lines should be seen as drawn between Nietzscheans and, among premoderns, Aristotelians. This is because Aristotelianism for him is the most powerful pre-modern system of philosophy, evidence for which is its capacity to have thrived not only in the Alexandrian and post-Alexandrian Greek world, but in the medieval worlds of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And furthermore, it was Aristotle’s world-view in particular, especially owing its commitment to natural teleology, that thinkers of the Enlightenment and in the early modern period rejected in launching their own moral programme (118). For MacIntyre, though, the opposition between Aristotle and Nietzsche must be seen as rooted in one important area of agreement: they are both anti-modern moral thinkers for seeing as central to the task of ethical inquiry directly answering

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the question ‘What kind of person shall I become?’ – a question, MacIntyre notes, that modern moral philosophers and their contemporary descendants (e.g. Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls) think cannot and or should not be addressed directly in a moral theory. MacIntyre sees as a natural consequence of the rejection of the notion of a teleology for human nature as such – and a rejection of the corresponding notion of ‘the human good’ – that modern moral philosophers characteristically give considerations about right (e.g. the following of rules and principles) priority over considerations about the good. Considerations about the good are regarded as largely a private matter to be left up to wholly subjective determination. Virtue, then, for a modern moral philosopher is understood as that trait of character which disposes an agent to follow moral rules, and rule-considerations are held to enjoy priority over virtue considerations. For Aristotle, on the contrary, a spokesman in this matter for many pre-modern moral traditions, MacIntyre notes, and for Nietzsche as well, the reverse is the case. The issue of primary import is answering the question ‘What kind of person shall I become?’ The acquisition and development of various character traits is thought to subserve the end of becoming a certain kind of person, and obedience to rules and precepts is thought to minister to the acquisition, maintenance, and development of these character traits or virtues (119). Where Nietzsche and Aristotle crucially disagree, of course, is in the matter of whether moral judgements can be the subject of rational justification – that is, whether they can be seen to enjoy rational objectivity or not. The remainder of After Virtue will be a set of lengthy arguments, based on both socio-historical claims and on some interesting and fairly original philosophical claims, for the conclusion that moral judgments can have an objective basis. But we have first to consider Chapters Ten and Eleven, ‘The Virtues in Heroic Societies’ and ‘The Virtues at Athens’ respectively, which aim to give the historical context and background for Aristotle’s moral theory proper. The Iliad and Odyssey are the primary material MacIntyre draws upon to discuss the moral horizons of so-called heroic societies, though he makes mention of lesserknown heroic epics deriving from medieval Ireland and Iceland which narrate tales from the pre-Christian days of each. While the historical accuracy or lack thereof of these epics is not relevant to his concerns, his fairly uncontroversial argument is that, for long stretches of time and in a number of different social orders, these epics were taken to be true, and that the stories in them, the evaluative language they employed and the characteristic authorial slant behind each of them combined to create a universe of moral discourse for their respective native societies. Before beginning to discuss specifics of these texts, MacIntyre makes an interesting if insufficiently qualified observation about the moral vision of premodern or classical societies (by these he means those social orders of the Greek, mediaeval and Renaissance world – members of a common moral theoretical type for, among other reasons, their shared belief in human teleology). Such societies, he claims, which are defined in part by their belief in the teleological ordering of things, are naturally drawn to story-telling as a means of moral education and as a means of representing their moral vision. To believe that human life has a goal which is

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not in the first instance specified by subjective choice, but is rather something to be discovered as part of the objective order of things, is to believe that human life has the shape of a narrative to it: human life embodies a story of success or failure in the attempted realization of human nature’s intrinsic capacities, which realization is life’s goal. Moral education within a coherent social order thus involves communicating success and failure stories of progress towards the human good (i.e. as the social order in question happens to understand that good). Typical of heroic societies, MacIntyre notes, is a moral vision hinging upon kinship relations. Typical also is a conception of the self which the civic morality that will emerge precisely by contrasting itself with heroic kinship morality will also share. So, in pre-modern societies, MacIntyre claims, the identity of the self is entirely functionalized: the self is its social role without remainder. Consequently, in the writings of epic narratives, evaluative language – the language of virtues or excellences of mind and character, duties, rights, honour – is tied exclusively to social role. Virtues are understood to be those traits of mind and character which enable an individual to discharge his social role effectively in the social or socialcum-cosmic order; duties are those obligations pertaining to social role; rights are the entitlements accruing to the effective discharging of that role, and so on. There is and can be no autonomous morality in these social settings: facts have evaluative consequences. Moreover, given that the self is constituted entirely by social specification, moral agency is always particularized, and moral accountability is always thought to be local. The self of the heroic era cannot, like the modern self, step back from its predetermined social roles and make moral evaluations from the outside, as it were. Only strangers, semi-human ghosts, are thought to have an external perspective on the social order in the pre-modern era, and they are thought to have it only owing to destitution. Thus pre-modern morality in its first, its heroic society phase, according to MacIntyre’s account. In the pre-modern setting, he claims, the parameters of moral agency are almost entirely set by those epic narratives which are the means of moral education. The framework these epics provide is not for the agents in the social orders in question a matter for rational choice or debate (again MacIntyre cites as primary examples the Hellenic societies whose moral imaginations were formed by the Iliad and the Odyssey). Instead, all agent deliberation and choice, all success and failure, take place within the boundaries of a presupposed and largely unquestioned framework for action. There is no moral choosing that is not the choosing of a socially situated, socially determined self, and here MacIntyre thinks he has two important rejoinders to Nietzsche’s exaltation of the classical, aristocratic self. In the first place, he argues, contrary to Nietzsche’s perspectivist account of truth, pre-moderns such as Homer, the Norse saga writers, and their respective audiences (and later members of the Greek city-states not under the sway of certain sophists) were realists about the truth of their moral beliefs. They saw their moral framework as rendering the social-cum-cosmic order wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. Secondly, an examination of texts like the Iliad reveals that where Nietzsche saw aristocratic self-assertion, he was fantasizing and projecting back onto an alien social order a

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category that it did not possess – one that was really derived from his own and much later individualist social order. In an interesting claim that is very much one for social anthropologists to corroborate or falsify, MacIntyre argues here that heroic self-assertion was really social role-assertion – social role especially as tied to kinship relations (129). From these points, MacIntyre takes two consequences to follow, but their logical relation to the preceding he does not spell out well: both concern a more general point about the inescapability of the historical past. MacIntyre thinks we should learn the following lessons from heroic morality: all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular, and … the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly … there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from a series or predecessors in which series heroic societies hold first place. (126–7).

There is something curious about these claims, and especially the universal quantifiers which precede them, because their truth seems to hinge on the kind of historical determinism which MacIntyre has in other contexts explicitly repudiated. An adherent of the modern approach to moral theory might be very happy to contrast the new approach with the old and celebrate the new for its difference. Modern moral systems might have their own particular kind of challenges to meet, but the claim that their aspiration to a social order-transcendent universalism involves an illusion seems overstated. Since MacIntyre is himself an essentialist about human nature, he cannot consistently be opposed to ethical universalism in principle, so he must be read here as objecting to a particular, and particularly modern, construal of ethical universalism. But his meaning is not entirely clear. As for the second claim about the virtues, for relying on a too deterministic a picture of social and conceptual change, it too is under-motivated and overstated. Ruptures, decisive breaks with past traditions – past social orders in their evolving historical forms – can and do make possible new tables of the virtues, new ways of understanding old virtues. MacIntyre himself has just cited a luminous case of this in contemporary accounts of the virtues by liberal theorists such as John Rawls – accounts which are un-traditional for specifying the virtues in terms of the right instead of the good. It would be curious to argue that this position must be false simply because it breaks with the inheritance of our collective past. Returning, though, to the narrative of After Virtue, MacIntyre sees as the next important episode in the evolution of Western ethical consciousness the transition from the kinship morality of heroic societies to the civic morality of the societies of the Greek polis. Unsurprisingly, he cites Athens as the most clear-cut case of this change, and he identifies Sophocles and Plato as two key theorists of the new emerging ethical conception. Belief in the teleological mode of ethical understanding remains, but now two items in the heroic version of this are put into question. A first challenge, arising out of the Greek city-states’ experience of rational civic discourse and rational conflict, and with Sophocles as a prime spokesman, questions whether

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life as a whole can be viewed in terms of success or failure. Plato next challenges the received content of the categories of the successful and the unsuccessful life by means of a new theory of human nature, and he then issues the more fundamental challenge of calling into question whether narrative story-telling is the appropriate mode for moral discourse (i.e. the conflict between the poets and the philosophers with which he was so preoccupied). As in other parts of the After Virtue narrative – and as is somewhat unsurprising given the amount of ground the book attempts to cover – the historical description gets a bit thin here, and though undoubtedly suggestive in places, the arguments in this stretch are far too elliptical to be compelling. MacIntyre is neither particularly clear nor sufficiently explicit about the mechanism of the transition from kinship morality to civic morality, but the gist of his account is that the Hellenic peoples begin to discover unsustainable tensions or contradictions between their Homeric ‘moral scripture’ and aspects of their quotidian ethical practice. By the fifth century and with the coming into being of the various Greek city-states, there is widespread moral confusion and disagreement. While moral vocabulary, especially terms picking out virtues and vices, is to a large extent shared at the time, there is widespread disagreement about the nature and precise requirements of virtues such as courage, friendship, and justice. Moreover, questions begin to emerge concerning, for instance, whether the requirements of one virtue such as justice can ever be in conflict with those of another virtue such as friendship. And here, MacIntyre notes, we have a significant cause of the prevalence and popularity of tragic drama in a polis such as Athens – and the reason for the subsequent discourse in Plato and Aristotle about the unity of the virtues. There is a very close connection in the Greek city-state, he observes, between drama, politics, and philosophy: political practice is consciously shaped by philosophical debate; drama both enacts the political conflicts of the day and selfconsciously traffics in the current philosophical controversies. MacIntyre sees Sophocles as particularly significant here in works such as the Philoctetes, the Oresteia and Antigone. Each work in its own way, he notes, depicts a tension, or even a tragic contradiction, between virtues – one salvageable only by the intervention of a god. In the Philoctetes, it is the tension between the virtues of prudence/cunning and truthfulness which is in question; in the Oresteia and Antigone, it is between family loyalty and social or civic justice. The Sophoclean view, for MacIntyre, stands at an interesting mid-point between the modern Weberian-Nietzschean conception of the self in relation to the moral order and the Platonic-Aristotelian conception of the same which arises in conscious opposition to the Sophoclean view. This can be clearly seen, he thinks, when one contrasts the Sophoclean and the Aristotelian-Platonic views with the Homeric ethos of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Homer, on MacIntyre’s interpretation, there can be no contradiction between the requirements of cosmic justice and those of civic justice: the world is so arranged that the two are always in accord. Neither is the possibility of any conflict between being a good man and being a good citizen conceived. But both of these types of conflict are envisaged by Sophocles. In this,

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MacIntyre notes, Sophocles is sensitive to matters any fifth-century free man in a Greek city-state would be, since constitutive of the new social order of the polis, and this particularly the case in Athens, are practices of constrained rational conflict – in the law courts, for example, or in the assembly and between citizen-philosophers, poets, dramatists and so forth. The same city that nurtures its citizens in the spirit of rational criticism and selfcriticism may in its turn be the object of such criticism at its citizen’s own hands. The possibility of a gap between being a good citizen and being a good human being opens up, and when the criteria for deciding between rival moral requirements, whether civic or personal, remain in doubt--or are regarded, as by Sophocles as unavailable-tragedy is thought to ensue. Sophocles, then, on MacIntyre’s interpretation, does not surrender the view that there is a strict objective order of universal justice; he merely suggests that because of human epistemic limitations, we cannot know what the requirements of that objective order of justice in various determinate situations are, so we are faced with irresolvable conflicts of the right with the apparent right. Among the sophists of Sophocles’ time, however (a clear example, MacIntyre notes, is the Callicles of Plato’s Gorgias), the response to apparent moral conflict is to give up the belief in objective, universal justice. The requirements of the various virtues are then relativized both to context and to subjective purposes, and apparent conflicts are in this way dissolved. Right can be understood in terms of social effectiveness; disagreements between different social orders about the requirements of friendship and justice and honour can be viewed as rooted in rationally undecidable differences in perspective. The notion of a perspective-transcendent truth is also then rejected. MacIntyre sees here, as many before him have, an anticipation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism – and of Max Weber’s reduction of practical reasoning to instrumental reasoning, as well as of Isaiah Berlin’s writings on the incommensurability of lives and of orderings of the virtues. Matters of ultimate and unifying purpose on this view, or family of views, are rationally undecidable: there is no objective and social order-transcendent table of virtues in a hierarchical ordering appeal to which can be made to decide moral debates. Practical disagreement is only rationally significant when it concerns matters of effectiveness within some moral scheme or life-plan, which scheme or life-plan can itself only be the subject of criterionless choice. To this sophistical response to the confusions in the thought and moral practice of fifth-century Greek social life, and to Sophocles’ solution, MacIntyre opposes the Platonic and –with important modifications, but in a similar spirit – the Aristotelian solution. Plato, he notes, cannot convict of inconsistency a sophist of a thoroughgoing perspectivist and egoist sort such as Callicles, as Plato’s own Gorgias makes clear, but he can so convict softer relativists such as Polus and Gorgias. What Plato can and does do with sophists of Callicles’ strict relativist persuasion is, while sharing their belief in the connection between morality and desire, convict them of misrepresenting desire. So in Plato we are given an ethic of desire-transformation, MacIntyre observes: the good can be equated with the satisfaction of subjective desire if and only if desire is understood holistically, harmoniously, and hierarchically. The desires consubstantial with human nature must be seen as having an intrinsic

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hierarchical order to them, which order is matter not for choice but for discovery. Plato teaches us that egoism errs, either in its crude hedonic form or in that more sophisticated form which sees the individual as capable of attaining her good apart from the common good, for failing to perceive the objective hierarchy of human desires and desire-satisfactions (140–41). Tragedians of the likes of Sophocles err also from Plato’s standpoint, MacIntyre notes, but in a different way: they think that conflicts between virtues can be tragic, whereas Plato’s view is that any given virtue is for the good of the whole person and the whole city and is subordinate to these. The virtue of practical wisdom or φροϖνησι’ is able to determine what requirement of which virtue must be respected in any given situation. There is an overarching order of cosmic justice, and if we are sufficiently possessed of certain key appetitive virtues and the virtue of practical wisdom, we can, in Plato’s view (which MacIntyre is in effect endorsing), surmount apparent conflicts of obligation. Where Plato adds a decidedly new wrinkle to classical moral thinking, MacIntyre notes, is by his claiming that the requirements of the genuine human good are such that they can only be served by an as yet ideal social order. So, while in a well-ordered city being a good citizen may not put one into any conflict with being a good man, being a good man may involve more than good citizenship and the virtues associated with this. For all his enthusiasm for the Platonic ethical conception, MacIntyre will note here that there remains an unresolved tension in it. Plato is blinkered by assumptions typical of his time and place, and regards the Athenian way of life as the human way of life par excellence. However, since his account of morality and the good life is based upon a theory of essential human nature, it is one which enables him to criticize aspects of Athenian life as he finds it, and one which can have application in places with social and political arrangements very different than that of a fifthcentury Greek polis. Likewise is this the case with Aristotle, MacIntyre observes: After Virtue portrays Aristotle as the outstanding spokesman for the classical Greek tradition of ethical theory, even though Aristotle will inherit this particularist– universalist tension from Plato without explicitly addressing or resolving it. In a manner similar to Plato, MacIntyre notes here, Aristotle assumes that the only way in which the good life can be lived is within the form of life of a citystate such as Athens. Yet, in a way in which Aristotle was not well aware, his own ethical conception also has a core which can have application and be lived out in very different social contexts – as later, particularly mediaeval, social history was to demonstrate (159–60). What, for MacIntyre, are the outstanding features of Aristotle’s ethical theory? Much of the burden of Chapter Thirteen, ‘Aristotle’s Account of the Virtues’, is with elucidating the ways in which Aristotle’s conception of the ethical is strikingly different from modern conceptions (the Aristotle of MacIntyre’s primary concern here is that of the Nicomachean Ethics, and not that of the Eudemian Ethics, since the Nicomachean Ethics has been the primary vehicle of Aristotle’s influence down to the present day).

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In the first place, MacIntyre notes, Aristotle’s is not an ethical theory proper, but a theory of practical rationality within which are contained items of relevance to ‘morality’ in the modern sense of the term. And it is in Aristotle’s theory of practical rationality that MacIntyre sees gains of a permanent sort made for our thinking about matters ethical and practical. The Aristotelian theory teaches us that human practical reasoning properly exercised has the following components: (1) it occurs in the context of those characteristic ends, goods, and purposes which beings of our species possess essentially and as given – and which theoretical reflection is able to catalogue; (2) it has as its unifying goal eu)daimoni/a, or ‘human flourishing’, that active state of being well in doing well; (3) it understands that we attain to the state of eu)daimoni/a by habitual excellence in the exercise of our characteristic capacities for action, thought, and creativity, that is, by the practice of the virtues, conceived both as instrumental to and constitutive of the flourishing which gives unifying purpose to all our desiring and practical deliberation, and finally, (4) according to this theory, correct practical reasoning seeks to direct us to eu)daimoni/a as a condition which we can only attain (though we cannot attain it in toto) in and through participation in a common life – a common life in which there is a large measure of shared agreement about the content of human flourishing (148–50). Before turning to MacIntyre’s more developed account of the social and political dimensions of Aristotle’s theory of the virtues, it is worth first examining his treatment of Aristotle’s doctrine concerning the inter-connection of the virtues. As he notes, Aristotle inherits from Plato a conception of the unity of the virtues, but gives new body to this teaching by specifying how and why – Kant and much later modern moral thinking to the contrary – moral goodness requires a significant measure of practical intelligence, and vice versa (MacIntyre admits that Aristotle’s account of this is elliptical and importantly incomplete, and that what he will supply for Aristotle here will be only part, but not enough, of what is needed to fill in the picture adequately). On Aristotle’s conception, he observes, a theory of practical rationality is aimed at determining what the human end is and specifying the conditions and prerequisites for its attainment. As a component of this, a theory of ethics or morality in something like the modern sense is required. The theory of practical rationality supplies a conception of the end with which the virtue of fro&nhsij or practical wisdom works. The theory of morality then details how, inverting the Humean understanding, human passions and desires are to be disciplined and trained to conform to the end proposed by reason. Since one cannot aim well at what one does not well perceive, the exercise of moral virtue requires the prior possession of the virtue of practical wisdom; since one can only perceive as good and desirable what one regularly desires, the exercise of fro&nhsij already requires, in some sense, the possession of the central moral (i.e. appetitive) virtues. Because there are a great multitude of factors which determine what the right action for a given agent is in the here and now, there is no antecedent algorithm of moral rules which can specify what that right action is. Instead, a sufficiently virtuous person (the agent himself or someone else), by taking into account all the salient circumstances in all

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their particularity in some situation of action, is able to determine which virtue (e.g. courage, friendship, honesty) should guide the action to be undertaken (148–50). So far, there is little particularly striking or controversial (or particularly new with respect to his earlier writings) in MacIntyre’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ethical outlook. It is more a useful exposition of those features in it that a modern might find particularly jarring. What is interesting, though, in After Virtue is MacIntyre’s interpretation of Aristotle’s little commented-upon teaching on intrinsically defective acts. Towards the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics (see Book II, 6) and in his discussion of the nature of virtue in general Aristotle speaks of certain actions, such as adultery, murder, and theft, as ‘ye/getai tw~| au)ta& fau~la ei]nai’, or actions ‘blamed as bad in themselves’. MacIntyre offers the following interpretation of the place of this teaching in the larger scheme of Aristotle’s theory of practical rationality – an interpretation which, as he is aware, is as much or more a development of Aristotle’s thought than strict exegesis (and it will form a cornerstone for MacIntyre’s own neoAristotelian theory of practical rationality). In Aristotle’s view, as we have seen MacIntyre note, the best life is the life of virtue, civic virtue crowned by the highest of the intellectual virtues, theoretical contemplation. Moral training and education consist in the education of the passions and desires so that fundamental conflict in the self is eliminated and the objective hierarchy of those goods which are the object of the self’s desires is respected (i.e. desires for lesser goods not encroaching upon or disenabling the discovery and fulfilment of desires for higher goods). Aristotle, then, has motive to regard certain action-types as intrinsically contrary to the exercise of certain important virtues, and so as contrary to the pursuit of the genuine and complete human good. But this, MacIntyre suggests, cannot be the only reason Aristotle speaks of intrinsically defective acts: to think so would be to view the moral life in too individualistic a way to be true to the spirit of Aristotle. Since for Aristotle the genuine human good can only be pursued and enjoyed in community, MacIntyre notes, there is another way his teaching on intrinsically defective actions should be understood (a teaching which MacIntyre himself wishes to defend, and which, as he notes, makes Aristotle, in contradistinction to Mill and the later utilitarian tradition, a non-consequentialist teleological ethicist). Spelling this out requires a more extended portrayal of Aristotle’s idea of a moral community, so After Virtue paints the following picture for us. The bond of a moral community for Aristotle is not, as for a modern, the rule of law; it is the antecedent bond of a common set of loves or desires, and the friendship resulting from an acknowledgement of these shared valuings. The institution, maintenance, and development of such a community – whether a smaller community such as a school, an art gallery, a hospital, an expedition or a larger community such as a city – will naturally involve the common valuing of those traits of mind and character which serve the pursuit of those common goods that are the cement and raison d’être of the community. It will also involve the disvaluing of those actions or habits of character which undermine the goods of community and threaten in various ways the community’s existence or flourishing and a disvaluing of those

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traits of character which prevent individuals from making their due contribution to the community. A well-ordered community will have in hand, then, at least implicitly, a table of virtues – traits for the exercise of which honour, merit, and various other goods are to be apportioned – and a list of proscribed acts or habits of action (vices and vicious acts): acts of habits of action which are identified as harmful or deficient with respect to the goods of community and in respect of which a set of penalties or sanctions will be established. Law will have a tertiary role in such a well-ordered community: enjoying pride of place will be the goods that the community exists to pursue and to foster. In second place will be those virtues deemed necessary to and or constitutive of the sought-after goods; in third place will be public prescriptions which enumerate prohibitions of significantly harmful or defective acts or habits of action, and which assign rewards of various sorts for contributions to the goods of the community. Justice will be in second place to friendship: no socially agreedupon common goods, no criteria for merit or demerit and thus for reward and praise or for blame and punishment. And since the community will be virtue-based, justice will not be thought of as something that can be rendered by a set of rules, however systematic: it will be regarded instead as a virtue, one to be used in applying the laws of the community by those practically wise members of the community with a sound grasp of the goods of the community and of their proper ordering and inter-relation. Since rational authority will reside in these practically wise individuals, it is in them that political power will be invested (150–56). So much for how MacIntyre thinks that Aristotle’s conception of the moral community needs to be elaborated. But this chapter on Aristotle in After Virtue concludes with a slightly sharper, slightly fuller set of criticisms of Aristotle’s ethical theory in its Nicomachean Ethics form than Short History gave us, and it is by working with these criticisms that MacIntyre’s own neo-Aristotelian moral-cumpolitical theory will begin to take shape. The criticisms fall into four categories. The first and most telling has to do with what MacIntyre sees as Aristotle’s lack of historical consciousness. To begin with (and tendentiously) MacIntyre accuses Aristotle of having a confidence in the finality and almost complete adequacy of his central philosophical doctrines – a confidence which prevented him from seeing that these doctrines, like the ones they saw themselves as superseding, could themselves be superseded by future more adequate doctrines. It is a much enriched and modified Aristotelianism that MacIntyre himself will want to defend. He accuses Aristotle also of lacking any awareness of the movement of history as something morally instructive and as something consequently requiring the close attention of the moral theorist. Aristotle, he argues, is also entirely wedded to the socio-political form of the Greek polis as the arena for the pursuit of the good life; he therefore does not address, as later Aristotelians must, the question of whether and how his conception of the good life can survive the absence of the institution of the polis (157–9). In a related way, MacIntyre sees Aristotle as possessing an insufficiently historical concept of essential human nature (MacIntyre will later defend a version of such, and be faced with the challenge of showing that the very notion is not oxymoronic). Typical of

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this particular shortcoming, he notes, is Aristotle’s notorious belief that slaves and non-Greeks were permanently tied to their inferior forms of life and incapable of changing so as to be fit for pursuit of the good and best life. After Virtue’s second area of criticism of Aristotle’s moral outlook concerns his denigration or unawareness of the value of the creative virtues and skills involved in manual labour. This, MacIntyre notes, was the product of Aristotle’s class-bound vision of the good life which A Short History of Ethics had already spoken of, and it will be natural for MacIntyre here to want to correct Aristotle on the matter of work-related virtues by means of Marx. A third area of criticism is the lack of appreciation MacIntyre sees in Aristotle for the goods of conflict. This criticism is not well developed: seemingly believing in their existence himself, MacIntyre credits Sophocles with drawing our attention to the existence of tragic conflicts – conflicts of the right with the apparent right against the backdrop of cosmic justice – and he claims that Aristotle, as Plato before him, had an excessively simple picture of the self’s capacity for harmony and unity, and the political order’s capacity for these as well. We should instead, MacIntyre holds, as the Australian philosopher John Anderson urged us: ‘not … ask of a social institution: “What end or purpose does it serve?” but rather, “Of what conflicts is it the scene?” … For it was Anderson’s insight – a Sophoclean insight – that it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are’ (163–4). This somewhat curious and certainly undeveloped criticism of Aristotle is certainly in tension, to understate the point, with MacIntyre’s earlier praise for Platonic-Aristotelian ethics over and against Sophoclean ethics. What MacIntyre probably means to say here is that a notion of subordinate conflicts over shared goods can and needs to be built into any account of the shared goods themselves and of the unifying function of those goods. A final and highly important criticism for the development of MacIntyre’s own moral theory concerns the nature of teleology in Aristotle’s ethics. This is surely one of the most important and unsatisfying claims in After Virtue, one which has attracted much secondary comment and criticism. Part of the reason for the criticism is that MacIntyre, when finding fault with Aristotle’s depiction of the human telos, is almost cryptic about what he means by Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical biology’. To retrace our steps a bit, most of the first part of the book was devoted to the argument that moral concepts in the dominant Western tradition have their origin, and find their sole adequate justification, point, and purpose both in discoveries about the teleological structure of human life (i.e. human life’s intrinsic shape with beginning, middle and end or over-arching, unifying purpose) and in discoveries concerning the prerequisites and conditions for a fully achieved such life. MacIntyre sees in Aristotle a clear awareness of the existence of a human te&loj which provides that unifying purpose, but with respect to the content of that te&loj or ultimate goal we have seen him raise some substantial and familiar objections to Aristotle’s account. If full flourishing is and should be the ultimate goal of all human strivings, and if Aristotle’s table of the virtues is in ways deficient owing to its original social and historical context, than would-be contemporary Aristotelians have a significant

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problem before them. It will not do here, as MacIntyre notes uncontroversially enough, to thank Aristotle for teaching us that flourishing (i.e. flourishing made possible and in part constituted by exercising a set of virtues) is the goal of human life – and then try to come up with our own list of virtues and vices. Here, After Virtue is helpfully explicit: This view ignores the place in our cultural history of deep conflicts over what human flourishing and well-being do consist in and the way in which rival and incompatible beliefs on that topic beget rival and incompatible tables of the virtues. Aristotle and Nietzsche, Hume and the New Testament are names which represent polar oppositions on these matters. (162)

In his observations about the relation between pleasure and activity, Aristotle does usefully teach us, MacIntyre notes, that some general end such as ‘pleasure’ or ‘enjoyment’ cannot serve as an adequate candidate for the human telos: these states supervene on incommensurably different forms of activity, and we need therefore to know which form of pleasure or enjoyment might be the most suitable candidate for our ultimate end while recognizing that such states qua supervenient cannot be the primary determinant of that telos or end. MacIntyre also thinks that Aristotle’s insight into the relation between character on the one hand and perception and judgement on the other teaches us that no mere appeal to our biological nature can fill in the picture of the virtues necessary for human flourishing as such. The abstraction of an unvarnished biological nature tells us far too little about our appropriate good, whereas our biological nature as we find it, when under conditions of reflection, has already been altered by social forces of uncertain value. All human agents are already raised in a social setting which modifies and shapes their character, so inclining their biological nature to desire certain things and not desire others; all developed human desiring takes place under antecedent social conditioning and its habituating effects. Although MacIntyre doesn’t link these two considerations together, their conjunction can plausibly be thought to be what he finds finally unsatisfactory in Aristotle’s conception of the human telos– and why he thinks Aristotle’s position on that telos is un-selfconsciously incoherent or at best incomplete. Aristotle holds both that the holistic and harmonious development of intrinsic human psychosomatic capacities is the human end and that a socially unconstructed characterization of the human end by human agents is impossible. So in this way an Aristotelian-style theory of morality and the good life points beyond itself and requires supplementing by an account showing that the human end which the theory portrays is not damagingly parochial or blinkered by the social-cum-historical standpoint from which it is unavoidably articulated. (MacIntyre makes this point more explicitly in the new introduction to the most recent reissuing of his Marxism and Christianity, one of the clearest statements of his understanding of rationality and moral argument to date; see MacIntyre, 1995: xv–xxiv. We will examine his remarks in those pages in Chapter 8 below.)

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As After Virtue notes here, Aristotle ties his own portrayal of the human end too closely to the institutional arrangements and the social horizon of the Greek polis, and so the crucial question for one who sees in the Aristotelian theory of practical rationality the best hope for rescuing and preserving moral objectivity in our own day is whether the Aristotelian conception of morality and the good life can survive outside the polis. The narrative of After Virtue accordingly turns next to a consideration of the fortunes of the Aristotelian conception in the Middle Ages following the demise of the Greek city-states and prior to the widespread rejection of Aristotelianism in the early modern period. The great advantage MacIntyre sees Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Aristotelians of the Middle Ages possessing is their being steeped in historical consciousness owing to the character of their respective religious belief-systems. Narrative is built into the very structure of Jewish and Christian and Islamic theology, MacIntyre notes, so the theists of the Middle Ages were able to work with the heroic era’s and the classical dramatist’s concept of narrative quest in a way that Aristotle was not – and they are able to link this notion with Aristotle’s core theory of the virtues. The focus of Chapter Thirteen, ‘Medieval Aspects and Occasions’, is on specifically Christian appropriations of Aristotle, but it is in many ways the least satisfactory chapter in the book. One of the reasons why the quality of critical work on MacIntyre is uneven though the quantity great is that MacIntyre draws on a breadth of historical knowledge which few philosophers presently writing in English can match. Historians, and humanists generally, are therefore drawn to his work, but they rarely possess the kind of philosophical tools that make for good criticism on the conceptual as opposed to the empirical side of things. Philosophical criticism of MacIntyre, in its turn, often misses the point, because it lacks the necessary patience and sympathy with matters of historical context to understand MacIntyre’s philosophical claims as they emerge out of the historical considerations he draws upon. So analytic philosophers are apt to find MacIntyre’s philosophical claims hazy and ill-defined, whereas humanists are apt to find his historical and contextual work meagre, spotty, and second-hand. Of course, it is precisely the in-between quality of MacIntyre’s style of thought (a style one might call ‘historical philosophy’) that makes it so suggestive – an inbetweenness liable to make it unsatisfactory to both camps (historians usually having the greater justification). And yet, to put the point a bit over-simply, the greatest merit in MacIntyre’s approach lies in its capacity to move the historically oriented in a more conceptual direction and the conceptually oriented in a more historical direction, even if the instrument by which MacIntyre does this is itself manifestly imperfect (a charge which he would be unlikely to deny). Chapter Thirteen of After Virtue is a very good illustration of this. There are some very suggestive connections made in it – between Stoic ethics and one strain of Christian ethics, between the intentionalist ethics of Abelard and the secular Christian ethics of John of Salisbury – but there are highly idiosyncratic principles of selection at work in the chapter, and not enough sustained argument for a number of its central points. It is, as a result, not liable to be found compelling by those well acquainted

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with mediaeval thought. To begin with, the contrast between a classical ethical conception such as Aristotle’s and any recognizably Christian ethical conception is not well drawn. There are some brief words about the centrality of the new and distinctively Christian virtue of charity and the difference it makes to ethics, but not nearly enough is said to elucidate the nature and mechanism of this theological virtue for those without theological background (it would have been better, in fact, if the chapter had been organized around this one point). MacIntyre does observe that Christian belief requires Christian Aristotelians to reinterpret the human telos so that it is now understood, not as the life of virtue crowned by theoretical contemplation, but as the life of virtue aimed at contemplative union with God – a union both intellectual and volitional that is begun in this life and consummated in the next. The Christian does not therefore, like Aristotle, believe in moral luck: she or he does not believe that any misfortune can deprive her or him of the telos of human life as such. No adventitious factors – not sickness, congenital defects, tragic losses of loved ones, etc. – but only free, interior acts of will can keep the moral agent from arriving at the supreme good of life, loving union with God. MacIntyre also notes here that, owing to the Bible, Christian thinkers were bound to add a good number of new virtues, virtues such as purity and patience and forgiveness, to the classical table of the virtues (177–8). We have with the arrival of Christianity, he notes, a teleology of a new kind. If love of God is now the summum bonum, and if it is within the reach of all and can be lost only by free interior acts, we are faced with a very different moral framework than that of classical Aristotelianism. For Aristotle, we have seen MacIntyre argue, considerations of will play no significant role in the moral life: considerations of character are paramount. For the Christian as typified by Peter Abelard, MacIntyre observes, character may strongly incline one to act in one way or another, but the crucial moral determinant of action is the will. So we have in the Christian era a key conceptual innovation in philosophical and moral psychology – a point the chapter does not develop adequately. Moral perfection for the Christian as opposed to the Aristotelian is no longer merely a matter of measuring up to some standard of essential human nature fully realized, but fidelity to a covenant of friendship with a person (i.e. a divine person, the Creator). This introduces the new moral category of sin – infidelity to that covenant – and the need for new virtues such as humility, repentance and forgiveness of the moral failings of others. Moral imperfection takes on a new face: it is no longer merely deficiency in moving towards full selfrealization, it may also be perverse delight in disobedience to divine law: it may involve an evil will over and above a bad, because deficient, character. To Aristotle’s discourse about the virtues, MacIntyre notes, the Christian naturally adds a much fuller discourse about the vices than that typically present in ancient thought. MacIntyre had pointed out earlier that the picture of life as a quest (i.e. a vocation with a specific mission) is of paramount significance in the Christian ethical outlook. Life is viewed by the Christian as a journey towards a goal – a journey amidst obstacles, difficulties, temptations to evil – in the attainment of which goal the human good consists. The virtues for the Christian are naturally therefore understood

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as those qualities of mind and character which enable the Christian to overcome the obstacles and difficulties and resist the temptations so as to arrive at the journey’s destination. If we turn to MacIntyre’s treatment of individual mediaeval Christian thinkers in After Virtue’s Chapter Thirteen, we see him interpreting the ethics of Abelard as a significant intentionalist turn in ethical thinking: a move away from seeing ethics as primarily concerned with external actions and their social consequences and towards seeing it as something wholly interior. So for Abelard, MacIntyre notes, it is free acts of will which respect the demands of divine law and either mould character in accord with those demands or pervert it in disobedience of that law. MacIntyre observes here a connection between Abelard and the prior Stoic tradition in ethics – Stoicism representing for MacIntyre a paradigm case of a ‘morality of law’ – and he points to similar background social factors at work in the case of each ethical conception causing the likeness between them. For the Stoic, on MacIntyre’s interpretation, virtue is some one thing either possessed fully by the agent or not at all (Stoics do not speak of virtues in the plural). Virtue is comprised of knowledge and right judgement concerning the requirements of cosmic law in the here and now, plus the will to act in accord with such requirements. There is no good life to be had outside of a life lived in accord with the demands of universal cosmic law: the moral life is the good life since there are no goods to be possessed except in conformity to the moral will which is the sole, unconditional good. This kind of ethical conception endows its adherents with a great independence from their social and political circumstances, MacIntyre notes, and in this morality of cosmic law observance, he sees a corrosive individualism: the common life is, or can be treated by the Stoic, as something external to the moral life and the good life. In the political circumstances of Stoicism’s time MacIntyre sees the explanation for the appeal of the Stoic framework: the community life of the city-state has been destroyed by both the Alexandrian and Roman imperial orders; individuals are increasingly alienated from public and political life and cannot easily identify their good with the good of their surrounding social order. A retreat to the private and the personal, a privatization of the good, becomes appealing (169–70). With Abelard, though, MacIntyre notes, the motivation for a turn toward the moral interior is different, but he sees in it similar negative consequences, and we can perceive here again MacIntyre’s Aristotelian, and especially Hegelian, proclivities for seeing the good and the moral life as necessarily the common and civic life. His case against Abelard is not well made, but the allegation, in effect, is that from an Abelardian standpoint the active life of political virtue possesses only a contingent relation to the human telos, this now being imperfectly understood as life lived in conformity to law (divinely revealed law in Abelard’s case). The life of political action is not understood as in important part constitutive of that end. Not so, however, in the rival twelfth-century ethics of John of Salisbury or of Alan of Lille, MacIntyre will argue next, and he bids us again to consider the social and political circumstances of the time.

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In the twelfth century, newly emerging Christendom is badly in need of a way of relating the requirements of divine moral law to the actions and transactions of the new secular Christian, as opposed to clerical Christian, institutions: an ethic for universities and kingdoms is needed, as opposed to one primarily for monasteries and episcopacies. Christendom inherits two resources to aid it in this task, After Virtue notes: the ethical discourse of the Bible and the heroic ethos of the newly evangelized barbarian peoples. Since the divine law in which Christianity believes is universal, so too must be its secular Christian ethic. But this means that more than a heroic understanding of the moral life plus the ethical precepts of Scripture are needed for the task. What is needed, and what Christian thinkers will naturally seek in the inheritance of ancient, particularly Aristotelian, philosophy, is a secular moral framework and moral vocabulary along with those techniques of reason which the Bible has not as its purpose to provide. As MacIntyre notes, various Christian thinkers will try their hand at this task and come up with different, and in some cases, incompatible ways of conceptualizing the secular ethical life; they will provide different tables of the virtues and vices and different rank orderings of these. Of central interest for MacIntyre in After Virtue (and we have seen an anticipation of this in his very earliest work) is the Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas (which will later enjoy great prominence in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?). While MacIntyre credits Aquinas in After Virtue with producing the best-ever commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, he has several significant criticisms of Thomistic-style Aristotelian ethics, each of which anticipates the elaboration of his own original moral theory yet to come in Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen of After Virtue, ‘The Nature of the Virtues’ and ‘Virtues, Unity of a Human Life, and the Concept of Tradition’ respectively. Aquinas, he observes, will not admit the possibility of a tragic moral conflict except as deriving from an antecedent fault in a moral agent’s character. He thus fails to improve on Aristotle in this respect. He also fails to improve on Aristotle’s notion of the τεϖλο’ of human action, since his notion is either premised on faith, and so unavailable for philosophical ethics, or merely a re-statement of Aristotle’s notion, and ‘yet we have every reason to reject Aristotle’s physical and biological science’ (179). This returns us to MacIntyre’s unsatisfactorily rendered objection concerning Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical biology’. What he ought to have said to be clearer here is that Aristotle’s philosophy of mind (as it is called today) and related theory of human nature are no longer tenable, but he would have to show how either of these rest in important ways on Aristotle’s physics and biology, and this he has not done. Another criticism MacIntyre makes here, and a more interesting if scarcely developed one, is that Aquinas’s elaboration of the virtues in their hierarchy and inter-relation is excessively a priori: it is driven too much by deduction from antecedent theory, and not enough from the contexts of practical experience, to answer the questions with which many ordinary moral agents are faced. In fact, much of Aquinas’s theory of the virtues, by its very place in the dialectical structure of the Summa Theologiae, is derived from and viewed as warranted with respect to the metaphysics and the theory of human nature which precedes it in the Summa.

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But this of course might be viewed more as a merit than a demerit of the theory, and a criticism of the theory would have to show up weaknesses in its metaphysical and anthropological foundations which MacIntyre does not attempt. MacIntyre’s third criticism of Aquinas contains a glaring error which puts into serious doubt his grasp of the Thomistic and Aristotelian theory of the virtues in After Virtue. He objects to the entailment of Aquinas’s theory, given what MacIntyre acknowledges as its commitment to an all-or-nothing unity of the virtues, that the ostensible ‘courage’ of a Nazi soldier would have to be regarded as not a virtue at all. While MacIntyre concedes here that the moral re-education of an intelligent and admittedly evil Nazi would require him to unlearn many vices and learn a number of new virtues, such as charity and humility, the Nazi would not, he argues, have to unlearn that avoidance of both excessive fear and excessive self-confidence in the face of danger which the (controversially described) virtue of courage represents. But to say this is to rather seriously miss the point of what Aristotle means by a)reth& and Aquinas by virtus. Virtues for either are not mere habits, but habits perfective of the agent. As Aristotle states: ‘every virtue or excellence both brings into good condition the thing of which it is the excellence and makes the work of that thing be done well; for example, the excellence of the eye makes both the eye and its work good; for it is by the excellence of the eye that we see well. … Therefore the virtue of man also will be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his work well’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 6, Ross trans.). Aristotle goes on to specify the ‘good’ and the ‘well’ that this state of character involves: it is for one ‘to feel [emotions or pleasures or pains] at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, in what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue a)reth& ’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 6, Ross trans.). And to feeling here, and to not yet active desire, Aristotle adds actions: ‘Similarly with regard to actions also there is excess, defect, and the intermediate.’ Aquinas merely re-states this position in his Treatise on the Virtues in the Summa Theologiae when he says: ‘virtue is ascribed to anything on account of some relation of that thing to the good. Whence a human virtue, which is a habit of action, is a habit for the good, for acting in pursuit of the good’ (Summae Theologiae, Books I–II, q. 55, a. 3, Resp., my trans.) The two prerequisites he later identifies for an appetitive habit (such as courage) to be directed towards the good are: (1) that the object it seeks accords with what reason teaches us about the human end – that the object be a ‘bonum conveniens rationi, quod est finis debitus’ , that is, a good not not incompatible with the all-things-considered human end or summum bonum, and (2) that it pursue such an object by means that are themselves reasonable, acting throughout ‘per rationem recte consiliantem, iudicantem, et praecipientem’ (Summae Theologiae, Books I–II, q. 58, a. 5, Resp.). This is to say that the habit operates in accord with the all-things-considered perceptions, judgements, and prescriptions of prudentia or right practical reason. Taken in themselves, these statements are but a short-hand specification of the prerequisites for a habit or capacity being considered as a habit for one’s genuine good – that is, a virtue.

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By the first condition here, the ‘in accord with the end proposed by reason’ or the finis debitus conveniens ratione condition, Aquinas means a choice in accord with that knowledge of one’s genuine good available to theoretical inquiry or inquiry about what is the case. He means to exclude those actions or habits of action which are found to be intrinsically compatible with one’s all things considered end or summum bonum. By ‘reasonable means’ in the second condition (the Latin reads ‘ut homo recte accipiat ea quae sunt ad finem’), he is referring to that instrumental direction the mind gives in pursuit of the partial and particular good at which a habit aims, a direction which ensures that this good be pursued ‘in the right way’, that is, not to the detriment of the self in other important respects and to one’s attainment of the overall good. So, the act of an otherwise good habit exercised at the wrong time (e.g. in place of the exercise of another habit whose action is called for in the here-and-now circumstances) would not be the act of a virtue, but of a sham virtue. As an Italian saying goes, a mother who is off in church praying while the pasta is burning on her oven is half angel, half devil: the habit of piety which has her in church praying is not in this case (as in other potential cases in kind) an act of the virtue of piety. Now, quite clearly, both Aristotle and Aquinas mean to rule out habits like the courage of the Nazi from being virtues, as they would want to rule out the capacity of a thief who is regularly able to avoid rashness and excessive fear when confronted by the dangers of unjustly taking the property of others, and they have perfect justification for doing this. The actions which issue from these habits have not the ‘right object’ in Aristotle’s terms: in fact, being intrinsically unjust, these fall into his category of intrinsically defective acts discussed earlier. And as unjust action types, they lack, in Aquinas’s terminology, the possibility of being ordered to the full human good – they lack that finis debitus conveniens ratione. Above and beyond this, which is enough to distinguish a mere courageous habit (i.e. a skill) from the virtue of courage, the habit in the case of the Nazi may also fail to qualify as a virtue for being inspired by a defective motive, namely racism. It may produce actions not ‘for the right reason’. Even with a creditable motive, for instance, the Nazi’s will to stay alive to support his family after the war – or in the case of the thief, his will to improve his family’s standard of living – the habit will produce actions which are harmful to their agent and to the common good. A habit to commit intrinsically unjust acts is not perfective of the Nazi or the thief as agents, and so cannot and should not be accounted a virtue. For Aristotle, as Aquinas, the entire point of a theory of the virtues is to give an account of agent-well-beingin-community, and MacIntyre is perhaps misled here by a desire for originality to overlook this important distinction between skilful habit and virtue in their respective moral theories. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, the moral re-education of the Nazi could indeed build on the habit to face danger appropriately which he possesses, but it would have possibly to replace the motive behind this habit, and certainly alter the range of objects towards which this habit of action has extended – no habitual justice behind acts of bravery, no habit perfective of their agent, and hence no virtuous habit of

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courage. It is precisely this point which compels one to acknowledge the need for unity or integration between habits – in this case, a unity between prudence, justice and courage – if any one of them is to be accounted a good habit or a virtue. 5.4

Reconstituting Virtue-based Morality

Chapter Fourteen, ‘The Nature of the Virtues’, is the heart of After Virtue, and with Chapter Fifteen, ‘The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition’, it contains the key elements in MacIntyre’s attempt to formulate an original theory of morality by working within, criticizing, and extending what he has referred to as the ‘tradition of the virtues’. The narrative of the book has thus far tried to establish the presence of a distinctively pre-modern style of ethical discourse and argument, one whose particular and outstanding characteristics are: a belief that evaluative vocabulary is straightforwardly derivable from matters of empirical fact; a conviction that considerations of the good enjoy primacy over considerations of the right; a conviction that states of human character are more important for a theory of the good than states of affairs in the external world; a belief in the importance of stable dispositions for human well-being, and finally, a belief in the indispensability of agency exercised in a common, shared life (i.e. political action) for human well being. MacIntyre has of course consistently applauded these features of the pre-modern ethical outlook, but there are, he thinks, two large difficulties which stand in the way of this style of ethical thinking serving us today as that highly to be prized theory which will, in his words, ‘restore intelligibility and rationality to our [present] moral and social attitudes and commitments … [given that] we still, in spite of the efforts of three centuries of moral philosophy and one of sociology, lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of the liberal individualist point of view’ (259). Part of the After Virtue narrative has tried to show that there are rival traditions of the virtues, that is, distinct, historically evolving social orders with rival lists of essential virtues and or with rival rank orderings of those same virtues. What is needed, then, is some rational decision-procedure to guide our choice between these, some impersonal rational criteria to determine which human qualities are to be accounted virtues, and so included on the list, and which are not and so excluded from it. This list, with its correlative set of moral rules corresponding to the identified virtues, can then, he thinks, form the normative basis of a revitalized and credible moral theory for our own time. The construction of such a list is the first challenge for a new virtue-based theory of morality. There is a second and more fundamental challenge, as MacIntyre is aware, and which he has brought to our attention in After Virtue: past traditions of the virtues have disagreed as to what the nature of a virtue is, so in drawing upon the resources with which our moral past provides us, we must somehow adjudicate between competing claims concerning the nature of virtue. What past moral traditions have generally agreed upon, he observes, is that virtues are action dispositions defined in

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terms of some prior feature of social life. The search for a new social order-based definition is what MacIntyre is after in his own formulation of a virtue-centred moral theory. To this end, he puts before us what he sees as three key strands in past thinking about the virtues in the Western tradition, represented by the moral theories of, respectively, Homer, Aristotle, and Benjamin Franklin. The point of juxtaposing these three theories is to derive some ‘core conception’ of the virtues, one which will separate wheat from chaff, and rescue the wheat from its potential loss at the hands, not of rational criticism, but of mere social and historical contingencies. So the charm of MacIntyre’s own theory will be its plausible belief that past traditions of the virtues have each something to teach us, and that later traditions have tended (with exceptions) to build upon and extend discoveries of the earlier traditions – thus the need to work historically, and the benefit in so doing. Of course, in constructing his own theory for a now economically modernized and cosmopolitan social order, MacIntyre will also try to do this himself – to produce an original, best-yet account of virtue-based morality answerable to past attempts in kind. With respect to his three past representative virtue theories, we have, to start with his reading of Homer’s presentation of the ethical life, virtues understood entirely in terms of social role fulfilment. Homer’s virtues are dispositions effectively to discharge socially established roles. The problem with this understanding of virtue, though, MacIntyre notes, is that it leaves us without resources to decide between rival understandings of social roles when we are confronted with a choice between incompatible social orders – a common enough experience in post-traditional societies. The benefit of the Homeric account is that it underscores the importance of the social in our justification and valuing of those action-dispositions we will regard as virtues. Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition next, on MacIntyre’s account, add the crucial refinement to our understanding of the virtues that the virtues are dispositions whose possession and exercise are not merely enabling, but constitutive of the good life. Virtues are means internal to the end which they serve. Relatedly, this tradition offers us an understanding of virtue that has a universalist dimension: in Aristotelian parlance, we speak not merely of the virtues of agent x in social order y, but of human flourishing as such, the good for man as such. This should provide us, MacIntyre thinks, with necessary critical resources to decide between rival social orderings and rival valuations of the virtues. The limitation of this account of the virtues for MacIntyre is, as we have seen, that Aristotle allows not enough room for conflict of the good with the good, and that his account rests on an untenable biologically based conception of the human end. MacIntyre’s account will work with the presupposition of a less unitary conception of goods and the good, and supply a different teleology as a means for the justification of moral claims. (Interestingly, the MacIntyre of After Virtue no longer regards Aristotle’s conception of the good life as so socio-historically limited as his earlier A Short History of Ethics had.) Finally, in Benjamin Franklin’s concept of the virtues, After Virtue argues, we are given a new perspective on what is of value in the virtues, yet Franklin’s contribution

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is one which also threatens to distort what Aristotle has already taught us. Franklin’s virtues, on MacIntyre’s interpretation, are external and contingently related to the end of human well-being. They are dispositions expedient to the attainment of worldly prosperity, rather than dispositions whose exercise is in part constitutive of human flourishing (185). How, then, does MacIntyre propose that we understand ‘virtue’ today? What he does here is engage in a highly ingenious attempt to get to the bottom of what particularly these three past virtue theorists (and others) have seen, and then to combine elements from each while avoiding what he has identified as their respective limitations. After Virtue will thus define ‘virtue’ in three stages: the primary defining context and the primary place, MacIntyre will claim empirically, where what we call ‘virtues’ are actually discovered and valued will be in the sphere of what he denominates ‘practices’. Next, as he will clarify retrospectively in the postscript to the second edition of After Virtue, a quality will only be a candidate for the title ‘virtue’ if it meets conditions specified by two other dimensions of human life – the unity of the agent’s life, and her or his participation in an ongoing social tradition. First, what does MacIntyre mean by a ‘practice’? By a ‘practice’ I … 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. (187)

Examples of practices he gives are activities like football, chess, architecture, and farming; non-practices for him are activities such as throwing a football skilfully, tic-tac-toe, bricklaying, or planting turnips. This definition can be, and needs to be, broken down. Practices, in MacIntyre’s sense, are joint undertakings in which sharing and inter-personal co-operation are essential. By ‘internal goods’ he means first of all those incommensurably different satisfactions which supervene upon excellence in carrying out the activities which are constitutive of the practice: these are goods available only to, and generally recognizable only by, proficient participants in the practice (188–9). As goods they correspond, roughly, he thinks, to Mill’s ‘higher pleasures’. There is a second kind of good internal to a practice, and here MacIntyre’s explanation is less full and less helpful: it is ‘participation in the attempts to sustain progress and to respond creatively to problems [in the practice]’ so that, ‘discover[ed] within the pursuit of excellence … is the good of a certain kind of life’ (190). The point here, apparently, is that engagement in a practice can, and often does, occupy much of one’s life, and it can endow that life with value in a continuous and abiding way. The internal good in question would then be that of a life organized and unified in part by dedication to advancing some practice. Within practices, on this understanding, are also to be had other goods – ‘goods external to the practice’ – which correspond roughly to Mill’s ‘lower pleasures’ and which are, on Franklin’s mistaken but for MacIntyre partially illuminating understanding, what give the virtues point and purpose. These external goods are

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contingently related to that exercise of skill within a practice which makes possible both the attainment of the practice’s objectives and the development of its standards for achievement. External goods include things such as money, power, prestige, and social status – goods which themselves make possible that form of pleasure, external to the practice itself, which is a physical or psychological state: pleasure, for instance, resulting from the physical enjoyments which money can purchase, or from the social enjoyments prestige makes possible, but not that higher form of pleasure, that state of satisfaction which supervenes upon excellence in carrying out the activities constitutive of a practice. MacIntyre acknowledges that these external goods are genuine goods, but his argument, unsurprisingly, is that they are clearly lesser goods, and goods, moreover, the excessively keen pursuit of which can lead to the loss or diminishing of one’s capacity to attain the higher goods – those goods internal to practices. Hence the role of the virtues. By way of a further point, MacIntyre observes that goods internal to a practice are common, non-divisive goods: the possession of internal good x of practice y by participant z denies to no other participant the possession, in some measure or other, of that same good. Not so with the practice’s external goods: here we have a limited quantity of such, and typically, for person z to have external good q is to deny it to r and s. External goods are thus non-common, competitive (their pursuit usually brings with it winners and losers), and divisive (in the neutral but potentially negative sense of the term; AV: 187–99). Before he advances his practice-based definition of the virtues, MacIntyre bids us to be aware that practices in his sense are provided with a superstructure and sustained or endowed with the capacity to persist through time by institutions. Institutions are the social bearers of practices; they are entrusted with, among other things, the distribution to the practice’s participants of the goods external to the practice. Thus the assemblage of material necessary for MacIntyre’s innovative definition of virtue: what, then, is a virtue for him? It is, in the first part of a three-stage definition, ‘an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods’ (191). The guiding idea behind this definition is that practices, like co-operative activities, require for their maintenance and development the possession of certain character traits on the part of their participants. MacIntyre sees, in fact, three such character traits – ‘virtues’ in his stipulated sense – built into the very structure of any practice in good working order: justice (in the sense of impartiality), courage, and truthfulness. His claim will be that if participants in a practice collectively lack such character traits, the practice will soon decline, and the goods internal to it will no longer be attainable. If, and here a crucial claim, participants individually lack such traits, they will become free-riders in the practice (an uncontroversial enough observation), but also, and more tellingly (and more controversially), they will deprive themselves, however skilfully they carry out the practice’s constitutive activities, of the goods internal to the practice.

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There is, as critics such as Samuel Scheffler have noted, something highly counterintuitive about this last claim. But before examining it – and it is crucial to the justification of MacIntyre’s entire, and as he hopes, best-yet version of a virtue-based moral theory – let us retrace former ground a bit. The spirit of this new account is to keep certain central elements of the moral outlook of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics while dispensing with the kind of teleology presupposed by it. So in the first stage of his definition, MacIntyre endows virtue with a social locus as opposed to the personal locus more common in the Aristotelian tradition. Social teleology, the sustaining and furthering of some collective undertaking, is to replace biological teleology or the sustaining and the development of the self. This is not as dramatic a move as it might appear, or indeed, as MacIntyre himself sometimes portrays it, because considerations of the personal – the unity of an individual life, the kind of considerations involved in Aristotle’s own metaphysics of entelechy – will make a timely appearance in stage two of MacIntyre’s definition of virtue. So the change can be viewed more as a supplementing of Aristotle’s account, on the not implausible grounds that Aristotle to a degree neglected or under-examined (a) the role of the social collectivity, and (b) the open-ended and evolving (as opposed to fixed and given) character of the ends of certain modes of human activity (e.g. activities such as portrait painting or musical composition or theoretical physics). That this move from the personal – and therefore from the universal, given an essentialist account of human nature – to the social – and therefore to the historically determinate and particularized – may come at the price of an inescapable relativism in MacIntyre’s theory of practical rationality is a matter to which we will return later. The background picture of human nature with which MacIntyre is working is plausible enough, and is certainly well drawn: what is most interesting and valuable in a human life is the development of human powers to make and critically remake, to sustain, to solve, to discover – and finally to enjoy successfully achieved such activity. It is engaging in these tasks that most motivates us (an empirical psychological claim) and that should motivate us, given the kind of beings we are (a normative claim about human flourishing drawn from the theory of human nature). Such activity provides in the first place for our and our dependents’ survival and physical enjoyment, while bringing with it as by-product certain other less immediate external goods, such as power, social reputation and so on. These remain, however, lesser goods – things objectively less worth possessing – and if they, as products of that rational activity which is the extension of human creative and cognitive powers, are sought to an excessive degree, their pursuit will jeopardize and in ways eclipse the attainment of the higher goods of rational activity. As MacIntyre persuasively notes in his criticism of a Benjamin Franklin-style theory of the virtues, the activities which both comprise and sustain collective rational activity are worth performing for their own sake, and, significantly, their performance may at times and in ways require the loss or the sacrificing of lesser external goods (such as prosperity) for some all-things-considered greater good or set of goods. As for rational activity, MacIntyre seems right in insisting that we can generally best engage in such activities and derive satisfaction from their performance in a

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collective setting – one in which we are both trained and corrected by the more knowledgeable and proficient, while assisted simultaneously by our peers and subordinates as well. Fruitful participation in such collective undertakings, however, does require certain stable dispositions on our part, and this requirement is a function of any collective undertaking per se, not a function of any act of choice on our part: it is an objectively rather than subjectively constituted requirement. We must be fair in allowing ourselves to be measured by, and in measuring others according to, the standards of the practice. This includes recognizing the objective hierarchy that obtains among practitioners owing to their dissimilar contribution to the well-being of the practice. Hence, we must acquire and exercise the virtue of justice. We must be committed in an abiding way to preserving and fostering the joint undertaking against harm, impoverishment, diminishment of standards and so on. Hence, we need to possess the virtue of courage. Finally, we must be reliable in our communications with fellow practitioners, and honest in our judgement about their contributions, past and future, to the practice. Thus, we need the virtue of truthfulness. One could imagine MacIntyre trying to derive similar virtues from the enabling and preserving conditions of a practice as such, but he does not attempt to do so here. As it stands, though, the form of his argument has a promising shape to it. Selfrealization through rational activity typically requires human agents to enter into a community setting, of which a practice is a version on a small-scale. This communal setting can only be maintained by the habitual efforts of the community’s members to act according to impersonal standards and to recognize the authority over their actions of the community’s shared goods. They must recognize also the hierarchy that obtains among them as members of the community, or as participants in a practice, owing to their differing relation to the shared goods of that community or practice (e.g. as beginner, proficient, or expert – each group making a different level of contribution to the life of the community, and each having a different evaluative capacity with respect to its goods). Yet does MacIntyre not rest too much weight on this his stage one criterion for human qualities being accounted virtues? It would seem so. He does admit that there might be (a matter on which he remains agnostic here), such a thing as an intrinsically defective or even ‘evil’ (his term) practice, such as torture (199–200). But, this, as he is aware, makes the ascription of the term ‘virtue’ to the qualities needed to sustain such practices highly counter-intuitive and problematic. What way out of this difficulty has he? He attempts two different routes. First, he rightly recognizes that his earlier rejection of the unity of the virtues thesis (as present, for instance, in Aquinas) requires him to maintain that qualities of obvious moral disvalue such as these are still to count as virtues. Courage in preserving the practice of torture against public outcries is still the virtue of courage: ‘virtues … are defined not in terms of good and right practices, but in terms of practices’ (200). So what provides us with the resources to identify a practice as ‘right’ or ‘good’? Virtues themselves, he suggests, seeming to miss the circularity of this argument. How, if the virtue of justice is defined initially in terms of its practice-sustaining capacity, can that same virtue provide resources to criticize the practice? What

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other frame of reference does the virtue of justice actually possess? Here, at first, MacIntyre falls back on an earlier claim: to speak of virtue is necessarily to speak of law (200). Laws, by proscribing certain actions, set the parameters for what can count as a virtuous act while identifying what represents an action contrary to, or even destructive of, a virtue: some acts may per se destroy a habit or capacity (as an act of serious dishonesty, my example, might destroy the virtue of truthfulness). This is the way Aristotle, seemingly, and Aquinas, certainly, viewed the matter, but MacIntyre has not done enough work himself in giving rational grounds for the thesis concerning intrinsically defective acts. Neither, and more importantly, has he considered in any informative detail the manner in which Aristotle and Aquinas each derive their account of the virtues, so that the uninformed would have reason to think (and not merely MacIntyre’s own word) that his method of derivation is preferable or superior to that of these his predecessors. What MacIntyre is really doing at this stage, at the cause of some confusion, is employing a heuristic strategy aimed at leading the reader who has already accepted a weaker, more commodious conception of the virtues to accept now a more robust and determinate way of conceiving them. The advantage MacIntyre sees in beginning with the context of practices is to show how conflict of good with good situations are possible, since different practices can make incompatible and opposed demands on us. If it were the case, as he is aware, that there were no other considerations available to an agent to guide his actions on such occasions, then a morality of the virtues so defined would have left the agent in the same situation of criterionless choice with respect to action as does the liberal individualist morality which MacIntyre has been at great pains to criticize. In other words, the question of whether the goods internal to practice x should be sacrificed for the goods internal to practice y or vice versa would be rationally undecidable. The logical move MacIntyre makes at this stage is to say that the justice necessary to sustain a practice must be recognized to contain within itself the seeds of a justice that transcends the needs and the goods of that particular practice, and so it is in this direction that MacIntyre’s account of a virtuecentred morality proceeds. Practices, he observes, are themselves the subject of an at least twofold embeddedness. With respect to their members, practices are embedded in, and are a part of the story of, the life of any given practitioner. Here we have the source of MacIntyre’s unity of life consideration, his stage two element for the definition of a virtue. A practice that occupies a disproportionate place in an individual’s life – one that costs him or her time, energy, attention and so on to the detriment of other worthwhile or necessary practices in which he or she is or could be or should be engaged – can be criticized from the perspective of the wholeness and the unity of the individual agent’s life. Here, MacIntyre notes, we discover the importance of another indispensable human quality: the virtue of integrity, that habit of character whereby individuals endow their life and maintain it through time with coherence, unity, and wholeness of purpose. The unity of a life is certainly a more powerful standpoint from which to criticize practices. The human qualities which MacIntyre has called virtues, and which derive

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their initial point and purpose from practices, are qualities of agents – agents who have both a continuous identity through time and a multitude of spheres of action. The larger good of these agents’ lives requires that these qualities or virtues have a scope and a horizon for action beyond that of some individual practice. So, while virtues can first be thought of as instrumental in the constituting and sustaining of practices, they can next be seen as of value in serving the realization of the self over its longer and broader history: The virtues are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome harms, dangers, and temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good. (219)

Given unity of life considerations, the table of the virtues must be expanded, MacIntyre observes: ‘the catalogue of virtues will therefore include the virtues required to sustain the kind of households and the kind of political communities in which men and women can seek for the good together and the virtues necessary for philosophical enquiry about the character of the good’ (219). Thus, unity (of an as yet unspecified content) can act as the telos of an individual life, giving needful moral bearing to the agent, and providing her with a point of reference by means of which she can rank order the goods of her life – goods both external to practices and those internal or practice-constitutive. Without such a practice-transcendent telos, MacIntyre notes, the exercise of virtues such as justice (involving judgements of desert) and patience (involving perseverance and self-control in the hope of some worthwhile but as yet unattained good) would be impossible. We would be unable to exercise these virtues when they call for us, as they frequently do, to rank-order the goods internal to different practices–both for ourselves and for others (e.g. those over whom we have warranted authority; 202). What MacIntyre has in mind here is the question of how one engaged in the practice of politics, for instance, should reward the contribution of one given practice (e.g. the practice of military service) to the political community relative to that of some other (e.g. working with the homeless). Clearly, one can only do this in a non-arbitrary way with some conception of the overall human good in hand. Or, to use another of MacIntyre’s examples, in view of what larger considerations ought a teacher to persevere in working with a difficult student who shows little or no inclination to pursue the goods internal to the practice of algebra? We will return shortly to MacIntyre’s account of the content of this telos, or organizing life purpose. This notion of unity of life was very much present, MacIntyre thinks, in the minds and in the theories of pre-modern virtue ethicists: it is the natural accompaniment to an account of the virtues as excellences of mind and character, and together with these, it comprises what he will refer to as the ‘narrative self’. This narrative understanding of the self, he argues, is for its centrality in our predecessor social order and moral culture (what MacIntyre refers to as ‘the tradition of the

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virtues’) still deeply embedded in our modes of thought and practice. But owing to episodes of social and conceptual change, we have lost our proper hold on it. There are currently, according to After Virtue, three obstacles to our seeing the applicability of the concept of unity of life to our present moral commitments and our present self-understanding as moral agents. Contemporary life is often viewed as compartmentalized, with each compartment – adolescence, adulthood, professional life, personal life, social life, religious life – having its own requirements and standards for action, and its own demands for skilful execution. At a theoretical level, and reinforcing this first obstacle, there is a second obstacle which we have seen MacIntyre comment upon much previously: contemporary theories of the self (e.g. Sartrean existentialism or the sociological theory of Ralf Dahrendorf) draw a sharp distinction between the self and the social roles it occupies. Homogeneity and integrity in behaviour cease to be seen as possible or desirable: the self in role b cannot be brought into meaningful relation with the self in role c, nor can the self as such be identified with either self-in-role-b or self-in-role-c. The concept of the virtues as those action dispositions which make it possible that an agent’s life as a whole have one shape to it instead of another ceases to have application. The virtues are thus deprived of their necessary sphere for acquisition and exercise – the world of social relationships (204–5). A third and different obstacle MacIntyre highlights is that human actions are often viewed today (for instance, in the action theory of much analytic philosophy) as discrete atoms: as items, that is, characterizable independent of considerations of context. In attempting to show how such a view is false MacIntyre returns to themes in his earlier work on action explanation, and he has recourse again to the notion of narrative. The scheme for the proper understanding of human action that is deployed here – we have seen the details previously – is the following: human actions, ‘x’s digging in his garden’, are constituted by physical movements overlaid with agent intentions; the causally effective intentions, beliefs and desires of the agent must be distinguished into primary (i.e. ultimate) and secondary or instrumental (intending b for the sake of c). But these beliefs and desires can themselves only be accurately characterized in terms of the agent’s social setting. Agent x may be carrying out his action in the context of a practice (e.g. gardening), and/or of an institution (e.g. marriage) and or of some other social milieu. But each of these settings has a history, and so agent x’s actions can only be explained via an identification of his causally-effective-intentions-in-his-present-social-settings-according-to-the-wayhe-construes-those-settings-in-their-present-state. So here the concept of narrative – narrative history – necessarily has application: Consider what the argument so far implies about the interrelationships of the intentional, the social and the historical. We identify a particular action only by invoking two kinds of context, implicitly if not explicitly. We place the agent’s intentions … in causal and temporal order with reference to their role in his or her history, and we also place them with reference to their role in the history of the setting or settings to which they belong. In doing this, in determining what causal efficacy the agent’s intentions had in one or more directions, and how his short-term intentions succeeded or failed to be constitutive of his

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The upshot of this position, as MacIntyre is aware, is that human life has an intrinsic narrative structure to it – not an alien one imposed on it by the agent, nor one that is merely imposable on it by an observer ab extra and ex post facto. Purposive action is the paradigm case for human action; human behaviour for which we cannot discover the intentional component (as in neurotic behaviour) is for us the special and anomalous case in explaining human actions. Adequately explaining human action requires that we discover what story the agent understands himself to be living out and extending in undertaking a given action – what episode in that story, that is, his action is attempting to enact. To say ‘story’ is, of course, as MacIntyre observes, to say goal-driven or teleological form of consciousness: it is to say past-informed-and-future-directedbehaviour. All human agents, as he notes, inherit stories. We each inherit a certain determinate set of social roles and relations: for example, son of this father in this determinate social order during this particular epoch of history with these and those genetic traits. We each begin to write the story of our own life, not ab initio, but in media res, and so our exercise of moral agency is unavoidably particularized. Before any of us can answer the question ‘How shall I act?’, MacIntyre notes here, we must implicitly answer the question of ‘Of what stories am I a part?’, so our authorship of our own particular story is always only partial. The sum of the agent’s particular inheritances is what MacIntyre calls the human agent’s ‘moral starting point’. Thus we have MacIntyre’s commitment to a historicist holism in the explanation of human action. On this view, the part, the action in question, and the whole, the first-person ‘story’, are inter-definable: the part can only be understood as a part in abstraction from the whole, which whole is a historical process – no identification of the relevant bits of agent consciousness in their proper causal ordering and historical setting (e.g. the intent to flatter in order to gain favour with an employer in order to secure a certain post in order to live out a certain conception of the good life shared with one’s spouse), no accurate identification of the action to be explained (e.g., a speech act conveying information about a employee’s ostensible perception of his employer’s management skills). These matters have of course important implications for the theory of personal identity, and MacIntyre seeks to draw these out in this the strictly constructive part of After Virtue. As he understands it, the identity of a human person through time rests not on matters of memory and the continuity of psychological states, but on the identity of a character in a story. A person at any given time is an abstraction from this character, and so she or he is accountable to what she or he has done in the past. The character and its story are themselves embedded in a historical process comprised of an interlocking set of such characters-with-stories. Therefore, the notions of (a) intelligible action, (b) personal identity through time, (c) accountability and (d) narrative are inter-definable and inter-dependent (217–18).

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Returning to the important question of what content can be given to the notion of a telos of an individual life, MacIntyre’s answer in After Virtue is proceduralistsounding, seemingly evasive, and potentially vacuous, but it does in fact follow from what he has argued previously, and drawing on what precedes it in the text, it can be given a measure of substantive content. The point of the answer is to provide a uniform rational objectivist scheme for answering questions about the good and the right. MacIntyre’s answer to the question of the nature of the human telos, then, is: ‘the good life for man is the life spent in seeking 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). The good which a unified life represents is a higher-order good: a good which enables us to give measure, balance, hierarchical ordering, and harmony to our pursuit and enjoyment of those first-order goods (external, and especially internal) which participation in various practices makes possible. This task of unification, integration, and harmonization is, as MacIntyre describes it, a ‘narrative quest’. In pursuit of the best kind of life for ourselves, we are led to discover and contend with obstacles, temptations, difficulties – and we are led to increasing and sometimes surprising self-knowledge. In the course of this quest, new demands are placed on our minds and character, and so we discover the need for new qualities of both, that is, for new virtues. Still, in this sphere we aim at a good which by the nature of the case is a formal one, one whose content can only be known in advance to a partial extent. We do not know in any interesting or detailed way what that best possible shape our life can have except in and through the ongoing task of trying to endow it with such a shape. So MacIntyre’s quasi-formalism here can be defended as simply being simply faithful to the complex structure of human life in pursuit of the good as an ordinary agent experiences it. We are typically much more aware in our strivings of what the good life isn’t than what it is. The positive component is by far the more mysterious of the two, and the moral life for humans does very much have a via negativa trajectory to it. A third component in MacIntyre’s definition of virtue yet remains. As he observes, there is a third context for the exercise of human qualities, and this corresponds to that second sphere of the embeddedness of practices. Practices, he notes, are, like their constituent members, entities which exist with a continuous identity through time. They are embodied in, and super-structurally sustained by, institutions. These institutions, the social bearers of practices, have themselves a history – a process of decline and impoverishment and or of growth and enrichment through time. A central part of the history of an institution is its rational component, those debates within the institution (e.g. within a university) concerning what the practice (e.g. theoretical physics) is and should become – what its goods are and or should be. The outcome of these institutional debates of course contributes to the shaping of the practice of which the institution is the bearer. Practices in this way form part of, with other practices, mutable sustaining-institutions-with-histories, and these institutions together in their inter-connection constitute social traditions.

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The pursuit of goods internal to a given practice must therefore square, not only with the exigencies of the unity of life of the individual agent, but also with the larger needs and demands of the social traditions which sustain practices. The human qualities which make possible the pursuit and enjoyment of the goods internal to practices thus cannot be considered virtues unless they also respect the demands of agent unity and the needs and demands of these larger sustaining social traditions. Qualities that fail at either of these two levels will be not virtues, but rather simulacra of virtues on MacIntyre’s account; institutions that are sustained by such qualities will be in one state or other, he will say, of moral corruption (195). As for social traditions themselves, these, for MacIntyre, make a twofold demand on the human qualities of their inhabitants. In the first place, the individual’s pursuit of the good and the best life cannot but take place in the context of a network of preexistent and continuing social relations. Our pursuit each of the good is situated and specified by a determinate moral starting point. We seek the good with a determinate social identity – as members of a particular family, students of a certain education, members of a certain political order, and so on. Fairness requires of us that we discharge the requirements of the social roles with which our moral starting point endows us – that we make a contribution to the maintenance and development of the larger social entities to which we belong and which sustain us. Qualities of mind and character will not be perfective of us as agents unless they incline us to reciprocate on our social debts and make our due contribution not only to the practices to which we belong, but to the social entities-with-histories, or social traditions, on which we as agents and these practices in their institutional embodiment depend. Of course, as MacIntyre is aware, this contribution may be a critical and transformative one: our moral starting point, our social identity with its constitutive social roles and their demands, is but a starting point. If reason leads us to believe that change in our social traditions (families, large- and small-scale political communities etc.) is called for, then our social contribution may involve the attempt to effect such change, and this will make its own demands on our minds and our character – for instance, in the areas of courage, justice, and truthfulness. What we should not do, he insists, is think that our exercise of moral agency, however reactive and againstthe-grain-of-our-background-social-context, is ever anything but a particularized agency: Particularity can never be left behind or obliterated. The notion of escaping from it into a realm of entirely universal maxims which belong to man as such, whether in its eighteenth-century Kantian form or in the presentation of some modern analytical moral philosophies, is an illusion and an illusion with painful consequences. When men and women identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually behave worse than they would otherwise do. (221)

This claim seems over-stated, and it is given in the form of an assertion more than an argument. Earlier, MacIntyre had attempted to provide the partial justification for it by observing that since we are each born into social traditions which have a

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past, ‘to try and cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships’ (221). It seems obvious, though, that one might make the discovery that one was born into a morally deformed tradition (the son of a Mafia capo in Sicily) and that disavowal of any connection with that social tradition and a radical escape from it might be precisely what reason and the virtues demand. MacIntyre could defend himself here by providing some account of how such a change of social tradition-cum-moral community, in order to be rational and nonarbitrary, must begin by working with one’s roots in moral particularity. But this is more the business of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and such a defence is not attempted here, though it is clearly very much needed. We have now, in any event, the third component in MacIntyre’s definition of virtue: a virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which also ‘sustain[s] those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context’ (223). By means of this three-layered definition of virtue, MacIntyre thinks that claims to moral objectivity can be rescued and successfully defended. What his reconstructed virtue theory provides us with is a scheme for determining whether a contemplated action does or does not lead to the genuine all-things-considered good of an agent: an agent, that is, considered (1) as participant in a practice, and (2) as subject of a narrative with an identity through time, and (3) as member of a social tradition (or, presumably, of overlapping and interlocking social traditions). Moral obligation, on this picture, then arises from the discovered demands that these three spheres of human agency jointly place upon the self – even as these same spheres when, in good order, minister to the full realization and to the genuine, all-things-considered good of that self. This, as MacIntyre observes, leaves us not so much with a morality of objective principles, as a morality of objective principles plus the crucial skill of knowing which to apply in a given circumstance and how to apply it or them (223). Thus, even when confronted by a practical dilemma (which MacIntyre mis-describes here as a tragic dilemma, something which he no longer accepts) – that is, a choice between two contingently incompatible goods, or the conflict of the good with the good scenario of which he has formerly made much, there will be an objectively better of worse way of handling the situation. There will be a virtuous (e.g. prudent, courageous, graceful) as opposed to unvirtuous (e.g. imprudent, cowardly, graceless) form of action. But one obvious problem posed for MacIntyre’s position here is how it can provide us with the resources for a non-subjective rank-ordering of goods and obligations. We will postpone an examination of this issue, however, until Part III of this book. Although he thinks that he has now given us a compelling rational justification for our adopting the standpoint of the virtues (i.e. on his special construal of the term) in our moral self-consciousness, he is far from thinking that it will be easy for us act on such a theoretical basis given the present shape of our social order. Few, if any, have insisted more than MacIntyre that a moral theory presupposes a determinate social order for its actual and possible embodiment, yet After Virtue has identified the dominant social order of the present day as a ‘culture of liberal or bureaucratic

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individualism’ which is highly antithetical to the pre-modern tradition of the virtues. So the socio-political question – the question about the social embodiment of this moral vision and the present obstacles to it – is a pressing one for the neo-virtue ethicist, and the last three chapters of After Virtue attempt to address it. 5.5 The Present Social Imperative The correct application of a remedy presupposes some measure of an accurate understanding of the disease or pathology. After Virtue has already detailed the nature and weaknesses of the present so-described bureaucratic, emotivist social order, and the book concludes by attempting to show how in the forms of theory generated by such a social order in its nascent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century condition, the nature of virtue came to be re-defined. Chapter Sixteen, ‘From the Virtues to Virtue and After Virtue’, is a highly condensed attempt at an account of this, and while it contains some fairly breathless intellectual history, the chapter rewards careful reading and re-reading. Although MacIntyre does not quite state it outright in the chapter, the fundamental cause of the decline of virtue, in his view, is what Karl Polanyi referred to in his eponymously entitled monograph as ‘the Great Transformation’ (Polanyi, 1944). According to Polanyi’s account, which MacIntyre follows fairly closely, economic modernization, or the development of non-local markets with the demands that these place on the formation of impersonal capital, has seriously damaged the institutional bases for the tradition of the virtues. The values of the market and the incentives these give for the growth of that character trait of acquisitiveness (formerly regarded as a vice) lead to a higher valorization of those goods external to practices, and a consequent lesser valorization of the goods internal to practices. As work moves outside the household, it tends easily to lose its focus on the supporting and sustaining of the household and the local community, save in an entirely pragmatic, economic way. Work in many instances becomes reduced to a mere means to the end of survival, and the goods internal to the activities of work are lost sight of or banished. Art, the realm of aesthetic considerations and values, becomes separated off from quotidian activity and slowly turned into a sphere of autonomous activity – aesthetic workers, as it were, produce aesthetic goods for passive consumers (227ff.). So while work, MacIntyre holds, is de-aestheticized, art is de-ethicized. The integrity, and even the possibility, of two key practices – creating and sustaining a family, and creating and sustaining a small-scale political community – are threatened. Family integrity, MacIntyre notes, is endangered by the impersonal and unmeasured demands which the market makes on its employee-instruments. The practice of politics in its classical understanding and as best expressed by Aristotle is rendered almost impossible: politics, that art of ordering the collective pursuit of the acknowledged shared goods of human nature, can no longer flourish because there is no shared vision of the good informing and directing the activities of the social order. The good has been privatized, and the unity in the new modern social

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order is but a largely procedural and bureaucratic unity. The stage is in this way set for the appearance of those three central actors in the drama of modernity discussed earlier in the book: the aesthete whose pursuit of aesthetic values is divorced from any conception of a unified life, with the moral demands that such a life makes; the bureaucratic manager who, under the guise of value-neutrality, seeks to impose the modern self’s understanding of value on the workplace, and the therapist who ministers to that individualistic pursuit of the good characteristic of the modern self (228). It is unsurprising then, MacIntyre argues here, that where understanding and commitment to practices and to narrative unity of life are damaged, the understanding of and commitment to the virtues, in their traditional acceptation, should likewise be damaged. This provides the motivation for Chapter Sixteen of After Virtue’s condensed history of the conceptual change behind our presently impoverished and confused understanding of virtue. Here we retrace ground swiftly covered, if from a different perspective, in A Short History of Ethics. While virtue discourse continues as a hold-over from pre-modern social orders (‘How could it not?’, MacIntyre asks), the erosion of its context of intelligibility and of justification within those social orders (i.e. the gradual loss of an understanding of the goods internal to practices and of the unity of life) requires that ‘virtue’ be re-conceptualized. A new attempt at composing a list of virtues indispensable for the good life – and a new rank ordering of these virtues – must be undertaken. Former virtue terms such as ‘justice’, ‘charity’, ‘chastity’ and so on must be redefined, and virtue language must now be related to the psychology of a new social entity, the ‘individual’ – that identity of the emerging modern self. There is a bold claim behind this account of the evolutionary decline of virtue discourse which is really the central claim of the book: that the protagonists of the virtues, having consciously rejected or unwittingly lost the sole adequate context of intelligibility and justification for the virtues, were doomed to interminable disagreement – and so are we, in as much as we are their descendants. The claim at the beginning of After Virtue about the systematic interminability of ethical argument returns here in a new form. The traditional precepts of morality, MacIntyre wants to say, drew their original point and purpose from their connection to the virtues – the virtues traditionally understood – plus from empirical discoveries concerning the conditions for the development of the virtues. As with these moral precepts, so with the virtues: once the larger background picture from which they derive is rejected or lost, there is no longer any possible adequate basis for agreement about their nature and content. Moral first principles multiply, each representing some aspect of the whole pre-modern moral picture; moral discourse fragments, moral debate becomes systematically inconclusive as moral arguments succeed only relative to the partial and inadequate premises from which they begin. As MacIntyre interprets this history of conceptual decline, what begins in the seventeenth century and re-shapes virtue discourse is an irresolvable dialectic between egoistic and altruistic theories of human nature and of ethics – a dialectic irresolvable within the framework in which it is set. Since any notion of a shared

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human good on the basis of which society and the moral life are to be ordered is rejected, friendship or benevolence based on and relative to that shared conception of the good can no longer serve as the cement of community, and so another basis for community must be found. Rejected is the classical notion, given authoritative voice by Aristotle, that moral training is about educating the untutored to see that the higher (i.e. more worthy and therefore more desirable) human goods are by their nature common and shareable. And since these goods are goods relative to what is common in humanity, they do not divide but can serve to unite us; they are goods, moreover, of which the egoist must necessarily be deprived (229). If the notion of the human good as something largely common is rejected, the good will be thought to be constituted relative to individual desire and seeking, and virtue language must in consequence undergo a significant alteration. Concepts like ‘honour’, ‘justice’, and ‘desert’ must necessarily take on new meanings. One tendency which After Virtue observes will be for the virtues to be re-defined as simply habits of subjective feeling ordered to personal utility. A related tendency in reaction to this will be to define virtues as those habits which control and restrain these same subjective feelings for the greater social good. But once the matter is understood this way, MacIntyre notes, insuperable conflicts between the demands of personal utility and the requirements of the greater social good will spring up. In fact, After Virtue argues, these conflicts continue to the present day, and are captured on the level of theory in the debates between John Rawls and Robert Nozick on the demands of justice, for instance – the concern of Chapter Seventeen of After Virtue. In brief, while MacIntyre admits no significant fault in the derivation of Rawls’s and Nozick’s conclusions from their respective premises, he raises the question of whether contemporary debates between Rawlsians and Nozickians could in principle be rationally resolved, given the incompatible and incommensurable nature of the premises from which they argue. For Rawls, he notes, justice is about recognizing and addressing present needs with an assumed commitment to equality and the maximizing of utility; for Nozick, justice (as opposed to kindness or generosity) is about respecting past and present legitimate acquisitions, and respecting and protecting the rights of citizens which flow from these. How, MacIntyre asks, once the assumed framework for the debate is that of a collection of, as it were, shipwrecked strangers who must bargain into a social order, could a debate between these two parties be rationally resolved without begging the question in favour of one side or the other? So, as MacIntyre sees it, the debate between traditional liberalism-that is, modern political conservatism--and new-fangled liberalism is systematically irresolvable. There is not enough of the common in the debate to begin with: within the debate’s framework, there is no way of determining what genuine human needs and entitlements are relative to some prior shared notion of the human good so as to assign these needs and entitlements their appropriate weight. This is to say, there is no socially accepted means of ascertaining desert in any given case of public justice which would enable society rationally to determine priority when a need and an entitlement claim conflict.

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Adherents of the tradition of the virtues, MacIntyre notes, must recognize that the modern state, for consciously not being organized around a shared conception of the human good, systematically excludes and politically marginalizes the kind of moral community necessary for the acquisition and development of the virtues. It is in no sense a patria for this tradition, so the kind of patriotism adherents of the tradition owe to it must be of a highly qualified and diminished sort. While the modern state serves various useful and indispensable pragmatic purposes, according to MacIntyre’s view, its mechanisms can in no sense be thought capable of securing moral consensus in society, and the legitimacy of its acts can never be assumed by the virtue traditionalist, only assessed by him or her on a case-by-case basis (252–4). Of course, the larger thesis that MacIntyre is working with here is that since the breakdown and rejection of the traditional teleological means of justifying morality, moral and evaluative commitments have fragmented, and while the protagonists in modern moral discussions share the same form of words – whether ‘justice’ or ‘friendship’ or ‘rights’ or ‘moral’ itself – this common linguistic stock masks the enormous divergence in the meaning with which they separately endow these terms. All of this confusion and divergence in the substance of moral discourse, MacIntyre notes, is then often celebrated in a kind of irrationalist fashion and dignified by the term ‘pluralism’. In looking back to the early modern roots of this crisis, the tendency After Virtue observes in and after the time of Hume is for virtue discourse to be simplified and the distinctions it formerly marked to be ground down. Following upon what is a socially acknowledged privatization of the good, virtues are increasingly understood as those dispositions to obey the rules which keep human egoism from damaging society at large. The expression ‘moral virtue’, informative in Aristotle, becomes tautologous in modern moral usage. ‘Virtue’ becomes understood as some one kind of thing, losing the important diversification of meaning it possessed in pre-modern moral discourse; virtue considerations begin to lose their former primacy over considerations regarding the rules of morality (MacIntyre cites as examples here the moral theories of Hume, Kant, and in recent times, John Rawls). It is this new conceptual (and attendant social) condition of which the book’s title speaks. Drawing on a correlation he had attempted to make earlier, MacIntyre argues in Chapter Sixteen that when confidence is lost in the possibility of a social embodiment of a shared conception of the good life, Stoic-like systems of ethics will have a widespread appeal – systems of ethics (those of Adam Smith, Diderot, and Samuel Johnson, for instance) in which virtue is identified with interior rectitude vis-á-vis some cosmic system of law (1981g: 233–4). In these systems, the exercise of virtue itself will be regarded as virtue’s only reward, and MacIntyre’s complaint against these, though not stated as explicitly here (though we are reminded again of how much he has learned from Hegel), is that they lose sight of the socially transformative power of the virtues and the contribution of the virtues to the good-life-in-society. This moral turn inwards leads, After Virtue argues, to a kind of ideologization of virtue and of morality itself (233). Once the teleological basis for the virtues in universal human nature has been lost, ‘virtue’, increasingly a singular noun, can be

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identified with any narrow moral content, and preference for a form of behaviour, that a particular theorist or social group wishes to invoke – hence the Victorian identification of ‘virtue’ with chastity, and of vice and immorality with unchastity. Arbitrariness begins to invade the field of morals since – and this is the central claim of After Virtue – without the teleological framework of universal human nature, there is no sound cognitive basis for underwriting moral claims. No consensus does, or indeed can, emerge, MacIntyre argues, from attempts to base virtue discourse and moral argument on accounts of the passions in their unreformed and uneducated state, because human desires which are not yet disciplined and educated by moral training, are too egoistically inclined, and do not yet contain within themselves the principles of their own right orientation (235–6). The intuitionism of Richard Price, and especially the almost entirely lawbased moral system of Kant, can then be explained, on MacIntyre’s picture, as an acknowledgement of and response to this unsettling arbitrariness. But these responses are too conditioned by what they are rejecting – too ad hoc – MacIntyre argues, to restore the sole sound, rational basis for moral discourse. Of greater interest, he thinks, is the Jacobin republican attempt at restoring order, intelligibility, and a sense for the common to morality, and here After Virtue revisits points on the subject made earlier in A Short History of Ethics. The Jacobins approach the task of moral reform and restoration, After Virtue notes, with neither the encumbrance of Aristotle’s putatively discredited standpoint in natural science, nor with the unattractive and irrational commitment to an absolutist state that is common in the early modern period. They are driven, on Macintyre’s interpretation, by both an esteem for the public good over private interest, and by a Christian-inspired passion for human equality. Appropriately enough, their concept of virtue is that of any and every disposition to act which regards a public standard for action – a standard, significantly, which is characterizable prior to any summing up or correlating of private interests. The Jacobins in this way represent for MacIntyre not, as Isaiah Berlin and others have argued, a proto-totalitarian movement, but a genuine if misguided attempt to restore the classical conception of the virtues and the goodlife-in-commonity. Jacobin republicanism, according to this view, is misguided, not for its championing of the common, but for its sociological naïveté. It was already, MacIntyre argues here, too late in the day of decline for any large-scale restoration of the tradition of the virtues to succeed. Moral fragmentation, the work of what he had referred to in A Short History of Ethics as the ‘acids of individualism’, was already too far advanced; the resources necessary for large-scale social reform – a coherent and consistent moral vocabulary, the framework of an accepted conception of human nature – have simply ceased to be present in the social order at large by the time the Jacobins set about their task. St Just’s subsequent attempt to impose morality by terror – a genuine forerunner of totalitarianism, MacIntyre will admit – is but a recognition of the cultural impotence of the Jacobin Clubs: ‘The true lesson of the Jacobin Clubs and their downfall is that you cannot hope to re-invent morality on the scale of a whole nation when the very idiom of the morality which you seek to re-invent is alien in one way to the

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vast majority of ordinary people and in another to the intellectual elite’ (238). Marx was later to discover this and draw our attention to it, MacIntyre notes: there is no single concept of justice to which appeal can be made to improve the conditions of the working class; there are instead a multiplicity of concepts of justice present in the modern social order, each deriving from rival and incompatible schemes of belief. It is already too late in the day to try to work for large-scale moral re-education and change: the agency of change must be sought instead on the small scale. MacIntyre has thus emphatically put behind him by the time of the writing of After Virtue any hope for large-scale radical social transformation. Jane Austen now emerges as a surprising heroine in the narrative of After Virtue. She saw this point, MacIntyre thinks, and saw the domestic realm, the sphere of family household, as a place where the virtues in their classical Aristotelian sense could be preserved. In the final paragraph of After Virtue, the great father of Western monasticism, St Benedict, will make a surprising entrance. His monasteries, MacIntyre evidently thinks, can serve as another kind of model for keeping alive and creatively extending the tradition of the virtues amidst the present dark times of un-selfconsciously incoherent modern ‘pluralism’. Are there not though more obvious heroes in the rejection and supplanting of modern morality, MacIntyre asks here? What of the Nietzschean alternative to modern moral systems: the project of abandoning modern pretences to objectivity and seeking to re-create the moral law from within the self, a self freed from the need for illusory external supports? What of the project of compiling a new subjective but authentic catalogue of the virtues with its accompanying set of moral maxims? MacIntyre focuses his final criticisms of this Nietzschean alternative on Nietzsche’s ideal of the ‘great man’ as developed in The Will To Power. The critique of Nietzschean ethics here is straightforward and relies on MacIntyre’s previously elaborated theory of the good. If the human good must necessarily be explicated by reference to social undertakings such as practices and traditions, then in his self-created morality the Nietzschean has doomed himself to a life of impoverishment. He has cut himself off from key sources of the good, chiefly from the capacity to grow both in self-knowledge and in that knowledge of the self’s good which can only come by entering into relations of rational subordination to proficients in social undertakings – proficients who reveal the human good and the potentialities of human nature more fully to us. So, in Nietzsche’s moral solipsism there is the greatness of a certain kind of honesty, After Virtue admits, but there is also grave self-impoverishment. Nietzscheanism, that noteworthy, ostensible alternative to modern moral systems, MacIntyre argues, turns out to replicate in a striking fashion the very individualism with which modern moral philosophy begins. It is therefore not a remedy, but something like the final stage of the modern disease: ‘the Nietzschean stance turns out not to be a mode of escape from or an alternative to the conceptual scheme of liberal individualist modernity, but rather one more representative moment in its internal unfolding. And we may therefore expect liberal individualist societies to breed ‘great men’ from time to time. Alas!’ (259).

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But what then of Marx and Marxism as an alternative – the alternative to modern morality and modern conceptions of the self? Some critics have puzzled over the way that, for all his former interest in Marx, discussion of explicitly Marxist topics form so small a part of After Virtue. The answer to this is not far afield for anyone who has followed the internal development of MacIntyre’s thinking in his earlier writings on Marxist topics and authors – those in the 1960s in particular, examined in Chapter 2 above (which is another way of saying that no strictly biographical explanation of MacIntyre’s rejection of Marxism need be sought). At the end of After Virtue, we are given a set of inter-connected criticisms of the Marxist standpoint – a standpoint which MacIntyre thinks also relies on a characteristically modern system of morality, and which is also too conditioned by the liberal individualism it rejects to serve as that radical alternative to liberal individualism which we need. The criticisms of Marx and the Marxist standpoint are stated here in lapidary form. On the matter of the nature and justification of moral maxims, when Marxists have been forced by historical events to argue for a moral standpoint, they have typically resorted to Kantian or utilitarian, that is, to characteristically modern forms of argument, MacIntyre states – for example, appeals to abstract duty or to utility. This undermines the Marxist claim to moral distinctiveness in the modern social order, and to critical difference (261). Secondly, in his theory of human nature, Marx remains an individualist, his ideal society is populated by what are really only, as MacIntyre puts it, ‘socialized Robinson Crusoes’. The Marxist emphasis on community and the values of community is therefore vitiated by its individualist starting point, and Marx gives us no justification of the why, and no account of the how, individuals should enter into community – nor have any later Marxists (261). Finally, an empirical claim: when Marxists have occupied positions of political power they have either been guilty of crude despotism (Soviet Marxism), or they have reverted to Weberian-style social democracy (as in Italy and Yugoslavia) or to elitist Nietzschean fantasy (e.g. Leninism’s ideal revolutionary, Lukacs’s ideal proletarian). So Marxism has also been significantly falsified in practice. The all-things-considered reason why MacIntyre thinks Marxism can never provide us with the alternative framework which we need in order to criticize modernity is because Marxism is simply too historically optimistic: ‘however thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it [Marxism] is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being accumulated’ (262). One of the central claims of After Virtue, of course, is that our present culture precisely lacks the resources for large-scale moral improvement, and hence the book ends by invoking the examples of Trotsky and St Benedict – an unlikely pair, one might think. Trotsky’s significance for MacIntyre is twofold: Trotsky, he notes, refused to accept conceptual adulterations of Marxism, whether of a Nietzschean or a Weberian or a despotic sort, and he also saw how Marxism, as a theory whose self-described warrant is its promised efficacy in directing and illuminating the world of political practice, might be decisively empirically falsified. So MacIntyre thinks that we need to learn from Trotsky’s insights into the structure

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of Marx’s thought why Marxism had to fail – a failure whose empirical working-out may have post-dated Trotsky’s death, but a failure which in the case of the Soviet Union in particular, MacIntyre notes, we can now observe (262; he is speaking of the USSR in its condition at the time of After Virtue, at the beginning of the 1980s). As for St Benedict, many readers of After Virtue have doubtless puzzled over the appearance in the book’s final paragraph of the founder of Western monasticism. But St Benedict is, for MacIntyre, a suitable model for our time of the sociologically aware and innovative social reformer. We require today, the book concludes, ‘another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict’, because MacIntyre thinks we must, like this great sixth-century social reformer before us, give up the hope of large-scale social and moral betterment, and while eschewing the cultural optimism of Marx, we must equally with St Benedict eschew defeatist pessimism. This will enable us, then, à la Benedict, to get on with the crucially important business of ‘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’ (263). What is needed is a stubborn, persevering, and hopeful but realistic effort to re-create in adverse social and political circumstances the perennial conditions for the good life. Although the work’s concluding paragraphs might strike the reader as melodramatic, the social imperative laid down in them certainly follows from MacIntyre’s premises about the nature of the good life and the virtues and the interconnection of the two. On this picture, a small-scale, practice-based community with a more or less homogeneous conception of the good is the proper and more or less sole arena for the pursuit and attainment of the human good: it alone meets the social requirement for the good life as MacIntyre has depicted it. As for the contemporary ‘dark ages’, this refers to, by analogy with the declining Roman imperium, the large-scale political and social order found in the nation-states of today’s developed world. We have in both cases a political regime that is highly morally deficient but pragmatically useful – or this, at least, seems to be the point of the analogy. The late Roman imperium was morally corrupt, and the modern bureaucratized nationstate, equipped as it is with but the resources of instrumental rationality, is morally vacuous; yet, like the Roman imperium before it, the social and political order of today’s modern nation-state is capable of serving as a useful technological or pragmatic backdrop – a potentially valuable enabling condition – for the much more important task of building small-scale moral communities.

Chapter 6

The Project Developed

6.1

After Virtue’s Aftermath

In the pages of the concluding chapter of After Virtue, MacIntyre had noted, by way of anticipation and in awareness of vulnerable points in the narrative, three main areas of criticism of the book’s central arguments. One, which we have treated briefly at the end of the last chapter, is the objection that more or less agrees with him concerning the bankruptcy of modern moral philosophy, but sees Marx or some version of Marxism, not Aristotle and Aristotelianism, as the form of anti-modernist thought that can provide the social and moral remedy for our present difficulties. Later, in Chapter 8 of this book, we will take a final look at MacIntyre’s position with respect to Marxism in view of his post-After Virtue writings, but for now the two other areas of criticism he anticipates illuminate the immediate course of his writing subsequent to After Virtue. The first criticism takes the following form, and forces MacIntyre, as he realizes, to take the articulation and defence of his standpoint to a higher level: the main thrust of the arguments and historical considerations in After Virtue was that a modified version of Aristotelian ethics (i.e. with its inter-connected theories of human nature, of the social world, and of the kind of knowledge of the social world available to us) is able rationally to defeat the various forms of liberal ethical-cum-social theories as well as those of Nietzsche and his contemporary disciples. But to claim this, and to claim it with the confidence that After Virtue does, is to bring to the fore the question of what the nature of rational vindication is, especially as it pertains to ethical theory and the social theory which an ethical theory implies. In response to this objection, MacIntyre acknowledges that he must produce a compelling theory of the nature of theory superiority and theory vindication, with special reference to the topics of practical philosophy – an explicit normative theory of practical rationality, that is. There is ample material for this in his early writings, as we have seen – for instance, his work on epistemological crises and the history of science – and he will draw and expand upon this material in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The third criticism of the After Virtue project anticipated at the book’s end concerns the contentiousness of MacIntyre’s presentation of the Aristotelian tradition itself. As is much his philosophical style, After Virtue’s presentation and re-formulation of Aristotelianism is almost provocatively tendentious – with the motive of eliciting

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a critical exchange from adherents of the Aristotelian tradition and sharpening the tradition’s internal reasoning in the process. In reacting to sympathetic critics of After Virtue, one of the salient features of Whose Justice? will be, as critic Charles Larmore pointed out in a notable review, that Thomas Aquinas will replace Aristotle as the chief protagonist in the history of occidental ethical theory (see Larmore, 1989). As with After Virtue, Whose Justice? is aimed both at the educated public and at academic philosophers, and this in protest to the academicization of philosophy and the separation of philosophical theory from social practice that MacIntyre has long decried (in order to maintain narrative continuity, criticisms of MacIntyre’s own chosen genre of philosophical writing – surely part of what makes his philosophical work so distinctive and so vulnerable – will be postponed until Chapter 9 of this book). The shape of Whose Justice?, important to have in clear view given the wealth of historical detail in the text, is by and large provided in Chapter One, ‘Rival Justices, Competing Rationalities’. In between the writing of this work and After Virtue MacIntyre had given the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford on the subject of transformations of the concept of justice. This is significant because it afforded him the occasion, as he notes here, to see the connection between differences in the theory of justice and differences at a more fundamental level in the theory of practical rationality. So the topical concern of this follow-up study to After Virtue is, as its title indicates, justice and rationality, and this conveniently permits MacIntyre to return to the theme with which he began After Virtue: systematic and systematically irresolvable ethical dissensus in the societies of the industrialized West. But now the concern about dissensus is focused on rival and incompatible concepts of justice and their rival background supporting theories. Chapter One returns us to observations familiar from MacIntyre’s earlier work, and particularly from the first two chapters of After Virtue. Different social groups in the same social order appeal to different conceptions of justice to defend opposed conclusions of their chains of practical reasoning. Some appeal to a rights-based conception of justice, some to a standard of utility, some to justice as desert, others to a contract-based understanding of justice, others still to justice as ideal impartiality. In society at large these debates are usually sterile – frequently no more than exercises of assertion and counter-assertion – because the participants do not acknowledge that disagreement about matters of justice is rooted in more fundamental disagreement concerning the first principles of theoretical and practical rationality. The resources to relieve this difficulty are not, however, to be found, Whose Justice? argues, in the dominant Anglophonic philosophical tradition of our time, analytic philosophy. In analytic philosophy, the unresolved disputes concerning justice in the wider culture are merely reproduced in a more cogent fashion, and this because the accepted method of analytic philosophy employs a piecemeal approach to discrete ‘problems’ without a consideration of the systematic interconnectedness of problems and their embeddedness in large-scale bodies of systematic philosophical theory (WJWR: 2–4).

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This point is well summarized in a précis of Whose Justice? which MacIntyre wrote two years after the volume’s publication: rival accounts of justice are each framed in terms dictated by, and in some respects detachable from, an overall system of thought, one which both imposes constraints upon its philosophical parts and also provides standards by appeal to which each philosopher advances a rational justification for his particular account. So whether either of … two accounts of justice stands or falls depends to some significant extent upon whether or not either of the correspondingly rival accounts of the rational justification of action and practice, stated and presupposed, can itself be vindicated. … [M]ore is at stake than … [an] account of practical rationality, for that account is itself embedded in [a] … larger scheme of thought. … So what have to be evaluated are the claims of two rival philosophical systems. (1991b: 149)

Here we have an interesting reversal of MacIntyre’s former esteem (e.g. in the early 1950s) for the methods of analytic philosophy, methods he believed at the time were capable of liberating us from the thought that philosophical controversies need involve a clash of overall philosophical standpoints (see pages 95–6 above). Whose Justice? aims to address what MacIntyre identifies in the book’s early pages as the social danger of our time, putting the point in a slightly different way than he had in After Virtue. The social danger of our time, he states here, is of a split between social groups – a split in which these groups come to view each other with increasing distrust and hostility. On the one side we have certain educated elites who take their lead from academic philosophy; on the other side we have traditionalists who are brought together, not by abstract argument, but by trust in persons – or by faith in some living, often religious, tradition. The academic philosophers and their following see in tradition-based groups a fideistic unwillingness to examine the commitments of their respective traditions in the light of reason; the traditionbased groups find in the work of academic philosophy no answers with conviction to their practical and theoretical questions and regard academic discourse as largely the interest-serving tool of an elite. So the urgent need of our time and our present social order, MacIntyre claims here, is for some socially acceptable rational decision procedure: one which will enable us to resolve debates concerning justice, and more fundamentally, one which will give us resources to adjudicate disputes between opposed conceptions of practical rationality (WJWR: 1–2). To say this, of course, is, as MacIntyre realizes, to involve oneself in a certain logical circularity, but not a damaging one. There is, as he is aware, no a priori ideal external perspective, no self-validating standpoint, from which to problematize the matter of rationality. If we are trying to construct or discover a socially binding rational decision procedure for the tasks of practical reason the only way to go about this is to begin from some as yet unargued for and undeveloped conception of the rational which will guide our undertaking, and then hope that this conception can prove its worth by the merits of the theory of rationality it is capable of generating. Still, there is something at first sight curious in MacIntyre’s setting up the task of Whose Justice? in this way: the search for a rational decision procedure to serve

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the workings of practical reason is precisely what MacIntyre had identified in After Virtue as the ‘Enlightenment project’. However, as on earlier occasions, we have seen that MacIntyre’s attitude toward the Enlightenment is by no means wholly negative, and in Whose Justice? he once again praises the central aspiration of Enlightenment thinkers: to articulate and provide rational justification for a set of timeless, universal, and accessible-to-all moral precepts (WJWR: 6). Still, and in a way different from After Virtue, MacIntyre wants in this follow-up work to fault the method of Enlightenment theorists and to make the ex post facto observation that, given the large amount of ethical dissensus today in both society at large and in academic philosophy, the Enlightenment undertaking has failed on its own terms. What he will now suggest, consonant with his earlier work on the nature of inquiry and of theory justification, is that the Enlightenment project has failed for employing the wrong method: we should, he argues in effect, keep the Enlightenment thinkers’ aspiration and admire their high valorization of reason, but we should pursue that aspiration by means of a better method – one which while it remains no less rationalistic, so to speak, takes social context and the historicity of reason seriously (7–9). What is interesting about this substitute method (which the narrative of Whose Justice? will embody) is the way it combines features of a modern, Hegelianstyle approach to rational justification in morals – one which pays close attention to matters of historical development – with a pre-modern, specifically PlatonicAristotelian approach. And what MacIntyre will give us finally in Whose Justice? is an approach whose universalist aspirations are more muted, more implicit, than that of Enlightenment thinkers, but one, as the book will argue, whose account of the nature and of our grasp of the first principles of human understanding as such is far superior to any of its Enlightenment rivals. The central tenet in MacIntyre’s proposed method to make ethical consensus in society-at-large again possible is that the articulation and defence of a theory of practical rationality must begin with a recognition that rational justification as such is context-dependent and tradition-bound. What is interestingly different about this view, he will argue, is that unlike the Enlightenment view of reason – what the later Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry will refer to as the Encyclopaedists’ view of reason – this view maintains that universal, rational justification by means of nongainsayable first principles can only be had at the end of a long effort of dialectical inquiry and dialectical testing – and indeed of moral education and moral training. It cannot be had at the outset of inquiry and by means of some special intuition, or of some untainted work of universal ‘common sense’, or of some uncontroversial exercise of universal reason. So the promise of the method will be to give us a new second-order account of the causes of present ethical dissensus, one that is unavailable to Enlightenment thinkers with their mistaken conception of rational justification as something essentially standpoint-less, context-independent, and ahistorical. This new account will also take on the burden of showing how our current ethical dissensus can, at least in principle, be overcome, and the account will proceed in two stages. First, it will attempt to

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bring into relation non-reductively, characterizing them in all their diversity (with their diverse first principles and diverse modes of rational justification), a plurality of influential traditions of inquiry concerning the nature of practical rationality alive in the West today. Secondly, it will put forward – and consciously from the standpoint of the tradition of inquiry to which the method is beholden (i.e. the broadly Aristotelian tradition) – an account of how diverse, rival theories can, by their own particular standards, be shown rationally inferior to some one contending theory. The plausible assumption of this method is that theories cannot meaningfully disagree about some subject matter without some at least tacit agreement concerning both what they are disagreeing about and that they are genuinely disagreeing. If this method shows itself capable of producing a compelling second-order account of ethical dissensus, and the question is then raised why someone not in the broadly Aristotelian tradition – a Kantian or a Humean, for instance – should abandon his own tradition and give allegiance to some form of Aristotelianism, MacIntyre’s answer to this question is not difficult to surmise. The promise of the method is to show the Kantian or Humean, for example, how her account must fail on its own terms. If the method in Whose Justice? can succeed in this task, it should then make the Aristotelian tradition from which the method derives initially plausible for these, as for others who find themselves in the same circumstance. Having then gained a more attentive hearing for the Aristotelian way of problematizing the nature of rationality (i.e. both practical and theoretical rationality), it will be up to the Aristotelian to show how her theory of practical rationality is capable of succeeding in matters of substance where these rival traditions have in important respects – again, according to their own standards and in the light of their own goals – failed. If Aristotelianism can show itself thuswise resourceful, it will then be rational, Whose Justice? will argue, for the Kantian or Humean, etc. – rational, that is, according to their own respective conceptions of rationality – to adopt Aristotelianism as a superior theory. In this type of scenario, MacIntyre sees a possibility for consensus emerging today on matters of justice and practical reason, and this, his account of the conditions for the possibility of such consensus, represents in large part his distinctive contribution to surmounting the moral predicament facing the inhabitants of the nation-states of the advanced, industrialized West. So much for the method behind Whose Justice?, now for its execution in the details. 6.2 The Evolution of Pre-modern Practical Reason Whose Justice? is divided effectively into four parts: three of a largely historical concern treating, respectively, ancient, medieval, and modern conceptions of practical rationality, and a fourth part which is more strictly speculative. To speak by way of overview, the first two parts contain a historical-cum-philosophical narrative aimed at showing how the dominant Western conception of practical rationality begins in a relatively undifferentiated form in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then undergoes subsequent and not necessarily consistent precisification at the hands of

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later Greek thinkers such as Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, and, most significantly, Plato. Aristotle, according to the thread of argument, continues Plato’s project of inheriting in part, criticizing in larger part, the Homeric legacy, and in the process he provides the most compelling account of practical rationality in the Greek world. Augustine, next, owing to ideas suggested to him by Christian theology, advances an account of moral psychology that is philosophically superior to Aristotle’s, and Thomas Aquinas subsequently creatively expands Aristotle’s account of human agency and practical rationality by incorporating Augustine’s moral psychological insights into an Aristotelian framework. Aquinas’s great achievement in the course of doing this is to show the rational compatibility and complementarity of key theses in Augustinian and Aristotelian practical philosophy. Aquinas is so to be regarded as the most compelling spokesman for a pre-modern conception of practical rationality. Thus the general outline of the first two parts of Whose Justice? To render this in more detail now, distinctive of the pre-modern conception of practical reasoning, as MacIntyre sees it, is that the pre-modern agent, when faced with the question, ‘What ought I to do?’, inevitably answers that he should seek to excel in the pursuit of his socially established, socially recognized, and cosmically appointed and sanctioned role. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, therefore, the good, the just, and the excellent are, he argues, more or less inter-definable terms. The good life is the life aimed at excellence in one’s role as soldier, wife, craftsman and so on, and to discharge the cosmically appointed and socially recognized duties and requirements of one’s social role is to live a just life. From the beginning, though, MacIntyre notes, this imaginatively or mytho-poetically rendered conception of the good, the practically rational, and the moral in the Homeric texts contained within itself certain ambiguities and tensions, owing both to the ambiguous range of the Homeric conception’s application (particularist? universalist?) and to its undifferentiated (my term) understanding of excellence. MacIntyre reads the Homeric and subsequent Greek texts anew here in the light of a distinction he did not have in hand at the time of writing Short History, though it is close to the distinction between goods internal and goods external to practices in After Virtue: a distinction between ‘goods of excellence’ and ‘goods of effectiveness’ that will be centrally important to his own theory of practical rationality. The problem in Homer and for his successors, Whose Justice? states, can be seen in the following way. The social order of the time, and this even in view of its subsequent modifications, was unlike modern social orders a relatively homogeneous one. It was constituted by a variety of occupations embedded in a number of different social practices (soldiering, agriculture, politics, architecture, poetry, politics, athletics, household building, painting, sculpture, mathematical and philosophical and theological inquiry, and so forth). Along with these practices came a set of socially valued action dispositions enabling achievement in those practices –a set, that is, of role-relative virtues, plus a shared and coherent set of reasons for action: reasons prescribing or proscribing action in accord with cosmic law or qe&mij. Typical of the pre-modern social order, MacIntyre notes, is the unawareness of any distinction between the cosmic and the social: the contingent social order is thought

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to be no less cosmically ordained than the order found in nature. This social order of Homeric times possessed also a set of common goods for distribution – honour, prestige, wealth and power – and a public standard of justice: a set of criteria for merit or demerit with respect to those common, publicly distributable goods. In each of the practices, the question could be, and eventually was, raised as to whether to excel in that practice was merely to attain victory over one’s rivals – to succeed and to gain the spoils of victory – or whether it was to achieve results according to impersonal standards (i.e. intrinsic achievement, valuable as such, and therefore to be sought for its own sake). So the role-relative understanding of practical rationality embodied in the social order which the Iliad and Odyssey texts reflect was, according to the argument here, indeterminate between two incompatible theories of practical rationality: a first which prized the goods of effectiveness over the goods of excellence, and saw excellence in activity as a means to the end of effectiveness, and a second which maintained as the most rational course of action for an agent seeking to live the good and the best life in the pursuit of excellence in the activities that constitute one’s social role – and enjoyment in a subordinate way of whatever goods external to that activity might come as a result of such excellence. What exactly, though, does MacIntyre mean by ‘goods of effectiveness’? Wealth, fame, social regard, power, and the physical pleasures that such make possible. These are goods that are in an obvious sense contingently related to excellence in activity, since their possession does not necessarily follow upon such activity, and since they can be had without it. The expression ‘goods of excellence’ is taken by Whose Justice? to be self-explanatory. MacIntyre does not offer any precise definition of it, but he clearly means it to refer to the enjoyment or satisfaction which supervenes upon excellence according to shared or shareable impersonal standards in the activities which comprise a given practice. One can assume this by referring back to his discussion of goods external and goods internal to a practice in After Virtue (see pages 269–270 above). Goods of effectiveness are synonymous, apparently, with external goods, ‘goods of excellence’ with internal goods, but it is unusual and unhelpful that MacIntyre does not state this explicitly here. Goods of excellence clearly have two dimensions (and here one can refer again to MacIntyre’s earlier definition of a practice in After Virtue, see pages 269–70 above): a subjective dimension – the extension of the agent’s powers and capacities to make, do, think, imagine and so on – and an objective dimension--the setting of new public standards for achievement in a given practice, the enlargement or the furthering of that practice. The subjective side of goods of excellence is private and only indirectly shareable; the objective dimension of goods of excellence is, of course, something per se common and publicly shareable. Returning to the Homeric conception of practical reasoning and its rolerelative conception of the good and the just – and of virtues and reasons for action – MacIntyre sees in it a potential to be specified in two opposed ways. This can be seen, he claims, by comparing two subsequent streams of Greek thought to which this conception gives rise. According to one stream, with various of the Sophists (Callicles, for instance) as prime exponents, the goods to be sought in and through

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role-relative excellence are the goods of desire-satisfaction – where desire is taken in its given or ‘natural’ form, not as something that must be educated and disciplined. This stream consequently prizes the goods of effectiveness (power, status, pleasure) over the goods of excellence, and sees the latter as instrumental to the former. Good reasons for action for this tradition of practical rationality will be those considerations indicating means to the end of desire-satisfaction, and the virtues will be understood as those habits of mind and character which make the possession of the goods of effectiveness possible. Publicly shareable or common goods will be taken to be those which exist in the overlap of the subjectively determined desires of individual agents. A second and rival specification of the Homeric, role-relative conception of the good and the ethical, now with Plato and Aristotle as chief spokesmen, will prize the goods of excellence over the goods of effectiveness. This tradition will count as a good reason for action any consideration which indicates a particular good that is in some way constitutive of human excellence as a whole. Virtues will be accounted those habits of mind and character which enable one to discover, conform to, and if possible supersede those impersonal, publicly available standards for excellence in practices – and in the practice of living a human life as a whole. Common goods will be regarded as those independently constituted and discoverable standards for excellence in roles and practices, and the excellence of a whole human life well lived (i.e. in all its various dimensions with a harmony between the dimensions) will also be regarded as a common and shareable good. MacIntyre thinks that the contrast between the broadly sophistical and the Platonic-Aristotelian traditions of practical rationality can be seen clearly when one compares the way they understand certain core virtues such as friendship, courage, justice, and prudence. The first tradition, he argues, will tend to view friendship as human concourse aimed at the attainment of mutual pleasure and or utility, the second as primarily the bond shared by those in pursuit of common, shareable goods. The first tradition will tend to view courage as that habit of character which is determination to succeed in the satisfaction of one’s given desires, the second as that habit which protects and preserves the common goods of the social order. The first tradition will tend to view justice as that quality whereby one enters into and abides by relationships of contractual reciprocity, the second as that quality which enables one to recognize merit (i.e. desert according to shared, impersonal standards) and to apportion recognition and public goods according to merit. Finally, the first tradition will regard prudence as habitual facility in the exercise of instrumental reasoning, the second as that habit of mind whereby one is able to distinguish genuine from merely apparent goods (i.e. those which are not all-things-considered, but merely here-and-now, goods) and to determine the expeditious means to the attainment of those genuine goods (36–46). To enter a bit more deeply into the details of MacIntyre’s account here, he treats the writings of, in particular, Pericles, Sophocles, and Thucydides as key stages in the subsequent elaboration of the very different Platonic-Aristotelian theory of practical rationality. Pericles is deemed significant because, in his chauvinistic

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rhetorical celebrations of the political adventures of Athens in the Delian league, he leaves unaddressed the tensions between particularist and universalist justice. His, MacIntyre notes, is but the articulation and defence of the goods of effectiveness and an extolling of the merits of co-operation in attaining those goods. Imposed Athenian justice, which often involves the advantage of the stronger Athens over its weaker allies in the Delian league, is to be praised because it secures victory for Athens – ‘success’ that is, in attaining her own collective aims (47–54). Sophocles, Whose Justice? notes, is an insightful critic of this as yet still mythopoetic and not rationally self-critical account of justice and practical rationality. In invoking in his dramas such as Oedipus Tyrannus and the Philoctetes the universal justice of Zeus, Sophocles stands as a critic of Athenian hubris, though he is still not a critic who rises to the level of philosophical reason (a point particularly evident, MacIntyre observes, in Sophocles’ recourse to the device of a deus ex machina to solve particularist versus universalist moral dilemmas: 61–3). Sophocles’ dramas so represent for MacIntyre a stage on the way to a rationally self-critical theory of justice and practical rationality. Something of this form of theory is to be had, though, in Thucydides, MacIntyre thinks, but it is a theory which pulls in the wrong direction and is not reflectively self-critical enough. Thucydides, he notes, is a historical pessimist and the first great Western apologist of the ‘might makes right’ theory of justice: Thucydides explicitly maintains that the just is the imposed advantage of the strong – and that this advantage of the stronger is the only kind of justice that can be had (anarchy being regarded as the only other possibility). Practical intelligence and virtue are seen by Thucydides as externally related, MacIntyre observes, since on Thucydides’ account one may possess various excellences of mind and character and yet be deficient in instrumental practical reasoning – or vice versa. So Thucydides is wont to praise the Athenian general and politician Nicias for his life of a)reth, but to fault him for his lack of practical intelligence in being unable to persuade the Athenian assembly to forgo the unfortunate second Sicilian expedition. Similarly, Thucydides will praise Alcibiades for his practical intelligence, which is to say, his persuasive abilities, but will fault him in the area of a)reth&, for lacking the qualities of restraint, respect for limits, and public-spiritedness. For Thucydides, then, MacIntyre notes, rhetorical as opposed to rational persuasion has overriding importance: the key to securing ‘justice’, the advantage of the stronger, is manipulating the fears and desires of others in order to secure those ends which untutored human nature spontaneously seeks. Unsurprisingly, MacIntyre criticizes the Thucydidean picture for taking untutored human desires and the ends at which these aim as uncriticizable, untransformable givens, and MacIntyre interprets Plato’s work, particularly in the Republic, as an attempt at refuting this Thucydidean conception of practical rationality and offering an alternative. The limitation MacIntyre sees in the Thucydidean framework, like the Periclean framework before it, is, as it were, a methodological one: from within neither framework is or can the question be asked of the rational justification of ends. Argument within both frameworks is made largely by appeal to images, and conviction is secured, not

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by dialectic, but by adducing considerations of the fittingness of certain means to certain unargued for ends (66-7). In contrast, MacIntyre notes, the sovereign consideration governing Plato’s rejection of the ‘rhetorical’ or sophistic interpretation of role-relative excellence is a distinction between genuine and apparent human goods, and this permits Plato to address explicitly that tension between particularist and universalist concerns which runs through the post-Homeric tradition. In Plato’s view, the good life is attainable only through the difficult process of an informed training of the desires by reason – a tutelage of self-discipline. In and through this training of character the goods of excellence come to be seen as of objectively greater value than the goods of effectiveness. Since the genuine good is now regarded as something which can only be seen after submitting to a disciplined pedagogy, a)reth and practical intelligence are no longer regarded as externally related. So, for Plato, MacIntyre observes, a condition for the possession of a virtue (an excellence of mind or character) will be knowledge of what the virtue in question is and why it is worth possessing. Instrumental rationality is no longer self-validating: it will be seen as worthy only to the degree that the ends which it serves are genuine and rationally defensible goods. Crucial to this, Plato’s new, critical of its predecessors, theory of practical rationality, MacIntyre notes, is establishing that there is a distinction in re between genuine and apparent goods; and, in order to show this, Plato realizes that he must produce an account of knowledge as opposed to opinion. MacIntyre reads the early dialogues such as the Laches, and especially the Gorgias, in this light, and sees the following development at work in Plato. In the early dialogues such as the Gorgias, Plato is almost entirely beholden to Socrates’ method of elenchus. While lacking himself the capacity to make good on claims to moral knowledge, he can through the character of Socrates at least show that other such claims are unable to withstand rational scrutiny. Philosophical reason, self-critical rationality, has now decisively entered into the understanding of practical rationality. Plato is led, though, beyond the Socratic method of elenchus to the formulation of a new method of dialectic, because he realizes there are two great weaknesses in the former method: (1) as a method of refutation it is not sufficient to ground positive knowledge claims and can treat truth only as a regulative ideal, and (2) even as a method of refutation it is flawed for being unable to handle instances of theory incommensurability – cases, that is, where theory A can refute rival and incompatible theory B relative to A’s own assumptions, but neither theory can refute the other to the other’s satisfaction. This more powerful form of refutation is something Plato particularly needs, MacIntyre observes, given his discovery, dramatically enacted in Socrates’ exchanges with Thrasymachus in Books II–IV of the Republic, that the sophistic conception of justice and his own rival conception can both appeal to what is ‘natural’ to man for justification. The sophist will mean by ‘natural’ what man in his untutored condition in any given social order spontaneously desires, whereas Plato will mean what the properly morally educated human agent in a well-ordered society desires. The result

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of this state of affairs is that each theory can only refute the other by employing premises incommensurable with the premises of its rival (WJWR: 71–8). In an intriguing and fairly original interpretation of the Republic, MacIntyre sees its elaboration of the method of dialectic and the doctrine of the forms as an attempt to provide philosophical reason with the remedies for the shortcomings of the method of elenchus. Plato does not think that he has solved the problem of providing moral knowledge in the Republic (e.g. a true theory of justice), only that he has established what it would take to solve the problem. His student (very much his student, on MacIntyre’s interpretation in Whose Justice?) Aristotle will later attempt to solve the problem directly, first with a criticism of the doctrine of the forms – a criticism already at work in Plato’s later dialogues themselves – and then with his own original doctrine of practical and theoretical first principles (arrived at by a slightly different method of dialectic). But we can wait a bit yet for MacIntyre’s rendering of that part of the story. In the Republic, on MacIntyre’s interpretation, the doctrine of the forms is meant to lay down the adequacy and consistency conditions that knowledge claims must meet in order to be acceptance-worthy. Built into the doctrine of the forms is a theory of rational inquiry according to which inquiry, argument, and dialectic do not embody by their nature a directionless or auto-telic perspectival flux, but rather are processes of reason with an intrinsic goal or telos: the possession of timeless, impersonal, standpoint-independent truth. Progress in inquiry, and thus progress in truth, obtains, in Plato’s view as MacIntyre interprets him, when: 1. temporally later stages in the inquiry presuppose and build upon earlier stages, and 2. later stages can explain the shortcomings of earlier stages and the reasons for those shortcomings, and 3. later stages illumine the goal of the inquiry better and so are better able to direct the future course of the inquiry, until 4. the inquiry is perfected, at which stage all the truths of the subject matter of the inquiry can be exhibited in a deductive and explanatory relation to the discovered a)rxai/ or first principles of the subject matter, and a complete history of the inquiry to date can be written, which illuminatingly accounts for the mistakes, the blind alleys, and the wrongly presumed closures of the inquiry during its previous stages. (see WJWR: 79–81) Plato’s Republic has consciously not given us a theory of justice which can satisfy these conditions, MacIntyre notes, hence Plato’s reversion to myth, images, and diagrams in Book X at the Republic’s end. But it has indicated what we should look for in such a theory, and what would be grounds for asserting the rational superiority of one theory to a rival and even incommensurable theory, and in this it represents for MacIntyre an important advance with respect to the Socratic conception of inquiry and rationality. MacIntyre will return to these themes at the end of Whose Justice? when he sketches out his own theory of practical rationality. We are reminded

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here, though, that it was not Plato’s theory of inquiry and practical rationality, nor Aristotle’s improvement upon it, which triumphed in Greek education and social practice, but that of Isocrates – the most highly regarded and influential spokesman for the sophistic tradition of practical rationality in Hellenic culture, as intellectual historians remind us. It is Isocrates who continues to noteworthy effect the tradition of moral education by example alone – and of moral argument by persuasive means alone – which was begun by Pericles. The difference between the two is that in Isocrates’ time, when the way of dialectic and of rational argument have become available as they were not in Pericles’ time, Isocrates’ rhetorical approach to practical rationality will involve a conscious and determined rejection of reflective and selfcritical reason – a choice for the imaginative universal against the conceptual universal. So Isocrates stands as Plato’s great opponent for trying decisively to sever the connection between theoretical rationality and practical rationality, with practical rationality no longer being dependent in crucial ways, as it is in Plato’s conception, on the outcome of theoretical inquiry: [I]f the sophistic alternative turns out to be true, then there are no objective and independent standards of justice or indeed, more fundamentally, of truth to which appeal can be made against the de facto standards upheld by particular groups. But if this is the case, disagreement about those de facto standards can only be resolved by means of nonrational persuasion; and the most effective means of non-rational persuasion is the type of rhetoric taught and practised by Isocrates. (86)

If we look next at MacIntyre’s treatment of Aristotle in Whose Justice?, we can see MacIntyre moving (sensibly) beyond textbook generalizations about fundamental oppositions between Plato and Aristotle and arguing instead that Aristotle’s aim in his philosophical work was largely to complete and correct the overarching project already begun by his revered teacher. Aristotle agrees with Plato, Whose Justice? notes, in seeing the good and the best as that which is discovered in any te&xnh, including the te&xnh of living a unified life. So Aristotle is also opposed to the sophistic view according to which the good is matter for subjective determination and the natural and social worlds are simply matter for re-shaping according to subjective desire. Aristotle’s advance on Plato’s moral and political conception, MacIntyre notes with some ingenuity, owed much to Aristotle’s rejection-by-modification of Platonic epistemology. Crucial here, MacIntyre observes, is Aristotle’s differing account of concept acquisition and concept possession: universals are grasped by a process of e)pagwgh&, a to-ing and fro-ing from token to type and back again, until a fully adequate type concept – for example, a concept of the exemplary, fully developed form of a species – is grasped by intellect or nou~j. The ideal for Aristotle is thus a function of the experienced potential of the actual. This has no small consequences for Aristotle’s political thought, MacIntyre observes: ideal justice for Aristotle exists not merely in mental abstraction; rather, it exists in abstraction only because it is a representation derived from real, imperfect exemplars of man-made just states of affairs – exemplars which have the potential to instantiate the ideal, and which are by

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nature striving (i.e. being moved) to do so in order precisely to realize their potential fully. Moreover, in Aristotle the virtue of justice cannot come into being in the soul without efforts at instantiating ideal justice in actual social contexts which as yet embody justice only imperfectly: the good life is therefore in important part the life of political action (89–97). This, MacIntyre notes, explains Aristotle’s contrasting method in political science to that of Plato’s: an energetic and wide-ranging empirical study of existing forms of political constitution aimed at discovering the exemplary form a political constitution, and therefore justice, should take. This is a fully rationalist method, one capable of overcoming conflicts at the level of the imaginative (and one which, MacIntyre might have added here, contains within itself the seeds of ethical universalism). As Aristotle observes, experiences themselves (e)mpeiriai/) based upon nou~j may conflict; however, the goal of scientific inquiry is e)pisth&mh – a rational, well-founded conviction that one’s conception is true. The proof of the truthfulness of a conception is its capacity to withstand objections in rational dialectic (MacIntyre interestingly and controversially here reads Aristotle as a fallibilist with respect to any and all knowledge claims). The fruit of successful scientific inquiry for Aristotle, MacIntyre notes, is, drawing on e)mpeiriai/, e)pagwgh, and dialectic, an explanatory a)rxh&– a conception, that is, which permits one to understand and explain the behaviour of particulars in a natural kind, such as their moving towards or away from the full realization of the potential of their kind. In the science of the human good, which Aristotelian political science aims to be, this a)rxh will be the discovered unifying purpose or telos of human nature, that state of human nature as fully realized. And it will be a telos which will supply us with the means to understand, and to classify as such, imperfect or misguided human strivings (91–3). The task of Aristotelian political practice, then, informed by this e)pisth&mh politikh& (Aristotle wrote the Politics, MacIntyre reminds us, to serve as a manual for political practice) will not be the mediating of the overlapping and private interests of citizens; it will be the structuring of the civic order so as to facilitate the acquisition and exercise of the virtues among citizens, which exercise of the virtues will enable citizens to live the good and the best life. The political project for Aristotle is therefore very much about securing the good life for the constituent members of the political order, Macintyre notes, in contrast to dominant modern conceptions of the practice of politics. For Aristotle, the desirable political order is an aristocracy of virtue, a political order with an inbuilt hierarchy to it. Only those who possess the virtues can judge rightly concerning action, so it is they who ought to have political authority. Since the acquisition of the virtues requires serious training, with its attendant pain and suffering, the young and morally uneducated tend to shrink from it, and so tend to diminish their own capacity for the good life. The rule of virtue thus needs to be imposed on the political order by the morally mature, those with sufficient practical experience who possess the virtues and so possess sound judgement concerning the good life and reliable criteria for right action. These are best entrusted with the responsibility of ordering society, of establishing criteria of justice (i.e. of merit and

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desert), and of acting on behalf of the shared good of the citizenry. These should set the parameters for corrective and distributive justice within the city. A background belief of Aristotle’s here, MacIntyre notes, is that there is an objective ranking or hierarchy to the goods which comprise the good human life, and that an appropriate concept of desert in a political order must respect this. The measure of value corresponds to this objective hierarchy of goods and forms the basis of judgements concerning justice by those who in possessing virtuous dispositions are alone able to see this objective hierarchy for what it is. These alone can rightly determine what rank ordering to give contributions to the common project of the political order, and how to weigh up actions which harm that order, so these alone should fix public rewards and punishments (98–110). Educated or virtuous desire is to be the determinant of value, not ‘untutored’ or Thrasymachean ‘natural’ desire, and so Aristotle, MacIntyre notes, must reject the claims of any forms of exclusively instrumental rationality to the title of rationality: a practical reason that ministers to uneducated desires or passions must be thought a defective one. Citizens deprived of the rule of justice established by the virtuous in a polity, on this Aristotle’s picture, will be deprived of the education of their desires and will be destined thereby to lead impoverished lives. Without the education of their desires under the rule of virtue, they will lack practical reasonableness in their actions, and lacking this, they will fail to attain that excellence in activity in which the good and the best life consists. The hierarchy in a well-ordered polis for Aristotle, MacIntyre notes, will be a pedagogical one, teacher exercising authority over learner through the virtueenjoining laws of the political order. By a paradox written into the very nature of moral development, only the fully initiated will be able – and only in an ex post facto way – to give a rational justification for the laws of the city. Novices in virtue must initially follow these laws with the motive of pleasing the mature in virtue (their superiors in the community), and not because they fully or even adequately understand the point and purpose of those laws. So moral development in Aristotle’s view, MacIntyre reminds us – the development of one’s capacity to live the good and the best life – comes about in several stages, stages through which a human agent can typically be led. The initially improperly morally educated and habituated are at the furthest remove from the good and the best life: these are vicious instead of virtuous, since they both judge falsely concerning the human good and are attached to various misperceived, apparent goods. Above these and at an early stage of moral development are the akratic: they have an adequate conception of the good, but their passions and the weakness of their character leads them fairly often to seek what they know not to be in their best interest. Next are the encratic: these also judge correctly concerning their good, and unlike the akratic, they are able to resist the sway of their passions, but their not yet fully disciplined and transformed passions make them feel the demands of virtue as still painful and difficult. At the pinnacle of moral development stand the virtuous: in these alone are the demands (the laws) of virtue found pleasant to obey and the activities of vice

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felt repugnant and painful; in these alone have the formation of character and the transformation of the passions attained full maturity. The virtuous man, for Aristotle, Whose Justice? reminds us, seeks not the pleasant and the expedient as sovereign ends, but seeks these only in as much as they form part of, or cohere with, the exercise of the virtues. So the virtuous man performs fine and noble actions for their own sake and with a noble disregard for their consequences. He alone is capable both of knowing in what the human good consists and of seeking that good in and out of season (MacIntyre, agreeing in large part with this picture, thinks that we should, of course, disassociate ourselves from Aristotle’s exclusion of woman and manual labourers from capacity for the life of virtue – an exclusion based on the uncritical adoption of, as he states, an ‘ideology of irrational domination’; see WJWR: 104–5). The bulk of the remainder of MacIntyre’s treatment of Aristotle in Whose Justice? is devoted to elucidating Aristotle’s concept of rational desire (proai/resij) as well as his connected understanding of the virtue of practical wisdom or fro&nesij. Clearly, MacIntyre’s aim in this part of Whose Justice? is with elucidating and reformulating in a contemporary idiom what he thinks contemporaries need to learn today from Aristotle as theorist of practical rationality and what they are very likely ignorant of. MacIntyre observes first that Aristotle has a well-worked out conception of what constitutes a rational action, and hence what constitutes right practical reasoning with respect to action. In Aristotle’s view, a human agent engages in a rational action when he is moved by a good reason for action because and inasmuch as it is a good reason. Aristotle considers rational action, though, MacIntyre notes, from two perspectives: from the perspective of reason and from the perspective of desire. To recognize a good reason for action – or more, to recognize the best reason for action in a practical context – one must deploy five connected cognitive skills. One must first be able to characterize the salient features of the situation calling for action; second, one must have in hand, as the product of rational inquiry and dialectic, some adequate conception of the total and complete human good (or of full human flourishing, MacIntyre might have said here); third, one must be able to identify the range of goods available to one in one’s context of desire – that is, those goods relative to one’s age, occupation, education, and personal ability; fourth, one must be able to reason from a conception of the total and complete good to some rank-ordering of the goods available to one in one’s context of action, and lastly, one must be able to combine the four cognitive abilities in the moment of decision so as to determine what is the here-and-now best course of action. This last ability is an act of the virtue of fro&nesij or practical rationality. Cognitive ability alone, though, for Aristotle, does not a rational action make, MacIntyre notes here, as he gives his own elaboration of this familiar point. One’s desires must also satisfy certain criteria, and in order for the desires to follow the bidding of reason concerning the best action in the here and now, they must be trained to do so. Untrained desire will lead one to seek merely apparent goods, goods which, of whatever present value, do not serve one’s long-term, all-things-considered best interests. And for Aristotle, MacIntyre reminds us, desire (o!rexij) may fail to be

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rational desire (Bou&lhsij) on account of several causes. As noted previously, an immature character is one in which the passions are not yet heedful of the voice of reason; the desires of the young, for instance, until they have been trained, are often irrational. Human desires may also be miseducated on account of the laws and mores in a city (Aristotle cites the case of Sparta, for example) – laws and mores which are themselves the product of mistaken judgements of practical reasoning by the political authorities concerning what the good and the best life is. In such cities, mistaken conceptions of human excellence (a)reth&) and of full human flourishing (eu)daimoni/a) will be enshrined in the law and will lead the young astray. Finally, adults who have not been properly morally educated will have irrational desires if they habitually overvalue lesser goods such as wealth or power – or if they make the characteristic mistake of thinking that all desires are equal and that the goods at which desires aim are not amenable to any objective rank-ordering (126–7). If, MacIntyre notes, the conditions for rational desire and right practical reasoning are met on Aristotle’s view, then rational action will arise out of a type of practical reasoning, the so-called practical syllogism, which will take the following shape: • • •

major or initiating premise – ‘x is a good for me (i.e. either as instrumental to, or as partially constitutive of, my final and complete good).’ minor premise – ‘Here is an x.’ conclusion – acting so as to secure x.

In unpacking this so-called practical syllogism, MacIntyre notes how for Aristotle dialectic, first of all, is meant to secure a rationally defensible notion of the full human good. Alongside this, rational deliberation is to determine what the particular goods are which are instrumental to or constitutive of this good for me, here and now: the exercise of the virtue of fro&nesij is indispensable in this activity. Finally, rational perception is to determine whether a particular good identified as such by rational deliberation is presently available. Once all these conditions are met on the Aristotelian picture, MacIntyre notes, action will issue spontaneously (i.e. without the intervening of any modern-style personal choice or decision), and were it not so to issue, it would be because the agent was guilty of some form of practical irrationality – an irrationality deriving from one of the causes of moral imperfection just cited above. It follows for Aristotle (and in endorsing Aristotle’s view here as he does, MacIntyre, significantly, changes his own position on the ineliminablity of tragic dilemmas from After Virtue; see pages 259 and 279 above) that there can be no tragic dilemmas for the agent caused by the fabric of the universe, only those caused by defective practical reasoning. Sound practical reasoning terminates in a true judgement concerning what the good and the best for me, here and now and all things considered, is. Truth cannot contradict truth in Aristotle’s (and MacIntyre’s) view, so only mistaken practical reasoning could lead one to think that in a given context of decision the good requires one simultaneously both to do x and to do some not-x (134–42). (The arguments with which MacIntyre endorses Aristotle’s

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view on moral dilemmas here are fairly clearly elliptical: a fuller defence of his position can be found in his later essay ‘Moral Dilemmas’, 1990d). As he concludes his treatment of Aristotle in Whose Justice?, MacIntyre credits him with a definitive achievement in the theory of practical rationality and with exemplifying for us in his work of theory construction both what it is for a theory to demonstrate superiority with respect to its rivals and how this superiority can be made manifest to those initially occupying a different theoretical standpoint. In summary, then, MacIntyre’s interpretive picture of the evolution of the Hellenic conception of practical rationality is the following. The Homeric writings articulated for us the presuppositions concerning practical rationality of their native social order, but this Homeric conception was undifferentiated and ambiguous with respect to the justifying purpose of role-relative excellence. The sophistic tradition, especially as represented by figures like Thrasymachus, disambiguated this conception by making the goods of effectiveness the acknowledged point of practical reasoning and the measure of rational action. Socrates, however, showed up the confusion in the state of moral discourse of his time, and by his method of e1legxoj, he pointed the way toward progress in deciding rationally between opposed ethical conceptions. Plato next, moving beyond the limitations of Socratic e1legxoj, provided both a refutation of the sophistic conception of practical rationality on that conception’s own terms, and he showed what would be required to vindicate the claims to knowledge implied in a right conception of practical reasoning. Aristotle’s thought represents a culminating moment in this development. He improves on Plato’s exaggeratedly other-worldly conception of justice, and with his conception of rational dialectic and of the virtue of fro&nesij, he brings to fruition what Socrates sought for practical rationality but could not produce by the method of e1legxoj: an account, that is, of how initially rationally well-founded conceptions of what a particular virtue is or requires can be modified in the light of new, hitherto unforeseen circumstances, so meeting the challenges of successful counter-examples to the initial conceptions. Aristotle’s fro&nesij in its exercise of e0piei/keia (that is, epikeia, the reasonable modification of law or the norms governing the exercise of the virtues in the light of the new and unforeseen) shows us how moral knowledge claims, and claims to the rational superiority of a theory of practical rationality over its rivals, can be made and sustained. With respect to this cycle of debates in the ancient world about the nature of practical rationality, MacIntyre argues that we should learn the following lesson: Progress in rationality is achieved only from a point of view. And it is achieved when the adherents of the point of view succeed to some significant degree in elaborating ever more comprehensive and adequate statements of their positions through the dialectical procedure of advancing objections which identify incoherences, omissions, explanatory failures, and other types of flaw and limitation in earlier statements of them, of finding the strongest arguments available for supporting those objections, and then of attempting to restate the position so that it is no longer vulnerable to those specific objections and arguments. (144)

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MacIntyre’s claim is that Aristotle advanced the Socratic-Platonic tradition to which he belonged (and for which the goods of effectiveness were held to be superior to those of excellence) by standards recognizably its own, but that with respect to the rival and incommensurable tradition of the sophists (which valued more highly the goods of effectiveness), he did not, and moreover could not, refute this tradition on its own terms, since his way of casting the debate between effectiveness and excellence theories of practical rationality was internal to his allegiance to the goods of excellence theory. MacIntyre will return to this as yet under-justified claim about rational vindication in the face of theory incommensurability at the end of Whose Justice?, so we will postpone consideration of it until then, but it crucially informs the construction of his own neo-Aristotelian theory of practical rationality (and it will decisively influence his subsequent Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry). 6.3 The Augustinian Contribution and the Thomistic Synthesis Augustine’s moral theory, according to MacIntyre’s interpretation of the history of pre-modern ethical systems, introduces an important modification into previous understandings of morality, as noted above. It is not merely that Augustine was, qua Christian, an ethical universalist, since, as MacIntyre points out, the justice proper to the well-ordered polis in Plato and Aristotle was already in the process of having its range of application extended in the ancient world due to the influence of Greek and subsequently Roman theology. Cicero, for instance, an eloquent spokesman for Stoicism as well as a philosophical eclectic, conceives of an order of justice that includes within itself all gods and humans. What was peculiar, though, about GraecoRoman ethical universalism, or quasi-universalism, MacIntyre argues – and what made it different from its Christian philosophical successor – is that it represented a kind of unquestioning extension of the ethical and legal status quo (i.e. the duties and entitlements of a citizen in the well-ordered polis or of the Roman civitas) to those hitherto excluded (whereas, presumably, and MacIntyre does not elaborate helpfully here, the Jewish tradition actually began with a conception of justice and the right which was universal from the outset). So although the Deuteronomic covenant is made directly with Israel, other peoples who flout its constitutive precepts and prescriptions in their behaviour are believed by Jews to fall under its judgment and to be subject to that covenant-law’s corresponding penalties. And as a later Jewish Rabbinical convert to Christianity, Paul of Tarsus, will make explicit, the law delivered to Israel on Mount Sinai is the same law written on the heart of each person and made known to him or her by the workings of his or her conscience. All humans, regardless of time or place, are under the same law. Although Cicero, MacIntyre admits, had a concept of universal, impersonal justice, MacIntyre is quick to add here that Cicero’s notion had a much more hierarchical structure to it than the corresponding Jewish and the later Christian such notions. For Cicero, he observes, one’s duties can be ranked, and they extend in priority from those owed to parents and fatherland, to those owed children and

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immediate family and then to those regarding more remote family, and finally to those owed friends. Beyond this, the requirements of Ciceronian justice make very little demands upon one, when, for instance, it is strangers (i.e. non-family members, non-fellow citizens, non-friends but mere fellow humans) who are in question. One only owes to these what the positive laws of one’s society have determined not to belong to the sphere of one’s private property, and so, MacIntyre notes, the extent of Ciceronian caritas is rather more limited than the sense of the term made widespread by Christianity would suggest (146–52). It is not so much in the area of the scope of justice that MacIntyre thinks we find Augustine’s most notable contribution to the pre-modern understanding of practical reasoning. As Whose Justice? observes, by Augustine’s time, Christian thinkers were already seeing a convergence between Hellenistic universalist conceptions of justice and the natural law and the universalist requirements of the Old Law. It was rather in Augustine’s way of working between these two different sources for a theory of justice that previous conceptions of practical rationality were distinctively reshaped. Chapter Nine of Whose Justice? gives us the following satisfyingly cogent account of this complex episode in the history of ideas. Augustine, as MacIntyre notes here, takes a largely neo-Platonic theory of justice and modifies it so that it coheres with the account of moral failing (deliberate or indeliberate) in Christian revelation. The form of justice remains, in Augustine’s account of morality, that unchanging standard familiar in the broadly Platonic tradition, a standard knowable by the human intellect and applicable to all. But Augustine gives a new account of the causes of and prerequisites for the practice of justice. According to his overall moral conception, happiness is the implicit goal of all human strivings, but happiness can only be attained if human desires are aimed, not at what is immediately attractive to them, but at what it is fitting for them to seek as specified by the wisdom embodied in divine law. Realizing that the moral psychology in the conceptual scheme that he had inherited was inadequate to describe this process, Augustine alters it by an innovation: improper desiring is caused not, or not alone, by ignorance, undisciplined passions, lack of right judgement, or insufficient experience (as the Socratic, Platonic, or Aristotelian theories would have it); it is caused also, and more fundamentally, by a defective will. For Augustine, unlike Plato or Aristotle, MacIntyre notes, the faculty of intellect or reason is no longer independently motivating; intellect is not therefore a sufficient initiating cause of human action: more fundamental in the genesis of action is the operation of the faculty of will, a faculty which directs – or misdirects, depending on its motive purpose – reason, the passions, and the senses. The un-reformed will, on Augustine’s account, habitually misdirects the cognitive faculties and the passions when its ultimate purpose is the defective motive of self-glorification. This motive leads it to resist the impulses of divine grace which are necessary for the agent to attain to right desiring and so to achieve happiness. The deepest cause of injustice and human unhappiness is therefore the vice of excessive self-love – a vice which inspires a prideful rebellion against the wise and beneficent laws of the Creator. The practice of justice therefore, in Augustine’s view, requires as a prerequisite the

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operation of the virtue of humility, through which man submits his desires to the divine law and opens himself up to receive the grace necessary to keep that law (152–8). As early as his A Short History of Ethics, MacIntyre had articulated and defended the thesis that every theory of morality and justice requires for its completion an elaboration of its consequences for the practice of politics. It is therefore unsurprising that, after Augustine, the narrative of Whose Justice? turns to a pre-eminent exponent and theorist of Augustinian politics, the eleventh-century Pope Gregory VII. Gregory’s political theology spells out more clearly still, MacIntyre will argue, the difference between an Augustinian conception of justice and the good life and a Stoical or Aristotelian such conception. For Gregory, as for Cicero, MacIntyre notes, there is a universal, impersonal order of iustitia from which no one – no matter how high their office – is exempt, and there is a system of iures which specifies the content, or entitlements and obligations, of this universal law. But, for Gregory, as a faithful Augustinian, the failure of individuals faithfully to submit to and to discharge the duties of their station in life – duties specified by the divine natural law – is caused by pride or superbia. With pride there is iniustitia, and for there to be the justice without which there can be no concordia, Gregory maintains that the virtues of humility and obedience are essential. This, MacIntyre notes, marks one highly significant difference between various ancient conceptions of morality and the post-Augustinian conception. There are other differences made manifest by Gregory’s political theology. While the ethical picture in Gregory is, as in Aristotle, teleological and virtue-based, in Aristotle’s scheme there is no place for a divine law-giver. The te&loj of human life for Aristotle is something very different than for Gregory, Whose Justice? notes, since Aristotle lacks any clear picture of the soul’s union with God in a next life – a picture which Gregory as a Christian, of course, has. Also, the magnanimous man who for Aristotle embodies full human flourishing is something rather different than the saint who, for Gregory as for any Augustinian Christian, is instead thought to embody that flourishing. The universal order of justice Gregory conceives, based on an impartial, socially established system of duty, merit, and reciprocity, is also more radically egalitarian than its Stoic counterpart. And unlike the impersonal rule of justice in Aristotle, it is non-exclusive – being applicable, for instance, to women and manual workers, and not merely to free adult male citizens (161–3). It is these perceived tensions, if not outright contradictions, between the Aristotelian and the Christian conceptions of justice with which Thomas Aquinas was confronted in his attempt to create a new theory of practical rationality, MacIntyre observes – a theory which could incorporate features from both the Augustinian and the Aristotelian traditions. Thus Thomas Aquinas is the figure to whom Whose Justice? turns next, but before he states why he thinks Aquinas is worthy of our esteem, MacIntyre wants first to establish why Aquinas’s distinctive method in philosophical inquiry is very worthy of our esteem. This is the point of Chapter Ten, ‘Overcoming a Conflict of Traditions’, and we return again to the issue of theory incommensurability, given relevance this time by the famous debates

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between mediaeval Augustinians in thirteenth-century Paris which were initiated by the reception of new texts of Aristotle. There are, MacIntyre argues here, two significant moments in the encounter between rival and incommensurable intellectual traditions – traditions, that is, with significantly different central theses, with different concepts of knowledge, truth and justification, and with each a different unfolding internal problematic. In cases of encounter between two such traditions, there will be from the perspective of either and by the nature of the case, no neutral ground from which rationally to adjudicate their differences. In a first stage, tradition A will discover that tradition B is incompatible with itself, and vice versa; each will then refute the other from its own standpoint, making perhaps those minor adjustments to itself seen to be advisable or necessary given its familiarity now with a rival standpoint. A and B may then recognize in their mutual initial failures to win converts from the other side, for instance, that they are indeed incommensurable traditions in the sense specified. They will then be faced with two choices about the nature of truth and inquiry: perspectivism or realism. Adherents of A or of B may so decide, given the nature of their conflict and the absence of a neutral vantage point from which rationally to resolve it, that truth is something internal to a scheme, something essentially perspective-dependent, and that theory incommensurability is in consequence something theoretically (i.e. as opposed to pragmatically) insurmountable (166–7). They may instead decide, though, that there is some mind-independent reality not of any human making, access to which may only be had from a given perspective, but which serves as the measure against which the epistemic worth of any conceptual scheme must be judged. In this case, the encounter between two incommensurable traditions can move to a second phase. Tradition A, for example, MacIntyre notes, might discover that although it is indeed incommensurable with tradition B, tradition B affords it resources to help with A’s own internal problematic. In order to make this discovery, however, members of tradition A will have to exercise an unusual bit of empathy: they will have to master and adopt for the sake of argument the standpoint of tradition B, and then view their native tradition from B’s perspective. If the light B sheds on A’s own internal problematic is significant, then the conceptual scheme of A might be seen by its adherents to require substantial modification, perhaps even abandonment in favour of the scheme of tradition B. In this way, Whose Justice? claims, what was once a theoretical impasse can generate a fruitful dialectic. MacIntyre has long thought that perspectivism with respect to truth is an incoherent position, but an extended attempt on his part to show how this is so will not be forthcoming until Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. He also thinks, as a largely empirical matter, that realism with respect to truth is the spontaneous attitude of the untutored human mind (see, for instance, his essay, ‘Moral Relativism, Truth and Justification’, 1994f). But for now we return to his treatment of Thomas Aquinas in Whose Justice? Predictably, MacIntyre sees in Aquinas’s ability to work with and between the opposed Aristotelian and the Augustinian traditions the exercise of this rare gift of empathy just noted. The goal of Thomistic-style inquiry, made plain by the

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infrastructure of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, MacIntyre notes, is to have the rational confidence that one’s philosophical premises and conclusions are truthful, or successful approximations of the truth, because they are more warranted than any other known alternatives. Position D for Aquinas, on this interpretation, is rationally superior to, truer than, positions A, B and C just in as much as it shows itself dialectically capable of meeting their objections to itself, while incorporating the respective strengths of A, B and C and transcending their respective limitations. Aquinas is, of course, a realist, MacIntyre notes, one who thinks that there is a mindindependent reality against which any and all human conceptions can be measured. And as evidence of Aquinas’s suitably broad-minded dialectical method – and of his willingness to be bound by no antecedent system and to learn from all available positions – MacIntyre later in Chapter Ten of Whose Justice? notes how Aquinas follows Cicero and Plato and not Aristotle on the doctrine of the ‘cardinal’ or hinge moral virtues – justice, temperateness, and courage – as on the inter-connection of these virtues and their relation to the fourth cardinal virtue of prudence. Devotees of Aquinas have showed some alarm at MacIntyre’s interpretation of Aquinas here, and have seen him, perhaps under the historicist influence of Hegel, Collingwood, and Kuhn, miscasting Thomas as an epistemological fallibilist. But they have perhaps not paid sufficient attention to MacIntyre’s own text and have opened themselves up to MacIntyre’s rejoinder that they, under the no less baneful influence from a Thomistic standpoint of Cartesian or Kantian rationalism, overlook, as Aquinas did not, the temporal and empirical dimension behind our possession of knowledge of timeless truths. So MacIntyre is entirely within his Thomistic rights to emphasize that although philosophical first principles are for Aquinas, once appropriately formulated and understood, apodictic and non-gainsayable, they still remain achievements: intellectual results that must be arrived at by a dialectical process of initial formulation, testing, emendation, and re-formulation. While they express timeless truths – that is, they capture what is true per se about some subject matter – and while entailments from these principles share in the warrant that the principles themselves possess, the warrant for these principles, according to Aquinas, is a posteriori and not ever strictly intuitionistic or transcendental. So the first principles of any science or of any sub-division of philosophy, unlike trivial per se truths such as ‘the whole is greater than the part’, are not knowable to all rational persons of basic conceptual-linguistic competence at the outset of inquiry. Moreover, MacIntyre reminds us helpfully, Aquinas conceives that much toing and fro-ing – much movement from subordinate truths to first principles, whose truth these subordinate truths presuppose, and then back to other truths entailed by those first principles, and so on – will be necessary to come to adequate knowledge of the nature and content of any given first principle (170–75). This has the important consequence for Aquinas’s moral theory, MacIntyre will note, that in it, unlike in the modern moral theories of Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and Bentham, there is at the outset of moral inquiry no first principle of practical rationality comprehensible in a form which would permit it to serve as the basis for the construction of a moral theory. This general truth for Aquinas concerning first principles as such, MacIntyre observes, is

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especially relevant when it is first practical principles which are in question, since for Aquinas practical rationality requires moral rectitude. Even at later stages of the inquiry about the nature of practical rationality, a robust knowledge of the content of the first and closely allied subordinate principles of practical reason can only be possessed by those who themselves possess the virtues. An adequate moral theory for Aquinas, as for Aristotle before him, MacIntyre notes, can only be sufficiently rationally justified ex post facto – and, crucially, only to and by the morally proficient (174–5). As for Aquinas’s theory of morality itself, MacIntyre contends that it can be understood as arising out of the following considerations – I paraphrase here MacIntyre’s novel attempt to reconstruct the core of the theory. The immediacies of practice force each human agent to construct an account of practical rationality and of morality. Working with one’s inbuilt tendencies and spontaneous inclinations – to self-preservation, to sociability, to the creating and sustaining of a family, to the development of one’s creative capacities and talents – one seeks to introduce harmony and order and hierarchy into these. In order to do this, one must formulate some conception of the unifying purpose of all action, some conception of the final and complete good. This conception will serve as the first principle of practical reasoning, which is to say, that principle upon which all other acts of practical reasoning will be premised and in accord with which the agent will formulate other and more specific action-guiding principles – principles enabling her or him to distinguish between genuine and spurious goods, between advisable and inadvisable courses of action, and so forth. The agent’s knowledge of the nature and content of these subordinate principles will be continually enriched over time, and, moreover, only at the end of a successful moral journey will she begin to realize the full content of that first principle of practical reasoning which has served as the basis for all her reason-informed actions – that principle of which she had initially only a partial grasp (175). Aquinas, MacIntyre notes, thinks that all human agents have both an innate capacity to discover and to formulate those trustworthy action-guiding precepts which comprise what Aquinas refers to as lex naturalis (the natural law), and that they have an innate capacity to engage in sound practical reasoning, However, Aquinas also maintains, MacIntyre reminds us, that this capacity can be damaged by bad moral education and by the acquisition of bad moral habits. With Augustine, Thomas holds that there is something intrinsically defective about the human will which inclines it to deviate from the natural law, a deviation which requires special explanation above and beyond Platonic or Aristotelian invocations of weakness of will or of ignorance or of undisciplined passions. The purpose of Chapter Eleven of Whose Justice?, ‘Aquinas on Practical Rationality’, is therefore to argue that an examination of the details of Aquinas’s theory of human agency shows where and how, under the influence of Augustine, Aquinas was led to modify Aristotle’s own account of human agency (MacIntyre sensibly follows more recent Thomistic scholarship here in noting how Aquinas’s tendency is more to incorporate Aristotelian theses into an Augustinian framework than vice versa).

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As background, Whose Justice? had noted in its Chapter Seven how we owe to the Augustinian tradition the introduction of the terms intentio, synderesis, and conscientia into the language of human agency and morality – terms corresponding roughly in English to, respectively, ‘intention or motive’, ‘the habit of conscience operating by means of the most basic, inadmissible principles of human practical reasoning’ and ‘the habit of conscience as applied to specific acts and taking into account specific circumstances’ (synderesis, it must be noted, is of course a term which lacks currency outside of Catholic moral theology, but what the term denotes does have currency). Aquinas was then able to use this new conceptual equipment in the following way, Whose Justice? maintains (and here we have MacIntyre’s not uncontroversial reconstruction of human action according to Aquinas). The human intellect perceives or judges some object or action to be good; this judgement elicits an intentio or act of desiring from the will. So far this corresponds to the way Aristotle had envisaged the matter. This elicited desire will be rational (and an instance of Aristotle’s proai/resij), and the action in which it issues will be a rational one, if the agent’s character is properly formed and no undisciplined passion or akratic impulse intervenes. However, on Aquinas’s conception, in order for the agent to act in pursuit of the desired object (i.e. to undertake the desired action), a further executive act of the will not envisaged by Aristotle, an electio, is necessary (188–91). This introduces an added note of responsibility to human agency. In Aquinas’s view, MacIntyre notes, an agent, even in an immature state, is responsible by acts of electio for shaping his character a certain way; an agent is also capable of acting out of character and of exercising, for instance, the mala voluntas of which Augustine spoke. In order for an act to be a good act for Aquinas, it must satisfy four conditions which would be more or less recognizable to Aristotle: (1) it must not contravene a negative precept of the natural law (on which more below); (2) it must be done out of a good motive – a motive which accords with the final human end; (3) its unintended per accidens negative consequences must not outweigh its intrinsic good, and (4) the action must be perfective of the agent her- or himself. The natural law for Aquinas is that system of positive and negative requirements which signpost the way to full human flourishing and set parameters for the inbuilt inclinations of human nature to observe. This system of precepts – hypothetical inasmuch as addressed to free agents who can only move towards their good by acts of uncoerced self-determination, categorical inasmuch as the command of a sovereign, that is, the product of the Creator’s intellect and will – is the product of divine wisdom. This system of the natural law plays the role of pedagogue according to Aquinas, MacIntyre observes, just as the justice of the well-ordered polis had played the same role for the morally untutored in Aristotle’s ethical conception. The negative precepts of the natural law prohibit those actions contrary to the human end or good, and the positive precepts enjoin or require those actions which are instrumentally necessary to and/or constitutive of that end or good. An adumbration of these precepts exists in the form of the Ten Commandments, and so is available to religious faith as a part of divine revelation. But, Aquinas also maintains, Whose

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Justice? is quick to observe, these precepts are available to any human agent in possession of his or her reasoning capacity. By the ineradicable and infallible operation of the faculty of synderesis in those in possession of reason, one is able to judge of those actions which are good or bad for oneself as agent, and by the faculty of conscience one is able to infer from synderesis the application of these general principles to specific actions or action-types (184–6). Moral precepts and human discovery and knowledge of them are importantly connected to the human end – an end grasped only dimly at the outset of moral inquiry, but seen with increasing clarity as human life progresses morally. This end is different, of course, MacIntyre observes, for Aquinas than for Aristotle: it is union with God in the next life, not qewri/a in this life (which for Aquinas is but an imperfect anticipation of the former), and Whose Justice? dwells usefully here on how Aquinas’s theological motives and commitments led him to incorporate Aristotle’s conception of eu)daimoni/a into a theological framework. With Augustine, Aquinas holds that the supernatural end of man beyond the grave can only be attained thanks to the work of prevenient divine grace – grace to which the human will can and must submit, and by means of which the infused theological virtue of charity can inspire and direct the acts of all those natural and acquired virtues of which Aristotle and other pagan authors spoke illuminatingly. But the consideration of this takes us out of the field of philosophy, and though MacIntyre, a self-described Augustinian Christian at the time of Whose Justice?, is moved by these considerations, they are not directly relevant to the book’s philosophical purposes, so he does not elaborate on them at length. 6.4

Challenging Modern Morality

The Thomistic moral synthesis was and is highly rationally compelling, MacIntyre has claimed. Why, then, has it not held sway and so become the dominant conception of practical rationality in post-mediaeval occidental culture? Repeating claims from earlier work, MacIntyre cites here several factors in the demise of the Aristotelian conception of the moral and political life, which demise begins in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most important of these, he argues, was the widespread loss of confidence that any socially shared conception of the good was still available: a loss of confidence caused by the religious and political conflicts of the age and by the failure of intellectual attempts such as Leibniz’s to secure one – and by the failure of political attempts to impose one. Compounding this was, Whose Justice? notes summarizing some of MacIntyre’s earlier work, the rise of the more austere Augustinian theology of the reformers, which put considerably less stock in the workings of unaided human reason, plus the rise of anti-teleological natural scientific inquiry. Economic modernization in its turn contributed to creating a new social climate by moving the locus of productivity out of the household and giving increasing prominence to the category of the individual.

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A new, distinctively modern, form of political theory so begins to take shape, Whose Justice? maintains, which is tailored to serve the social and ethical needs of the time. According to this new form of explaining and justifying political practice – with its novel account of political authority, of political justice and of right practical reasoning – the political regime must be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good, and sound practical reasoning requires the citizen to recognize as a good reason for action obedience to evaluatively neutral norms of political justice. Obedience to these evaluatively neutral norms is required of the citizen even when those norms contravene, as they often must, norms deriving from his or her personally held conception of the good. This way of understanding and justifying the political clearly cannot, MacIntyre observes, cohere with the Aristotelian way, and yet, as he notes, Aristotelian ethical-cum-political theory lives on in the early modern period. But its continued life, at least in its Scottish incarnation (a special object of MacIntyre’s interest), sees it undergo several important modifications (209–12). It is worthwhile asking why MacIntyre chooses here to examine developments in ethical and political thought in the Scotland of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The answer to this question is not apparent – not, at least, until the later chapters of Whose Justice? on Hume and contemporary liberalism: the de facto victors, as MacIntyre would have it, in the social contest between competing conceptions of practical rationality. The focus of what is effectively the fourth section of Whose Justice?, though, is with the social and political developments of the Scottish Enlightenment and with the ethical and political philosophy called forth by it. The authors MacIntyre examines first are the little-known Viscount James Dalrymple of Stair and the better-known Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson’s thought, he argues, will set the terms of the subsequent British debate about justice and the right. These chapters contain what must be regarded as, by any account, some strikingly brilliant and path-breaking (and, needless to say, contentious) philosophical historiography. MacIntyre’s claim is that the social and intellectual lives of Scots and Englishmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can best be understood as embodying a tale of two rival and incompatible social orders. The first of these might be termed a principle-based social order, the second an interest-based order. Key exponent theorists of the first will be Lord Stair and Francis Hutcheson, of the second Edmund Burke, and in a very different way, David Hume. According to the first and distinctively Scottish conception, and here I summarize MacIntyre’s exegetical arguments, social and political life is thought to be regulated by impersonal principles of justice which are discernible by reason and which take primacy over and constrain human passions and interests (they de-absolutize, for instance, property rights). This conception has an inherently universalist scope, as the principles upon which it is based are thought both applicable to all and accessible to all by reason or by an inner moral sense. Furthermore, these principles of justice are regarded both as knowable in themselves, and knowable in their entailments and applications for the constitutive practices of a given social order.

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According to the second conception, the passions and the interests of the individual enjoy primacy; the principles of justice governing the social order must therefore be tailored to serve both the individual’s interests and the common interest arising from the overlap of individual interests. This interest-based social order naturally tends, though, to construct a common interest out of the overlap and harmonization of interests of the propertied (i.e. those individuals most empowered to satisfy their personal interests, the dominant interest group), while it tends to marginalize, by discounting their potentially conflicting or disrupting interests, the un-propertied. Social relationships within this order are characterized in terms of the way x is capable of satisfying or frustrating y’s interests, and vice versa, and this again will give rise to the tendency within the social order–a social order of the reciprocity of benefits – to regard the interests of the propertied as determinative of the character of justice. No appeal outside or beyond the interests of the status quo in establishing norms of justice is thought possible, and these norms are deemed malleable before the changing character of the common interest – which is to say, adaptable to the changing interests of the socially dominant. Property rights in this social order are regarded as absolute. Turning to the specifics of modern Scottish history, MacIntyre observes that, even in spite of the 1707 Act of Union with England, there was much in Scotland at the time that inclined it to continue in its former direction as a principle-based social order. The terms of the Union permitted it to retain its own established Church and its own educational and legal system, so the country possessed the institutional means – schools and universities, its own system of jurisprudence (one drawing on the legacy of Roman and Dutch Reformed jurisprudence instead of English common law), and the governing bodies of the Church of Scotland (kirk sessions, synods and General Assembly) – to resist the slide with England into an interest-based social order. In view of these institutional means, it also possessed the ability to carry on a continuing debate about the character of its shared social principles. Early eighteenth-century Scotland was additionally fortunate, MacIntyre notes, in having an exemplary theorist of a principle-based form of social order in the person of James Dalrymple of Stair, a theorist able philosophically to articulate and defend a number of characteristic Scottish attitudes. Whose Justice? draws our attention in particular to Stair’s treatise, widely influential in the Scotland of its day (authored first in 1681, revised subsequently in 1693), the Institutions of the Law of Scotland: a work with a comprehensive account of justice, law, and right practical reasoning and conduct. Significant concerning Stair’s conceptual scheme, MacIntyre notes, was its interesting blend of Aristotelian and Calvinist commitments which made it, if not fully consonant with various of Aristotle’s own doctrines (particularly those concerning first principles), consonant with the doctrines of Scottish Presbyterianism (i.e. at least on a common construal of the doctrines of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms). Law for Stair is that dictate of reason which bids man to observe what is fitting for his nature as specified by God, and in Stair’s view, all properly functioning

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human reason is capable of apprehending the two types of principles describable as laws: ‘principles of equity’ and ‘principles of expediency’. Principles of equity are principles which specify the objective, impersonal standards to which man must measure up and conform in his conduct in order to meet the divine requirements for his nature: requirements, for example, that he be humble, devout, penitent, just towards family and society, and sociable. Principles of expediency or utility, for Stair, are the dictates of positive law or human convention which are laid down because man is in rebellion against God, but these in their own way order him to obedience to God and so minister to the principles of equity (Stair, MacIntyre observes, did not think that principles of expediency had anything other than derivative value, and this marks his difference with later utilitarians). The lynchpin of this account of the right and the just for Stair, MacIntyre notes, was the knowledge of the existence and perfections of God available to all humans. In holding this, Stair made manifest his membership in that wing of Presbyterianism to which Francis Hutcheson would later give his allegiance, and for which a rational vindication of principles comprising the rule of law and governing the social order was deemed both possible and valuable. It is here, however, MacIntyre observes, that Stair’s account most notably diverged from Aristotle’s. There is no discussion in Stair of the dialectical process by which first principles, knowable in themselves to all rational inquirers and dependent for their truth on nothing more basic than themselves, are grasped and defended. But Stair was at least aware, MacIntyre notes, that his universalist account of justice and the right required of him to explain why the beliefs about justice and the right articulated in Institutions of the Law of Scotland were not universally held. And Stair’s explanation of this – that divergence is the result of inferential error or of moral failure – while not impressive, MacIntyre admits, does at least manifest some critical self-awareness in his efforts at theory construction. More impressive, Whose Justice? argues, is Stair’s Aristotelian-style attempt to locate his ethical and political tenets within a unitary, comprehensive, and hierarchically ordered system of the sciences, in which subordinate tenets grasped by experience and experiment are linked by deductive relations to underived-withinthe-science, per se knowable first principles – and where each science is located, in accord with the nature of its subject matter and the degree of derivation of its first principles from the wholly underived first principles of metaphysics and philosophical theology, in a hierarchical ordering, with theology at the head. Instructive in the contrast between Scottish and English self-understanding in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century periods, MacIntyre notes, is the contrast between Stair’s Institutions of the Law of Scotland and Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England of 1765. Whereas both revealed and philosophical theology are at the justificatory centre of Stair’s jurisprudence, the existence and nature of God is something inessential to Blackstone’s theory, which rests instead on a conception of universal and innate human self-love. Whereas the right in Blackstone is determined by human wants and fears and or by historical English precedent, in Stair it is determined by reference to a standpoint external to

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the social order and external to spontaneous human desires and fears. Whereas in Stair property rights are conditioned by the needs of the species, in Blackstone they are regarded as uninfringeable and absolute (228–31). As Whose Justice? moves next to the thought of Francis Hutcheson, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and eminent spokesman for the moderate wing of the Church of Scotland, MacIntyre sees in Hutcheson both an important continuation in the vein of Stair and a decisive contribution to the future debate about the Scottish social order. Unlike Stair, MacIntyre observes, Hutcheson’s attempt to provide the underpinnings and defence of the distinctive form of Scottish society, with its largely homogeneous and unitary character, is made in the face of two new pressures: first, economic modernization within the United Kingdom, and second, the prevalence among Scotland’s educated classes of philosophical thought (for instance, that of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke) opposed in various ways to the Scottish style of social order. With Stair, Hutcheson upholds the primacy of principle in the determination of right, and with Stair, but without drawing upon him, Hutcheson articulates and defends a notion of an impersonal order of universal justice and a universal and accessible-to-all natural law. Both thinkers thus define the useful in terms of the right, and not vice versa. Like Stair, Hutcheson also maintains that there is a unified hierarchical ordering of the sciences for which the knowledge attainable by us in philosophical theology provides the archstone, and in which the subordinate truths of each science are linked to the evident first principles of that science by deductive relations. Hutcheson’s conception of the hierarchically ordered unity of the sciences, a conception albeit still in the process of elaboration, was capable, MacIntyre observes, of producing a unified philosophical curriculum to serve the self-understanding, the organization and defence, and the self-critical development of the Scottish social order of his time (264–7). Crucially, though, and damagingly, MacIntyre argues, Hutcheson’s account of the nature of first practical principles and of the means of our access to them was even less satisfactory than Stair’s – and this owing to the influence on Hutcheson of both the ‘way of ideas’ epistemology of philosophical predecessors Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld, and Locke and the theory of human nature of Shaftesbury (268–70). So with the thought of Hutcheson, for all of its laudable intentions to be true to a broadly Calvinist Aristotelian philosophical outlook, we have a further adulteration and philosophical weakening of its Aristotelian component, MacIntyre wants us to observe. MacIntyre does not take sides in the interpretive debate over whether Hutcheson’s moral epistemology was cognitivist or non-cognitivist; what he is eager to point out, though, is how Hutcheson’s particular moral sense theory damaged the broadly Aristotelian theory of justice and the right to which it was linked. On MacIntyre’s interpretation, Hutcheson was heavily influenced in the construction of his moral theory, as Shaftesbury before him had been, by the prevailing form of Calvinist spirituality of the time, with the great emphasis in its preaching and devotional literature on inner sentiment and introspective self-scrutiny. Hutcheson thus follows

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Shaftesbury’s anti-intellectualist departure from a Platonic or Aristotelian form of Calvinist thought by denying that actions in themselves, considered independently of the passions which produced them, have any moral worth. Actions are taken by Hutcheson to be morally defective (as opposed to being merely harmful or beneficial, useful or inconvenient) only when they derive from some passion or set of passions which on the occasion has been given disproportionate importance relative to the entire range of the passions. An inner moral sense then, in Hutcheson’s view, enables the ordinary moral agent, whether educated or uneducated, immediately to discern good from evil actions – and virtues from vices – as well as to determine the passions which have produced her or his actions. Deductive reasoning then permits the agent to draw out the consequences of this moral discernment for both action and social practice (Hutcheson here maintaining what Stair had previously maintained). MacIntyre notes how the task of the moral philosopher in Hutcheson’s view is both to clarify for the ordinary agent the nature of his inner world of passions and sentiments, and to determine what order should obtain between these. Philosophical reflection will show, Hutcheson thinks (and here again, MacIntyre observes, he follows Shaftesbury), that there are two dominant passions in the self: benevolent empathy and self-love. The perceptive capacity of the moral sense, when functioning properly, enables the agent to adjudicate between the potentially and often competing claims of, on the one hand, a ‘calm self-love’, and, on the other, of altruistic benevolence. And the deliverances of this moral sense are self-justifying – that is, they are reliably accurate without either needing or being susceptible of any justification by reason. In this way, MacIntyre notes, the deliverances of the moral sense are, for Hutcheson, the first practical principles which serve as the basis for the deductions in which the natural moral law is made manifest in its details (268–72). The fairly radical break with Aristotelian moral epistemology that such a view represents is evident, and MacIntyre is therefore able to draw the contrast between the two with bold strokes. For Aristotle, right moral appraisal always involves the work of reason, the bringing of a set of contemplated actions under an appropriate concept and the consideration of the order of the contemplated action to the agent’s ultimate good. Right moral action on Aristotle’s picture thus requires the compliance of the passions or desires with that determination of reason. For Hutcheson, human passions exist in a fixed state, the objects which they seek are not matter for rational reflection or criticism, and reason can but serve what passion bids it to seek (this way of thinking clearly anticipating Hume). For Aristotle, while reason does not deliberate about the ends of desire, it inquires about what ends are genuinely worthy of human nature, and in the form of the virtue of fro&nesij it educates the passions. These passions, once appropriately disciplined, can then seek what is genuinely good for the agent, all things considered. Aristotelian practical reason thus has a prescriptive function with respect to the passions and their objects, MacIntyre notes, and the moral theory of which it forms a part wisely respects the fact that the passions are capable of much variation in their activity and are capable of being shaped and re-shaped in various ways (275–6).

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Hutcheson, Whose Justice? argues, is caught in a bind because he seeks to construct a universalist account of the right while at the same time employing an epistemological stance which privileges the first-person perspective. He thus needs to satisfy the contrary demands of deriving abstract, impersonal action-guiding principles while working from what can only warrantedly be regarded within his conceptual scheme as private mental representations. The ‘moral sense’, therefore, MacIntyre wants to claim, is a philosophical fiction constructed to satisfy these incompatible demands, and it is a fiction that easily conceals itself because it serves so well the kind of social order which Hutcheson is addressing and for which he is acting as a kind of apologetical theorist. Hutcheson’s difficulty here, Whose Justice? argues next, prepares the way for the twin opposed developments of Hume’s noncognitivist empiricism and the common-sense theory of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Hume will more or less accept Hutcheson’s moral epistemology and theory of human nature, but reject his philosophical theology and his theory of justice and the natural law; Reid and Stewart, as MacIntyre notes, will retain Hutcheson’s central moral-cum-political commitments and philosophical theology, but reject his moral epistemology. To begin with his treatment of Hume, MacIntyre credits Hume in Whose Justice? with seeing what Hutcheson failed to see: namely, that the way of ideas epistemology adopted by Hutcheson under the influence of Shaftesbury was in fact deeply incompatible with the metaphysical and theological commitments to which Hutcheson had tried to link it. If private mental representations are all that we have to work with in understanding self and world, these cannot serve as the source of abstract universals specifying the laws of nature – nor can they provide any sound basis from which to infer the existence of God. Another basis for the institution of morality, the rule of law and the institutions of government must be sought. In Hume, as MacIntyre observes, any ambiguity about the nature of moral judgement disappears, since Hume’s is an explicitly non-cognitive theory of moral judgement, and reason can never, in Hume’s view, move one to act, only the passions and sentiments can. Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen of Whose Justice?, ‘Hume’s Anglicizing Subversion’ and ‘Hume on Practical Rationality and Justice’, contain a very useful, if avowedly controversial in places, presentation of the kernel of Hume’s moral and closely allied political theory. MacIntyre first gives us the following résumé of Hume’s moral theoretical framework. True to the way of ideas framework, the sole two sources of mental representations for Hume are either ideas or impressions. It is these which by their impact on the agent cause passions and sentiments (sentiments being passions linked with ideas), and unless a passion caused by some idea or impression is impeded by a stronger passion, or by some external circumstance, it automatically moves the agent to act. Ideas and impressions, in Hume’s view, cause the agent different passions depending on whether they cause him pleasure or pain: if these passions have an intentionality towards the self or towards other selves, they are termed by Hume ‘indirect’ passions; if they lack any such intentionality, they are termed ‘direct’ passions. If pleasurable, impressions or ideas cause the direct

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passions of either desire or joy or hope; if painful, they cause those of aversion or grief or fear. And an act of will for Hume, MacIntyre reminds us, is merely the effect of a pain or a pleasure giving rise to these ‘direct’ passions. Pleasurable impressions or ideas cause the indirect passion of pride when they have an internal reference to the self, or the passion of love when the internal reference is to some other self. Painful impressions or ideas cause the indirect passion of humility with reference to the self, or of hate when the reference is to another self. A virtue, then, for Hume is merely that capacity of the self to produce passions of pride or of love; a vice is the capacity to produce passions of humility or of hate. In a further division of the passions important for Hume’s political theory, MacIntyre notes, passions can either be calm or violent: they are calm if they serve the longterm and more general interests of the agent, and violent if they aim at particular, immediate satisfactions which are often contrary to those long-term interests. What, then, is the role of reason in human action, according to Hume? On MacIntyre’s interpretation, reason for Hume has a threefold task with respect to action: it can address questions concerning the existence and attainability of the objects of the passions; it can specify expeditious means to attain those ends or objects which the passions have determined for themselves, and finally, it can, in an ex post facto manner, give expression to the passions and their intentions by the formulation of propositions such as, ‘I want an x’, or ‘y is a good action.’ But reason can in no sense independently motivate an agent to act (303–5). This philosophical psychology, MacIntyre observes, is closely related to Hume’s moral and political theory in the following way. Property, for Hume, is what causes in human nature as such the greatest amount of pleasure, both directly in its being possessed, and secondarily by the admiration it elicits in others – especially among those of similar property and status in the social hierarchy, to whom this admiration is reciprocated, so benefiting both parties. Here, Hume in his theory of the good, MacIntyre argues, speciously generalizes from the English Hanoverian ruling-class standpoint to which he aspires to belong (293–5). Increase in property for Hume brings increase in pleasure, and safeguarding of property becomes essential both for present and long-term satisfaction. This safeguarding becomes particularly important in times not of general scarcity, but of partial abundance, with the social and economic inequality such brings. In these conditions, property rights may be threatened unless they have the protection of impersonal norms and impartial institutions. The rules of justice and the institutions of government are therefore, for Hume, artificial constructions of reason which the sensible agent will respect and to which he will submit even when they require him to frustrate his violent passions and shortterm interests – or to benefit those individuals whom he desires not to benefit. The enlightened agent will support these artifices of reason, on Hume’s picture, MacIntyre reminds us, if and because he has learned from experience the greater benefit that comes from strengthening his calm passions and weakening his violent passions, and also because of an instinct of sympathy in him which causes him displeasure at the sight of others being done harm. These will lead him to observe the rules of

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justice and submit to their enforcement by government even when it would be to his immediate and occasional advantage to act against them. The right, on this account, is a function of status quo property relations, and cannot be defined antecedently to or independently of these. Government exists both to protect private property (on which no just claim, even by those in need, can be made) and to enforce contracts, so securing stability and harmony within the system of existing property relations. Because the right for Hume, MacIntyre argues, is something internal to the status quo, practical rationality on Hume’s account can only be exercised by an agent working within the social system in its actual condition. This agent will be one willing to have his idiosyncratic or excessively partial and subjective passions and sentiments corrected by a common interest. So, as in Aristotle, MacIntyre points out, but on account of a very different background theory of the good, Hume’s theory of practical rationality also has it that one can only be practically rational by belonging to and being shaped by a determinate social order – in this case a cosmopolitan community of enlightened self-interest (instead of the small-scale virtue based community of the Greek polis; 320–21). Although there is not much by way of explicit philosophical criticism of Hume in Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen of Whose Justice?, MacIntyre does make two related points in them against Hume’s large-scale moral-cum-political theory. The first of these re-states an earlier criticism from A Short History of Ethics (see pages 35–6 above): that Hume, in his reliance on a strongly essentialist conception of human nature, falsely believes that human passions and sentiments are unalterable givens, and so fails to see or acknowledge that passions and sentiments can be, and are, variously shaped and altered in different social orders owing to the influence of rival and incompatible background metaphysical beliefs and conceptions of the self. Hume is then, in the first place, guilty of a fairly straightforward, and significant, empirical error in his account of human nature. MacIntyre’s other objection to Hume’s moral theory here is that Hume unwarrantedly treats the values and interests of the dominant sentiments and passions of the social order to which he aspires to belong as normative, and then, in an un-philosophical manner and by means of a partisan historical narrative of progress (as in his The Natural History of Religion or his The History of England) simply excludes or marginalizes without significant argument those rival passions and rival interests and virtues which are discordant with the set he values. This leads him into an inconsistency, so that when, in his consideration of the Jacobites, for example, Hume wishes to reject their rival account of political legitimacy and the rival social order which that account underwrites, MacIntyre notes, Hume claims that their error and their social misconduct arise from a set of false beliefs. But if this were the case, then reason would be capable of moving agents to action – the very possibility disallowed by Hume’s theory of action (316–18). Curiously, MacIntyre does not do much with this objection here, perhaps because his purposes on this occasion are more narrative than dialectical. He does in any event want to show in Whose Justice? how the explanation of moral dissensus which it is incumbent on Hume as value universalist and anthropological essentialist to

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give, is, as was Hutcheson’s before him, fatally weak. Its weaknesses will not be much improved upon, Whose Justice? argues next, by the rival moral theory, also produced within a Hutchesonian framework, of Thomas Reid. Reid’s moral theory, MacIntyre notes, shares with Hutcheson and with Hume, as with the later theory of Dugald Stewart, the belief that inter-cultural moral disagreement, whether diachronic or synchronic, is an illusion. Reid identifies as one of the causes of this illusion the work of errant philosophical theory. Common sense, an endowment of human nature as such, according to Reid, indicates to any and all of sound mind what actions are right and good to perform, and reflection on our nature for him indicates, contra Hume, that there are two principles which harmoniously govern our actions. One principle determines and prescribes for us the fulfilment of various duties; the other bids us to seek happiness and the appropriate satisfaction of our desires, passions, and interests. When the deliverances of these principles are grasped properly, in Reid’s view, they can be seen to coincide without conflict. Reid’s theory presupposes, of course, MacIntyre observes, the truth of an empirical thesis which the inquiries of social anthropology have shown to be false – namely, that plain or philosophically untutored persons of sound mind the world over share the same fundamental moral beliefs and give allegiance to the same fundamental moral principles. And Dugald Stewart’s later substituting of ‘fundamental laws of human belief’ for Reid’s ‘principles of common sense’ in his moral theory was but an attempt, Whose Justice? adds, to improve on Reid’s more facile universalism by putting forward a revised account of the genesis of (allegedly) universally shared moral beliefs. This account of Stewart’s shares with an older scholastic view, of which it was a somewhat impoverished reflection, a distinction concerning the deliverances of universal practical reason. At one level, for Stewart, MacIntyre notes, the fundamental laws of belief and a shared human nature ensure that with respect to basic practical principles all humans agree; at another level, ‘speculative opinions’ and differences in social custom and the physical environment cause these principles to be differently interpreted and applied, this causing what is only apparent moral disagreement. This distinction differs in at least two crucial respects, MacIntyre notes, from the synderesis–conscientia distinction of Aquinas discussed earlier in Whose Justice? For Aquinas, there is a kind of ex post facto verification of the truth of the deliverances of synderesis and conscientia in the life of the mature virtuous man who has lived in accord with them: practical principles, according to Aquinas, so point beyond themselves to the state of human flourishing, and from the standpoint of human flourishing looking backwards, true practical first principles can be discriminated from false. But there is no such possibility of ex post facto justification and verification in Stewart. In addition, Aquinas’s account presupposes that conscientia can be malformed, and that entire social orders can make seriously erroneous judgements about the good and the right on the basis of a shared malformed conscience. Such is not possible in Stewart’s account, MacIntyre observes, since Stewart is constrained to hold, and does hold, that whatever a social order spontaneously determines to be

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a fitting interpretation or application of the basic principles of morality in a given set of circumstances – infanticide, for instance, or the killing of one’s parents – must be a legitimate, and hence permissible, derivation from those laws. This ends up making the right, vacuously, whatever members of a social order generally do. A final weakness in Stewart’s (as in Reid’s) theory, Whose Justice? argues, is that neither can account for the manifest presence of disagreement in moral judgements between plain persons in the same social order – the disagreements, for example, between pro- and anti-slavery factions in the United States before the outbreak of the American Civil War, both of which factions indeed had affinities for common-sense moral theory (330–322). At this point in the Whose Justice? narrative, MacIntyre begins to take stock of the upshot of the historical-cum-philosophical arguments that have preceded. We are about to be given his own relatively novel proposal for coming to grips with the moral dissensus that both a set of contingencies and a combination of social and intellectual trends in our collective past have caused (certain of which have been examined in both After Virtue and in the earlier pages of Whose Justice?). But the key to this proposal will be a rejection of an alternative proposal which is in the spirit of the common-sense realism of Reid and his disciples. One might, MacIntyre observes, in the face of the clash of theoretical viewpoints on the ethical rooted in rival and incompatible ethical traditions (whether, for instance, Augustinian, Aristotelian, Humean, or Kantian), try to decide between these viewpoints by an appeal to the unvarnished, pre-theoretical facts about the ethical drawn from a wide-ranging empirical inquiry, both diachronic and synchronic, across civilizations and cultures. But such an inquiry, so described, could never be carried out: there are no unvarnished facts about the ethical – about, for instance, the nature of human action, or about justice or practical rationality – waiting to be discovered by some theoretically uninformed inquiry, because the very determination of what are to count as examples of justice, or of the structure of human action, or of rationality, which examples would form the basis of an induction, must presuppose some contestable theoretical commitments as to what the nature of each of these is. The social order in which a given theory of practical rationality is constructed – the fourth-century Greek polis in the case of Aristotle, thirteenth-century Christendom in the case of Aquinas, eighteenth-century Presbyterian Scotland in the case of Thomas Reid – tends unsurprisingly, MacIntyre observes, to abound in cases where ordinary, philosophically uneducated agents understand and describe their actions, for instance, in the way that the theory articulated from within their social order specifies. But the self-understanding of plain persons in alien social orders often provides counter-examples to the framework of these theories of practical rationality, theories which, qua descriptive, are really social order-specific and not universalist. And this shows these theories to be indefensible if they are taken to be warranted on largely empirical grounds (332–3). This is all, MacIntyre hastens to add in Chapter Seventeen, ‘Liberalism Transformed into a Tradition’, bad news for liberalism, since liberalism’s very raison

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d’être was to provide a theory of justice and of practical rationality compelling to all rational agents independent of their particular histories and their native social orders and native traditions of moral inquiry. We should remember here MacIntyre’s prior arguments that a social order is always the embodiment of some determinate, if not fully coherent, tradition of practical rationality and of moral inquiry; it takes shape around some determinate, if subject-to-ongoing-revision, conception of the good (an extended argument for this can be found in MacIntyre’s ‘Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure’, 1987g). Chapter Seventeen re-states points we have seen After Virtue attempt to establish at length: that liberalism, moral theory without history and tradition, has failed on its own terms, since debate between liberal ethicists on the precepts of morality remains to the present day highly inconclusive – or because it reaches a consensus on moral principles at such a high level of generality or formality (MacIntyre has in mind the case of Kantianism in particular here) as to fail to be serviceable to the social order at large. Unsurprisingly, liberals have been forced by this failure to re-conceptualize themselves and their own task – and so they have, he observes, as in the case of a leading liberal theorist like John Rawls. The promise of liberalism, MacIntyre notes, is that in a time of moral dissensus and for a value-pluralistic social order, it can provide a framework for political decision, a framework neutral with respect to the good, because one which regards equally the preferences of each, and tries to ensure that none are disadvantaged in the economic and political bargaining processes within the social order. According to this framework, each individual in society is to enjoy equal political status and equal economic opportunity. So much for its promise, MacIntyre’s critical reaction to liberalism here in Whose Justice? can be predicted on the basis of his earlier remarks about the absence of theory-neutral criteria for deciding debates between rival substantive positions in ethics and political philosophy. The liberal’s ‘neutral’ conception of the good is just another partisan stance on self, world, and practical rationality – one with its own particular epistemological presuppositions and its own assumed conceptions of justice, of practical rationality, and of the self. (Curiously, MacIntyre does not make much here of political liberalism’s epistemological agnosticism-tending-to-scepticism: its lack of confidence, or perhaps even of hope, that knowledge – and subsequent rational persuasion – concerning matters of substantive ethical debate is possible. Any real effort to address epistemological questions on MacIntyre’s part will have to wait until subsequent work, especially First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues, 1990h; and also the later essay ‘Moral Relativism, Truth and Justification’, 1994f.) The self presupposed by liberal political theory is, Whose Justice? notes, one which has a variety of preferences between which there is no objective rank ordering and which set of preferences may be continually ordered and re-ordered, shaped and re-shaped, according to subjective determination alone. There is, and can be, no objective highest good for the liberal self, and it is a self also which lacks any essential unity. As for the liberal concept of justice, it, MacIntyre observes, is one which, unlike its Humean counterpart, gives no overriding importance to the stability

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of property, and unlike its Aristotelian rival, makes little use of the notion of desert. And as regards practical rationality, this for the liberal means typically three things: the capacity to order and rank one’s subjective preferences; the capacity to reason soundly from one’s preferences and possibilities for action to one’s chosen actions, and lastly, the capacity to think and act so as to maximize one’s preferences (WJWR: 336–8). With liberal theory, then, we have for the first time a situation in which ‘I want (some x)’ emerges as a self-justifyingly good and even sufficient reason for action. However, given the highly subjectivist nature of practical rationality on the liberal construal, the liberal self is never constrained by any norm of reason to act on a practical inference of the form: ‘I want x. φ-ing is the sole available or most expeditious means of securing x. Therefore, I ought to φ’ (my formulation). New considerations and a new ranking or ordering of preferences may occur to the liberal self at any time between the construction of this inference and the possibility or demand for action, so acting on the inference’s conclusion would not be something required by reason (as the conclusion of an Aristotelian practical syllogism, for instance, would be). The values and value-ordering of the liberal self may be forever in flux, MacIntyre notes, and liberal practical rationality exists simply to serve this self-determined flux (338–41). What, then, of the shape of the liberal social order, MacIntyre asks – a social order comprised of liberal agents, constrained by liberal norms of justice and guided by the liberal understanding of practical rationality? What is the natural social embodiment of liberal practical rationality? It is clearly, he argues, one which must disallow the public expression of any substantive conception of the good by any of its constituent members or social groups. It is also one in which the medium of interaction between diverse individuals and social groups will be more a matter of trade-offs and bargaining than of rational dialectic. MacIntyre thus envisages four levels of activity and debate in a liberal social order. At the first level, individual and group theories of the good must be re-cast as sets of subjective preferences, and the conflicts between them seen not so much as items for resolution by rational debate as difficulties to be dissolved by non-rational means of persuasion. At a second level, the activity of weighing and tallying the preferences of members of the social order, and assigning the strength of their claims to various publicly distributable goods, occurs. Here liberal rules of justice have application: these, MacIntyre notes, are really rules of procedural fairness attempting to secure and protect values like diversity and equality of opportunity and equality of access to the bargaining process. At a third level, liberal theorists make the effort to give some theoretical justification to all fellow citizens in the social order for the rules and principles of justice employed at level two: this involves them (MacIntyre restates here a claim central to After Virtue which we have examined previously), whether they descend from Kant or Mill or Jefferson or other seminal liberal thinkers of the past, in endless and interminable debate, because the attempt to justify norms of morality at the outset of moral discussion to those outside one’s own tradition of moral inquiry is to attempt what we have good reason to think is impossible.

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MacIntyre adds here that the inconclusiveness of debate about the justification of the principles of justice at level three does not in any way cripple the functioning of the liberal social order, because ‘the lawyers, not the philosophers, are the clergy of liberalism’ (WJWR: 344). Disputes about justice in the social order are resolved, and are thought to be resolvable, at liberalism’s fourth level of activity – the level at which the rules and procedures of the legal system operate, which rules and procedures may themselves make eclectic and incoherent use of fragments of rival liberal theories of justice. Again MacIntyre, consistent with his earlier work, wishes to fault liberalism for its, as it were, un-Socratic foreclosing of rational debate about the good, and he observes here that the partisan good that political liberalism is in business to establish and preserve through argument and activity at the four levels noted above is merely the continuing existence of the liberal social order. The substantive good of liberalism, in his view, is therefore merely the continued existence of liberal procedures (342–4). Because the liberal theory of the good has an obviously partisan character to it, being clearly incompatible with other theories of the good, and because liberal theorists have been unable, as promised or hoped, to deliver on rules of justice and morality available to all rational persons whatsoever, irrespective of their moral traditions, liberal theorists like Richard Rorty and John Rawls, MacIntyre notes, have come to acknowledge that liberalism is itself but one more particular and situated tradition of moral inquiry – one which does not, as in its initial self-description, address all rational persons whatsoever, but only those with a particular history and set of contingent starting points. Liberalism has thus come to be acknowledged as possessing, like other traditions, its own social institutions, its own internal problematic and internal debates, and its own authoritative texts and internally acknowledged forms of rational justification and standards for rational progress. To illustrate the point, MacIntyre cites two salient problems internal to liberalism that liberal theorists such as Diderot and, more recently, Robert A. Dahl have addressed. The first of these concerns the liberal concept of the self: if a liberal political order is to function properly, it must be capable of adjudicating conflicts between selves with their own particular ordered sets of preferences. But this seems to presuppose that the self is a non-divided self, one free of deep value conflicts and schisms. And yet, as thinkers such as De Sade and Lacan have argued, this integrated self may well be a fiction. Another and very different problem for liberals is that of how to motivate agents to observe liberal rules of justice; this is a particular problem for the liberal tradition, Whose Justice? observes, because a liberal social order is one in which practical rationality is defined prior to and independent of considerations of justice, and, in the liberal theory of value, subjective choice enjoys primacy, and indeed confers value on its objects. So the problem with respect to the public good of justice for liberalism is this: why – if, according to the liberal theory of value, objective precedence cannot be ascribed to any one good over any other – should an individual curtail the pursuit of certain private goods in order to assist in, or contribute to, the maintenance of certain public goods such as liberal procedural justice (347–8)?

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But now, and here we approach the dénouement of Whose Justice?, if liberalism is, even by the admission of its leading exponents, yet another unique tradition of moral inquiry – one whose theory of the good can only be justified relative to premises particular to itself – then we seem to be at a rational impasse in the contest between those rival and incommensurable traditions of moral inquiry inherited from our collective past which Whose Justice has been at work identifying. If rival moral-cum-political traditions have rival and incommensurable theories of the good, must rational progress or deficiency and failure be relativized to traditions? Is there no possibility of rational interchange or significant rational communication between diverse traditions? Must we, once we have acknowledged ourselves to be the inheritors of these rival and incommensurable traditions, be compelled to think that they must each lead a kind of monadic existence? The remaining three chapters of Whose Justice? address these questions and contain, effectively, the core of MacIntyre’s contribution to how we contemporary moral agents and or moral theorists should think about approaching today’s disputed moral questions. In many ways, the whole of MacIntyre’s distinctive contribution to the moral sciences stands or falls with the strength of the arguments which follow. 6.5

Confronting Today’s Moral Dissensus

We have in Whose Justice’s concluding chapters two crucial claims – one descriptive, the other normative – and then we have a set of related claims meant to flow from these two. The descriptive claim concerns the locus for rational moral beliefs, and it is that moral claims are always made from within what the book has hitherto been attempting to disclose in our past history as ‘traditions of inquiry’. A tradition of inquiry is a ‘historically developing conceptual scheme’, one in which moral beliefs are nested in some overall metaphysical conception: a conception which includes, along with a metaphysical cosmology and an account of the self, an account of practical rationality. Derived from this metaphysical conception, and seen as justified by it as background framework, are, inter alia, theses about justice and that catalogue of virtues and vices which any developed moral outlook contains (349–50, 371) – thus the crucial descriptive claim underwriting MacIntyre’s constructive proposal. The crucial normative claim towards the end of Whose Justice? is, while less complex, more ambitious. It is that the rational evaluation and subsequent acceptance or subsequent acceptance-with-modification or subsequent rejection of a moral claim can only take place from the standpoint of some tradition of metaphysical-cummoral inquiry or other. From this claim, which MacIntyre takes to be warranted on the basis of the failure on its own terms of the Enlightenment project (i.e. the project of a-traditional rational justification and persuasion in morals), MacIntyre moves to a group of claims which set out his account of what might be called the logic of inter-traditional dialectical contest. These claims concern the form that dialectical encounter between traditions of inquiry ought to take, and how and to what extent conflicts between traditions of inquiry can be thought rationally decidable.

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MacIntyre envisages the following situation (what follows here is largely my reconstruction of Chapters Seventeen and Eighteen, ‘The Rationality of Traditions’ and ‘Tradition and Translation’ respectively). Tradition of inquiry A and tradition of inquiry B share certain beliefs, images, and texts, and as systems of belief they have areas of common as well as diverse subject matter. With respect to the common areas, they have logically incompatible theories which are also incommensurable: that is to say, they have theories which are rooted in diverse justificatory frameworks, and there exists as yet no, or no sufficient, common standard to adjudicate the differences between them (and this in spite of the fact that the two traditions share a certain amount of rudimentary logic). All that we have as yet between tradition A and tradition B in such areas is agreement about disagreement. How, then, is one rationally to choose between tradition A or tradition B from outside of either? How is either tradition to be warranted for a given rational inquirer if the only justifying reasons for each tradition are internal to it? MacIntyre notes that in the face of such a rational impasse, several rival theories of truth and of the nature of human inquiry have been advanced to account for this situation, namely relativism, perspectivism and Enlightenment rationalism. He wishes to show why each of these is flawed, and then to advance his own alternative theory, which we might call historical rationalism. The promise of this alternative theory is that it will be able to: (a) identify and explain the reasons for the incoherences and shortcomings in rival theories of truth and inquiry (for more on this point, see the excellent essay by Nancey Murphy: Murphy, 1995), and (b) provide a more compelling explanation of actual historical episodes of dialectical conflict within and between competing traditions than they can, and (c) provide a more faithful rendering of what inquirers within a tradition of inquiry generally (although not always) understand themselves to be doing and are in fact implicitly doing. In effect, MacIntyre takes a–c to be the conditions a theory of rationality must jointly satisfy if it is to be successful – a theory which will need to have built into it a theory of inquiry, a theory of rational justification, and a theory of truth. Why not for MacIntyre the relativist solution to the rational impasse between competing traditions, then? The relativist, he notes, holds that differences between rival conceptual schemes cannot be adjudicated because there is no traditionindependent rationality: all justification and all ascriptions of truth can only have force internal to some tradition-generated scheme or other. The perspectivist, on MacIntyre’s portrayal, travels part of the way with the relativist and holds that since there are in fact no compelling reasons external to a tradition justifying its claims, then we should deny that even internal to a tradition can terms like truth and falsity have their common-sensical meaning. If justification is tradition-internal and tradition-relative, so is refutation; acknowledging this, the perspectivist claims that members of traditions are forced rationally to concede that no tradition can claim a privileged or a dominant epistemic position with respect to any other. Instead, each tradition must view alien traditions, as MacIntyre states, presuming to speak for the perspectivist, as simply ‘providing very different, complementary perspectives for envisaging the realities about which they speak to us’ (352).

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Behind these two approaches, and acting in part as their inciting cause on MacIntyre’s account, lies that approach to truth, justification, and inquiry of Enlightenment rationalism. The Enlightenment rationalist, in MacIntyre’s portrayal, sees the problem of rational dissensus as immediately tractable: conflicts between rival traditions can be adjudicated at the outset of the encounter between traditions because context-independent forms of rational justification yielding objective, impersonal truth are available to any rational inquirer regardless of his or her past history or present standpoint. The intellectual history in Whose Justice?, like that of After Virtue before it, was aimed at showing on probabilistic and empirical grounds – the only grounds available according to MacIntyre’s own as yet inchoately developed theory of truth and justification – that the Enlightenment conception of rationality (i.e. of inquiry, justification, and truth) must be regarded as false. Ready-at-hand, impersonal forms of rational justification making convergence and consensus in belief possible do not presently exist. The point of MacIntyre’s own theory of rationality will be, put roughly, to keep the rationalism of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the possibility of rational progress and of timeless, impersonal and objective truth and justification, but to historicize that rationalism. The justification for MacIntyre’s own theory of rationality provided in the final pages of Whose Justice? begins with a phenomenology of that creature we have encountered previously: communal rational inquiry. The procedure here, apparently (MacIntyre does not make this explicit), is that of an Aristotelian e0pagwgh& – a seeing of the type in and through its tokens – so we are given what amounts to an account of how traditions of moral and metaphysical inquiry as such take shape and function. Such traditions, he maintains, begin in a social community which has the following features to it. It has: (a) a set of belief-producing authorities – for instance, texts, oral traditions, priests, prophets, kings; (b) a set of shared though revisable beliefs; (c) a set of institutions which are informed by those beliefs and beliefproducing authorities, and finally (d) a set of social practices of which the institutions in question are the bearers. In its ongoing encounter with the natural and social worlds, such a community will come to take on the form of a historical tradition, and if is to be or become a rational tradition, it will have to become a tradition not only of belief and belief-informed practice, but of inquiry. In becoming a tradition of rational inquiry, it will, on MacIntyre’s account, characteristically pass through the following stages. In the first stage, members of the tradition will adhere with a more or less unquestioned allegiance to the tradition’s tenets, but apparent or real inconsistencies discovered within their shared belief system, interpretive disagreements with respect to the tradition’s belief-producing authorities, the emergence of new and intractable questions arising out of newly encountered situations and circumstances, and or the encounter with the beliefs or thinkers of some alien social community will lead members of the tradition to problematize various of their tradition’s beliefs. These will be important events in the rational development and maturation of the tradition, and will typically lead to the modifying and or extending of the core beliefs

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constitutive of the tradition’s outlook. At this juncture, MacIntyre observes, several things may happen. In whatever way a tradition of inquiry is to handle difficulties for its set of beliefs, its modification of that belief set must be partial: a tradition is a tradition because it contains within itself some principle of continued existence through time. Therefore, some core beliefs must survive every modification of its belief set. Were this not to be the case – were there to be a rupture between beliefs of tradition A at time t1 and time t2 – then tradition A would have ceased to exist, and some new incipient tradition would have arisen to take its place. If the difficulties a tradition encounters are particularly acute, it may, Whose Justice? notes (and here we return to a theme treated earlier in MacIntyre’s œuvre) experience an epistemological crisis: the tradition may discover that its native resources and methods of inquiry are sterile before certain of its pressing problems. For instance, these problems may appear to it rationally unsettleable by its own means; or it may discover that its very methods of inquiry and sources of belief have generated certain incoherences. When faced with such serious epistemological difficulties, the tradition, if it is to continue to develop rationally and not fall into decline, has no choice but to seek to enrich its present conceptual scheme by concept- and or theory-innovation. If these innovations are to succeed, MacIntyre will say, they must enable the tradition to: (a) provide plausible solutions to the problem(s) precipitating the crisis; (b) explain why these problems arose for the tradition in its un-enhanced form, and then (c) accomplish both a and b while preserving continuity in the tradition before, during, and after the crisis (361–4). A paradigm case of what MacIntyre has in mind here is Aquinas’s creative transformation of both Aristotelianism and mediaeval Augustinianism, traditions which Aquinas had more or less simultaneously assimilated. Aquinas took these two traditions, each facing on their own terms significant and intractable difficulties (i.e. those identified earlier in Whose Justice?), and by drawing for each tradition on the conceptual resources of the other, he was able to save both from explanatory partiality and one-sidedness and consequent sterility, all the while preserving a core element and therefore continuity within each. He thus rationally transmuted the two traditions into a new hybrid tradition and made it rational for adherents of both traditions to switch their allegiance to this new tradition as a rationally compelling outgrowth of their former tradition. Epistemological crises, MacIntyre thus argues, may sometimes be surmounted, may sometimes even need to be surmounted, from the outside by the aid of an alien tradition. It may also be the case, he notes, that an alien tradition B so effectively accounts for and resolves an epistemological predicament with which a tradition A is faced (MacIntyre has in mind examples such as the physics of Galileo and of Newton with respect to the late mediaeval impetus theory of motion) that the most rational thing for members of tradition A to do is to cease giving their allegiance to A and transfer it now to tradition B. But here we move a bit too far ahead of the story, and we will return to this point later on.

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What MacIntyre thinks provides a decisive falsification of a relativistic theory of rationality is precisely the experience internal to a tradition of the tradition’s own weaknesses – its impotence before problems thrown up by its own scheme of belief, and so forth. These common experiences of epistemological weakness within traditions (Whose Justice? has furnished us with a good number of historical examples, such as the case of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart before the tradition of Calvinist Aristotelianism which they had inherited) demonstrate quite clearly, MacIntyre thinks, that the human mind is measured by objects external to it, so that truth and epistemic adequacy cannot be things entirely internal to a given tradition, but rather things in a significant way tradition-transcendent. MacIntyre is willing to concede, indeed he thinks we must concede, that the relativistic explanation of theory incommensurability is the correct explanation at the outset of the encounter between traditions and for those not belonging to the competing traditions. Those within a competing tradition, he notes, may be perfectly capable of providing a criticism and refutation from the standpoint of their own tradition – with its own first principles and standards of justification – of salient claims in their rival, so adherents of the traditions in conflict will not themselves draw relativistic conclusions from the encounter. But neither tradition may as yet have the resources rationally to assess the other on the other’s own terms, and so their presumed refutation of the other will be partial and imperfectly rational. What is needed is a refutation or a critique which will be compelling to those within the alien tradition – that is, a critique which respects fully the standpoint, the distinctive idiom, and the standards for rational justification of that tradition. Until such a refutation is forthcoming, it will be reasonable for someone outside both traditions to draw provisionally relativistic conclusions of the following sort: tradition A is vindicated on its own terms, tradition B is vindicated according to the standards of tradition B, but neither is rationally superior simpliciter; therefore, on matters of common concern where the two hold logically incompatible positions, truth must for the time being be regarded, pending the possible elaboration of a more comprehensive explanatory scheme, as scheme-relative (a detailed treatment of this point in MacIntyre’s own words can be found in his earlier essay ‘Relativism, Power and Philosophy’, 1985d). The warrant for a relativistic theory of rationality, though, can only finally be provisional, MacIntyre thinks, since all conflicts between rival and as yet incommensurable standpoints are in principle surmountable – and they are surmountable in just the way that rational difficulties internal to a tradition are: namely, by the development of an account which (a) explains in a way rationally compelling for the competing traditions how the rational impasse between them can be surmounted, and which also, and crucially, (b) explains why the impasse between them was bound to occur. On this matter – that and why all conflicts of incommensurable standpoints are in principle surmountable – MacIntyre could have elaborated further been more exact and explicit here, and for failing to do so, he has needlessly exposed himself to the accusation that he is himself, finally, a relativist

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(see, for instance, the essay by John Haldane in After MacIntyre, Horton and Mendus, 1994: 91–107) – a matter which will be considered in Chapter 9 below. On the criticism of perspectivism, Whose Justice? is less helpful; Three Rival Versions will later, in its treatment of ‘genealogy’, attempt an extended criticism of a noteworthy form of perspectivism, that stemming from Nietzsche. Here MacIntyre simply wants to argue that perspectivism is as indefensible as relativism, and for similar reasons. He claims here that perspectivism is, like relativism, much the product of a psychological attitude – a kind of despair or weariness at the failure of Enlightenment rationalism to make good on its promise of securing rational consensus on important disputed questions affecting our shared social order. Perspectivism can’t succeed, MacIntyre thinks, because it tries to have it in two incompatible ways at once: empathy for a tradition – a view from the inside – plus a view detached from membership in any specific tradition. Some supplementary paraphrase is needed here of MacIntyre’s otherwise overly concise remarks on this topic at the end of Chapter Eighteen of Whose Justice?, ‘The Rationality of Traditions’ (WJWR: 367–9). His point in the first place is that to have a genuine view from the inside of any tradition requires eo ipso comprehending that tradition’s standards of justification. But adherents of traditions of inquiry do often think that some of their contentious beliefs are, by the standards of justification of their tradition, true – and true in a robustly realist sense of the term. Therefore, to take proper stock of the standpoint of traditions A and B is often to recognize that they hold logically incompatible and antagonistic beliefs on some common subject matter S. There may as yet be no way rationally to adjudicate these logical incompatibilities from the standpoint of either tradition – there may as yet be no way of doing so even from the standpoint of any other existing tradition (the point MacIntyre has already made with respect to relativism) – but outside all tradition the possibility of adjudication ceases. To be outside any tradition is to be in a state of intellectual destitution: it is to be without standards for rational justification and without criteria for rationality. The perspectivist solution from the outside to the problem of theory incommensurability is thus a non-rational solution. The perspectivist simply refuses to play the game – or better, engage in the activity – of rational dialectic; he lazily or playfully or ironically identifies the conflicts between incommensurable standpoints as not genuine conflicts, but as irreducibly different vantage points on different realities. He wants both to respect conceptual difference and yet to exempt himself from acknowledging the origin and purpose of any given tradition of inquiry or conceptual-framework-with-a-rational-history: namely, rendering the mind increasingly adequate to the structure of the natural and social worlds, where to envision these worlds in a certain way is both to incur normative commitments and to exclude oneself from envisioning these worlds in other ways. The perspectivist might well respond here that MacIntyre, by his phenomenology of inquiry (according to which it is written into the very nature of human inquiry that it seeks to represent the world as it is in its putative mind-independent form), has begged the question in favour of metaphysical realism. MacIntyre’s response to this charge, no doubt, would be that it is impossible not to assume some position on

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the mind–world relation in one’s theory of inquiry, and that his assumed standpoint offers both a more compelling interpretation of our experience of inquiry and provides rival standpoints a compelling account – compelling to their own adherents – of how and why their alternative views of the mind–world relation (whether, for instance, of a perspectivist or relativist or an ahistorical rationalist sort) have erred, proved sterile, etc. And, since there are not enough theory-neutral data or bare facts about inquiry sufficient to resolve disputes between rival theories, this is all that any theory of inquiry can hope to do. A crucial fact about human inquiry is this paucity of theory-neutral data, and this widely acknowledged fact, MacIntyre can claim, his theory has the merit of taking into consideration. What, then, is the precise shape of MacIntyre’s alternative theory of rationality, with its inbuilt theory of inquiry? His admiration for Enlightenment ideals has been commented upon previously, and his solution to the problems posed by rival theory incommensurability is a rationalist one, but a historical and traditionbased rationalism, not an ahistorical one. He thus invokes the notion of ‘traditionconstituted and tradition-constitutive’ rationality (354), and to understand this notion we must have recourse again to his phenomenology of inquiry, and once again some supplementary paraphrase is called for. Part of the attractiveness of MacIntyre’s notion of ‘traditions of rational inquiry’ is that on the issue of the relation of thought to the material aspects of culture it steers a middle course between materialistic reductionism – which interprets thought as the pre-determined outcome of antecedent economic, social, and political factors – and a non-contextualist, anti-materialist approach to thought, which attributes thought with an exaggerated autonomy, and which regards philosophers, for instance, as grappling with a shared set of timeless, context-independent problems (we have seen MacIntyre voice a complaint against this second approach in the important Introduction to his Against the Self-images of the Age collection). On MacIntyre’s view, inquiry rightly understood typically has the highly practical aim of resolving difficulties, conundra, predicaments and so on for determinate social practices and traditions. When a social group has been forced by these difficulties to problematize its original beliefs, or some part thereof, it may find solutions to these difficulties which force it to conclude that some of its prior beliefs were false – false in the sense of standing in an inadequate relationship of correspondence to the world. So part and parcel of the rationally directed (i.e. as opposed to arbitrary or haphazard or dogmatic) path that any tradition of inquiry will by nature follow, MacIntyre holds, will be an at least implicit reliance on a correspondence theory of falsity. This is to say that in its changes of belief, a tradition A will implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that its belief set at time t1 , and before it changed, was inadequate with respect the world as acknowledged by its new belief set at time t2. In such cases, MacIntyre argues, traditions of inquiry will implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that the world has eluded their grasp, not because of something intrinsically elusive about the world, but rather because their own prior schemes of understanding were, in their un-reconstructed form, inadequate.

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As an empirical matter, MacIntyre of course thinks that traditions of rational inquiry can and do make claims to possessing timeless truth: claims, that is, to possessing beliefs fully adequate to the world in a non-time-and-space-indexed way. And he thinks that his account of inquiry can show why it is natural for members of intellectual traditions to make such claims. Traditions of rational inquiry have written into their activities, he argues, what he calls an anti-Cartesian conception of rationality. They do not, that is to say, treat their starting points and first principles (unless these are regarded as of divine origin) as self-justifying and irreproachable, but rather as contingent and thus as dialectically established – and dialectically testable and emendable. Implicit also in the activity of a tradition of rational inquiry, on MacIntyre’s account, is an anti-Hegelian conception of rationality: adherents of traditions of rational inquiry never think themselves capable of knowing for certain by their own powers that their beliefs are fully adequate to the world. However, traditionbased inquirers may and do arrive at beliefs which they judge to be, according to the standards of justification in their tradition, not only justifiable in the light of present evidence and argument (i.e. rationally warranted in their adequacy), but fully adequate come any conceivable evidence or argument to the contrary (363– 4). The ‘conceivable’ here is an important qualification for MacIntyre because, on his account, members of a tradition of rational inquiry must be open, by the very dialectical nature of their undertaking, to having the beliefs which they presently hold as true being overturned by what, since they can in no way presently conceive it, they are licensed to judge as non-existent. What, then, according to MacIntyre, is the rational mechanism – the logic in play – in a dialectical encounter between traditions? He reminds us first of all that it is natural for traditions of inquiry to engage in dialectic with one another. In and through an encounter with tradition B, tradition A may discover new justifying reasons for holding the beliefs that it does – and/or new falsifying reasons for beliefs contradictory or contrary to its beliefs. Dialectical engagement thus has the potential of strengthening the rationality of a tradition for its own adherents. Moreover, tradition B may help tradition A resolve difficulties that are part of A’s own evolving internal problematic, including problems that may have landed A in an epistemological crisis. To re-state and enlarge upon an earlier point, it is in the very nature of a tradition of rational inquiry, in MacIntyre’s view, to be open to the possibility that some alien tradition is superior to it in rationality – superior not only with respect to individual theses concerning more or less subsidiary matters, but superior in its very fundamental conceptual framework. Traditions of inquiry are each committed to this possibility, MacIntyre maintains – and here a key and controversial claim – because their members hold (implicitly and/or spontaneously? MacIntyre is insufficiently explicit about this in Whose Justice?) that many of their tradition’s beliefs are true in a robustly realist sense. This ipso facto commits them to holding that rival beliefs are, and can in principle be shown to be, false. Adherents of an intellectual tradition recognize, furthermore, that their belief in the truth of various tenets of their own tradition is not an incorrigible one: truth for adherents of

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a tradition of rational inquiry is only as good as truth does dialectically with respect to its rivals, both internal and external to the tradition – and these rivals may, of course, be numberless. Traditions, therefore, on MacIntyre’s picture, if they are not to decline but rather to increase in rationality, must maintain a permanent willingness to engage in dialectic with their rivals, and they must continually expose their constituent beliefs and justificatory framework to criticism and refutation. Adherents of a rational tradition engage rivals in the hope of vindication, but also and always in the greater hope of improving the adequacy of their own beliefs with respect to the natural and social worlds. This impersonal truth-directedness which is written into the very nature of tradition-constituted inquiry may at times require of adherents of a given tradition dramatic shifts in their rational allegiance. To return now to the issue of the logic of inter-traditional dialectical contest, MacIntyre paints the following picture for us, which he takes to be an accurate rendering of episodes of real intellectual history. At the outset of a properly rationally conducted encounter between two rival and incommensurable traditions of inquiry, tradition A and tradition B, the first development must be the awareness by each of their substantial difference from the other – a difference not merely in specific commitments, but in overall conceptual framework. It will not do, then, for A merely to render the standpoint of B in A’s own terms, and vice versa: this would amount to but a convenient yet dialectically sterile conceptual restructuring of a rival tradition to suit one’s own tradition’s purposes. Tradition A must recognize that B is distinct from itself, and vice versa, and it must, mindful of the partiality and one-sided nature of human inquiry which it has discovered from developments internal to itself, be open to the discovery that B speaks a different conceptual language than it – one that must be assimilated on its own terms. Tradition B must be open to the same. A and B must so learn the language of the other as, to use MacIntyre’s favoured expression, a ‘second first language’; they must each discern where there are instances of conceptual diversity between their own framework and their rival’s, and then engage in translating into their own idiom, with the necessary paraphrase, concepts for which their own idiom as yet possesses no straightforward equivalent. As MacIntyre puts it, tradition A must identify in the idiom of B instances of samesaying and instances of conceptual diversity: the former present little problem for translation, the latter may require conceptual-cum-linguistic innovation, and this often in the form of an imperfect literal translation plus supplementary paraphrase (370ff.) Each framework must also take note of the difference in the methods and forms of justification in its rival (a matter about which MacIntyre might have said more in Whose Justice?). This broad-minded approach to translation is, MacIntyre insists, a crucial step in the first phase of the dialectical encounter between traditions, and he sees an awareness of it lacking in translation models such as that of Donald Davidson (for a not very extensive criticism of Davidson, see WJWR: 370–71). A’s effort at translating the alien idiom of B into A’s own idiom may have made A aware (will have made it aware, in the case we are considering, where A and B

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are in fact rival and incommensurable intellectual traditions) that various tenets of B are not only logically incompatible, but also incommensurable with counterpart tenets in A. This is to say that A will have discovered that there are in B different and competing substantive criteria for the application of B’s set of concepts. By way of example here, MacIntyre reminds us of instances of this which Whose Justice? has already examined: two traditions may have different substantive criteria for the application of proper names (an extended discussion of this can be found in the chapter ‘Tradition and Translation’, 376–80) or of virtue concepts such as ‘justice’ or ‘courage’, or of concepts characterizing human action. With this prior recognition of significant difference – difference not only in concepts, but also in justificatory frameworks – we are now at the threshold of a productive dialectical encounter between the two traditions. At this stage, with A sufficiently conceptually enriched justly to represent B to itself, and vice versa, the two traditions can now move to the important stage of identifying what exactly it is that they disagree about – and only now will accurate agreement about disagreement be possible. With agreement about matters of disagreement then in hand, the following dialectical moves by either tradition become possible. In spite of a careful rendering of the standpoint of B to itself, tradition A may decide, according to its own standards of rationality, that B’s logically incompatible tenets are not acceptance-worthy, and are to be rejected as false. Tradition A may also discover, in contrast, that various tenets of B, though not the overall framework of B, are more rationally warranted than their counterparts in A, so it might move to accept these tenets of B and reject its own corresponding tenets, thereby introducing partial modifications into A’s own framework. In a more radical way, and this is especially a possibility when A is faced with an epistemological crisis, A might decide (recall the case MacIntyre discusses of late mediaeval Augustinianism in its encounter with Thomism) that the overall theoretical framework of B affords it with superior resources for handling difficulties internal to its own current problematic, so that the most rational thing for A to do is to adopt the standpoint, the conceptual framework, of B. Of course, all the moves which are logically possible for A in these cases are also possible for B. Finally, and importantly, someone who is outside either tradition of inquiry A or tradition of inquiry B, might decide, after a faithful rendering of B in A and of A in B, that by the standards of their own tradition, call it C, A is rationally superior to B or B is rationally superior to A. Or they might decide that the differences between the two traditions are not yet rationally decidable because their own tradition, tradition C, as yet lacks the capacity to overcome the incommensurability of theoretical framework between A and B (which incommensurability is more a product of differences in structures of justification than differences in concept). It is important to note here for MacIntyre that when they are engaged in a genuine dialectical encounter, tradition A or B – or both – may lack the capacity rationally to decide between theses in their own tradition and those corresponding and logically incompatible theses in their rival. Either or both traditions may as yet lack the rational resources to overcome the pro tempore incommensurability between themselves. But

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neither tradition will be led by this state of affairs to draw relativistic conclusions about truth and inquiry because, as MacIntyre states, neither will have yet, from their own standpoint, good reason to disbelieve their already-justified-from-within-theirown-tradition theses (366–7). Presumably, MacIntyre would hold that tradition C in the undecidable case envisaged above, would, if it did not already itself have an internally justified position on the point(s) of disagreement in question between A and B, be licensed to draw agnostic but not relativistic conclusions. We now approach the denouement of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and in the book’s final chapter, ‘Contested Justices, Contested Rationalities’, MacIntyre reminds us that the purpose of all the intellectual history and the more-or-less original theory of inquiry and of rationality deployed in Whose Justice? has been for the sake of answering a fundamental and pointed practical question – a question whose pointedness the intellectual-cum-social history of After Virtue was intended to bring home to us. Given that as a matter of intellectual historical fact we inherit the fragments of past logically incompatible and incommensurable systems of ethical belief, how are we, the confused moral agent at the end of the twentieth century (or now, we can say, the beginning of the twenty-first century), to decide which system of ethical belief – which tradition of moral inquiry – we should give our rational allegiance to? This question, as MacIntyre understandably emphasizes, is not necessarily one posed for any of us at some high theoretical level. Whose Justice? and its predecessor After Virtue have both been addressed not only to academic philosophers, but to the ordinary educated public at large, because all of us, whatever our level of education, have this large question thrust upon us by more concrete questions – questions posed by the immediacies of practice. Are we or are we not to support a policy of affirmative action, and why or why not? Are we to view a given military conflict in which our nation is involved as just or unjust, and why? Are we to support or oppose legislation criminalizing abortion or euthanasia, and on what grounds? These are age-old questions, but what is new about them now, MacIntyre has wanted to insist, is that we both lack any socially shared framework to seek systematically to answer them and attain rational consensus and that we lack even appropriate institutional settings in which these questions might properly be addressed. This second concern is central, as we shall see, to Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, but the concern with the social crises caused by un-self-aware (or concealed) intellectual dissensus has been one that runs right through MacIntyre’s entire intellectual career. What, then, is the solution to our present social and cultural crisis that some four hundred pages on Whose Justice? Which Rationality? wishes to propose? As the book’s title queries, whose justice should we give our rational allegiance to now given the multiplicity of choices available, and derived from which theory of rationality? After all the build-up, the book’s concluding answer seems surprisingly procedural rather than substantive, but this is really only a surface appearance. The procedural recommendation derives from substantive background epistemological and metaphysical commitments, and rightly, MacIntyre has not sought to conceal this. He appears instead to harbour the hope that the success of the recommended

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intellectual procedures will provide a warrant for the substantive assumptions from which the procedures themselves derive. Whose justice, then? Which rationality? MacIntyre’s answer in the book’s concluding pages is worth quoting in full: a person is confronted by the claims of each of the traditions which we have considered as well as by those of other traditions. How is it rational to respond to them? The initial answer is: that will depend upon who you are and how you understand yourself. This is not the kind of answer we have been educated to expect in philosophy, but that is because our education in and about philosophy has presupposed what is not in fact true, that there are standards of rationality, adequate for the evaluation of rival answers to such questions, equally available, at least in principle, to all persons, whatever tradition they happen to find themselves in and whether or not they happen to inhabit any tradition. When this false belief is rejected, it becomes clear that the problems of justice and of practical rationality and of how to confront the rival systematic claims of traditions contending with each other in the agon of ideological encounter are not one and the same set of problems for all persons. What those problems are, how they are to be formulated and addressed, and how, if at all, they may be resolved will vary not only with the historical, social, and cultural situation of the persons whose problems these are but also with the history of belief and attitude of each particular person up to the point in which he or she finds these problems inescapable. (393)

We have here a fairly complete statement of the outlines of MacIntyre’s historical or historicized rationalism. The salient claim (and the lengthy justification for it can be found in MacIntyre’s earlier work examined previously) is that rationality is to be found at the dialectical intersection of an inquirer’s past belief history with the present stage of those intellectual traditions which seek his or her rational allegiance. We are reminded, alongside these remarks, that the arguments of Whose Justice? were primarily addressed either to those who, unlike the author and those similarly intellectually situated, consciously inhabit no particular tradition of inquiry, or to those who are conscious in some measure that they simultaneously and inconsistently inhabit two or more rival intellectual traditions. For the first group, the point of MacIntyre’s argument is straightforward. These individuals may find, in encountering the claims, texts, and overall framework for belief of some particular tradition of inquiry, that they actually belong to this tradition and have been formed by it (though MacIntyre does not make the point explicitly here, his arguments commit him to holding that anyone who lives and works in an established social order and has received a certain minimum amount of education is in a certain minimum sense the member of some tradition of inquiry or other: all social orders and all the institutions therein, in his view, are, after all, the partial embodiment of the beliefs of some tradition of inquiry or other). In this first type of case, encounter with a tradition will begin in an act of self-discovery. If, however, the continued membership of such persons in the encountered tradition is to be rational they must both – and here MacIntyre simply applies some of his earlier arguments – enter into the present debates internal to that tradition (whether those debates concern matters of interpretation, or consistency, or adequacy, or warranted

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innovation, etc.), and be willing to bring that tradition into rational relation with alien traditions (via acts of empathetic conceptual imagination, the learning of a second first language, and so forth). For those persons in the second group, those in a state of conceptual confusion and aware of their inconsistent moral and political allegiances, MacIntyre’s recommended remedy is, naturally, different. These divided selves, he argues, should invite those traditions of inquiry to which they are aware of having given at least a partial allegiance to furnish them with an account of the why and the wherefore of their personal inconsistencies. Any tradition, he holds, that is able to provide them with a rationally compelling such account is the tradition to which reason now bids them to give their allegiance (397–8). There is a third type of person for whom MacIntyre’s arguments have a different application. This is that individual alluded to a number of times earlier who is, by MacIntyre’s lights, a victim of the failures of Enlightenment rationality. This postEnlightenment thinker, recognizing that the Enlightenment standards of rationality have not been and very likely cannot be met, becomes disillusioned with the work of reason and susceptible to the temptation of seeing everything in traditions of inquiry, beyond what is aimed at the satisfaction of pragmatic needs, as ideology – as a series of self-deceiving and falsifying masquerades ministering to some concealed selfinterest or other. Any commitment to the non-pragmatic component of a tradition of inquiry is thereby assumed by such individuals to be the disguised act of an arbitrary will-to-power. For these persons there are the arguments which MacIntyre deployed earlier in the book in seeking to refute perspectivism. What the intellectual and social history of Whose Justice?, as After Virtue before it, has attempted to do is to provide the why and the wherefore of this type of individual’s disillusionment with reason. And in so illuminating the reasons for her or his state of mind, MacIntyre has sought through these two works to provide the post-Enlightenment individual with a motivation to re-enter the arena of rational inquiry and rational dialectic. For the self-aware and rationally consistent Enlightenment liberal, MacIntyre’s arguments have yet a different force. To these, his challenge is methodological: the arguments in this book, like those earlier in his œuvre, have attempted to show that the rational evaluation of theses outside of their native context of justification and from the standpoint of a tradition-free reason is an impossibility and a fiction. Liberal institutions, particularly academic institutions such as the modern, belief test-free university, are places, he argues, which perpetuate this fiction. They act on the one hand as if their pluralistic humanities faculty can make sustained progress in inquiry without the advantage of sharing the evaluative standpoint of a common (if contestable and internally contested) tradition. They act also as if the teaching of texts in the humanities deriving from different and rival traditions in our collective past can proceed without any serious effort to understand those texts as, in both the order of inquiry and the order of justification, products of their distinctive intellectualcum-social traditions. More injuriously still, Whose Justice?’s concluding pages argue, liberal academic institutions act as if the evaluation of these texts by both

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student and teacher can proceed by means of ready-at-hand and evidently justified (i.e. to both teacher and student) criteria of rationality. The endless debate this flawed approach to both inquiry and to pedagogy embodies, MacIntyre will note, ends up leaving the student of the humanities a sceptic about evaluative matters. So MacIntyre’s conclusions in Whose Justice? are finally programmatic. In an important aside in this second instalment of his trilogy, and tempering some the pessimism of After Virtue, he observes here that although the majority of the social structures in the industrialized West (including its dominant academic institutions) are informed by a broadly Enlightenment liberal conception of rationality, traditions of inquiry rival to this (Humean, Thomistic, and otherwise) have been able to stay alive and to carry on in un-fragmented form, even if with only the minimum of institutional support. The alternative approach to rationality he has been recommending should by now be clear, and it is one which cannot flourish, he wants to insist, in the academic institutions and forums of debate of Enlightenment liberalism. His traditionconstituted and tradition-constitutive approach to rationality bids us, on the model of progress in theory adequacy in the natural sciences, to take stock of the historical situatedness of both personal inquiry and of intellectual tradition; it identifies this stock-taking as both the means and the necessary prerequisite for the progress of human reason (i.e. reason taken both individually and collectively). A given tradition, then, is only as worthy of rational allegiance as the narrative power it exhibits in telling a rationally persuasive story about the partial achievements, but over-shadowing failures and deficiencies, of its rivals. This, his concluding summary of the arguments of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in the book’s final chapter, paves the way for the work of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: a study which will attempt to demonstrate the Thomistic tradition’s superior rationality to two of its main current rivals – Enlightenment liberalism and (broadly speaking) post-Enlightenment irrationalism – by drawing upon Thomism’s normative and evaluative resources to tell the story of the what and the wherefore of the achievements-overshadowed-by-inevitable-failings of these two rivals.

Chapter 7

The Project Applied

7.1

Present Humanistic Debate in its Social and Historical Context

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, MacIntyre’s 1988 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University, commences with some striking reflections about the activity of lecturing at the end of the twentieth century. It is in some ways unsurprising that MacIntyre begins in this vein, since he has devoted much attention in the past to the relationship between genre and inquiry. What he has to say in the Introduction of the work derives both from thoughts that occurred to him while delivering versions of the lectures in Edinburgh and from subsequent discussions of the lectures’ drafts with members of the humanities faculty at Yale University (he was a visiting scholar at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center in 1988–89). The Introduction opens with two different, if related, considerations about the act of lecturing. Lectures in today’s pluralistic intellectual climate may, he notes, open up new areas of inquiry for members of their audience, but more likely they serve as an episode in the ongoing and very different engagement by each audience member – or by each like-minded group in the audience – with a set of shared questions. This differing engagement is likely to generate disagreement, both among the audience members and between audience and lecturer, as to the veracity of the lecture’s interpretation of the thought of others and to the veracity of its independent claims. Academic lectures today are in this sense, MacIntyre observes, invariably like ‘remarks made by someone standing at the point of intersection of … very different groups, engaged in … distinct conversations … [remarks] understood by the members of each group as a contribution to and a continuation of the themes and arguments of its conversations’ (TRV: 2). This recognition inspires in MacIntyre the further thought that in our present stage of intellectual history – and contrary to Adam Gifford’s conception of the eponymous lecture series which he endowed and to which Three Rival Versions is a contribution – the audience on the receiving end of humanities lectures today cannot be thought of as an educated public, but rather as an assemblage of educated publics. There is no longer, MacIntyre notes, as there may have been some approximation of in Gifford’s own day, a more-or-less homogeneous academic community; there are only academic communities. What then are we to make of this state of affairs, MacIntyre asks? Are we, following the lead of various historians of science, cultural anthropologists, and social historians, to treat our fundamental intellectual differences as unbridgeably

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incommensurable, the choice between one or the other as undecidable by any neutral rational criteria? Or should we view the differences instead as commensurable, because they are both measurable according to some ready-at-hand, neutral metric of rationality, and because they stem from theoretical conceptions which, though diverse, are all relatively unproblematically inter-translatable? MacIntyre wishes, of course, consistent with Whose Justice? and with his earlier work on rationality and relativism, to resist either of these options, and to show, moreover, how they can be resisted. The approach in these lectures, whose subject matter is moral inquiry (moral theory, that is, broadly conceived – ethical joined to historical, sociological, literary, and anthropological considerations), will be, continuous with the earlier Whose Justice?, to argue for problematic translatability and commensurability, and then, having joined this to an enriched version of his previously developed theory of rational vindication, to show how one fundamentally unique moral standpoint, Thomism, can vindicate itself with respect to two of its rivals (broadly speaking, Nietzschean post-modernism and ahistorical, universalist liberalism). At the outset of the lectures, MacIntyre reminds us that, as long as second-order disagreement between fundamentally opposed philosophical standpoints remains unaddressed in the humanities – disagreement about the why and the wherefore of intractable first-order disagreements (e.g. in ethical theory, in the explanation of action, in the theory of historical knowledge, in the theory of interpretation) – firstorder debates in disciplines such as history, humanistic psychology, literary theory and so on will remain, as they have been for some time, sterile (TRV: 6–7). He so urges here the now-familiar point that today’s university is a misnomer; most of our institutions of higher learning do not embody any shared conception of unified intellectual inquiry. Though we have seen great advances in the acquisition of positive knowledge, not only in natural science but in the humanities as well, and though we are capable of discussing points of detail with increasing clarity and rigour, yet fundamental doctrinal differences between rival schools of thought in the same discipline abound. The unresolved state of these differences within the university ensures that debates outside the academy by members of the general public are endless and inconclusive. To cite one of MacIntyre’s examples, as long as cognitive theorists disagree with neo-Freudians, who disagree in turn with behaviourists, about human agency, so too will members of the public at large, and we will obtain no rational consensus on matters of much importance to contemporary social life. Or, to put this his oft-stated point more schematically: as long as with respect to subject matter S, standpoint A can refute rival standpoints B, C, and D to its satisfaction--and they it and one another in turn--we will be stuck in a situation where there is no real hope of progress towards rational consensus, academic and or social, with respect to S – and this in spite of the undeniable fact that in the humanities, as in the sciences, we have progressed greatly in recent centuries in both detailed positive knowledge and in the rigour and analytical clarity with which contending positions are formulated, evaluated, and criticized.

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The Introduction to Three Rival Versions, written as a retrospect to the lectures themselves, ends, interestingly, with a certain lowered sense of expectation on MacIntyre’s part for advancing rational convergence in humanistic inquiry – a lower expectation, he admits, than he had when he first drafted the lectures and before he subjected them to the critical scrutiny of members of today’s aforementioned academic communities (and a lower expectation, it should also be added, than that which gave direction to the arguments of Whose Justice?). His hope now is not securing general agreement about the correct outcome for second-order intellectual disagreement – or even general agreement about the present shape of that disagreement – but only, and more modestly, ‘render[ing second-order] disagreement more constructive’ (TRV: 8). The book will end with a striking set of institutional proposals to further that goal. Chapter One of Three Rival Versions, ‘Adam Gifford’s Project in Context’, portrays Gifford as someone approaching rational dissensus with a second-order view rival to MacIntyre’s own. Gifford, for MacIntyre, is an exemplary Enlightenment universalist, and this can be most clearly seen in Gifford’s stated conviction that inquiries in philosophical theology (understood as including within itself inquiries concerning the foundations of ethics) can and should exhibit the same type of rational progress and convergence towards knowledge as inquiries in natural sciences such as astronomy and physics have. But it is precisely here, MacIntyre observes, that Gifford’s meta-theoretical perspective should strike us as implausible. In the period running from the time of Gifford’s bequest (1888) down to the present, there has not been any convergence in belief or any shared sense of rational progress in philosophical theology or the foundations of ethics; nor is there, one hundred years on, any agreement about what the standard for rational progress in these disciplines should be. MacIntyre’s explanation for this failure is threefold, and he maintains that these considerations seriously undermine the universalist rationalism from which Gifford’s perspective derives. In the first place, there has not been any agreement among those engaged in the inquiries of philosophical theology, such as the past list of Gifford Lecturers, about where the inquiry should begin, that is, what its justificatory starting points or set of first principles are or should be. There has emerged, furthermore, no shared metric by which rationally to assess the different first principles from which those rival and incommensurable theoretical structures elaborated to address the questions of natural theology have each begun. Each theoretical conception works from certain background assumptions and advances these in logical support of further beliefs while remaining more or less silent about why its assumptions should provide the starting point for the inquiry, and how and why they are preferable to rival assumptions. As a third point, although there has been widely accepted progress in matters of analytic technique, in our capacity to understand the logical structure of theories (the inferential relationships that exist between the premises of a theory, or the logical entailments of tenets of the theory, or the cartography of the concepts within a theory), this widely recognized gain does not in itself provide us, Three Rival Versions notes, with the neutral standard of intellectual value which we would need

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to assess impartially the costs and benefits of adhering to one rival and competing theory as opposed to another (10–11). MacIntyre’s point here is that even when we relativize rationality to conceptual framework (i.e. with the particular assumptions each framework is based upon) and then try by shared means to assess the probative force of conclusions internal to some framework, we are still without any agreed upon credibility index to apply across frameworks – to apply, for example, in order to determine how rationally costly all things considered accepting framework A’s conclusions Ac relative to its set of assumptions Aa is, compared to accepting framework B’s conclusions Bc relative to its assumptions Ba. These considerations add up to the conclusion, Three Rival Versions maintains, that at this stage of our collective intellectual history, with its multiplicity of competing theoretical standpoints, all that we can expect are rival and competing second-order theories – rival and competing theories of rational choice, that is, with respect to large-scale, first-order theoretical commitments. Any straightforward universalist rationalism of the sort Adam Gifford adhered to is therefore undermined – undermined empirically – and so revealed to have failed on its own terms. Typical of Gifford’s mistaken standpoint, MacIntyre claims, is an oversight similar to the empiricist myth of the given with respect to our perceptual beliefs. While MacIntyre is aware that Gifford and his Victorian collaborators were not empiricists, he observes that they did think with respect to the data of morals or of philosophical theology, for instance, that such data could and should be approached without any prior classificatory schemes. For these Victorians, then, all rational persons – all persons on Gifford’s account of honest, attentive, and unprejudiced mind – conceptualize data in the same fashion, and this common conceptualization of data serves both as the subject matter of a science or field of inquiry and as the basis for more or less unitary rational progress within that science. But no one now should, post Gaston Bachelard and Thomas Kuhn, Three Rival Versions states, believe this depiction of the mind–world relation typical in Gifford’s time. Bachelard and Kuhn have taught us – and what applies to our cognitive interaction with the natural world applies pari passu, MacIntyre thinks, to our thinking about the world in its moral and metaphysical aspects – that while at the outset of any theoretical inquiry all inquirers share some pre-theoretical conceptualization of the data, no attempt at theoretical understanding of the data can get started without some theory-presupposing way of identifying, characterizing, and classifying that data, which classificatory schematizing will be internal to the inquiry itself. If our understanding of thinly identified and characterized data is to advance, neutrality in the very identification and characterization of the data must necessarily cease. Therefore, this side both of definitive advances in the philosophy of science and a number of episodes in our social and intellectual past, MacIntyre argues here, three points separate us from Adam Gifford’s understanding of rationality – a separation that should give a Gifford Lecturer today pause as to whether she or he can contribute to the lecture series as Gifford conceived it.

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First, we are no longer able to presuppose the existence of any neutral theory of rationality, nor of an educated public which would share such a theory. Second, we are no longer in agreement that there is some rationally incontestable scientific understanding of the Whole, where the particular sciences would be hierarchically ordered, mirroring the hierarchical ordering of things in the Whole, and where the knowledge found in natural theology would serve as the crowning goal of all scientific inquiry. Third, and finally, we no longer think that the history of even the natural sciences is a history of unilinear progress, with occasional ruptures; we have come to see it instead as a very history of ruptures and discontinuities (TRV: 18–24). Can MacIntyre himself, then, satisfy the demands of a Gifford Lecture? No, he answers, in the sense that Gifford’s now discredited conception of rationality embodies the not unusual error of taking for a privileged point of view what is only a contingent and contestable one – and, as MacIntyre states here, he has no wish to repeat this mistake. But yes, in the sense that MacIntyre’s own lectures will, while critical of Gifford’s understanding of the nature of rational inquiry, be historically continuous with what Gifford had in mind – particularly because MacIntyre shares Gifford’s belief that inquiry into the nature of the good and into the nature of God are not ultimately separable enterprises. The lectures begin with a criticism of the Enlightenment conception of moral inquiry in its Victorian incarnation, and they draw especially upon articles in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, particularly Henry Sidgwick’s article entitled ‘Ethics’. 7.2

Competing Conceptions of Moral Inquiry

Victorian ethics, according to MacIntyre’s interpretation, has five distinguishing characteristics: first, it views moral considerations as separate from religious, aesthetic, political, legal, or economic considerations; second, it regards moral action as a matter either of rule-following or of ritualized responses to infractions of those rules; third, it sees the institution of morality as concerned primarily with socially sanctioned negative prohibitions on action; fourth, it views social life as compartmentalized, with strong socially shared notions of propriety attaching to each sphere and the crossing of boundaries between the spheres seen as something improper; and, finally, it presumes that there is a high degree of social consensus concerning both the broad content of the rules of morality and their susceptibility to rational justification (while acknowledging that there will be disagreement concerning the manner such rational justification should take). These traits, MacIntyre argues, give the Victorian ethicist the mistaken understanding of the task of moral inquiry as simply elucidating the content of the timeless rules of morality and providing a rational justification for these. What the Victorian conception fails to recognize, he notes, is that (a) pace Gifford and others, the universally held timeless moral truths of Victorian culture are only local, contingent, and unproblematized claimants to truth, and (b) morality as conceived by the Victorians is not something susceptible

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of rational justification, owing to the Victorians’ intuitionist understanding of moral cognition (26–9). Three Rival Versions’ aim, then, is to apply the account of rational vindication between rival and incommensurable standpoints sketched at the end of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and in this vein it will examine two traditions to moral inquiry rival to this Victorian approach, each approach containing within itself the means to construct a debunking narrative of Victorian morality – an account of how Victorian rationalism got off on the wrong foot and is in consequence wrongheaded. The charter document of the chronologically first approach, Thomistic Aristotelianism, will be the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (1879); the key document of the second, Nietzschean genealogy, will be Zur Genealogie der Moral. Each approach will (with MacIntyre doing the work of application) provide us with the means to exhibit the contingency and the provincial character of the timeless truths of the Victorian moralists. For the Thomistic tradition, this will be a matter of showing Victorian moral tenets as true and justifiable moral principles whose original context of intelligibility and of justification has been lost; it will thus exhibit Victorian morality as an un-self-aware and mis-justified survival from a past intellectual milieu. For the Nietzschean, it will be a matter of critiquing Victorian morality’s claims to rational objectivity, and showing these claims to be, in MacIntyre’s felicitous paraphrase of Nietzsche, ‘the latest version of a reactive, herd morality in which enmity to the biologically vital … [is] masked by the false pretensions of reason’ (TRV: 30). The lectures will then go the further step of trying to show how the Thomistic interpretation of Victorian rationalism’s failure (a failure, that is, on its own terms) is rationally superior to the rival Nietzschean account of the same, and that Thomism provides us today with resources for identifying crucial shortcomings and limitations in the Nietzschean approach itself. In so doing, Thomism can establish itself as the most rationally compelling of the three approaches. However, before we get to this the critical denouement of the book, MacIntyre spends a bit of time tacking between the three rival traditions, noting their similarities and dissimilarities. Chapter Two of the lectures, ‘Genealogies and Subversions’, attempts first to get to the bottom, the deep motivations and underlying tensions, in Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of ‘Encyclopaedia’ (synonymous in MacIntyre for the Victorian’s ahistorical rationalist standpoint). In a fairly conventional way, MacIntyre praises Nietzsche as both prophet and diagnostician of the downfall of Enlightenment rationalism. Nietzsche, he notes, gives us an illuminating explanatory scheme by which we can account for the pervasiveness, in the late nineteenth century and beyond, of unproblematized and blinkered claims to knowledge and to objective truth – or to objective rights and duties. According to this scheme, such claims spring simply from unacknowledged motives serving unacknowledged purposes – a lack of selfawareness which can be, and often is, systematically institutionalized (and which explains, MacIntyre notes, Nietzsche’s flight from both the university and the genre of the ex cathedra university lecture: TRV: 35–6). MacIntyre will later urge that the contemporary Thomistic Aristotelian should take much of this style of criticism

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of ahistorical rationalism on board, even though the Thomist shares with the Encyclopaedist a ‘one world/one-true-and-comprehensive-account-of-the-worldwith-authoritative-history-of-the-achievement-of-that-account’ picture of the goal of rational inquiry (my expression). But the Thomist, MacIntyre notes, will want to eschew any narrative of unitary progress culminating in such an account – which is the way the Encyclopaedist views the matter. Nor should the Thomist fear but rather welcome, MacIntyre thinks, the Nietzschean tradition’s drawing of our attention to the existence of warring and partisan factions in the same field of inquiry: factions embodying rival and incommensurable standpoints whose presence the Encyclopaedist has conveniently overlooked (56). How Thomism itself is to contend with this state of affairs is matter for subsequent discussion in the lectures. The Nietzschean, for his part, MacIntyre notes, will of course have nothing to do with privileged perspectives on the world: he will want not only to underscore the overlooked or suppressed existence of a multiplicity of differing perspectives on what is, and will also, following the lead of his master, want to avoid committing himself to any given perspective for fear of falling into the trap of intellectual dishonesty. But here, MacIntyre notes, lies the great tension in Nietzsche’s alternative approach to truth and rationality, which many critics have commented upon. Nietzsche’s project of unmasking empty claims to truth and objectivity seems, in its pure form, to be pragmatically inconsistent and self-defeating. Universal perspectivism, the doctrine that truth is and can be nothing more than what-is-believed-to-be-true-from-someperspective-or-other, seems itself to flow from a privileged wie es ist eigentlich gewesen standpoint, and so to self-destruct. While recognizing the considerable force of this criticism of Nietzsche’s undertaking, MacIntyre will not deploy it straightaway, because he thinks that Nietzsche consciously sought means to escape from it, and that the viability of these means must first be examined. On MacIntyre’s interpretation, Nietzsche wished to hold no such dogmatic doctrine as universal perspectivism, but to engage instead in a kind of nomadic unmasking – a distancing of himself from not only allegiance to any given perspective, but also from his own previously adopted and wholly critical perspectives. MacIntyre still thinks it should be queried whether such an intellectual undertaking does not presuppose a metaphysics to which it is not entitled. If Nietzsche is to succeed in his aim of genealogical critique, his arguments must be communicable to an audience, and the force of these arguments, as with any arguments, can only have effect and be seen by the audience to which they are addressed to have effect, from the standpoint of some atemporal now – an atemporal now in which standards of reference, of reason-giving, and of reason-assessing can have application. But this brings with it a tacit metaphysics, MacIntyre notes, and so universal genealogical critique is impossible, and it is in this way MacIntyre argues that the genealogical conception of rationality is fairly seriously undermined, But Three Rival Versions also notes that Nietzsche and his followers are not without resources for rebuttal here (44–5). Nietzsche can concede that he must employ a metaphysics for the duration of the time in which his critique takes place, but that thereafter he can and will disavow

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it as but a deliberately and self-consciously employed fiction – one to be unmasked as a fiction and disowned once its critical work has been accomplished. What is crucial to keep in mind here, on MacIntyre’s interpretation, is Nietzsche’s deliberate ambiguity: a Nietzschean can be happy to be accused and found guilty, from the metaphysical realist standpoint occupied by an Encyclopaedist or a Thomist, of the inconsistency of employing fixity in speech, reference, and belief precisely to deny that these are anything other than transient moments of fixity with nothing other than transient significance (36–8). So it is not on this plane. MacIntyre argues that the Nietzschean approach can be defeated, or more exactly, defeated on its own terms – which is the condition any standpoint must meet, according to MacIntyre’s view, if it is to show itself rationally superior to a rival. So the metaphysical realist will have to look elsewhere for her definitive criticism of Nietzscheanism, and at this stage of Three Rival Versions, MacIntyre gives a fairly developed indication of where he thinks she should look. It is not on the semantic level that the Nietzschean must fail on his own terms, he argues, but with respect to the notion of the self – the critical, unmasking self which the Nietzschean must presuppose, and also, and crucially, with which he wishes positively to work. The subversive genealogical project on which the Nietzschean is embarked (MacIntyre has in mind here in particular the case of Michel Foucault) presupposes and requires the existence of an Ur-self (my expression): a self behind and accompanying those transitory, un-masking selves which discard their identities and the standpoints from which they operate once the task of un-masking has been completed. This Ur-self must have the continuity through time that the undertaking of any project – any purposive activity through time – requires, and it can only accomplish its chosen task by availing itself of means that it has the intention not only of doing without, but moreover, of disallowing. MacIntyre has in mind here both that narrative of success or failure in the carrying out of his un-masking project which the genealogist will need and want to construct to make his work intelligible to himself (let alone to make it critically successful for others), plus those standards for success and failure, with their implicit metaphysical commitments, that any such narrative must draw upon. And here, MacIntyre observes, the Nietzschean must unwittingly land himself back in the realm of logic – the logic of identity and difference and of impersonal standards – and in this way Nietzsche’s project must self-destruct, which is to say, fail on its own terms (54–5). MacIntyre will attempt a fuller re-statement of this criticism at the end of Three Rival Versions. As for his account of the distinctiveness of the Thomistic approach to moral inquiry, MacIntyre does a considerable amount of work here arguing for one exegetical interpretation of that approach against others, while claiming that some types of Thomism represent conceptual adulterations of Aquinas’s teaching – adulterations of the sort from which a tradition-based understanding of inquiry would free us. He begins, though, with a broad characterization of the Thomistic standpoint; what will emerge later in the argument is a figure we have not really yet encountered in MacIntyre’s text: Thomas Aquinas the theologian.

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Unlike the genealogist or Encyclopaedist, MacIntyre notes, the Thomist does not see the history of Western philosophy leading up to the end of the nineteenth century as having a continuous character. Where the Encyclopaedist is committed to seeing that history as the ascent of reason from superstition and irrational dogmatism, and the genealogist as a repetition of the pattern of false ideological pretences to objectivity, the Thomist sees rupture – he sees a fundamental break with philosophy’s past begun in the High Middle Ages and become definitive with the epistemological turn inaugurated by Descartes. After Descartes, questions concerning the justification of belief are given priority over questions about how the contents of what we are already taken to know should be elucidated. The broad contrast Three Rival Versions offers between the Encyclopaedist, the genealogist, and the Thomistic understanding of the nature and preconditions for rational inquiry is then as follows. For the Encyclopaedist, reason is by nature impersonal, impartial, disinterested, universal, and uniting: to succeed, rational inquiry requires freedom from allegiance to any community, religious or moral, with that partiality of standpoint that any such allegiance brings. For the genealogist, ‘reason’ or rational inquiry is but selfinterested partiality disguising itself from others and from itself by the specious claims it makes to universality. The Thomist on MacIntyre’s interpretation, though, offers us an alternative middle way: reason naturally aspires to universality, but it can only attain to that condition by beginning from a state of self-consciously partisan commitment to a community-of-inquiry-with-a-history: a community which at the outset excludes from its midst any dissenting standpoint, and which requires of its participants the possession of certain moral beyond strictly intellectual virtues. The Thomist thus inherits from Plato (e.g. the Plato of the Gorgias and the Republic) the belief that intelligence is not enough for success in inquiry, since she too holds that, in MacIntyre’s words, ‘the enquirer has to learn how to make him or herself into a particular kind of person if he or she is to move towards a knowledge of the truth about his or her good’ (60–61). The Thomist then, like Plato, sees rational inquiry in any of its particular forms as a te/xnh or craft, and she sees inquirers as initially apprentices in that craft. Successful participation within a craft requires of its participants, MacIntyre notes, two key abilities: first, it requires their ability to learn from teachers, proficients in the craft, about how to criticize their own work in the light of the best standards that have emerged in the craft thus far – standards of which proficients will alone be fully cognizant. In time, the apprentice must internalize what he has received from his teachers so that he becomes adequately self-critical. Secondly, and importantly, therefore, the apprentice must learn to alter his character in appropriate ways. He must learn to change his habits of taste, of judgement, and of desire in order to become a better participant in the craft. The skills necessary for success in a craft, though, MacIntyre adds, are themselves morally ambivalent: they may be used for an end that is not the genuine good of the practice as well as for one that is (an example would have been helpful here: MacIntyre presumably has in mind a case like that of a physicist whose skill in devising and conducting novel experiments gives him at the same time a capacity cleverly to falsify experimental results – with

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the motive of personal gain, for instance– and so gives him also a capacity for acting contrary to the genuine good of the practice). Skills must be transformed into virtues, and the apprentice must learn from the proficient how to identify and distinguish virtues from vices within the practice and how to inculcate the former in himself while uprooting the latter (60–62). MacIntyre has made much in his writing of the so-called Meno paradox, and he is aware here of how an unsuccessful solution to that paradox would spell serious difficulties for the Thomistic conception of rational inquiry as portrayed in Three Rival Versions. The paradox has application with respect to MacIntyre’s account in the following way: according to his understanding of the nature of a craft and the conditions for success within it, an apprentice must be able to identify and to instil within himself the various virtues required both for the progress of the craft as such, and simultaneously, for his contribution to that progress. Yet it is in the nature of a craft that only those who already possess the virtues in question can accurately identify which qualities of mind and of character are virtues. MacIntyre thinks there is a solution to this apparent Catch-22 fairly ready at hand: the craft theorist need merely point out that the capacity (and the inclination, MacIntyre should have added here) both to acquire these virtues and to recognize their worth is something intrinsic to human nature. Once some individuals have learned from experience and trial and error within a craft the value of certain qualities of mind and of character (i.e. virtues) for the craft (and for the institution in which the craft is embedded and the moral tradition of which that institution forms a part) – and once they have learned the disvalue of opposed such qualities, namely vices – then they can serve as teaching authorities within the craft (i.e. as master craftsmen). Master craftsmen will then be rational authorities within a craft, because they will be aware both of the standards for achievement within the craft thus far, and aware also of the enabling and disabling dispositions for the achieving and the superseding of those standards. They will know not only how the craft has progressed from the past into the present, but also how to innovate within it and so lead it into a new future. Once in possession of this capacity for progressive innovation, they will be able to instruct the craft’s apprentices in the rudiments of such innovation (63–4). MacIntyre will want here, and he will find this in Aquinas as in Aristotle and Plato before him, to speak of moral inquiry as the second-order master craft or craft of crafts, that craft of successfully shaping all other crafts and binding them into a harmonious unity in the life both of the individual and the community. It is moral inquiry which seeks to answer the question, ‘What is the good and the best, both for human beings in general and for this specific kind of human being in these particular circumstances here and now?’ In providing an answer to this question, the craft of moral inquiry will be able to identify, to catalogue, and to rank those dispositions which are virtues, and those opposed dispositions which are vices, and this information will be indispensable to the particular and, in some senses, subordinate crafts – crafts, that is, which seek not the total and complete human good, but only partial and particular goods. To illustrate MacIntyre’s point here, one can consider an analogy with the craft of health care, whose relatively inclusive

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good is promoting human health. The answers to its questions concerning the nature, causes, and constituents of human health provide it with the means to direct work in the, in this instance, subordinate crafts of biochemical research and pharmaceutics (this example is close to the one MacIntyre himself gives in TRV: 67). Crucial to progress within a given craft, as MacIntyre observes – and the master craft of moral inquiry is no exception here – will be a memory of past achievements in the history of the craft and the time-index attached to judgements about what are good, and what are better, products within it. So the determination of what is a rational belief, choice, or action within a craft now will always be predicated on some account of the past history of inquiry, experiment, debate, and creative activity within the craft. While crafts are each organized around a specific telos, namely, the goal of perfected activity or of a fully perfected product within the craft, judgements of good within the craft will always be relative to the craft’s past achievements. Judgements of best will generally be judgements of best so far, and the specific way the telos of a given craft is conceived by members of that craft may, and typically will, change over time. What MacIntyre seems to mean here, to borrow an Aristotelian distinction, is that the form of the goal or unifying purpose of a craft will remain constant, but the matter of that goal – the specific character of the instances in which that goal is thought to be realized – will change, often in unforeseeable ways, as craft activity progresses. Harking back to an example from After Virtue, one might note how in the craft of composition in the medium of the string quartet, our conception of progress towards the goal of ideal musical achievement within that medium has changed from Haydn to late Beethoven to Bartok. Undoubtedly, though, such an example, which is my own gloss on a point made concerning practices, in MacIntyre’s special sense of the term (see AV: 190), raises as many questions as it provides answers. Shouldn’t, for example, ‘progress toward a telos’ be understood to apply analogously across crafts or practices (taking these two, as in MacIntyre’s sense, as roughly synonymous) so that it will apply in some respects the same way, in some respects differently, to crafts which admit of relative closure – for example, the making of rudimentary tools such as a hammer or saw – and to those such as painting, musical composition and so on which admit of no such closure because there is no way to give sense within them to the notion of a definitive and fully achieved product (i.e. one which would render all other achievements in the craft superfluous and or outmoded)? Within practices, it seems MacIntyre ought to distinguish craft in the standard sense of the term from art, and there is lurking here the difficulty for his view that artistic progress may often occur with, and even have as its pre-condition, ignorance or forgetfulness of past achievements within the art form in question. Crafts are in any event, on MacIntyre’s account, by nature historically as opposed to atemporally rational, hence the discomfort MacIntyre thinks their existence ought to cause the Encyclopaedist. Furthermore, in presupposing the existence of impersonal standards for achievement that are discovered in and through collective craft activity, crafts, he argues, are not something of which the metaphysically anti-realist genealogical perspectivist can easily give an account. The temporal

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index practices place on claims to rationality and to truth must also sit ill with Encyclopaedist and genealogist alike – the Encyclopaedist because he tends to view rationality as an all-or-nothing and definitive possession, the genealogist because his perspectivism denies him the ‘seems–is’ distinction which makes rational progress within a tradition both possible and ex post facto identifiable (64–6). MacIntyre thinks there is another feature to crafts so understood that is bound to be discomfiting to both genealogist and Encyclopaedist. Crafts are directed and progress by the exercise of authority within the craft and by the trust placed in that authority. Authority within a craft is exercised by the craft’s proficients, who alone have access to its present standards for achievement, and who alone can, characteristically, initiate the younger generation into being able both to appreciate those standards and, if possible, to improve upon them and to set improved standards. We have not here authority that occludes the work of impersonal unsituated reason, as the Encyclopaedist would have it, MacIntyre will note, or authority to be resisted because it cannot represent anything other than the will to subjugate, now acting in the guise of professed expertise, as the genealogist would have it. We have instead authority which can be both non-self-serving within the activities of a craft and rational – rational, that is, even though it requires an assent from apprentices based upon trust: a trust in the epistemic capacity of another person or persons, and not upon shared impersonal reasons initially available to apprentices. MacIntyre sees this discussion of crafts as relevant to the Thomistic conception of inquiry and of rationality because he sees built into the very structure of Thomas’s method of inquiry an awareness of the temporal and historical and contextual dimension of justification. Before this can be seen clearly, though, he thinks (relying here on the great figures in Thomistic scholarship in the twentieth century such as Mandonnet, Grabmann, Gilson, and Van Steenberghen), that a work of recovery of the genuine Aquinas is necessary. So Chapter Three of Three Rival Versions narrates some important episodes of the history of the late nineteenth-century revival of Thomism stemming from Pope Leo XIII’s aforementioned Aeterni Patris. The details of these episodes needn’t concern us here, what is important is MacIntyre’s claim, familiar to neo-Thomists, that early stages of the revival of the thought of Aquinas were tainted by the influence of Continental ahistorical rationalism (e.g. Cartesianism and Kantianism). Thomas was wrongly treated as a thinker whose timelessly valid thought did not itself undergo any development or arise out of any specific dialectical context. In their eagerness to meet the challenges posed by modern philosophy, MacIntyre notes, Catholic apologists were often quick to line up philosophical theses in Aquinas – taken out of context – against contending theses in modern philosophers (e.g. on the justification of knowledge). In the course of this enterprise, these apologists tended to father onto Aquinas answers to questions he never asked (often enough because these questions could not arise for him within his conceptual framework), and they tended at the same time to overlook the particular character of Aquinas’s dialectical method. Crucial to that method, MacIntyre notes (and here it is MacIntyre’s earlier work on debates in the philosophy of science surrounding the thought of Thomas

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Kuhn which provides the impetus for a claim that is meant to serve as a wake-up call for a certain brand of neo-Thomist), was a commitment to an enriched version of Aristotle’s dialectical method, enriched owing to the influence of revealed theology (67–77). In Chapters Four and Five of Three Rival Versions, MacIntyre does some useful work tracing how the method in theological inquiry which Aquinas inherited from Augustinian theologians had evolved up to Thomas’s own time (TRV: 82ff.). The craft of Augustinian theological inquiry in the Middle Ages, he observes, had the following shape to it. Its subject matter was God as revealing Himself both in and through the natural world which He created, and in and through the texts of sacred Scripture which He inspired. Proficients in the craft of theology were those with the requisite interpretive skills, both intellectual and moral, to read both the text of nature and especially to read the books of sacred Scripture. Initiation of beginners into the craft required their learning the sacred history narrated in scriptural revelation, plus their learning to form their mind and character in accord with the lessons contained within that history. It also required their learning how to extend sacred history by playing a role in its unfolding (i.e. its being increasingly comprehended, its further enactment, the application of its lessons to new circumstances and new times and places and so on). Central to the work of the craft of theological inquiry so conceived was its reliance on a form of ongoing intellectual criticism. Incoherences, obscurities, discrepancies and so forth discovered in Scripture called out for solutions, and so gave rise to the dialactical disciplines of the quaestio, the disputatio, and the distinctio. In the quaestio, as MacIntyre notes, scriptural passages for and against a certain thesis, or arguments of proficients within the craft for or against a certain interpretation of a passage, were placed side by side in the hope of systematically resolving the discrepancy or apparent discrepancy between them. These quaestiones were sequentially organized with the aim of building up an edifice of scientific knowledge, with dialectical arguments seeking to establish first principles, and demonstrative arguments seeking to exhibit the entailments of dialectically established premises. The disputatio was a means of seeking publicly to resolve the discrepancies or logical conflicts treated in quaestiones, and both disputatio and quaestio made use of the technique of the distinctio: a technique aimed at marking not simply different senses of the same term, but the different forms of discourse (edicts, narratives, proclamations etc.) contained in the texts of scriptural revelation, each of which discourse gave distinctive shape to the meaning of Scripture’s content. Aquinas will inherit this understanding of the craft of theology from the Augustinian tradition, MacIntyre notes, and he will inherit also Augustine’s metaphysically realist standpoint and his conception of the goal of theoretical and practical inquiry as the coming to full awareness of the degree and kind of perfection that God, nature, and the self each possess. But Thomas’s tutelage in Aristotelianism under the late Augustinian Albertus Magnus will lead him to give a new shape to the craft of theological inquiry. MacIntyre has dealt before (see pages 308–13 above) with the importance for mediaeval philosophical inquiry of the reception of Aristotelian

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texts in the key centres of learning in the twelfth century. His observations here can be re-stated in summary form. The Augustinian tradition was committed to the view that the understanding of the revealed Word of God, or theological inquiry, was the queen of the sciences – that form of inquiry having an architectonic and governing role with respect to all the other sciences or forms of disciplined inquiry. However, it had not yet had this conception challenged by a systematic philosophical standpoint, one at odds with Augustinian theology, not only on account of certain specific doctrines which it professed (in the case of Aristotelianism, the non-immortality of the self and the eternity of the world, to cite two significant such teachings), but also in its understanding of the very structure of inquiry (i.e. the divisions and methods of the sciences, the relationship between philosophy and the subordinate sciences). Augustinianism, MacIntyre notes, though predicated on a belief that in matters of inquiry trust in authoritative guides must precede understanding, was vulnerable on its own terms in two respects. Internally, it had, like any tradition of inquiry, its own problematic: its own set of unresolved puzzles, difficulties, questions and so on. And failure to exhibit resourcefulness before these would have undermined its claims to rationality and undermined its belief in the epistemic and institutional sovereignty of theology (e.g. as embodied in the thirteenth-century University of Paris). Looking outside and owing to its metaphysical realism and its conception of truth, Augustinianism was committed to the belief that its conceptual scheme was demonstrably superior in re-presentational adequacy to any actual or potential rival scheme. Incapacity on its part to show how rival schemes must necessarily fail – either by falling into incoherence, or by having to resort to unjustified or unjustifiable beliefs (failure evidenced by resourcelessness) – would deny Augustinianism the kind of secondary corroboration it was bound on its own terms to seek. Thus the challenge faced by Aquinas in the mid-thirteenth century, standing at the intersection of the Augustinian and the Aristotelian traditions. Aquinas, as MacIntyre is aware, faced the tensions between the Augustinianism of the University of Paris’s theology faculty and the Aristotelianism of its arts faculty fully conscious of preceding attempts to bring revealed religious doctrine and systematic Aristotelianism into relation – attempts, for example, by the Jewish thinker Maimonides and by the Muslim Ibn Roschd (Averroes in mediaeval Latin). But Aquinas, like his Christian Aristotelian contemporaries at the University of Paris, needed in various ways to go beyond these accounts, since the accounts in question were chiefly concerned with the question of how the philosopher should approach his task in the context of a faith community. These same accounts failed, however, as MacIntyre notes, to address the question of the suitability of the philosophical concepts and commitments internal to revealed religious belief and practice (105– 6). Aquinas does not adopt the position of his Parisian colleagues on this question: the position of the so-called Latin Averroists, for whom the doctrines of philosophy are to be taught and acknowledged as valid deliverances of philosophical reason even when they clearly contradict revealed religious doctrine (i.e. and so would ordinarily not be thought acceptance-worthy for the believer). Instead, MacIntyre notes quite aptly, Aquinas, beginning with his earliest work (De ente et essentia, De

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veritate), was eager to formulate a concept of truth – namely, truth as the adequacy of mind to created, mind-independent world – which would embrace both religious and philosophical rationality, and which would provide him with the critical means to mediate between Augustinian speculative theology and Aristotelian philosophy (121–3). There is an extended account in Chapter Five, ‘Aristotle and/or/against Augustine’, of the problems of truth, rationality, and incommensurability, and a summary of it will serve our purposes here. It is evident by the chapter’s end that MacIntyre wishes to endorse the method of inquiry that he thinks can be read off Aquinas’s dialectical practice in his mature works, such as the Summa Theologiae – works which give us, in MacIntyre’s phrase, ‘a new genre for the discourse of inquiry’ (124). MacIntyre re-states here, really, what he had already tried to establish earlier in Whose Justice?: namely, that Aquinas’s achievement consisted in assimilating Augustinian theology and systematic Aristotelianism on their own respective terms, while seeing how each afforded the other resources to save the other from falling into an epistemological crisis or explanatory sterility. Behind this achievement was an antecedent conviction in the unity of truth, but the details of the application of this notion of truth to two otherwise incommensurable schemes of thought is what presented Aquinas, on MacIntyre’s reading, with his great challenge. What MacIntyre adds to these former observations from Whose Justice? is some new and helpful detail about the specific incommensurable doctrines of Augustine and Aristotle between which Aquinas was seeking to mediate. Thomas, he notes, saw in Augustinianism and Aristotelianism rival and incommensurable conceptions – of the relation of the mind to its objects (a doctrine of divine illumination versus a doctrine of abstraction), of truth (truth as a relation of created things to God versus truth as adequateness of the mind to its objects) and of the causes of intellectual error (perversity of the fallen will uninformed by grace versus defects in the individual’s education in the virtues). What enabled him to avoid the fideistic solution to the conflict of religious and philosophical truth – a solution adopted from a different standpoint by both his Christian Aristotelian and his Augustinian colleagues – was his capacity to stand outside either tradition and use resources of the one to shore up the other. So, adding by creative synthesis Augustine’s concept of the will to Aristotle’s concept of the intellect – and giving an account of the inter-relation of the two – and adding Augustine’s doctrine of the divine ideas to Aristotle’s account of universals, Aquinas was able to forge a systematic philosophical standpoint superior to either of these two predecessors, MacIntyre argues (109–11, 124). Here we have for MacIntyre the model par excellence of right method in rational inquiry. On the one hand we have a historically self-conscious dialectic, one which in the course of moving through a set of sequentially ordered quaestiones works carefully to establish later theses on the basis of earlier theses. Established opinions on any given quaestio and claims by past and present thinkers of repute are evaluated systematically in an attempt to arrive at the most rationally warranted view on the topic under discussion. Conclusions are then deduced from these dialectically

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established premises, so moving towards the goal of a deductively ordered scientific understanding of some subject matter, and moving in Aquinas’s comprehensive Summa Theologiae towards a hierarchical ordering of the different disciplines of scientific understanding, with theology serving as the apex (124). Justification is understood by Aquinas to be necessarily contextual, that is, as something constituted by a specific historical trajectory of understanding and of argument. Tradition is the embodiment of that past understanding and argument; it is not merely, as it was to be later for Enlightenment thinkers such as the editors of the Ninth Edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, merely the milieu in which evidently true principles are discovered and articulated. It is, instead, the indispensable source and means of their justification. Given the relative obscurity for those outside the Aristotelian tradition of the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship in a science between inquiry, first principles, dialectic, demonstration, and truth, a brief excursus on these matters is called for here, and MacIntyre, no doubt aware of this himself, embarked on such an excursus in the Aquinas Lecture which he delivered at Marquette University in 1990, First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues. Since this lecture was given around the time he would have been preparing Three Rival Versions for publication, and since it is useful for elucidating themes in Three Rival Versions and related discussions in the earlier Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, we can examine it now. 7.3 The Thomistic Aristotelian Epistemic Ideal: A Reformulation First Principles is highly schematic, and the fact that it is so shows, as MacIntyre himself will admit, just how wide the gap is between the Aristotelian-Thomistic conceptual framework and that of contemporary analytic philosophy or of contemporary deconstructionism: much work of a preliminary sort must be done before Thomism and dominant forms of contemporary philosophy can even be brought into fruitful dialectical relation. MacIntyre plausibly locates the gap between Thomism and its contemporary rivals in their differences about the nature and function of first principles, whether practical or theoretical first principles. The a)rxai/ or principia of which Aristotle and Aquinas spoke differ markedly, MacIntyre notes, from modern, non-teleological understandings of first principles, as from the understanding of moderns’ contemporary progeny. An Aristotelian-Thomistic first principle, MacIntyre correctly and helpfully observes in this Marquette Lecture, is not, like Descartes’s epistemological first principle, something that can be easily or immediately seen as self-justifying. Even when embedded in and presupposed by all coherent human thought and discourse – as, for instance, Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction: the theoretical first principle according to which no thing can be itself and another thing at the same time and in the same respect – only the work of reflection and dialectical exploration can disengage that principle from its implicit condition and make it, for any human

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mind capable of grasping its constituent concepts, something self-evidently (really, MacIntyre might have said here, non-derivatively) true (FP: 34–40, passim). An Aristotelian first principle is not something self-justifying, then, in any strong sense. Though it relies on no more ultimate principle or premise for its truth (i.e. whether relatively in its own subject domain, as, for example, a first principle in physics would be true in virtue of no prior truth about the physical, or absolutely, as in the case of metaphysical first principles whose truth presupposes the existence of no prior truth or truths simpliciter), a first principle can only be seen to be true relative to a set of dialectical explorations, in the metaphysical or mathematical or logical cases, plus a set of corroborating experimental observations in the case of all other types of scientific inquiry. These first principles, when evidently true, are so only for the suitably informed who have gone through the requisite dialectical and, in most cases, observational and confirmational processes. They differ from their counterparts in analytic philosophy in that, qua first and indemonstrable, they are not regarded as true in virtue of social agreement or by stipulation or by assumption or relative to individual purposes, but rather in virtue of the extra-mental reality which they re-present to the mind. Principium for Aquinas, like αϕρχη for Aristotle, unlike ‘principle’ in most contemporary usage, refers at the same time to an extra-mental and a mental entity (FP: 3–4, passim – and this is because, MacIntyre might have added here, on the question of the mind–world relation, Aristotle and Aquinas are both committed to a mind–world identity picture). One has but to re-state this doctrine of theirs, though, accurately rendered here by MacIntyre, to recognize how strange it must sound to modern ears. And yet that is the doctrine, intelligible and justifiable only relative to a whole set of background considerations regarding the nature of human cognition, the nature of concepts, theses in ontology, and so forth. MacIntyre does not seek to establish these background tenets here – he could not, even in the context of a very long lecture – nor has he elsewhere in his œuvre. And, as he would be the first to say, there is abundant work here for the Thomist who wishes to advance the doctrine of Aquinas on the nature of science, truth, and human understanding in a way intelligible and persuasive to contemporaries. In the case of a first practical principle, the difference between Aristotelians and moderns and post-moderns is, MacIntyre goes on to note in First Principles, Final Ends, particularly striking. For Aristotle, as for Aquinas, the first practical principle supplies the end, the te/loj or finis, for the practical life. This end is not something to be chosen or something established relative to personal decision or social agreement; it is something fixed and intrinsic to the human species as such. It is an end which measures the truthfulness and the worthwhileness of individual choices and decisions or of social conventions about the human good, and it is something that practical inquiry is able to discover as at first implicit in the structure of human motivation and desire as such. Later, when possessed as an item of reflective knowledge and enriched experience, it is something which can be increasingly understood for the substantive content it possesses; and, through it, more fully comprehended, the mind becomes increasingly adequate to the reality about the human end/good (FP: 7).

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The objects of scientific knowledge, according to the Aristotelian view, are the intrinsic necessities of essential natures, and in a mature, fully achieved science, one will have in hand a theoretical structure comprised of first indemonstrable premises linked with subordinate premises jointly entailing all the conclusions about the essential properties of the subject matter of the science – and so exhibiting isomorphically (i.e. mirroring by re-presenting in the mind) the necessary connection in the real between nature and essential property. The te/loj of scientific inquiry so understood will be this full adequacy of the mind to the natures-with-their-intrinsic-properties under study, and a given science, perhaps always in a state of some incompleteness and imperfection, will only approach full adequacy. It thus will only as yet be a dialectical construct, highly warranted perhaps, but not apodictic. For a science to make apodictic claims, in the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, MacIntyre notes, which it may warrantedly do, it will have to claim that no conceivable evidence or argument could compel a rejection of its first principles or of its derivative, deductively ordered judgements. However, and significantly, it will not be incumbent on the theorist to have absolute certainty that any of his beliefs are true in the sense of fully and finally adequate – indeed, on this account, MacIntyre observes, such will be impossible. The human mind does not measure, but is measured by, external reality; therefore, even when it is fully adequate to that reality it can never be certain of its full adequacy. It may warrantedly claim apodictic status for various of its beliefs, but it can never know that any of them enjoy such (44–6). So, by way of what some have argued is a revisionary interpretation, MacIntyre holds that first principles, for Aquinas even more so than for Aristotle, are not objects of a priori knowledge: all that one is entitled to maintain who has made the suitably informed judgement that a given first principle is true is that he knows of no conceivable convincing evidence or argument which could successfully contradict their truth. And in this way, Aquinas’s teaching on first principles can accommodate, as MacIntyre thinks it should, the kind of considerations about fallibility, falsifiability, and rationality urged by thinkers such as C.S. Peirce and Karl Popper (39–40). 7.4 The Distinctiveness of the Thomistic Moral Standpoint To return now, taking these points into account, to the narrative of Three Rival Versions, it is interesting to observe how MacIntyre’s past work in the philosophy of explanation affords him with a strikingly insightful understanding of Aquinas’s philosophical method here – one superior in some ways to those who have been working on the text of Aquinas for many years. It is worth quoting him at length here: The conception of truth embodied in … [Aquinas’s] scheme [of thought] requires that claims for truth on its behalf and on behalf of the judgments in which it is expressed commit those making them to hold that when that scheme encounters alternative standpoints making alternative and incompatible, even incommensurable, claims, Aquinas’s dialectical synthesis will be able to render those standpoints intelligible in a

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way that cannot be achieved by their own adherents from their own point of view and to distinguish their defects and limitations from their insights and merits in such a way as to explain the occurrence of what they themselves would have to take to be their defects and limitations at points at which their own explanatory capacities are resourceless. (TRV: 125)

So, while he is aware of the assumed metaphysical realism written into Aquinas’s philosophical method (as written into the Augustinian-style theological inquiry from which Thomas’s method is in part derived). MacIntyre sees in that method a highly impressive exemplification of how the activities of theoretical inquiry ought to be organized and conducted. Aquinas, as MacIntyre’s interpretation here underscores, is guided by the recognition that not all conceptualizations of mind-independent reality are created equal: one conceptual framework can show itself superior to another by showing itself richer, more detailed or less partial/more comprehensive than the other. And in this way a historically evolving conceptual framework (a ‘tradition of inquiry’ in MacIntyre’s sense) can show itself rationally superior to its predecessor framework, as C1 can show itself at time t1 rationally superior to an earlier version of itself C at time t. When it is a question for Aquinas of framework C demonstrating its rational superiority with respect to some rival and incommensurable framework, D, we are faced with a topic familiar from MacIntyre’s past work, and he returns to its consideration here. By way of reminder, according to MacIntyre’s account of this dialectical process, conceptual scheme C, when confronted by rival and incommensurable scheme D, will in the first place have to avoid the characteristic temptation of leaving its own standpoint unproblematized by seeking simply to translate D into its own idiom – or by permitting itself the thought that whatever in D cannot be translated into C is thereby unintelligible. Were C so to act and so to domesticate its rival, it would deny itself an opportunity of being able to discover its own unrecognized partiality of standpoint – or perhaps even of the way its entire standpoint rests upon a mistake. However, if C is in fact rationally superior to D (as adherents of C are already committed to thinking prima facie) then it should, in assimilating D on D’s own terms, be able to show adherents of D their own partiality of standpoint and the cause of their lack of success, on D’s own terms, with various aspects of D’s internal problematic. In such a case, if members of D are willing to problematize their standpoint, it will be rational for them to convert to standpoint C. Now MacIntyre credits Aquinas with more of less recognizing all of this, and as Three Rival Versions notes, what is striking about Aquinas’s achievement in this domain was his capacity bilingually to tack between two incommensurable standpoints and create a third systematic standpoint out of these which was rationally superior to either of them – whence we have the curious title of Chapter Five of Three Rival Versions, ‘Aristotle and or/against Augustine’. But before MacIntyre gives us in the concluding chapters of Three Rival Versions, with this work of background now complete, his considered criticisms of genealogy and encyclopaedia from the

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standpoint of Thomism, he offers, as is fitting given its strangeness to modern ears, a fuller characterization of the new moral theory which Aquinas brought into being. Moral inquiry, just as the philosophical inquiry of which it forms a part, is for Aquinas a craft, MacIntyre has observed – a craft which, like any other craft, has a history and has methods, materials, and ends which are subject to change as the circumstances of the craft activity themselves change. Proficients in the craft know how to innovate with regard to those methods, materials, and ends in the face of new circumstances, and know how to do this in a way which respects and learns from the craft’s past achievements. An interesting and important characteristic of moral inquiry so conceived is its overlap with ordinary human agency: moral inquiry, in Aquinas’s, sense seeks to answer the question ‘What is the good specific to human beings?’; the ordinary human agent seeks to answer the question, ‘What is the good of my life?’, and she answers this question by her actual choices. As a craft, moral inquiry and the theory it generates seeks to lead initiates to a theoretical discovery about their genuine good, so MacIntyre notes how Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae leads the reader through a series of dialectical exercises, the successful passing through of which will require of her or him the acquisition a set of moral and intellectual virtues (e.g. the forms of habitual physical self-control necessary to follow difficult and sustained intellectual argument and virtues such as honesty and humility in the form of openness to intellectual criticism). These exercises are meant to lead the reader to acquire a demonstration of the nature of the human good, and concurrently, of the role and the place of the virtues and the precepts of the natural law in that good. As is typical in crafts, a certain trust in a rational authority internal to the craft must be exercised by the initiate if he is to progress in contributing to the craft, since various virtues must be acquired on trust before their true value – their point and purpose – can be seen by the initiate (125–31). As for the precepts of the natural law, they will be those dictates, discovered in experience and formulated by reason, which set the boundaries within which human passions, desires, and capacities will alone be able harmoniously to aim at the all-things-considered-good of the human agent. So, in Aquinas’s moral picture, MacIntyre rightly insists, action-guiding rules will serve the virtues, and these rules cannot be considered as intelligible or justifiable independent of this relation of subservience (TRV: 139). MacIntyre observes here, for the first time in his work really, how in two crucial ways Aquinas’s account of the moral life goes beyond – even philosophically corrects – Aristotle’s otherwise largely similar account. There is for Thomas at the end of those theoretical inquires (which presuppose and serve the practical inquiries consubstantial with human agency) the discovery that no good or goods in this life can fully satisfy human nature: in this life there is no perfect happiness, no fully satisfactory summum bonum or final end, only imperfect such ones. Human life (i.e. without divine intervention) therefore has for Aquinas an inescapably tragic character to it (a character Hobbes by a different route was later to acknowledge, MacIntyre notes). Recognition of this tragic character should, in Aquinas’s view, at least open the inquirer up to divine revelation – which Thomas of course sees as

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occurring in and through Christ – and to the practice of those supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity which presuppose and can bring to satisfactory completion the natural virtues of which Plato and Aristotle spoke (TRV: 137–8). There is yet another discovery theoretical inquiry makes about the moral life to which Thomas adverts and which MacIntyre here endorses – one which will also tend to lead the moral agent to look for divine assistance. It is the discovery of a surd about human life, a surd at the very heart of human agency which, as MacIntyre points out, escaped Aristotle’s notice. In our pursuit of the good, the requisite knowledge of which is attained by progress in the acquisition both of the moral virtues (which bring the passions and desires under the sway of reason) and the intellectual virtues, especially prudence (which light up the path and make clear the existence and nature of the precepts of the natural law), our efforts are undermined by an inordinate and perverse self-love – an exaggerated esteem of self which leads us to contempt for God and to seek irrationally to exalt ourselves above others. Here, before this our deep congenital weakness, but for the work of direct divine moral assistance healing this wound of pride on Thomas’s picture, a human life lived by the exercise of the natural virtues alone would be radically impotent and so radically imperfect (136–8). There is of course much more that needs to be said about this; MacIntyre does not say it here, nor does he develop extensively Thomas’s claims about the limitations on human flourishing without divine grace, but he has waved an important flag. And he does take some pains to stress, and this partly with rival presentations of Aquinas’s moral theory in mind, that for Thomas, a spontaneous knowledge of the existence of God is available to any moral agent with a properly functioning reason at the outset of the moral life. This knowledge, moreover, in which God is seen, if indistinctly, as the beginning and end of all things, is crucial, Thomas thinks, for organizing the moral life and understanding our directedness towards the good (141). MacIntyre so reminds the reader here of a highly important tenet in Aquinas’s moral outlook, one easily overlooked by those seeking to interpret Aquinas’s thought in today’s climate of widespread theistic unbelief. Given MacIntyre’s portrayal of the strength of the Thomistic standpoint as something self-recommending, there is an obvious question as to why, after its inception, it failed even within Christendom to secure widespread allegiance for any length of time. We have seen MacIntyre attempt some answer to this conundrum previously in Whose Justice?, and Chapter Seven of Three Rival Versions, ‘In the Aftermath of Defeated Tradition’, is largely devoted to elaborating that answer further. The main obstacle the Thomistic synthesis of Averroistic Aristotelianism and Augustinianism faced, MacIntyre states here – repeating, if from a different perspective, what recent historians of Thomism have claimed – was an institutional obstacle. It is not so much that central theses in Thomas’s synthesis were novel, as that the synthesis itself brought with it a new architecture of the disciplines – one which was not only incompatible with the ancient institutionalized organization of secular learning into the trivium and quadrivium, but one also in which theology was

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understood to be in need of constant dialectical contact with the secular sciences (and particularly philosophy), both learning from and criticizing these. So this newly established Thomistic tradition of inquiry, drawing upon and systematically synthesizing past disparate philosophical and theological traditions (Aristotelian, Platonic, neo-Platonic, Patristic), was strongly committed to the unity of all theoretical inquiry, MacIntyre notes, and it was therefore committed to forging, by means of its philosophical and theological principles, an ongoing unification of the findings in the different spheres of learning. But the Thomistic tradition did not secure the means to institutionalize its conception of the order of learning and of the relation between the disciplines, with the unfortunate result that even though various of its theses were able to live on, the tradition of inquiry as a whole, with its systematically inter-connected parts, was doomed to decline (151–2). And various of its theses, now detached from their original justificatory contexts, were bound to be misrepresented: Each of the liberal arts to a large extent went its own way and the overall effect was one of more and more heterogeneity and variety. Grammar under the influence of the modistae moved into new areas; rhetoric, having been subordinated to and in Paris almost merged into dialectic, began to achieve new independence, especially with the fourteenth century rediscovery of classical rhetoric; and dialectic was transformed into a set of heterogeneous discussions of a disparate collection of logical and conceptual problems, treated in large part for their own sake and not in respect of any function of dialectic within any overall system. Arithmetic, music, and geometry came to serve new purposes in the world outside the universities. (157)

The thought of Duns Scotus, on MacIntyre’s interpretation of late mediaeval philosophy, was a major cause of the decline of the Thomistic synthesis. Scotus, he notes, wishing in Augustinian fashion to safeguard faith and theology from the alien and critical intrusions of philosophy, and especially of Aristotelianism, departed from Aquinas’s standpoint in two key ways, both of which contributed greatly to the separation of philosophical from theological inquiry. Scotus, on the one hand, denied that philosophical reason was capable of recognizing that the ultimate end of the moral life was an imperfect happiness: in Scotus’s view, MacIntyre observes, only faith can tell us that we are capable of a perfect happiness in a next life – and so, correspondingly, that any happiness we might attain in this life is imperfect. Philosophy, therefore, no longer ends in a state of recognition of its imperfection and of its internal demand to be completed by something higher than itself: it is now thought to enjoy a kind of autonomous finality. Secondly, Scotus in his philosophical psychology assigned primacy to the will over the intellect, and departed from Aquinas in denying that the intellect could be an independent cause moving an agent to act. Man obeys the natural law, not because he perceives that it is good for him to do so, but because his will chooses to subject itself to divine authority. A split has opened up between the ought of practical reasoning as understood by Aquinas and the ought of moral obligation. In Aquinas’s picture, as MacIntyre has often noted on previous occasions, the knowledge that

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God (omniscient, omnibenevolent) has commanded x gives an agent additional and superior reasons for thinking, as the agent by his own lights already should, that x is good for him to do: the ought of practical reasoning and the ought of obedience to God are thus as two sides of one coin. After Scotus, for whom the dominant reason for action is the command of another, Three Rival Versions argues, it becomes possible and natural to query why we should obey this ab alio command, and to query whether we would have an obligation to perform the commanded action in the absence of the command. The way is thus paved for the voluntarist ethics of Occam and the deontological ethics of Kant (152–5). MacIntyre takes a strong view here of Aquinas’s achievement and the consequences of the resistance to its acceptance by the dominant academic institutions of the time. With Aquinas’s concept of the unity of inquiry in hand, he argues, on an analogy with the development of the sciences of physics and astronomy in the early modern period, it became possible to mark progress in philosophical rationality. Aquinas bequeathed philosophy with a unified and unifying conceptual framework for philosophical beliefs and a dialectical method for testing the truth-value of the framework’s own open-to-revision-and-falsification commitments. What MacIntyre is praising in large part here is a kind of formal achievement: Aquinas’s commitment to bring into rational relation with one another beliefs in all the different spheres of learning, including religious beliefs – his effort, that is, at cognitive systematization and cognitive systematization serving social and political practice. With the failure of Aquinas’s distinctive approach to intellectual inquiry to secure institutional support, MacIntyre claims, there is fragmentation, beginning in the intellectual order and then spreading to the social and political orders, and developments which land us in the state in which we are currently and which he thinks is deplorable – that of the scholasticism of Anglo-American philosophy and social and political fragmentation in the culture at large. As he states here in Chapter Seven of Three Rival Versions: ‘What largely disappeared from view [beginning in the High Middle Ages] … was the possibility of any overall synthetic and systematic mode of thought and practice, embodied within a tradition being recognized, let alone securing widespread allegiance’ (164–5). This requires some elucidation. Aquinas, as MacIntyre notes, was strongly committed to the systematic inter-connection of philosophical theses and to the holistic character of philosophical understanding and explanation. That commitment placed great demands on the tradition of inquiry it spawned, but it also provided its native social order with the means for unifying theory and practice – for rationally systematizing and ordering belief, that is, and for rationally orienting the social order’s belief-presupposing practices in turn. Whatever the substantive merits of the Thomistic tradition of inquiry – and MacIntyre, needless to say, has for some time argued that they are considerable – it provided a highly attractive framework for progress in rational inquiry and for rational and socially self-critical pursuit of the good. Given the failure of the Thomistic tradition of inquiry to secure institutional and social embodiment, what we can observe taking place instead, beginning in the High Middle Ages, MacIntyre notes, is the absence of any such unifying framework.

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Already in Occam, MacIntyre points out, there is the denial that intellectual inquiry has some one unifying goal or unified subject matter (161). Different forms of inquiry begin to go their own separate ways, and agreement on larger questions – questions at the overlap of the disciplines – becomes more and more elusive. Social and political fragmentation follow the loss of social consensus, since now, in the absence of a framework for rational agreement about belief and value, jurisdictional conflicts (Church versus State, empire versus city-state, intra-state social practice versus inter-state social practice) become inevitable. And without the shared conception of justice which a unified framework for belief and practice offers, it is natural that defensive rights claims (one social or political faction against another) will abound – as they do, MacIntyre observes, beginning in the early modern period (164). On the intellectual plane – and here we return to MacIntyre’s complaints about the scholasticism of much contemporary philosophy – the hope for rational consensus on large issues, both among scholars and between the scholarly community and the educated public, is abandoned. Philosophy becomes the increasingly refined application of increasingly refined analytical (i.e. logical and conceptual) techniques to discrete, de-contextualized, and purportedly autonomous problems. Each rival camp has its own way of determining which problems are central and which marginal, but there is little effort systematically to trace these problems back to the larger contexts from which they derive and at which level alone the possibility for their rational resolution, and for agreement between rival and divergent standpoints, exists. Philosophers, meanwhile, who are also human beings, must inevitably take a stand on larger Weltanschauung issues, and they do so. But this stand, MacIntyre observes, often covertly and unjustifiably shapes their approach to philosophical problems, and dictates their preference for certain solutions to those problems. Philosophy at large, according to the account of Three Rival Versions, undergoes a kind of methodological Fall: instead of open and public debate about socially central issues in metaphysics and morals, it becomes content with, even proud of, its social isolation and marginalization and the professionalization of its discourse. Meanwhile, in its detailed and technical work, it simultaneously helps itself to and lives off unexamined large-scale commitments: large-scale commitments which represent often nothing more than some unexamined spirit of the age or other (Tolstoyan morality, the aesthetic Weltanschauung of Bloomsbury, or scientific materialism, to cite three of MacIntyre’s examples). These commitments guide philosophers’ choices of problems and provide the evaluative standard for their adopted solutions to those problems. But because these different and rival background frameworks for belief, these different general outlooks, often remain off the stage of rational debate; no possibility for agreement about the rational solution to philosophical problems emerges, and so the craft of philosophy necessarily fails to exhibit any directedness or shared sense of progress over time (158–60). There can be and is a shared sense of progress in matters of argumentative technique, MacIntyre will admit, but he will insist that the piecemeal approach to

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intellectual inquiry denies philosophy the possibility of securing social consensus and condemns it to sterility on the macro-level. It is here he thinks that the Thomistic, tradition-constituted approach to rational inquiry offers us a clear and attractive alternative. 7.5 The Vindication of Thomistic Moral Theory Few today, as MacIntyre is aware, would espouse in undiluted form the conception of rationality he has portrayed as characteristic of the Enlightenment, according to which disputes in philosophical matters can be resolved by neutral, available-toall rational means. We are mindful instead, at this stage of philosophy’s history, that any rational (i.e. logical or conceptual) means sufficient to adjudicate between rival philosophical standpoints would themselves have to have derived from some contestable theoretical or conceptual structure, and so would lose any claim to the title of neutral. It is widely held now that rationality on matters of substantive philosophical debate cannot be other than standpoint-dependent. But MacIntyre’s interest has long been in arguing that the standpoint-dependence of rationality needn’t mean the full relativization of rationality to standpoint or scheme: standpoint dependence, that is, needn’t make rationality something entirely internal to a particular standpoint or scheme. Chapters Eight and Nine of Three Rival Versions, ‘Tradition against Encyclopaedia: Enlightened Morality as the Superstition of Modernity’ and ‘Tradition against Genealogy: Who speaks to Whom?’ respectively, try to show how this is the case, using the conflict between the three rival traditions of moral inquiry discussed earlier in the book as a case in point. And in these two chapters MacIntyre deploys in full form a theory of rational superiority with its components sub-theories of inquiry, truth, translation, and refutation. An interesting point about MacIntyre’s development is that he seems to have been at work formulating such a theory for some time before discovering a version of it in Aquinas that he thinks highly serviceable – a best-yet version, as it were, of the theory he has been seeking and for which he had already found independent grounds of support. Much though not all of MacIntyre’s own account, then, can be seen as derived from his later interpretation of Aquinas’s philosophical method. That interpretation, already discussed at various points in this study, bears re-stating again, now against the background of the contest between the rival and incommensurable traditions of Augustinianism and Averroistic Aristotelianism, and with the method embodied specifically in Thomas’s Summa Theologiae before our minds. Put schematically and by way of reconstruction, MacIntyre’s theory of rationality, both intra- and inter-traditional rationality, is as follows: Intra-traditional rational superiority – theory A2 is rationally superior to A1 (i.e. an alternative version in the family of theory A) if A2 can both identify explanatory limitations and inadequacies in A1 and convincingly explain why these limitations were bound to occur.

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The After Virtue Project Inter-traditional rational superiority – theory A is rationally superior to rival and incommensurable theory B if having understood theory B in B’s own idiom and according to its own internal means of justification, A can:

1. withstand according to its own standards the strongest objections against itself by B 2. identify explanatory limitations and inadequacies in B, recognizable to adherents of B as such, while providing a remedy, also recognizable to adherents of B, for those limitations and inadequacies, and also 3. explain why from the standpoint of A these inadequacies were bound to occur relative to B’s standpoint; and, finally, where necessary (e.g. in the face of the obstinate refusal of adherents to B to accept B’s rational inferiority with respect to A in view of 1, 2, and 3), 4. supply an account of the cause(s) of ideological blindness on the part of adherents of B.

The task Three Rival Versions sets itself is to apply this theory of rational vindication to the conflict between Thomistic and Nietzschean and Enlightenment liberal versions of moral inquiry. MacIntyre tackles Thomism’s contest with Enlightenment liberalism first, and the work of Henry Sidgwick, Victorian utilitarian and author of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article ‘Ethics’, provides his considered point of reference within the Enlightenment tradition. MacIntyre begins by noting an important contrast between the views of earlier eighteenth-century Enlightenment theorists, and those of late nineteenth-century contemporaries of Sidgwick and Sidgwick himself. While early Enlightenment moralists, such as Louis chevalier de Jaucourt (the contributor of the article ‘Moralité’ to L’Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert), David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Joseph Butler, Richard Price, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart, tended to see morality as something with a timeless, changeless subject matter, composed of universally recognized and independent-ofreligious-or-metaphysical-tradition moral rules, plus the virtues necessary to keep those rules (the exercise of which virtues was held to produce, generally and in the long run, individual happiness and a just social order), this perspective was no longer available to later Enlightenment thinkers such as Sidgwick. MacIntyre observes that Sidgwick and his contemporaries were well aware of the empirical divergence between moral codes in past social orders, so they formulated a more sophisticated version of Enlightenment moral theory – one employing a developmental framework drawn from biology and anthropology – to show timelessly true universal morality as a unilinearly emergent phenomenon, the product of an ascent from divisive forms of superstition to a unifying, purely secular and rational moral conception (174–6). For Sidgwick, MacIntyre notes, the task of moral theory remained what it had been for his predecessors: to ratify and defend against false theory the moral apprehensions of the plain moral person. But Sidgwick thought it was also to show how these apprehensions were purified of their admixture of superstition and dogmatism over time to produce in the mind of the present-day plain moral agent (and, correspondingly, in the theory of the right-thinking present-day moral theorist) an unalloyed, wholly rationally justifiable conception of the dictates of autonomous

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morality – a morality, that is, independent of reliance on religious or metaphysical beliefs. Modern man and modern moral theorist had so discovered in Sidgwick’s view, MacIntyre notes, the autonomous moral ‘ought’. In Three Rival Versions, MacIntyre credits Sidgwick with the realization that the moral outlook of his own time was not free, whether among the learned or the unlearned, of conflict and disagreement. And he observes how Sidgwick went further in addressing this disagreement (e.g. aiming to eliminate it as much as possible in the strictly moral realm where it would be independent of differences in belief between moral agents in other areas) than his Enlightenment predecessors did – predecessors who were often wont to attribute moral disagreement simply to circumstantial differences in the application of shared general rules. But MacIntyre retains two significant criticisms of Sidgwick’s approach: on the one hand, for Sidgwick’s reading into other social orders a way of conceptualizing the moral common to his Enlightenment contemporaries and predecessors (as fellow contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica Ninth Edition J.G. Frazer did with respect to primitive morality, MacIntyre notes, and William Robertson Smith did with respect to Hebraic morality), Sidgwick was not historically and contextually minded enough. He thus violated the cardinal condition for establishing the rational superiority of one’s own standpoint which MacIntyre has argued for repeatedly: namely, that one assimilate an alien standpoint on its own terms so as to be able to criticize it on its own terms. This of course represents a criticism of Sidgwick’s moral theory relative to MacIntyre’s own broadly Thomistic standpoint on rationality, but MacIntyre acknowledges that the Thomistic standpoint also requires him to give an account of how Sidgwick’s theory of morality can be shown by a Thomist to have failed on its own terms. How does he attempt this? Sidgwick, he notes, thought that moral theory, owing to the ever-increasing organization and systematization of human thought, was progressing to the point, although it hadn’t yet arrived there in his own time, where it could show how most differences in moral belief between moral agents could be eliminated. The outcome of the ascent of moral reason from superstition and dogmatism was to be a wholly secular moral conception, acceptable to all on the basis of the kind of unconstrained assent Sidgwick admired and saw operative in the natural sciences. But Sidgwick realized that there was in his own utilitarianstyle theory of autonomous morality a division which that theory had not overcome for those moral agents who respected the demands of the autonomous moral ought: a division between these agents’ pursuit of their own personal happiness and their respect for universal happiness. What to do, then, from the point of view of the theory when the principles dictating the means to the one conflict with those dictating the means to the other? Because he saw the weakness in Kant’s moral psychology, MacIntyre claims, Sidgwick did not want to follow Kant by asserting that the rules of morality have an unconditional character which denies self-interest a role in moral motivation and which forbids the making of an exception in one’s own case. But Sidgwick did think that the occasions of conflict between egoistic and universalist principles would be infrequent enough to be negligible. Here, MacIntyre argues, he was simply living off

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the high degree of unscrutinized moral consensus in his own Victorian society – a consensus which we have since seen erode and which was but the unacknowledged hold-over of the moral consciousness of a past and rival moral tradition. More damaging, though, to Sidgwick’s standpoint, and damaging precisely on its own terms, MacIntyre notes, returning to one of the main themes of the philosophical history of After Virtue, is the evident fact that subsequent rationalist moral theory has not, as Sidgwick’s views led him to predict, solved the problem it set for itself of producing unconstrained agreement about the content and ordering of the moral intuitions of the modern moral agent: the subsequent history of moral philosophy has been a history of ramifying disagreement in which all of Sidgwick’s attempted reconciliations of hitherto warring post-Enlightenment points of view into a synthesis – which was itself intended to foreshadow a coming convergence of an even more complete kind – have been dissolved into new and multifarious conflicts. Universalizability theorists, utilitarians, existentialists, contractarians, those who assert the possibility of deriving morality from rational self-interest and those who deny it, those who uphold the overriding character of an impersonal standpoint and those who insist on the prerogatives of the self, disagree not only with each other but among themselves, and the certitude of those who maintain each point of view is matched only by their inability to produce rational arguments capable of securing agreement from their adversaries. Thus post-Sidgwickian moral philosophy, judged by the standards of the Ninth Edition and of Sidgwick himself, has turned out to be a dubious type of activity, self-discrediting in just the way that Sidgwick held that the theology of the late nineteenth century was self-discrediting. (189)

The Thomist – MacIntyre in this case – has thus, as he sees the matter, identified a key failing on its own terms of Enlightenment-style universalist moral theory. What now of the required identification of the internal causes of these internal failings – the how and the why of the what, so to speak? Here, Three Rival Versions observes, the genealogist and the Thomist, both the Encyclopaedist’s rivals, will offer conflicting accounts. The genealogist will see Encyclopaedist moral theory as, in continuity with past moral theory beginning with Socrates, the re-enactment of an ideological assertion of the will to power – one doomed in time to be unmasked for its ideological character, just as its predecessors before it were. The Thomist, however, sees something else: he sees a tradition of moral inquiry doomed to failure for incorrectly problematizing the subject matter of morality. One cannot, MacIntyre’s Thomist will argue, reconcile the demands of personal well-being with the demands of a just social order if one starts with a society of individuals cut away from their historical dependencies and the social contexts which have made them, and continue to constitute them, as the persons they are. One must speak instead (to paraphrase MacIntyre here) of socially embedded, historically constituted persons pursuing their good in a social context in which the personal good can only be had in and through active contribution to the common good (i.e. with the demands that this contribution makes on the exercise of the social virtues, particularly justice). Or, more precisely put, the Thomist will maintain that a serviceable moral theory

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must take note that human agents are only able adequately to inquire about, pursue, and enjoy their personal good by means of prior and ongoing membership in, and contribution to, the institutions and social structures by which the practices in which their personal good is to be found are sustained (192–3). Why, then, according to the explanation it is incumbent upon MacIntyre according to his standpoint to give, has the Enlightenment tradition of moral inquiry inevitably arrived at the impasse it has? It has first of all on MacIntyre’s account, wished to retain a large portion of the moral doctrines of the traditional pre-modern moral outlook: this, MacIntyre as Thomist will observe, is but the workings of that ineradicable synderesis of which Aquinas spoke – synderesis, the capacity to know the primary precepts of the natural moral law, which capacity can be damaged by the moral degeneration of one’s culture or by one’s own moral vice, but a capacity that can never be eradicated (194). However, in breaking with the teleological justificatory framework of the pre-modern moral outlook, Enlightenment moral theory, MacIntyre’s argument continues, has surrendered the sole adequate means of rationally comprehending and justifying those same precepts of traditional morality – and it has thus generated various insoluble moral antinomies: antinomies between rights and rights, between rights and duties, between egoistic happiness and universal happiness, and so forth. It has condemned itself in this way to internal sterility and ineliminable internal dissensus. MacIntyre’s suggestion here, plainly, is that any modern who was well aware of the quandaries of modern individualist moral theory, and who could by an act of imaginative empathy come to understand the Thomistic standpoint, would find it rational to switch his allegiance to Thomism, this being for her or him, in continuity with her or his past intellectual labours, the most rational next thing to do. MacIntyre means to extend this form of criticism to the genealogical tradition as well, and at the end of Three Rival Versions he fills out the sketch of the Thomistic criticism of Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean genealogy advanced earlier in the book. In the Thomistic tradition of moral inquiry, given its background assumption of moral realism, he observes, it is presumed that there is a truth about the human good which is matter for discovery, but which can for various reasons evade the inquirer’s grasp. Each member of the tradition must submit his or her beliefs and actions to dialectical and confessional scrutiny either to test how and whether they hold up within the framework of that tradition – for instance, how or whether tradition-constituted reason or faith-informed reason requires that they be modified or abandoned – or to test how and whether, conversely, they themselves make the modification of, or addition to, the canonical beliefs of the tradition something rationally mandatory. Authority within the community resides in those who have demonstrated a more adequate, a fuller, grasp, whether practical and or intellectual, of the human good, and these steer the tradition’s collective inquiry about, and pursuit of, the good. They also preside over the scrutiny of members’ actions and beliefs, a scrutiny carried out according to the shared standards for truth in both belief and action as established in and through the tradition’s past history.

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Presupposed in this tradition, as in many, perhaps most, pre-modern moral traditions, MacIntyre will observe (he cites here the examples of Native American tribes, Islamic caliphates, the Mayan empire, ancient and mediaeval Celtic peoples), is a conception of personal identity: every member of the tradition has an identity through time which is at least and characteristically more than that of a body, and quite often that of a psyche-inhabited body. Each member of the tradition is accountable to his or her fellow-members and to the tradition’s shared past for the beliefs, actions, projects, commitments and so forth that make up her or his life, a life with a presumed beginning, middle and end. Initiation into the tradition is initiation into the past dialectical history of the tradition – into the way its inter-connected arguments have gone thus far, into its present standards for intellectual and practical achievement with regard to the good, and so on. In the Thomistic tradition very clearly, MacIntyre notes, an effort is made to distinguish different, analogically related senses of ‘true’ and to mark the way in which different inherited texts within the tradition advance truth-claims depending upon the genres of writing embodied in those texts (whether those genres be, for instance, poetical, mythical, dialectical, or dramatic). All of these distinctions are crucial to the rendering of each individual to account for his beliefs and actions and crucial to the tradition’s scrutiny of those beliefs and actions. But all of this, MacIntyre will observe, stands in stark contrast to the genealogical tradition of moral inquiry, since one of the chief purposes of that tradition is to deny the conception of personal identity written into the beliefs and practices of the Thomistic tradition (as into many or most pre-modern moral traditions). In his effort at pointing up hidden or concealed oppositions and contradictions in what we might call the traditionally conceived self, the genealogist, MacIntyre admits, can save himself from falling into the standpoint of metaphysical realism and into any metaphysically realist conception of the self by asserting that, when he engages in deconstructive critique, he is only donning one of a succession of masks. MacIntyre has admitted this point in the genealogist’s favour earlier: only from the standpoint of the metaphysical realist (the Thomist in this case) and in metaphysical realist terms has the genealogist fallen into self-contradiction in so acting – but not on the genealogist’s own terms. Therefore, according to MacIntyre’s theory of rationality, the Thomist cannot yet claim victory by rational superiority: he or she must show that the genealogical tradition does fail yet in its activities and self-appointed projects on its own terms and provide an explanation for the why and the wherefore of these internal failures that indicates their logical inevitability. The Thomist has two moves he can make at this stage, MacIntyre argues. He can point out that in the activities of the genealogist as understood from within there remains a self-contradiction. Genealogical literature is meant to be emancipatory, freeing its author and others from damaging and distorting ways of seeing the self and the world – for instance, those characteristic of the metaphysical realist – and genealogy typically proceeds by constructing an ‘I was blind but now I see narrative’ in and through its critical activities. But if the genealogist is to comprehend his own narrative of emancipation – and offer it as intelligible to others in the hopes

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of emancipating them as well – then we are indeed back in the realm of a self with identity and accountability through time, and genealogy has thus failed in its avowed aspirations (209–14). There is a second and related point MacIntyre thinks the Thomist can and should make here: that genealogy appears to have an entirely derivative – indeed, parasitic – structure to it: its mode of dialectical engagement seems in concept, thesis, and style of argument entirely conditioned by the standpoint it is opposing (215). MacIntyre does not helpfully elaborate on this criticism, and it is not entirely clear why the genealogist should have a problem, on his own terms, with admitting that his activity has such a form to it. MacIntyre seems unwittingly to have reverted here to the, on his own terms, less interesting form of critique – critique from an external standpoint, in this case his own Thomistic standpoint. No Thomist qua metaphysical realist would wish to have his mind-independent-world-directed activities described as wholly parasitic upon, and conditioned by, the thought of some other mind or minds, but much more needs to be said about why the genealogist should fear admitting he is guilty of such a charge. The genealogist ought to have the resources to say how and why false pretences to objectivity are spontaneously engendered and how and why they call for parasitic deconstructive activity. However, MacIntyre’s first Thomistinspired criticism of genealogy here is clearly a telling one. As to the cause, from the perspective of Thomism, of the Nietzschean tradition of moral inquiry’s errant ways – or, more precisely, of its persistently errant ways in view of the Thomistic-style criticism of it which has not been lacking historically – MacIntyre offers the following highly compelling suggestion. The roots of the Nietzschean’s persistent intellectual errors and his ideological blindness to those errors lie in prior volitional errors, errors in valuing. It is the uncorrected inclination to pride or exaggerated self-love, the desire to dominate others and to show contempt for the sovereignty of God (a sovereignty misconceived, MacIntyre might have said here, as something constraining and limiting, as opposed to something affirming, enabling, and enlarging), which leads the Nietzschean to construct a fiction: the fiction of the impersonal will-to-power that serves as a mask and as an excuse for his own distorted and distorting will to power. It is this same unacknowledged pride which leads him to conceal from himself and from others the acts of self-assertion which lie behind his ostensibly selfless and altruistic acts of unmasking the will-topower at work in the activities of others (147). MacIntyre believes, and with evident justification, that by the end of Three Rival Versions he has drawn the circle closed on what he set out to do. He has taken the theory of rational superiority developed at the end of Whose Justice? and applied it to a specific case of inter-traditional dialectical conflict. He has then tried to show, descending to the details, how one tradition of moral inquiry, Thomistic Aristotelianism, rationally defeats two other dominant such rival traditions. We can now turn to his interesting institutional suggestions for the future of rational inquiry with which Three Rival Versions concludes.

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Revitalizing Contemporary Academic Debate

As evidence of the demise of an educated public – with its shared canonical texts, shared standards for victory, defeat, and progress in inquiry, shared forums of intellectual and political debate – and of the loss of any widespread belief in the unity of inquiry, MacIntyre notes how, by its Eleventh Edition published in 1910 (just over thirty years after the Ninth Edition), the Enyclopaedia Britannica no longer presented itself as embodying the march of Reason. It intended itself instead to be a work of universal reference – a mere collection of pragmatically ordered, as opposed to systematically relatable and related, facts. Underlying this change, MacIntyre observes, was a change in the nature and forms of disciplined inquiry itself. The fragmentation, professionalization, and consequent social marginalization of inquiry (we have seen MacIntyre locate the early source of this change in developments in the fourteenth century) had become, by the time of the Eleventh Edition, MacIntyre notes, a fait accompli. Few then believed, few now believe, in the unity of knowledge as Adam Gifford, T.H. Baynes, Robertson Smith and company once did. And yet, MacIntyre wants to argue, if we look at today’s presumably post-Encyclopaedic university, it, in much of its infra-structure, its self-presentation, and its official rhetoric, does not provide us with the means to take stock of and learn from the demise of the belief in unitary universal reason which spawned the Encyclopaedic project--and spawned in turn the liberal university of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an interesting historical observation, MacIntyre points out how the pre-liberal university – whether the mediaeval university such as the University of Paris, or the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century universities in the USA, or older Scottish universities such as the University of Glasgow in its early modern form – were premised on policies of exclusion by means of the application of moral and religious tests. These tests served the purpose of furthering the traditions of moral inquiry which these universities were often founded to serve, and this, according to MacIntyre’s theory of inquiry and rationality, was a good thing. Yet these institutions suffered from the weakness, MacIntyre admits, that they not only practised the preferment of the dubiously qualified orthodox, but also, and more damagingly, that they engaged in unjustified and unjustifiable exclusions from their communities of inquiry – exclusions, for instance of Jewish people. In so doing, they paved the way for the rise of the liberal university, that university set up to secure unconstrained rational consensus by rationally self-recommending means, perceivable as such by all rational persons. Today, however, MacIntyre continues (repeating a point he has made insistently since After Virtue), we have no such widespread consensus – at least none other than on matters of academic technique. We have only ramifying disagreements. The liberal university has not delivered on its promise of producing unconstrained rational consensus in moral and metaphysical matters, and when this charge is made against it by members of the society at large, it risks defending itself by misleadingly pointing to the consensus that frequently reigns in the natural sciences (where, of

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course, as MacIntyre will point out, a priori justifiable, but not fully justified, forms of exclusion and the enforcement of an orthodoxy reign). Or, it can misleadingly point to the rough consensus concerning the assessment of technical skill in humanistic forms of inquiry. Inasmuch as it avails itself of this form of reply, MacIntyre notes, the liberal university is often seeking disingenuously to conceal and or domesticate the fundamental conflicts on matters of substance in philosophical and humanistic inquiry today, and by so acting it does a disservice to the future of rational debate and intellectual progress – and it undermines, simultaneously, its own indispensable mission within society: ‘universities are places where conceptions of and standards of rational justification are elaborated, put to work in the detailed practices of enquiry, and themselves rationally evaluated, so that only from the university can the wider society learn how to conduct its own debates, practical and theoretical, in a rationally defensible way’ (TRV: 222). MacIntyre’s argument is that today’s university should instead, aware of its post-Encyclopaedic status, face up to the state of dissensus in matters of substantive belief and value – matters crucial to the life of society at large – and become a place of constrained disagreement. This means that it should encourage within its institutional framework the development on their own terms of the kind of rival and incommensurable forms of moral inquiry that Three Rival Versions has been portraying – and that it should respect and promote the distinct and distinctive modes of inquiry and argument, sets of canonical texts and so on of these diverse traditions. Against the charge that the demands on infra-structure such an arrangement would make on today’s university give his proposal here the look of a pipe dream, MacIntyre’s first response (interestingly he will amend this response by the chapter’s end) is that an institution of the form he is envisaging has already existed: the thirteenth-century University of Paris, where Augustinians and Averroistic Aristotelians developed their incommensurable forms of inquiry systematically and systematically engaged with one another to mutual rational benefit (232). What MacIntyre thinks is required of members of an academic institution that is set up to minister to constrained disagreement is twofold: on the one hand, selfconscious and avowed partisanship towards a determinate tradition of inquiry, and secondly, an elementary form of justice or fairness whereby each participant, whatever her or his allegiance, acts to preserve and foster those common structures which serve the debate between the rival and incommensurable traditions. MacIntyre clearly advances this proposal as one he thinks would be attractive to fair-minded, intellectually honest, and sociologically and historically aware adherents of any tradition of moral inquiry, but he is not unaware of how radical-sounding this proposal must appear to today’s cadre of academic administrators. However, it is more, seemingly, from the consideration of just how much of their own space and resources the ironic, aphoristic Nietzschean tradition – or the dialectically systematic Thomistic tradition, for instance – would require for their own proper development that leads MacIntyre to amend this proposal for restructuring the university. By the end of the same chapter in Three Rival Versions where he makes this very proposal, MacIntyre calls instead for the creation of, so to speak, post-liberal confessional

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universities, each set up to serve, more or less exclusively, the rational development of some one tradition of inquiry or other (as the University of Paris in some ways did for the Thomist in 1272, he notes, or as the University of Vincennes did for the Nietzschean genealogist in 1968). And, alongside these confessional institutions, he calls for the creation and maintenance of certain intermediating forums of academic debate (presumably journals, institutes, societies and the like) to minister to intertraditional exchange and debate (234). That MacIntyre’s earlier premises strongly imply some such conclusion about the appropriate institutional structures for moral inquiry seems clear. What is less clear is that they imply the sharp criticism of various Great Books approaches to addressing today’s moral and metaphysical dissensus with which Three Rival Versions ends. MacIntyre’s argument against such proposals is certainly under-developed here, but it is fairly straightforward: lists of texts embodying the inspirations for and the sources of our present self-understanding and our present intellectual and moral conflicts can neither be read nor taught from an allegedly evaluatively neutral standpoint. To identify these sources and to interpret them is inescapably to become a partisan in the debates which the texts themselves embody; therefore, the only way to work unideologically within such a pedagogical framework is to be a self-aware and avowed partisan. But recognition of this should move us back to something like MacIntyre’s own proposal, just given, for furthering rational inquiry today (228–9). Of course, the Great Books proponent could merely call hers a more modest proposal than MacIntyre’s – one aimed at least elevating the level of debate in today’s university and in society at large by returning those debates to their textual origins and by putting them in some at least weak form of historical perspective. But MacIntyre is likely to respond to this defence, though, that given the depth of today’s intellectual and moral fragmentation and dissensus, what passes for modesty here is simply inefficacy. 7.7 A Postscript to the Project: Moral Inquiry and Dependency The award of the Carus Lectures to MacIntyre in 1997 afforded him an opportunity to revisit in an extended way central themes in the After Virtue trilogy, and these lectures formed the basis of the recently published Dependent Rational Animals (1999a). This book is in many ways more than a supplement to these earlier works; it represents instead the addition of a significant new emphasis, not so much modifying earlier claims as viewing them in a new perspective and endowing them with an added dimension. Where the emphasis in MacIntyre’s prior writings had been on the social aspects of the moral life, this later work places the emphasis on the biological basis of the social: human moral agency considered as the agency of a social animal. To speak of animality, the book insists in a variety of ways, is to speak of bodily dependence, and MacIntyre has clearly now seen the relevance of considerations of biology and animality for any moral theory that would wish to

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call itself ‘Aristotelian’. Part of Aristotle’s understanding of human moral agency, however, will come under strong criticism in this book. There are a number of interesting arguments in the first several chapters of Dependent Rational Animals aimed at showing how, contrary to a number of the prominent traditions in Western philosophy, non-human animals are capable of a form of rationality – for instance, of acting for a reason and of discriminating between reasons for action. Beyond this, MacIntyre seeks to show in these lectures how human rationality is always exercised in continuity with, even while it goes beyond, non-human animal rationality. Particularly relevant for MacIntyre’s moral theory are claims made in the second half of the book concerning the importance of the first part of the book for a theory of the good. Awareness of our animality is significant, he will argue, because it leads us to a consideration of our vulnerability and dependence (a consideration uncommon, he justly notes, in many of the dominant traditions of occidental moral inquiry). Human agency and human practical rationality are things exercised in the context of our bodily condition, with its ever-present or everthreatening physical and mental afflictions. Relatedly, MacIntyre will now identify as one of the main presuppositions of After Virtue a view which he will argue for, if briefly, here: that personal identity is based upon, though not entirely reducible to, the bodily identity of an animal through time (see, for instance, DPR: 82–3, 94–5). How exactly does MacIntyre think that awareness of our dependence is significant for the theory of practical rationality? Because, he argues here, it requires of us the acquisition and exercise of a distinctive set of virtues, virtues that as important a figure in the history of virtue theorizing as Aristotle overlooked. So the tenor of Dependent Rational Animals is very much shaped by a Thomistic correction of a dominant theme in Aristotle’s ethics: the ethical ideal of the megalo&yukoj or magnanimous man who, in Aristotle’s words, ‘is apt to confer benefits, but he is ashamed of receiving them; for the one is the mark of a superior, the other of an inferior … [These men] seem also to remember any service they have done, but not those they have received (for he who receives a service is inferior to him who has done it, but the proud man wishes to be superior) …’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1 124b9–18, Ross trans.). This, Aristotle’s great-souled man, MacIntyre will argue, conspicuously lacks those traits of character which will become a main theme of this study: the virtues of ‘acknowledged dependence’. While there can be no doubt that Dependent Rational Animals represents an internal and Thomistic correction to MacIntyre’s own neo-Aristotelian moral theory and theory of practical rationality (MacIntyre, for instance, will cite a prayer of Aquinas’s in which Thomas asks God to grant that he may happily share with those in need what he has, while humbly asking for the things he needs from those who possess them; DPR: xi), it is evident how much this internal adjustment is motivated also by what MacIntyre has learned from the woman’s voice in moral and political philosophy – a debt he more or less openly acknowledges in the Preface of the work. Aristotle, he argues now, not only overlooked the virtues of acknowledged dependence, but failed in his otherwise correct observations about the moral agent’s need for communal assistance when deliberating about matters of personal importance,

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to include within the deliberative community women, manual workers, and slaves (i.e. the dispossessed in general) and so systematically excluded the possibility of his or our learning from his standpoint about the value of such virtues. To begin with the matter of animal rationality, how does MacIntyre think that we should draw the contrast between non-human animal rationality and human rationality – once, that is, we have become aware of the continuity between them? Both, he notes, have as their end or ultimate purpose the goal of flourishing – flourishing understood univocally as the development of the intrinsic capacities of a species for determinate goods (i.e. whether these be goods instrumental to the attainment of further goods, or intrinsic goods worth possessing for their own sake – for example, as constitutive parts of a good life as a whole; DPR: 64). But distinctive of human flourishing is that form of dependence members of the human species have with respect to one another. So while young dolphins, MacIntyre notes, are threatened by particular harms and dangers and depend on older dolphins for sustenance and safety – for learning techniques of hunting and communication and the formation of alliances – young humans must learn from mature humans even more fundamentally what the good is towards which they should direct themselves, and not merely how to attain it and how to protect themselves from physical harms and dangers along the way (63ff.). Accompanying this particular learning need of humans is the fact, he adds, that humans have also and relatedly a distinctive capacity for language acquisition and use: a capacity in and through which they are able to represent to themselves the nature and structure of their present directedness towards the good and to assess and weigh options in their actions. It is in this way, the book will argue, that the human animal is a distinctively rational animal. Human maturation in practical reasoning, and the progressive attainment of the good of flourishing at which such reasoning aims, takes place, on MacIntyre’s account, in three stages. In a first more or less infantile stage, the human agent is spontaneously inclined to pursue the objects of its felt needs and desires. Reasons for action are not yet significantly explicit at this stage, though learning from experience and the activity of discriminating between goods are both present. A key next stage in the development of human agency occurs, then, when the human agent begins to distance himself from his desires: by representing to himself his reasons for action, he begins to query whether these reasons (e.g. the satisfaction of a certain physical desire or of the desire to please an elder) are good or bad reasons. Now the human agent’s dependence on his species community takes on decisive importance. Before he can become, as is good for him to do, a fully independent practical reasoner – an appropriately autonomous member of the species – he must also learn from fellow humans about the range and the rank of the goods available to him, and, significantly, he must learn of his own distinctive capacities or incapacities to attain those goods. In this transition to appropriate but not total independence in his practical reasoning (deliberating with others even about one’s own good will always be a requirement if one is to flourish, MacIntyre sensibly adds), the human agent will also have to learn about the connectedness of present goods to future possible goods, and about the probabilities linking attainment of the former with attainment of the latter (72–5).

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It is in this transition from representing to oneself and querying one’s reasons for action, and then becoming aware of the need to learn from others about the nature of the good, that MacIntyre thinks we become aware of the point and the purpose – and the indispensability – of the virtues, both the moral and the intellectual virtues. Put schematically, the virtues, as MacIntyre would have us now understand them, are those excellences of mind and character by means of which we organize, transform, and re-direct our desires so that they aim at the full and complete human good. Of course, we do not, he reminds us, acquire the virtues in special classes on morality, nor in arenas separate from those which comprise ordinary characteristic human activity: activities, for example, such as providing for one’s livelihood, or seeking forms of human association, or caring for one’s children or siblings or parents, or developing one’s intellectual or athletic capacities or one’s aesthetic sensibility. It is only as a student in a school, or worker in a vocational institute or in a trade, or in discharging one’s family obligations, or in involvement in associations dedicated to common athletic or intellectual or artistic ends (e.g. a sports club, a historical society, a poetry reading group) that one acquires of fails to acquire the prerequisites of mind and character for flourishing in these activities. It is only in these contexts, he notes, that one learns or fails to learn of the value of moderation in pursuit of physical pleasure, or of perseverance in one’s tasks in spite of the difficulties and dangers of the setting or of the tasks themselves, or that one learns of justice in allocating one’s time, or in contributing to and assessing the work of others, or of honesty in one’s self-presentation, and so on (87–9). Learning from others, and therefore dependence on community, takes on a particular importance because of this ineliminably social dimension of selfdevelopment. In order to attain those characteristic and intrinsic goods of a human life, the joint possession of which constitutes human flourishing, immature human agents must be taught by mature and experienced agents what the goods internal to a given practice are. They must be taught to identify and respond to these appropriately, and they must be taught about the deficiencies in their own mind and judgement which impede them from attaining those goods. Criticism by experienced others is therefore indispensable for the beginner’s acquisition of that self-knowledge which is necessary for her or him to become a proficient in any practice. The young and inexperienced must expose their often defective and uninformed judgements about their own abilities, or about the goods of a practice, to have these criticized and to have taken away from them illusions and fantasies concerning their circumstances or themselves. They must thus learn to acquire, MacIntyre observes, the virtues of honesty and humility (accurate self-regard) and the courage to make their thoughts and values vulnerable to external criticism. The acquisition, in and through our particular social relationships and participation in determinate social practices, of the virtues which we need in order to become proficient independent reasoners will eo ipso require of us that we follow certain exceptionless rules, MacIntyre argues (repeating claims in his earlier work), since rule-following is integral to the exercise of the virtues. If we are to flourish as trustworthy contributors and as grateful receivers in our social community, we

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will have to learn always, whatever the circumstances, to follow rules (precepts of the natural law) such as: ‘Never directly take the life of an innocent person’ or ‘Never falsely misrepresent the reputation of another in an important matter’ or ‘Never unjustly evaluate the work of another for personal gain.’ Virtues of course also enjoin positive acts (e.g. of courage or of sincerity), he notes, but Dependent Rational Animals repeats the long-standing Aristotelian tenet that there is no algorithmic solution to the question of which virtue we are called to exercise in any given situation; instead, the virtue of prudence, the accurate and proper assessment of particular circumstances, is called for to determine this (109–12). So far, we have little new in MacIntyre’s own moral theory. But he continues by stating that all this openness and attentiveness (and, when it is rationally warranted, resistance) to the criticism of others is aimed at forming in the agent an appropriate imagination of her potential good and of the prospects for attaining that good – prospects based on reliable generalizations about the natural and the social worlds that the agent must learn over time. This suitably enriched imagination will inform her choice of premises for her present practical reasoning about what she ought to do now, and through the process of moral education described above, she will become an increasingly independent practical reasoner, one capable of understanding and aiming at an overall good – a good that is in part shared with the rest of the species and in part personal and distinctive. Even as an independent practical reasoner, though, she will still need continually to rely upon the deliberative resources of others, especially friends and family, MacIntyre observes – those independent practical reasoners whom she typically has particular reason to trust. The picture, then, that Dependent Rational Animals paints for us of the social context of the good life is the following (and we are given here some of MacIntyre’s most persuasive thoughts in print on the relationship between human agency and the common good). As an individual agent I cannot attain my good – that is, have identified it sufficiently and become capable of striving after it effectively – if I am not an independent practical reasoner, one who acts on the basis of critically evaluated reasons instead of untutored desire or unthinking submission to the commands and desires of others. But I cannot become such an independent practical reasoner without an initial and continuing dependence on other independent practical reasoners. This constant and ineliminable dependence – if, unlike in the ethical ideal advanced by Nietzsche, I am to be capable of full flourishing and not merely of solipsistic goods – means that my good requires the good of these other agents. The better my instruction in the good, instruction not only in skills but in virtues, the better my chances of attaining a greater measure of the good. But this instruction cannot be limited, save for exceptional circumstances, to the instruction I receive within the family, since my capacities typically are not, and cannot be, fully developed and realized within the sphere of the family alone. Nor does my largely passive membership in a large-scale political society affect those capacities significantly; instead, it is in and through intermediate associations, both voluntary and involuntary, in and through socially established practices, that my full flourishing is made possible (107–8, 134–5).

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In these practices, I will initially be both a learner and a beneficiary, benefiting both from the critical advice of others and from their exemplification of various virtues which I must myself acquire in order to flourish. Later, I in turn will be able to act as teacher and benefactor within the practice. One of the particular aims of Dependent Rational Animals is to make us aware that we are each capable of learning about the good from any other member of our community, even, or in some cases perhaps especially from the infirm and the gravely dependent. In the first place, MacIntyre observes, we can recognize in these what we may once have been – or what we may yet at any time, by different fortune, become. They so may teach us about graceful bearing with suffering and hardship, and about how to be gracious receivers; they may also teach us to value more highly, as we should, the non-cosmetic aspects of the self, and, they may remind us about the state of significant dependence we were each once in as infants, dependent entirely on the care of solicitous others. In this way they may provide us with a valuable opportunity to reciprocate to the human community, and especially to that local network of giving and receiving from which we take our origins. Practising these virtues of acknowledged dependence first within our family and local community, we will be able then to extend their scope, as we ought, MacIntyre notes, to all members of our species – especially to strangers in whom we should always be capable of recognizing aspects of our own self (107–9, 122–6). This situation of our continual dependence upon others – for physical or psychological care in times of infirmity, for that criticism and calling of us to account without which we cannot become adequately self-critical practical reasoners – is what gives rise to what MacIntyre identifies as one of the cardinal or hinge virtues of acknowledged dependence, the virtue of ‘just generosity’. Because any one of us has benefited significantly in the past from the physical care and the pedagogical solicitude of countless others, we have each amassed a debt to a pre-existent network of giving. We may not be able to reciprocate to these our benefactors directly, MacIntyre observes – that is, to repay those specific individuals upon whose past care we have been significantly dependent – but we can and should repay it to members of our community at large, and this is the role of the virtue of just generosity. This virtue combines elements of justice – we owe back to our sustaining social order – and of generosity – we should be prepared to repay without calculation even more than we have received if the needs of those around us require this, because there is, in a sense, no accounting of the debts of dependence. Fortune may at any time turn upon any one of us, and so we should each forgo any calculating of equity – a calculation which may show us as either having given more or received more from our sustaining social network, but whose sum is at any rate too dependent on numberless contingencies to be relevant. And he who in accord with Aristotle’s ideal of the great-souled man, conceals from himself his past, present, and probable future forms of dependence, MacIntyre adds, will be unlikely to recognize sufficiently and respond appropriately to the needs of dependent others (127–8). A well-ordered community, MacIntyre thus infers, takes great care of its gravely dependent and is concerned with their flourishing to whatever extent that flourishing

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is possible. He has in mind here, of course, Marx’s dictum, ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’, and he is envisaging a social order in which the needs of dependent others are accounted sufficient reasons for action. This justly generous giving to others in need should be, since uncalculating, Dependent Rational Animals argues against a Kantian way of thinking, done from and not contrary to inclination: we should spontaneously be moved to relieve the needs of others out of a sympathy in which we feel their destitution as our own. And, were this feeling to be lacking, it would be a sign of imperfection on our part, a sign that we did not yet possess the virtue of just generosity. Acts according to this virtue are performed with the sentiment of ungrudging kindness, and they are performed towards other persons of our social community irrespective of their identity, because any of us in the community may at any time fall into a condition of urgent and extreme need. It bears re-stating here that, according to MacIntyre’s view, acts of social virtues such as just generosity (or even mercy) are not properly characterizable as altruistic acts because, on his scheme, the egoism–altruism dichotomy does not apply. The good of each, as he notes, requires the co-operation and the contribution of many; my contributing to the good of many is at the same time for their good and for my good. In this way, acts of the virtues of social concern are, like the acts of other virtues, worth performing for their own sake. They are also not only instrumental to, but constitutive of my good, and constitutive, inseparably (this manifestly in the case of virtues of social concern) of the common good – the good of all other human agents in my social community. What is crucial about this picture of the-moral-life-in-community, and what MacIntyre rightly thinks makes it stand in stark contrast to various individualist systems of ethical and political thought, is that sense cannot be given in it to treating the common good as the amalgamation of various already specified personal conceptions of the good – for instance, orderings of the personal preferences of those members who constitute the political society. Nor, on this picture, can one treat the political and the social as a realm comprised entirely by voluntary affective relationships or by bargaining relationships of give and take between roughly equal free agents. This would be to put the matter backwards, and would embody a mistake not only about the structure of human agency, but about how the human good is to be attained and in what it consists. We are born, MacIntyre notes, into a series of asymmetrically and symmetrically dependent relationships, relationships in which mutual and often uncalculating co-operation is necessary for the good of each. This network of symmetric and asymmetric dependence is the enabling condition for the attainment of our personal good, and to attain that good we must begin seeking our personal good with a commitment both to the well-being of the community and to the exercise of the various virtues necessary to sustain that commitment. This, as he notes towards the end of the book, has important implications for the way in which a properly ordered social community can be rationally selfcritical. MacIntyre has argued thus far that in order for the community to flourish, its members must acquire and practice the virtues both of rational independence and of acknowledged dependence. He has argued also that only in the realm of associations

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intermediate between the family and the nation-state can this education and this flourishing fully take place: the family considered by itself is typically inadequate for education in the good and provides an insufficient realm for human flourishing; the nation-state’s services and interventions may be indispensable, but it is too remote and too impersonal a sphere to provide adequate education in the good or guidance in on-the-spot practical reasoning. Near the end of Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre argues that the infirm and seriously dependent must have their good recognized and ministered to, and because it is their good which is in question (a good inseparably linked, as the good of all other persons in the social order is, to the common good), they must be represented in public deliberations by proxies – individuals who know what they judge their good to be, and who can therefore represent them in forums of political deliberation and decision-making when they are unable (147ff.). But how rationally self-critical, then, is such a social community capable of being, if built into its very structure must be, as earlier chapters of the book have argued, an unquestioned commitment to both the precepts of the natural law and to various virtues such as just generosity, honesty, courage, temperateness and so forth? Should not this commitment itself be called into question, as rationality seems to demand? MacIntyre’s answer here is yes, and in light of his earlier work on social rationality it is not difficult to surmise why it is so. To be committed to the truth and the relevance of various precepts of the natural law, and to the indispensability of the virtues, he notes, is to be committed to what are the enabling and sustaining conditions for any all-things-considered successful socially co-operative activity – activity of the sort that constitutes practices and crafts. But theoretical inquiry about the merits of a community’s values and reasons for action is itself a craft activity – an activity that can only succeed by and large in the context of a socially established practice, with that practice’s internal goods, governing norms, evolving standards for achievement, and ongoing rational history. The point of MacIntyre’s own inquiries, here and in his earlier work, has been to uncover the moral preconditions for rational activity – preconditions that subsequent reflective rational activity (such as his own here) can disclose and vindicate. And according to this way of thinking about rational activity, to claim ironic detachment (e.g. à la Richard Rorty) from the very beliefs and values needed to constitute a social community – a community capable indeed of sustaining the practice of self-critical theoretical inquiry – would be to exhibit serious confusion. The rational social community may of course discover grounds to call into question the beliefs, judgements, relationships, and commitments that it embodies, MacIntyre readily acknowledges here. But, he wisely adds, the dialectical process which such calling into question initiates will need to be a social process if it is to succeed – a process involving shared normative standards, the shared exercise of virtues such as love of truth, honesty, and courage – and so it will retain the various preconditions of the kind of which Dependent Rational Animals has been speaking. Since commitmentless calling-into-question is an absurdity, MacIntyre notes in not so many words here, the self-consciously normatively committed social community

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need have no fear that it will automatically fail in rationality for having non-ironic commitments. Crucial to its rationality instead will be its continuing openness to dialectical challenge, both from within and without (156–62). There are a number of details in this work worth exploring further, but this can be done more fruitfully when we address criticisms of MacIntyre’s project in Part III of this book which follows.

PART III Future Directions

Chapter 8

Continuities and Discontinuities in the Œuvre

8.1 The Normative Question in Ethics One of the most interesting and frequently asked questions about MacIntyre’s ambitious and wide-ranging œuvre is where exactly, after all the intellectual and social history, the comparative vistas and the wealth of historical detail, does MacIntyre stand on the normative question in ethics? His greatest contribution to philosophy is rightly taken to fall within moral philosophy, broadly conceived, and debates about the normative question in moral philosophy – the question about the nature and justification of the authority of moral concepts and judgements over us – are central to work being done in ethics today (see, for instance, Korsgaard 1996, esp. Lecture I). What, then, does MacIntyre say on this question when all his work of historical reconstruction and comparison has been done? As we have seen, there is no one place where he answers this question sufficiently, but having canvassed a good deal of his work to date, we are in some position to answer it now, and succinctly. As is clear from his earliest works, treated in Chapter 1 of this study, MacIntyre’s first aim in his ethical writings was to develop an adequate moral phenomenology. This aim was driven by a reaction against the attempts of analytic philosophers at mid-century to make moral reasoning more ‘scientific’. MacIntyre makes the fair point early on in his work that sound moral phenomenology has as its concern the perspective of the ordinary moral agent – her or his practical reasonings before the problems of living – and not the exigencies of scientific theory construction. The revolution in contemporary ethical thought that MacIntyre’s œuvre has consistently called for, in view of the intractable difficulties modern moral philosophy has experienced on its own terms, begins with a challenge to theorists of morality to make themselves answerable to an agent-centred perspective. A priori theories of various sorts – that is, overly ambitious, insufficiently empirical theories of the ethical, whether Moorean-style intuitionism, Stevensonian-style emotivism, or the prescriptivism of Hare – will then lose their hold on us, MacIntyre has argued, because we will see that in various ways they fail to fit the facts of moral experience. His first ethical writings are thus an attempt, by drawing upon the practical reasonings and moral utterances of ordinary agents, including the vivid and detailed representation

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of these in literature, to provide counter-examples to such excessively a priori accounts of morality. The first picture of moral reasoning (i.e. of moral judgement and moral disagreement and vindication) that he gives us, in The Significance of Moral Judgements, has it that moral judgement is that act of cognitive classification whereby the facts before one, in some situation calling for choice or action, are brought under some moral concept(s) or other. Abstract theory is, by the nature of the case, of little or no aid to the agent here, and rational moral disagreement between agents at this judgment-forming stage is possible on his account at three distinct levels. There can be: (1) disagreement about which facts are relevant to the moral appraisal of an actual or contemplated action, and or (2) predictive disagreement about what is likely to follow from an agreed upon fact set, and more fundamentally, there can be, (3) disagreement about classificatory adequacy. Disagreement about classificatory adequacy may easily collapse into disagreement about which set of moral concepts is to be used in the act of moral appraisal and or what the scope of such concepts is. The main purpose of moral judgements is so, on MacIntyre’s first account (but on this he never really changes his mind), to serve as the raw material for moral principles. Later work in the first phase of his career emphasizes that moral judgements may serve a variety of purposes – persuasive, hortatory, emotive, action-guiding, selfobliging, appraisal-making and so forth. Moral principles (or, synonymously, moral rules) are those action-guiding norms which classify moral action-types as good or bad, desirable or undesirable – as in ‘Courageous acts are good’, ‘Malicious gossip is always and everywhere to be avoided.’ With moral principles and moral judgements in hand, moral reasoning and rational moral disagreement with oneself and with others can begin. Part of the phenomenology of this account is that moral principles are generally, but not necessarily (here MacIntyre’s second effort, ‘What Morality is Not’, corrects the earlier Significance on the per se scope of moral principles), socially established and shared, and of universal scope. It is these principles which do the work of rationally legitimating moral and proximate action-guiding conclusions, and the social warrant of these principles in a given instance is what often makes them rationally effective inference tickets – or action tickets – for agents in a given social setting. As for the per se warrant for these principles, this, according to the phenomenology of moral experience MacIntyre offers, derives from experiential knowledge (or at least justified belief) of which action-types conduce to human well-being and which do not – and hence of which types of behaviour afford good reasons for action and which do not. Nature and history, or as MacIntyre’s later work on the broadly Hegelian tradition will make clear, nature in history is the source of moral principles and of the normative character such principles are taken to have. This point shows Hilary Putnam’s objection to MacIntyre’s theory of morality, for instance – that MacIntyre’s account of the right is too rationalist and a priori (see Putnam, 1995) – to miss the mark quite widely. The warrant for moral norms on MacIntyre’s account has all to do with experiment and learning by trial and error; it is not, as Putnam claims, about ‘what is agreeable to reason’ in some strongly a priori sense, precisely

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because in socially established practices, MacIntyre will note, ‘moral thinking is put to the relevant practical tests and achieves objectivity’ (1994a: 290). What MacIntyre has quite justifiably been opposed to is a kind of re-inventing of the wheel in moral matters, which would cast doubt on the possibility of traditions of moral inquiry having made definitive rational gains – a doubt that is scarcely more plausible than it would be with respect to rational progress and definitive gains having been made in, for instance, technological or scientific traditions of inquiry, such as medicine, or animal husbandry, or communications technology, and so on. It is After Virtue which refines MacIntyre’s views concerning the sources of moral normativity by treating at length the way in which socially established practices are the locus for the discovery of whether some type of behaviour (and, by extension, some character trait) does or does not conduce to human well-being in the form in which such well-being takes in that practice: for example, the extension of human capacities and powers to make and to do, to invent and discover, to enter into forms of association, to recognize and enjoy achievements within the practice and so on. This further consideration leads straightaway to the matter of moral truth – truth being understood in the moral domain and when it is action-guides which are in question, as instrumental efficacy: as what reliably leads to the human good, just as road signs are true if, when followed, they direct those journeying to the place they promise. Thus, MacIntyre quotes approvingly Aristotle’s dictum in the Nicomachean Ethics that, ‘the truth in practical matters is judged from what we do and our way of life; these have the last word’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1 179a: 18-20, see 1995g: 5). It is finally because MacIntyre believes there are facts of the matter about which action-types are conducive to, and which impede, human flourishingin-and-through-socially-established-practices that he is not, and certainly cannot be in intent at any rate, a relativist. In his view, a sound moral outlook is based upon discovered and dialectically vindicated facts about the internal connection between human action-types, their correlative habits of mind and character, and the goods internal to practices – especially that sovereign practice of living-a-unified-life-in-community. Moreover, his constant point has been that, on the evidence, morality spontaneously and healthily takes the form of a system of hypothetical eudaimonistic imperatives (though he does not use this precise language) – a system which gives logical structure to these discovered facts about human flourishing. Only overly ambitious theories of morality (and especially, he will say, in times of social fragmentation) disguise this form of moral outlook, natural to humans; they confuse matters by separating deontic and aretaic considerations, which serve practical reasoning better when they are kept together. In MacIntyre’s view, when morality is not conceived as something artificially autonomous, deontic considerations are seen as intrinsically motivating for an agent because their point and purpose – an intrinsic connection to human well-being as such – is manifest. Moral requirements are then able to form part of a seamless whole of an account of practical rationality – of how, that is, it is reasonable, all things (including one’s duties to others) considered, for a human being to act.

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It is thus the case, on MacIntyre’s account, that moral rules properly understood are rules of practice: rules whose habitual, and in some cases exceptionless, observance (for example, concerning matters of honesty, impartiality, fairness) provide the enabling and sustaining conditions for the achievement of the goods internal to practices and for the living of the good life in community überhaupt. MacIntyre in this sense is most certainly committed to value realism and value objectivism: there are mind-independent facts of the matter capable of being discovered concerning the existence and nature of goods internal to the activity of practices and concerning the expeditious, and in some cases indispensable, means for the attainment of those goods – means such as character traits plus their corresponding rules, precepts, or norms, which specify the boundaries and the scope for the exercise of those traits. An advanced moral tradition is for MacIntyre simply one that is far along in discovery concerning the nature and dimensions of the human good; it bases its progress on what, as far as it can tell, are definitive rational gains in understanding the human good and the means necessary for its attainment (e.g. moral truths concerning the goodness or badness of action-types and of habits or action dispositions). And the social warrant for these moral rules/rules of practice is clearly, for MacIntyre, the commonality of human desire – that human nature as such is apt for, and inclined to seek, the goods which a given practice, including the second-order practice of living a unified life in community, is set up to seek. In this way, moral rules and moral character traits enjoy an objectivity and are capable of a universal appeal – an appeal to all those properly situated, or in the right state of experience and information, with respect to the goods internal to a given practice, including the master and secondorder practice of moral inquiry: the-rational-pursuit-of-a-good-life-as-a-whole-incommunity. 8.2 Theism and Religious Belief Is MacIntyre (has he always been?) fundamentally a religious thinker? Early critics such as Ernest Gellner have claimed as much (see Gellner, 1971: 193–7, esp. 197: a piece rich with insult, but weak with counter-argument). More recent critics such as Thomas Nagel have accused MacIntyre of, in effect, a kind of covert religious propagandizing (see Nagel, 1995: 203–14). Nagel, for instance, states: ‘My sense is that MacIntyre’s religion is driving his philosophy. He wants to produce an argument that does not rely on religious premises to show that only something like a religious morality is possible. This cannot be done. But to him the conclusion of the argument is evident on other grounds’ (Nagel, 1995: 209). There is little of fairness or accuracy in these ad hominem-ish claims, since there is precious little religious thinking, or religious justification of philosophical theses, in MacIntyre’s published work. On the contrary, and as we have seen, there has always been a careful effort on his part to limit his arguments to philosophical ones and to keep personal religious developments that are off the page, off the page. It is incumbent upon those who think otherwise to show where, other than in his small number of writings as a religious believer to fellow

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believers (I have in mind pieces such as 1982a and 1994e), exclusively theological premises or any untoward religious inspiration figure in any of his central arguments in normative ethics, the theory of rationality, the philosophy of explanation, political philosophy and even much of his work in the philosophy of religion. It looks instead like some critics have been more interested in marginalizing MacIntyre’s approach and strictly rational contribution to these topics than in engaging with the various philosophical and historical arguments which he actually does make. In another vein, Kelvin Knight, an otherwise perceptive and sympathetic interpreter of MacIntyre’s thought, seems to endorse the surprising claim that the notion of a secular theistic ethics is a paradoxical one (Knight, 1999: 24–5). But to claim this is merely to assume that the project of natural theology cannot succeed, which is to make a large assumption – natural theology is in fact alive and well today on both sides of the Atlantic, and really always has been. MacIntyre certainly believes that the project of natural theology has much to be said for it philosophically, but he is rightly aware that that project need not draw at all on revealed religious belief per se or on revealed theology. A more interesting question to ask about MacIntyre’s considered moral views is how God – the God of philosophical theism, that is – enters into his moral theory and his picture of the good life, since it is certainly the case that MacIntyre has wrestled throughout his career with the question of the place of God in a rationally justifiable and defensible moral outlook. Here, as has been noted, his views have evolved and have been far from lacking in subtlety. The aspiration in his earliest ethical writings was, as just summarized above in Section 8.1, with giving an accurate, agent-centred moral phenomenology – a description of common moral experience and of the diversity of ethical concepts and their uses, both diachronic and synchronic, which would avoid the pitfalls of overly ambitious and a priori ‘neutral’ forms of metaethical analysis (intuitionist, emotivist, prescriptivist and so on). Thereafter, and in an Aristotelian vein, his interest was with discerning, on the basis of a survey of ethical theories across time and (Western) social order, the most rationally plausible tradition of ethical theory, and then with shoring up that theory by adjusting it to the socio-economic and political circumstances of the present day, drawing on insights from alternative and even rival moral traditions. A Short History of Ethics found Plato teaching us a permanent lesson about the rational criticism of desire – that a system of morality which is aimed at directing us towards our objective and progressively discoverable good must be a morality of desire-transformation, a morality of the virtues. In Aristotle’s in some ways dated political ethics, MacIntyre has found a promising core of related theses showing us how virtue, moral rules, life in community, and happiness are internally connected. In theorists such as Montesquieu and Rousseau, he found valuable insights about the indispensability of intra-cultural and trans-cultural social analysis for the vindication of a sociologically aware morality which might serve as the basis for present social hope. In Spinoza and Bradley he found valuable lessons about the role and the relevance of the social order and its configuration for the individual’s pursuit of the good. And, finally, in progressivist historicizers such as Hegel, Marx, and T.H.

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Green he found lessons about how historical considerations and their consequences for social change (e.g. evolving human possibilities and limitations) must be taken account of in any moral theory that is to be credible today. From Kant, interestingly, he seems to have taken the idea of the moral life as an enacted narrative quest. God and the afterlife figured scarcely at all in these early ethical writings. Subsequent to these, we saw him confront more openly the possibility of a specifically Christian ethical outlook, and this led him initially to seek a non-theistic alternative to it (as can be seen in his essay ‘Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?’, 1977a). In his avowedly Marxist phase, and reaching its zenith in his writings in the 1970s, we see MacIntyre explicitly calling for a secular ethical outlook – one which would incorporate lessons about the relevance of historical progress and social context and social change for a presently viable moral outlook, but which would also incorporate past lessons about moral absolutes, the virtues, the internal connection between moral obligation and happiness, and that between the good life and the common political life. His proposed solution, which he has stood by since, is that we view the moral life as a personal-cum-collective this-worldly quest: a quest in which the human good is more fully disclosed through time and made more widely available to humankind thanks to the efforts and sacrifices of earlier generations for later generations (see again here esp. 1977a). When he did in his pre-After Virtue writings turn his attention to religious ethics, specifically Christian ethics, it was mostly with the interest of pointing out its internal and external challenges, and with observing that much of its decline was due to corrosive, extra-ecclesial changes in the social order – changes provoked in particular by economic modernization. While MacIntyre has remained aware all along of the conceptual possibilities for an alliance between the teleological ethic of the Old and New Testaments and a secular, broadly Aristotelian ethic, he did not show in his earliest writings, and has not shown much since, how such an alliance would work internal to Christian theology. Although there is the interesting Kantian-style point he makes in the late 1970s (in ‘Seven Traits for the Future, 1979b) – that social hope requires for its ground, since empirical history can supply no such ground, belief in an evidence-transcending reality (i.e. a transcendent divine providence, though MacIntyre himself doesn’t use these precise words) – it is really only later in his career, and particularly with the writing of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, that he begins to note philosophical reasons for the secular ethic which he had long been trying to articulate, taking on concepts and commitments whose origins are broadly theological and which derive, more specifically, from Christian revelation or from reflection thereon. These are concepts and commitments, though, which as he is aware can stand on their own philosophical feet, and which, or so he has argued, can introduce rational improvements into the shared secular ethic we should be seeking (i.e. secular, not because necessarily non-theistic, but because non-denominational, relying on no exclusively supra-rational or faith premises). The virtue of humility is one such contribution MacIntyre thinks Christianity has made to our thinking about things ethical; another is the related notion of a divine Creator-lawgiver. Neither of these

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notions were fully available to the Greco-Roman tradition of ethical and political thought prior to Christianity. It is worth noting with respect to the inspiration for MacIntyre’s own thinking about things ethical that the same charge of covert religious special pleading which has been made against him could (equally ineffectively) be levelled against John Rawls, since as Rawls acknowledged candidly in an interview at the end of his career a key set of concepts in his political philosophy–namely, those concerned with human dignity and equality – have their historical origin in the Christian tradition. But, as Rawls rightly added in making this admission, these concepts and commitments are fully intelligible and justifiable independent of the Christian tradition per se (see Rawls, 1999: 616–22). More recently, the vastly influential Jürgen Habermas has plainly acknowledged our indebtedness to Jewish and Christian revelation for a whole host of key social and political concepts and asked, appropriately, why seculars (or social and political philosophy) shouldn’t avail themselves of these. For instance: In the past, many of our most powerful conceptions derived from religious sources. That God created man in his own image is a wording of lasting influence. The modern idea of human dignity, which is claimed equally for all and everybody, is inspired by this image of all human beings created ‘in the likeness of God.’ A similar connection exists (for example) between the individuating force of a life history, for which each person is responsible, and the expectation of the Last Judgment. In our culture the loaded meaning of an ‘individual,’ that is of a unique and irreplaceable person, has Biblical origins. Why should this rich semantic potential not continue to inform our secular culture in the future, too? (Habermas, 2005)

As MacIntyre for his part will note in Whose Justice?, when commenting upon the writings of Pope Gregory VII, thanks to the Christian theological outlook we are able to form a clearer picture of the equal demands upon all of an order of universal justice, and we are able to see more clearly that without the exercise of the reparative virtue of humility before God the Creator, we are each liable not only to a rebellion against our Creator (which pride or inordinate self-love, the vice opposed to the virtue of humility represents), but also and relatedly, we are liable to forms of injustice in our social and political lives – in our obligations towards one another. Though the origin of this belief is unmistakably Christian (MacIntyre says as much), there is nothing exclusively Christian about it, and it is intelligible and defensible on strictly philosophical grounds (and, of course, the notion of impiety or hubris before God or the gods is a widespread one across cultures, time, and place). Here MacIntyre could easily say, as did Gabriel Marcel before him, that there can be no genuine fraternity without a shared sense of our common paternity (both terms meant in a non-genderspecific way). But to say this is to take no stance with respect to any determinate religious tradition – or towards the idea of religious revelation at all. There is also that important refinement in our conception of human agency which MacIntyre thinks Christianity has introduced into our thinking about the moral life,

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whereby we come to see human acts as deriving ultimately from a faculty of will: a faculty which has the power to direct our senses and our inner powers of memory and imagination and even our reason, and a faculty which has relative sovereignty over our emotions and passions and so is ultimately responsible for the formation of our character. Christian authors (Augustine pre-eminently) teach us that intellect or reason plus character is, while a necessary, not a sufficient cause of human action, again a view MacIntyre has argued has intrinsic philosophical merit – Christian thought being responsible in important part for enlightening us on the matter (a point overlooked by Martha Nussbaum in her widely read critical review of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, see Nussbaum, 1989: 40). The point of MacIntyre’s later, open-ended definition of the good life in After Virtue – namely, ‘the life devoted to seeking the good life’ – is presumably in part to be initially neutral with respect to the outcome of metaphysical inquiry concerning the existence of a creator God and an afterlife. Moral requirements having to do with the ineliminably political dimension of the good life, with the obligations of one’s social role (i.e. obligations discovered, not chosen), with the narrative unity of a human life, and so forth would stay in place, according to MacIntyre’s arguments, regardless of where the metaphysical arguments about theism stand or seem to stand, presently. By the time of Whose Justice?, MacIntyre is beginning to speak more fully of the relevance for ethics of the notion of a creator God as law-giver, where human agents qua creatures would have additional reasons to respect moral requirements so as to fulfil their own natures: reasons having to do with both their fundamental, thoroughgoing, and ineliminable debt towards the source and sustaining cause of their being and with the advisability of an autonomous deference on their part to the epistemic authority of a far superior mind. But MacIntyre’s thoughts on this matter are highly undeveloped, and again they needn’t have any specifically Christian colouring to them. Some initial attempt at their elaboration is made in a 1996 interview where, when asked about these questions, MacIntyre observes, aptly enough, that: ‘just as grace may be at work in someone’s life without that person being aware of it, so also someone’s life may give expression to her or his belief in God without that person recognizing that she or he is a believer’ (1996a: 11–12). Moreover, as he has consistently conceived the matter throughout his career, moral reasons for action deriving from God the Creator can only further strengthen the independent moral reasons for action we already possess, so the ‘extra’ ethical notion of God (i.e. the God of natural theology) as lawgiver would really only serve to intensify our sense of moral obligation, not alter it in any radical way. (These things would be evidently true for MacIntyre’s moral theory if he regards law, which he appears to, as in Aquinas’s formulation, ‘an ordinance of reason for the common good promulgated by him who has care of the community’; Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 90. a. 4). By the same token, MacIntyre rightly thinks that no Christian need be put off by the notion of the moral life as at least a secular narrative quest, because it might well be the case that considerations drawn from the Christian conception of the supernatural order (sin, redemption, grace, the Final Judgment, and the life of the

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world to come) fit squarely enough on top of that secular picture – one’s eternal destiny, that is, being in continuity with and a function of the success of one’s earthly narrative quest for the good (i.e. internal to which quest are the demands of what we have come to call morality). That is indeed a standard enough picture in Christian theology of the criteria informing the Final Judgment. Clearly, MacIntyre is interested, as any Christian of a moderately rationalist sort would be, in seeing the most plausible results of philosophical inquiry (e.g. concerning the nature of the self and the moral order and the metaphysics of the cosmos) as concurrent with the richer portrayal of these in Christian revelation – and as capable thereby of opening the philosophical inquirer up to accepting, by means of a gift of grace, the evidence-transcending claims contained in the Christian revealed narrative. But pace Nagel, there is nothing necessarily philosophically dishonest or blameworthy in such a hope, and whether it can be realized is entirely to be worked out in the details of philosophical argument. To write off MacIntyre’s philosophical arguments simply because they might be consonant with and even intimate the truth of Christian revelation would be as un-philosophical as writing off the philosophical work of Thomas Nagel because one suspected that it was really secularized Judaism that was driving it. 8.3

Marxism: The Considered Verdict

MacIntyre’s interest in Marx and Marxism stemmed, as was noted in Chapter 2 above, from an early interest in rational myth: a rationally self-critical story about the whole – about nature, man’s place in nature, the transformations of human nature through history, and the bases for social hope. While he has long admired Marxist thought for its ambitious scope and its commitment to praxis, he has also long been critical of its dogmatism and its tendency un-selfconsciously to adopt significant parts of that modern social order it is ostensibly criticizing – for example, the atomistically individualist starting point characteristic of modern social theory, its optimism, the characteristically modern (in rejecting any robust teleology of human nature) moral outlook, whether Kantian or utilitarian-consequentialist. And while with regard to the historical process MacIntyre thinks that we can learn much from Marx about the material conditioning of thought – that moral progress in history is to be viewed as something non-autonomous and non-idealistic – he has always held, against the Marx of Engels’ influence, that we should view that progress as something which cannot be accounted for reductionistically or deterministically. This means that we should keep something like the base–superstructure relation as Marx described it, but see the two as linked, not externally and deterministically, but internally and conceptually (so, for instance, we should see forms of social practice as the embodiment of forms of practical reasoning). If in the After Virtue stage of his career and beyond MacIntyre retains anything of a teleological conception of history (e.g. the ‘unified secular narrative quest’ he speaks of in the late 1970s), it is of an entirely non-deterministic sort, and he comes

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to place little or no confidence in the process of history as such. On the matter of effecting widespread fundamental societal change, the previously affirmed goal in MacIntyre’s earlier writings of a radical transformation of the social order does not last through to the 1995 reissuing of Marxism and Christianity, and the work’s new introduction, as two post-After Virtue essays on Marxist topics written prior to it (‘After Virtue and Marxism: A Response to Wartofsky’, 1984l; ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road not Taken’, 1994a) make clear that MacIntyre has since abandoned the goal of a large-scale transformation of the modern social order – and that he thinks that all who have read Marx aright and understand the particularities of both present-day capitalism and the modern state should do the same. However, he has now become clearer in his reasons for why the capitalist social order must be resisted. Even, he will say, as large-scale capitalism undeniably and laudably increases the worker’s standard of living, it finally buys her or him off with material prosperity – so breaking, for instance, the strength of the trade union – while rendering the worker still an instrument of profit-maximization and long-term capital formation, and so a pawn of the artificial demands of the global marketplace. The capitalist economy of advanced modernity is in this sense for MacIntyre systemically unjust: the surplus it produces does not proportionally benefit labour or local producers, it disproportionately benefits investors and owners of capital. When economic production ceases to serve local needs and becomes instead an instrument of non-local markets and of the vice of acquisitiveness, a power asymmetry, MacIntyre will say, is readily introduced into the relationship between labour and capital. This denies the worker the opportunity to see his work as a contribution to the common good, since the good that free-market capitalism promotes is not a genuinely common good but a highly class-specific one. And because of the profit asymmetry between labour and capital inherent in the workings of non-local capitalism, the worker is denied, as justice and his or her own good demand, the capacity to participate in, and freely to assent to, the arrangements of the economic system of which he or she is a part. MacIntyre clearly also continues to accept Marx’s point that at the inception of the bargaining process between labour and capital, there is already a significant injustice which must be addressed: namely, that much of the unequal amount of capital which gives capitalists the advantage in the bargaining process with labour was itself previously acquired by unjust means. For instance, in the new 1995 introduction to Marxism and Christianity, he observes: There is the source of injustice that confronts every individual or group at the point at which they first encountered the capitalist system, usually by entering the labour market, from the period of nascent capitalism onwards. This source of injustice arises from gross inequalities in the initial appropriation of capital – whatever point is taken to be the initial point – an appropriation that was in significant part the outcome of acts of force and fraud by the appropriators. (MC, 1995c: ix)

The just wage and the just price, therefore (understood in a non-class specific manner), can in MacIntyre’s view have no application in large-scale capitalism. Moreover, on

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this view, free-market capitalism is as harmful to those it instrumentalizes as to those who most benefit in a material sense from its arrangements, because in both groups it promotes the vice of acquisitiveness and the subordination of the pursuit of the goods internal to those practices in which human labour engaged to the pursuit of the external goods of wealth and power. The top-down instrumental rationality wielded by capitalist managers not only denies the worker the opportunity of seeing his labours as aimed at meeting local needs, and so as contributing to the building up of community, it also tends to make him an avaricious consumer. It encourages him to work (or overwork) in order to gain means to satisfy his desires as he happens to find them, instead of enabling him to see his work as a form of desire-transformative, or in Marx’s sense, ‘objective’ activity: activity in which one comes to discover those objectively constituted and common goods internal to practice-based activity so as to make them one’s own, while benefiting the community and transforming oneself in the process. When we accept, as MacIntyre still thinks we should, Marx’s notion of the individual as an ensemble of social relations, we see that large-scale capitalism inevitably fosters a manipulative relation of domination between a managerial capitalist elite and a passive, managed labour force, and that, accordingly, this form of capitalism must be opposed. It bears noting then that this MacIntyre’s critique of late industrial capitalism seems finally to rest on a criticism of its scale. It is the very extra-local, international, and now even global nature of advanced capitalism that MacIntyre thinks is the great cause of its systemic flaws. The scale of the contemporary capitalist social order makes it too large to be changed by any just, widespread social upheaval, and any social movement which aims at trying to co-opt advanced capitalist society for better purposes will, he thinks, end up being co-opted by capitalist society instead (i.e. will end up replicating its form of top-down, manipulative, elitist managerial rule). One would have liked to see MacIntyre enter into more detail to justify this claim, but by all the evidence, he seems to think that it is the entirely instrumental and instrumentalizing rationality enshrined in the managerial culture of today’s capitalist societies that makes them unamenable to betterment from within their own framework. When the size of markets expands to the extent that co-ordination and betterment problems become immense, then problems become tractable only through a rationality of means aimed at predetermined – or at any rate determinedfrom-the-top-by-a-managerial-elite – ends. Both consultation with workers and adequate accountability to them fall out of the deliberative process. The workers’ participatory capacity to shape the institutions which are the bearers of the practices in which they labour is thwarted: they are denied the opportunity to employ their own practical reasoning in the deliberations about what shape those institutions should take to serve those practices. Large-scale capitalism so denies them the opportunity for self-education, and alienates them in an important way from their good – that good proper to independent practical reasoners. Marx was therefore, for MacIntyre, far too optimistic in thinking that the possibilities of overcoming the culture of advanced capitalism were contained within

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the very form of its systemic arrangements. Neither does Macintyre think, because of what he sees as the serious systemic flaws in advanced, capitalist culture, that a gradualist or meliorist approach with respect to it has anything much to be said for it. As he put the point in a short essay on Marxism in 1984: Certainly there are goods to be achieved and evils to be averted in the present and the immediate future. But any systematic political action of a conventional kind involves a commitment to the dominant social order of the present which I reject. … [F]or I do not see any prospects of overthrowing the dominant social order. But perhaps it can be outlived; and even if it cannot be overthrown it ought to be rejected. The grounds for hope lie in that from the pre-modern past which has survived the worst that the dominant social order of modernity has been able to visit upon it. (1984l: 252)

So the way forward for MacIntyre clearly lies in local, small-scale, bottom-up, practice-based activity, sustained and given direction by the virtues and by the rational authority which derive from their possession. And it is MacIntyre’s commitment to the very small scale which he thinks necessary for a practice-based pursuit of the human good to succeed that is sufficient to make his views different from those of self-described communitarians. In his own words: No large-scale nation state could have or should try to have the characteristics of a community in which there is agreement on goods. For such agreement – or rather the appearance of such agreement – could be achieved on the scale of a nation-state only by being coercively and unjustly imposed. When a modern nation state claims to be the locus and source of community, it is always dangerous to its own citizens and often a dangerous threat to others. Contemporary nationalisms are of a number of different kinds and some of them are deeply inimical to genuine community, substituting for the bonds of the common good the bonds of ethnic prejudice. (1996a: 9; I quote from an unpublished English translation of the article; see also, for instance, 1991j.)

Thus MacIntyre’s call instead is for a politics of local resistance and survival – a politics of the revitalization and defence of small-scale communities, communities constituted by a set of interlocking practices. As he states: practice-based communities, that is, communities in which the goods of various practices are ordered within a way of life aimed at the good and the best, cannot but have a very different political structure from that of modern nation-states. … [A] politics of relatively small-scale and local forms of community whose shared conception of goods and virtues makes possible a conception of the communal life as a shared enterprise, within which an understanding of justice in terms of desert – ‘from each according to her or his ability, to each according to her or his contribution’, as that partial Aristotelian, Karl Marx, almost put it – can find application. The construction and expansion of such local forms of community, where they do not yet exist, and their sustaining and defense, where they do already exist – in a myriad of different situations: fishing villages, farming cooperatives, schools, clinics, parishes, laboratories – is a central task of any contemporary protagonist of practice-based communities in which the virtues can flourish and be taught effectively. It is a task that puts such a protagonist at odds politically with the dominant structures

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of the market and nation-state, structures in which the qualities of acquisitiveness and aggrandizement are valued in such a way as to undermine any teaching of the virtues. (1996a: 8).

8.4

MacIntyre’s Mature Outlook: A Unified Perspective?

Anyone who attempts to represent MacIntyre’s thought by means of some conjunction or succession of facile ‘-isms’ is bound to go astray, and there are no shortage of journalistic-like reports on either side of the Atlantic of MacIntyre having changed philosophical positions as easily and with as little notice as one might change masks at a ball (see for example, Elie, 1995). Closer scrutiny of his published work in its chronological order tells a different story, though. It is certainly the case that part of what has made MacIntyre’s thought so attractive and influential across the humanities is his sustained critical engagement with a wide variety of standpoints and intellectual styles: with developments at the forefront of analytic philosophy – in ethical theory, action theory, the theory of explanation, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of religion – with the existentialist movement (writings not discussed in this study: see, for instance, 1964g; 1967f), with psychoanalytic theory, with historicizing Continental philosophy and social theory in the tradition of Hegel and Marx, as well as his lifelong engagement with the classical metaphysical tradition from Plato and Aristotle up to and beyond Aquinas. That breadth of engagement in itself is no small accomplishment, and MacIntyre has undeniably been a key figure in breaking down the walls between Anglo-American and classical and broadly Continental philosophical styles and preoccupations – between, that is, tough-minded, detailed, small-scale logical and conceptual analysis and philosophy as a socially conscious, socially relevant and historically self-aware undertaking in dialogue with the great achievements of its past and with the great Western theological traditions of Christianity and (if to a lesser degree in MacIntyre’s own work) Judaism and Islam. Almost entirely to his intellectual credit, MacIntyre resists easy characterization, and in his case this is not because he has been a trend-follower or an opportunistic eclectic. Nor does the resistance of his œuvre to conventional characterization reflect a paradoxical dislike on MacIntyre’s part, as some have perhaps more plausibly alleged, of identifying with any specific community or tradition, the value of which identification he has so eloquently defended. Changing one’s mind in theoretical inquiries of any difficulty can often be a reflection of noteworthy intellectual virtues, such as love for truth more than one’s own initially staked-out position, a broadminded willingness to learn from alien perspectives, intellectual integrity in resisting ideological dichotomizations or polarizations, willingness to submit one’s standpoint to fundamental challenge by engaging with rival theoretical standpoints on their own terms, and so on. And MacIntyre’s academic career, as embodied in his published work (it is no interest of this book to speculate about the relationship between his personal life and his written work) reflects these virtues and more.

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There are, moreover, notable constants throughout MacIntyre’s intellectual career. Most prominent among these, including by his own identification, has been the rejection and critique of liberal individualism (see for instance, as quoted previously, 1994k: ‘My critique of liberalism is one of the few things that has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my whole life. Ever since I understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it – and that was when I was seventeen years old’). And this constant, on the evidence, has been driven not by some party political animus which he acquired at some stage in his youth, but by an abiding admiration for the values of the common life and for unity: the unity of the self in and through its various projects, plans, values, and commitments across time; the unity of that same self in its distinct spheres of activity – familial, social, professional, and otherwordly – and of course, the unity of that self with the other selves in its social world, in co-operative pursuit of a good that is in large part common and shareable. MacIntyre’s critical writings in social theory, ethics, and politics have accordingly centred on attacking atomistic theories of both the self and of moral and political obligation, as well as ahistorical theories of the self which undermine or deny the self’s substantial unity through time or its uniform accountability for behaviour in its different spheres of activity. Relatedly, the critique of subjectivist theories of value has also been one of his constant concerns (for some relatively recent reflections of note on this topic, one can consult MacIntyre’s introduction to the Danish philosopher Knud Logstrup’s study The Ethical Demand; see 1997d). Viewed in this light, MacIntyre’s attraction to the rather diverse company of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Vico, Rousseau, Kant (in some measure), Hegel, Marx – and latterly Bradley, Green and Collingwood – is much more easily explicable, as is his critical treatment of Stoic transcendental individualism, Machiavelli, Luther, Nietzsche, and Sartre, for instance. His abiding criticism of what, in John Rawls’s term of art, is now called comprehensive liberalism is that although it supplies constraints, many of them unobjectionable, to political action, it provides us with no positive direction, no imaginative ideal or vision, by which we might grasp the significance of our quotidian actions; it gives us no imaginative or interpretive framework to rescue our lives from the insignificance of their otherwise largely solitary finitude. Comprehensive liberalism is therefore intrinsically impoverished and impoverishing, and MacIntyre has long been interested in the articulation and defence of another kind of humanism – thus the pull on him of Aristotle and Aquinas, of Kant in certain respects, and of Hegel and Marx and various of their interpreters in other respects. MacIntyre’s work in the early 1960s spoke of the need for an emancipatory humanism in contradistinction to liberal humanism: a non-deterministic humanism which would be emancipatory by providing us with the theory for the practice of liberating ourselves from the fourfold alienation of which Marxist authors such as Lukacs had spoken. Liberation, that is, from (1) the alienation of the self from its genuine ends due to the imposition of other ends upon it by the dominant social order; (2) the alienation caused by an economic order which forces an inversion of means and ends, so that man is forced to work servilely in order to survive instead of

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surviving to work autonomously and creatively; (3) the alienation of man from a true understanding of himself caused by various false and obfuscating theories generated by errant economic practice, which prevent man from seeing himself as an autonomous, creative worker with intrinsic dignity, and, finally, (4) the alienation of the self from its own unity by a social and political order with its separate compartments, each with their own mutually incompatible set of behavioural norms. Going beyond Marx and attempting to formulate, in his own words, a ‘post Marxist ideology of liberation’, MacIntyre’s consistent effort, at least since the work that went into the 1971 Against the Self-images of the Age collection, has been with giving what he has maintained since the late 1960s that Marx and Marxists have not: a credible account of the means to radical societal transformation. This radical societal transformation he now conceives, as noted in the previous section, as something capable of realization only locally: in institutionally un-deformed practices and in the small-scale social order which sustains them. MacIntyre’s allied interest has been with giving an account of the origin and justification of the authoritative moral norms within such small-scale social communities: norms which enshrine socially established and socially recognized truth conditions for moral judgements. Here, of course, we have the inspiration for his practice-theoretic account of moral authority, of moral discovery, and of moral justification discussed above in Section 8.1. Part of his consistent effort has also been with re-capturing an understanding of the summum bonum as something ineliminably social: he has wanted to us to see that the common good is essentially an object of each person’s rational desire, and that it is a historically evolving such good. Both of these considerations merge in his identification of dramatic narrative as the indispensable framework for the selfunderstanding of both individual moral agents and the social collectivity (which collectivity includes not only the small-scale moral community but humanity itself). Closely related has been his long-term effort to restore unity to the self in both theory and practice – a self re-unified across the social, economic, moral, political, and religious spheres of its activity – and here we have the source of MacIntyre’s critical animus against both Stoic-inspired or Protestant theology-inspired forms of moral or transcendental individualism (which advocate, in effect, an abandonment of the social and the creation of a heterogeneous or compartmentalized self), as against Erving Goffman’s and Jean Paul Sartre’s modernizing banishment of the very notion of a unified self. The pre-modern self of the Greek polis or the mediaeval village has clearly been an inspiration for MacIntyre in this vein, and his solution for rescuing the self from the insignificance of its own finitude has always lain with having it rediscover its place in the larger social and cosmic order of things. Another abiding interest that peeks out from behind his work in moral theory has been with elucidating and recovering the notion of rational authority. His treatment of this notion has not been extensive, and one suspects he would be among the first to say that this is a crucial topic for the kind of extensive historical-cum-conceptual inquiry which he has undertaken concerning the notions of tradition, virtue, and rationality.

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A further constant in MacIntyre’s œuvre, except for a short period of relapse, is a totalizing tendency, a desire for that conceptual fulfilment which drove Aristotle and the mediaeval scholastics to system-building. Compounding this totalizing intellectual tendency has been a constant preoccupation with praxis: a concern no doubt present in the Aristotelian tradition, but greatly intensified in MacIntyre’s case owing to the influence of Marx. Significantly, MacIntyre begins his academic career with an interest in rational myth, an overall interpretation of human existence (personal, social, and cosmic) and in a unification of this overall interpretation or grand theory with praxis – with a rational ordering and re-ordering of the personal and the social. For a brief period – at the end of the 1950s and perhaps at the very beginning of the 1960s – MacIntyre was clearly very taken by the self-described ‘revolution in philosophy’ initiated largely by Russell, Moore, Austin, and Wittgenstein, and he seems to have seen this as the beginning of the end of a clash of rational myths or overall conceptions – and perhaps even of their relevance and value. Shortly thereafter, however, he returns to speaking of the limitations of piecemeal logical and conceptual inquiry in philosophy, and he re-emphasizes the need for rational ideology construction and for attending to the systematic inter-connection between philosophical commitments. On these topics one can see MacIntyre disagreeing little with two magisterial essays of Nicholas Rescher – matters which Rescher, more of a theoretical philosopher than MacIntyre, has addressed in impressive detail (e.g. see Rescher, 1991, ‘On the Systemic Interconnectedness of Philosophical Issues’, and Rescher, 1994, ‘The Rise and Fall of Analytic Philosophy’). One can see MacIntyre wholeheartedly embracing, for instance, Rescher’s observation that: While the tendency to detailed investigation has many positive aspects (sharpness of focus and voidance of superficiality not the least among them), the lack of interest in big-picture systematization also involves forgoing something valuable and important. It would be nice if it were true that if one looked after the details, the big picture would take care of itself, but that is not the case. Indeed, it can be argued that diminished concern for the wider issue of how detailed investigations fit into a larger picture exacts so high a cost to the adequacy of their detailed efforts that philosophers should be extremely reluctant to pay it. For the crucial fact is that one cannot hope to get the details right without a concern for the big picture. There is nothing wrong with precision; it is just that in philosophy useful precision almost invariably requires context. … Accordingly, we can avoid the systematist’s concern for the interconnectedness of local issues only at the price of compromising the adequacy of the localist’s concern for matters of detail. (Rescher, 1991: 113–14)

This concern with not abandoning ‘our inherent drive to make humanistic sense of the world and our place within it’, to use Rescher’s apt expression, was central in MacIntyre’s still as yet not highly constructive Against the Self-images of the Age collection. His gradually elaborated defence of a kind of a contextual and historicizing holism in philosophy – the belief that philosophical theses can only be understood properly when the historically determinate questions and the overall problematic which generated them is first grasped – and that they can only be assessed

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properly when seen in the light of the web of background beliefs and commitments from which they derive – becomes increasingly more prominent in his subsequent writings. It turns out to be one of his main remedies for reducing rational dissensus in moral debates today (and one can find a helpful reiteration of this in MacIntyre’s important 2002 essay, “Truth as a good: a reflection on Fides et Ratio”, reprinted in the first volume of his 2006 collection of essays, see TP: 197–215). A matter which MacIntyre becomes progressively clearer about, until it is finally explicitly addressed in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, is that the interpretation and evaluation of philosophical claims, especially in ethics and the theory of human nature, cannot effectively be carried out except from the standpoint of some determinate (and therefore partisan) theory or other. This recognition has much to do with his discovery both that the first principles in moral debate today (whether they invoke natural rights or the Golden Rule or personal autonomy or collective utility) are incommensurable, so that there is no neutral court of appeal between them, and with the recognition that one cannot identify the ethical principles of any social order accept on the basis of some set of theory-laden preconceptions or other. Already, with the writing of After Virtue, MacIntyre sensed the nascent Aristotelianism in his previous ways of conceptualizing the choices facing us today in moral philosophy and social and political theory. Though he arrived at Aristotelianism by a more or less historical-comparative route, he came naturally to see the need for Aristotelianism to be defended on its own terms – both via its explanatory historiographical resources in addressing the nature and the causes of our present moral and political predicaments and in terms of certain of its crucial philosophical tenets: its account of the mind–world relation or of the nature of truth or of teleology and natural kinds or of the identity and ontology of the self or of ultimate metaphysical explanation. With respect to this second, this theoretically systematic means of justifying a broadly Aristotelian overall conception, MacIntyre’s own contribution has not been extensive; his primary focus has been on the former, the historiographical, while insisting that the warrant here needn’t merely run from philosophical thesis to larger explanatory framework, but may just as easily run in the opposite direction – plausible narrative of the causes of and reasons for today’s moral and political predicaments in theory and practice warranting the theoretical principles – the philosophical theses assumed by and informing this narrative. There can be no denying, though, that MacIntyre thinks there is an enormous amount of systematic work to be done today on the elucidation and vindication of central philosophical theses in the Thomistic-Aristotelian outlook. And inasmuch as he has been, while highly conversant with the broadly philosophical Aristotelian tradition, never really a systematic Aristotelian or Thomistic-Aristotelian (in the manner, for instance, of a Jacques Maritain or Bernard Lonergan), much of the interest of MacIntyre’s work from the standpoint of that tradition lies in his colourful, highly original and productive journey towards it as a point of arrival. A senior figure among North American Thomists once quipped about MacIntyre that: ‘It took him a long time to arrive where I started.’ But of course, even from

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the perspective of Aristotelians, and especially Thomistic Aristotelians, the great interest in MacIntyre’s œuvre ought to lie in precisely how he arrived at where he did not begin, his journey so casting a new light on the philosophical merits of Thomism – particularly for those for whom it is a largely alien and unfamiliar tradition. And on MacIntyre’s allegiance to Thomism as the outcome of a long logical development in his own thought, there is something else worth noting: a significant reason for MacIntyre’s strong commendation of Thomism is for those procedural achievements embodied in Aquinas’s academic treatises, achievements often overlooked by interpreters of Thomas’s thought, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic. Procedural achievements, that is, such as: Aquinas’s overall method of inquiry; his understanding of dialectic and of rational vindication; his commitment to holism in philosophy and his efforts at seeking a unifying framework of understanding across the various sciences and academic disciplines; his commitment to the unity of theory and practice; his related belief that the inquiries, efforts, and theoretical problems of the learned should be continuous with those of the plain or unlearned, and finally, and with respect to religious belief, his commitment to the unification of philosophical with theological inquiry.

Chapter 9

Criticisms, Internal and External

9.1

Relativism and the Question of Vindication

That, despite his intent, MacIntyre cannot, or at least does not in his stated views, escape relativism is a frequent criticism, particularly by those sympathetic to his general project (see, for instance, John Haldane in After MacIntyre, esp. 96–9, and Robert George in George, 1999: 250–57; exemplary of criticisms of this sort, but from a decidedly different outlook is that of R.M. Hare in Hare, 1989: 113–30). A serious engagement with the problem of ethical relativism has long been one of MacIntyre’s preoccupations, driven by his convictions about the empirically evident diversity of morals and his consequent commitment to, as noted previously, ‘let cultural difference have the first word’ (1994k: 46). As he has commented more recently, ‘[I am] strongly inclined to think that any contemporary philosophy which does not find this question [of ethical relativism] inescapable and central must be gravely defective’ (AM: 295). However, a not entirely careful reading of things he has said has led critics to conclude that MacIntyre is, if not a relativist in intent, someone at any rate whose normative ethical theory is finally powerless before the relativist challenge. Some, such as John Haldane and Robert George, have been led in this direction of thought by MacIntyre’s so-described particularism, his denial that a rationally justifiable moral theory can speak to, and be persuasive for, any rational person beyond the bounds of the moral community of whose practice it is the theory. However, MacIntyre’s moral theory contains a particularism of procedure, not of outcome, and his point in this vein, perfectly intelligible and defensible from an Aristotelian standpoint, is that moral habituation colours moral perception, while moral judgement (just as the vocabulary embodied in it: terms such as ‘just’, ‘good reason for action’, ‘human action’ and so forth) is very often itself theory-laden. So his aim has been, taking these and other considerations on board (e.g. the fragmentation of tradition-based moral communities, the absence of any unitary educated public today), to develop a normative ethics powerful enough to counter the arguments of a sophisticated moral relativism. That he thinks a final, so to speak, rationally vindicated relativism (as opposed to an initial, provisional relativism) with respect to moral reason is untenable is clear from his observations examined previously about the rational dynamic internal to any tradition of moral inquiry. By their own standards of argument and justification,

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particular traditions of moral inquiry undergo rational change and emendation: earlier tenets are contested and may be, often enough are, rejected in light of later findings. This MacIntyre thinks is enough to show that in moral and in other matters, the human mind, including in its social consolidation in a community of enquiry or an intellectual tradition, is governed by objects external to itself. And that, he thinks, is enough to show why a thoroughgoing relativism with respect to moral (or metaphysical) truth – that is, a perspectival denial of moral objectivity tout court – is entirely implausible. What, then, of a relativism with respect to moral truths between different traditions of moral reason? It is certainly his stated view that moral inquiry properly conducted can and does turn up moral truths binding on all rational persons – truths about how humans ought to act, must act, if they are to attain the end proper to their species. But that these truths hold for all members of the species does not entail that it is reasonable for all persons of any moral upbringing and habituation and outlook whatsoever to accept them up front once simply they have been advanced by the adherents of some one tradition as truths about human nature as such. The thought that MacIntyre’s moral theory is impotent before relativism is therefore often enough inspired by a failure to distinguish what he says about rational moral persuasion from what he says about moral truth. In MacIntyre’s view, moral reason (the past and present moral judgements and reasonings of persons in specific moral communities and social and cultural traditions) can, and typically does, aspire to universality, but he has always rejected the Cartesian-style portrayal about how its claims to universality are justifiable: they are justifiable, he holds, not by intuitable, self-justifying moral first principles, but by dialectically discovered and hypothetico-deductively corroborated such principles. And when it is practical and not theoretical reason which is in question, MacIntyre is perfectly within his Aristotelian rights to say that the process of reflective dialectical discovery of first principles is crucially affected by one’s prior moral habits and prior moral instruction in a nurturing and sustaining moral community. In point of departure, therefore, MacIntyre’s is a historical and tradition-based, and thus antiCartesian, moral rationalism, though one no less universal in intended scope than varieties of Enlightenment morality. And in point of arrival, as has been noted, it is an anti-Hegelian historical rationalism for denying that there is ever an omega point to rational moral inquiry (the case of a faith-inspired moral inquiry, MacIntyre admits, would be a separate one, since a putative divine revelation would precisely supply one with the God’s-eye point of view). We can never, as he states, ‘at any stage rule out the future possibility of … [our] present beliefs and judgments being shown to be inadequate in a variety of ways’ (WJWR: 361), and thus he considers the standpoint of absolute knowledge in an Hegelian way of thinking to be an illusion. The appropriate goal then of a theory of practical rationality with its inbuilt theory of rationality for Macintyre is to have a good measure of rational confidence that one’s ethical beliefs and general moral outlook are true: that is, that they represent permanent gains in our understanding of the human good and of the necessary means to that good – gains which will hold up, come any conceivable evidence or argument

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to the contrary (see, for instance, MacIntyre’s remarks on this in the second edition of After Virtue, 1984i: 277). Here he says something quite similar to statements of Bernard Williams on the subject of what we should be after in moral inquiry and in the construction of a rationally credible moral outlook. MacIntyre’s point can be made from another angle with respect to the concept of essential human nature. There is no ready-at-hand neutral conception of human nature to which appeal can be made to adjudicate disputes between rival and incompatible theories of morality and of practical rationality: the intellectual sophistication necessary for informed choice with respect to a plausible conception of human nature requires that one already be imbued with such a conception. What is needed to escape from a condition of apparently rationally undecidable moral conflict (with its implication that moral justification and moral truth can only be something internal to a scheme) is some trans-traditional theory of rational vindication, acceptable to the adherents of any of the rival and conflicting traditions (i.e. rational traditions). It will, of course, as MacIntyre is rightly aware, be no mark against such a theory that its elements or inspiration may derive from some determinate tradition of moral inquiry or other. In fact, that is inevitable. What is crucial is that the theory be seen as setting a fair standard for rational vindication for all the parties in the debate and across diverse traditions. So MacIntyre has consistently sought to elaborate a plausible such theory, and it is not in his interest to conceal – nor has he sought to do so, at least in his writings in After Virtue and beyond – the origins and inspiration of that theory of rational vindication as broadly Aristotelian. Moreover, his claim has been (witness the title of the crucial Chapter Nine of After Virtue, ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle?’) that in pluralistic post-modernity, where the theoreticity of observation is now a widely accepted truth, the only finally satisfactory alternative to Nietzschean subjectivistic voluntarism and irrationalism is this broadly Aristotelian way of establishing impersonal, rationally authoritative moral standards. His broad argument along these lines can be re-stated in the following way: 1. Moral concepts are typically social-order specific and subject within any given social order to flux. 2. The knowledge that other beings recognizably similar to us, especially in our own social order, have notably different and often contrary moral beliefs to our own should cause us intellectual disquiet. 3. No appeal to a readily available neutral standard of essential human nature can decide between competing moral conceptions, since such conceptions of human nature are internal to each rival moral conception. 4. No universally available principles of practical reason true of human agency as such are capable of generating a moral conception rich enough to serve as a neutral standard of adjudication in systematic moral disputes, therefore, 5. Either some theory of rational vindication between rival and incommensurable standpoints acceptable to all reasonable parties in the dispute must be formulated, or relativistic conclusions concerning moral truth are inescapable.

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We have seen his theory of rational vindication between rival and incommensurable standpoints before, and it is the availability of such a theory to us, he thinks, plus a substantive conception of truth – a conception which he argues is written into the very activity of theoretical inquiry as such – that makes a final relativism in principle surmountable, however much any given inquiry may be shaped by a particular tradition. MacIntyre rightly affirms, though, that a pro tempore impasse in the conflict between rival and incommensurable traditions may occur, so that neither party in the conflict may see its way through to refuting the other on the other’s own terms. But, as he will add, there is no reason for either side in such an impasse automatically to draw relativistic conclusions from this state of affairs, because each side will still retain intact its own internal means of justifying its particular theory, and also because, as he notes, parties in the dispute can ‘never … avoid the question of whether there may not be some standpoint more comprehensive than their own in principles and conceptually richer, still to be discovered, in the light of which the inability of both contending parties to resolve their disagreements will become explicable’ (AM: 294–7; see also MacIntyre, 1991p: 71). In reconstructed form, MacIntyre’s theory or rational vindication, then, is as follows. Theory A is rationally vindicated with respect to rival and incommensurable theory B if, having understood theory B in B’s own idiom and according to B’s own internal means of justification, A can: 1. withstand, according to its own rational standards, the strongest objections against itself formulable by B; and 2. identify explanatory limitations and inadequacies in B, recognizable as such to adherents of B, while providing a remedy for those limitations and inadequacies, also recognizable as such to adherents of B; and 3. explain why from the standpoint of A those inadequacies were bound to occur relative to B’s standpoint, and finally, where necessary (for example, in the face of obstinate refusal of adherents to B to accept B’s rational inferiority with respect to A in view of 1, 2 and 3); 4. supply an account of the cause(s) of ideological blindness on the part of adherents of B. This meta-theory presupposes that participants in the debate share certain rudimentary logical principles, share a commitment to certain highly general theoretical aims, share certain basic norms of theoretical rationality, and agree in some minimally determinate way that they disagree about some commonly identified subject matter (e.g. ‘justice’, ‘practical reasoning’, ‘human nature’, ‘the morally obligatory’). A crucial presupposition of the meta-theory is also that there are no ready-at-hand, shared, and neutral rational standards by which one could do a rational cost-benefit analysis either with respect to accepting the first principles of any of the rival theories in question or with respect to accepting a given theory in view of the degree of logical support its first principles afford derivative tenets in that theory. Therefore,

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the only recourse for rational vindication (and rational persuasion) across rival and incommensurable theories lies in the power of any one of them to mount a successful immanent critique of its rivals, bearing up all the while under the force of those rivals’ objections. This account of a successfully rationally vindicated theory is helpfully expanded upon in the 1995 Introduction to the reissuing of Marxism and Christianity and extended to that of a successfully vindicated overall philosophical conception or ‘rational ideology’. A rational ideology, or in MacIntyre’s words, ‘philosophy as a form of social practice embedded in and reflective upon other forms of social practice’, has for him a fourfold subject matter and a fourfold task, as he makes clear in these highly illuminating pages (and one can see here how much MacIntyre remains to the day a ‘global optimizer’, to borrow Nicholas Rescher’s expression, with respect to the scope of philosophical inquiry): There is first of all that which has to be learned empirically: the rules and standards, concepts, judgments, and modes of argumentative justification, actually embodied in or presupposed by the modes of activity which constitute the life of the social order in which one is participating. Secondly, there are the ways of understanding or misunderstanding those activities and the relevant rules, standards, concepts, judgments, and modes of argumentative justification that are dominant in that particular social order. Thirdly, there is the relationship between these two in respect of how far the second is an adequate, and how far an inadequate and distorting representation of the first. And finally there is that of which the philosopher must give an account, if she or he is to vindicate the claim to have been able to transcend whatever limitations may have been imposed by her or his historical circumstances, at least to a sufficient extent to represent truly the first three and to show not just how things appear to be from this or that historical and social point of view, but how things are. (MC, 1995c: xvi–xvii)

Interestingly, however much an Aristotelian MacIntyre may be, he is not so much one as to claim that Aristotle fully understood what the conditions for a successfully vindicated theory or overall outlook were so as to apply them to his own case. In his moral theory based on goods of excellence (versus goods of effectiveness), MacIntyre thus claims, Aristotle succeeded in establishing the superiority of the goods of excellence theory on its own terms, but he did not carry out the necessary work of showing the rival goods of effectiveness theory as bound to fail on its own terms. Aristotle, in MacIntyre’s view, therefore understood the conditions for rational vindication in part, Aquinas understood (and exemplified) a right understanding of them more fully, but it is really from MacIntyre’s reading of Lukacs, as he has himself testified, that MacIntyre has learned of the need, in his own words, ‘to identify in the case of other and rival theses and arguments a variety of distortions and limitations deriving from their authors’ historical and social context, while at the same time being able to exhibit one’s own theses and arguments including one’s theses and arguments about their theses and arguments, as exempt from distortion and limitation’ (MC, 1995: xix).

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If we turn to MacIntyre’s own neo-Aristotelian moral theory and its vindication (or, more precisely, to his theory of practical rationality which includes a theory of moral obligation), what exact shape does the theory finally have in view of his later work? It derives from background considerations about the absence of any sufficiently thick conception of human nature, or of any substantive set of principles of universal practical rationality, to which to appeal for its vindication, but it has two largely empirical premises. The first is that any recognizably human society as such must be sustained by the exercise of certain basic virtues or qualities of character and mind (for example, honesty, fairness, courage, patience, prudence – MacIntyre’s own list), and that these virtues will be acknowledged and valued in any society where there is no errant theory to distort that society’s self-understanding. Secondly, no appeal to common virtues (as in the preceding list) can do any immediate work in adjudicating moral disputes between societies or rival moral outlooks, because human societies characteristically have rival lists of those virtues which they acknowledge and value, and they have often rival rank-orderings of what are roughly the same virtues. Thus, though virtue considerations can form a justificatory core of a universalist ethic, they are insufficient. To what else does MacIntyre think we can and should turn? Before answering this question, it bears noting that what MacIntyre is after in his theory of rationality is constructing a satisfactory commensurating framework for moral debate so that it can be rendered amenable in principle of rational progress and resolution. His appeal, which is a largely empirical one, to certain core virtues as forming the moral basis of any recognizably human society is meant to instruct us in the way other virtues can be rationally justified, and this will provide us with a way of thickening our basic, particularistically framed, universalist moral conception. But the manner in which these subsequent virtues will be established so as to form part of that conception will be by the role they are discovered to play in the constituting, sustaining, and furthering of practices. Here, crucially, MacIntyre invites us along that path of discovery – to re-trace, no doubt, the steps members of traditional social orders have taken – rather than himself leading us along it by further elaboration and argument (in fact, MacIntyre has rarely taken a stand in print on determinate questions in normative ethics). Practices for MacIntyre, we must remember, are spontaneous social constellations which make up the warp and woof of human society: they are socially established and socially co-operative activities which may serve immediate and pragmatic human needs – for instance, those having to do with survival (as do the practices of farming, working in a fishing crew, and military service); or, beyond meeting immediate biological needs, they may minister to other intrinsic human needs having to do with the cultivation of our shared nature – needs associated, for instance, with sociality or creativity or understanding or leisure (family rearing, membership in a string quartet, portrait painting, chess, and cosmological inquiry are all in this way for him practices). If, conventionally, we break down MacIntyre’s theory of practical rationality into its component conceptions of the right and the good and begin with the second of these, we have seen that MacIntyre follows Aristotle in holding that human

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flourishing – the well-being proper to a member of the human species over a lifetime – is the best initial way to characterize the human good. What is meant by ‘flourishing’ here is the development of intrinsic human capacities to make and to do, to create, to inquire and to understand, to form affective bonds, to overcome and eliminate obstacles and dangers in the natural and social environments, all the while cultivating and perfecting one’s environment, oneself, and one’s social order in the process and resisting temptations (both within and without) to imperfection or stasis or regression along the way. This is the ‘narrative moral quest’ with its ineliminably social dimension which figures prominently in After Virtue. Much of the good being sought will be shared by each individual with the other members of the species – it will be common: some of it, owing to talent, genetic predisposition, opportunity, upbringing, taste and so on will be idiosyncratic and personal. MacIntyre thinks that Plato and Aristotle have taught us permanent lessons here about the need for, and the value of, diachronic integrity and synchronic harmony in our pursuit of the goods constitutionally available to our nature and for an acknowledgement of the objective hierarchy discoverable between those goods. This means the training and disciplining of our desires as we happen to find them and their submission to the authority of reason – reason both in ourselves and in those credible others in the social arenas where our desires inevitably seek their goods. The human good from which political organization must take its bearings will, finally, be the acquisition and exercise (and the enjoyment which supervenes upon the exercise) of those qualities of character and mind, the moral and intellectual virtues, in and through which persons are able to attain the goods internal to the practices in which they participate, both throughout a lifetime and as reciprocating members of a sustaining social community. Justice and ‘just generosity’ (in MacIntyre’s specified sense in Dependent Rational Animals) will thus be crucial virtues in living the good life: acting upon the demands of justice will be something built into the concept of human well-being, not something related to it externally and contingently. The right necessarily plays a subordinate role in this theory of practical rationality. Moral obligation in the form of following moral rules (some exceptionless, some not) will amount to respecting that set of largely negative precepts which fix the boundaries for a self-perfecting and socially responsible exercise of the qualities of character and mind necessary for achievement in the activities constitutive of practices. These rules will be concerned with things such as right communication in speech, attentiveness and response to the just deserts of others, and in general, that anti-consequentialist respect for the rights and dignity of persons which MacIntyre saw the need for in his early Marxist days and saw lacking in Marxist theory (see, for instance, MC: 129–30, and 1959a: 96–7). The value and justification for these rules will be discovered or not, on MacIntyre’s view, in the context of the pursuit of specific goods in specific practices, and the truth of that claim is undeniably crucial to the justification of his normative moral theory of which we have really only a general outline.

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Historicism versus Thomistic Aristotelianism?

One of the main tensions that sympathetic critics have identified in MacIntyre’s general outlook (see, for instance, Janet Coleman’s criticism, ‘MacIntyre and Aquinas’, in After MacIntyre: 65–90) springs from MacIntyre’s allegiance to two seemingly contradictory philosophical standpoints, one broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic, and the other of a historicizing sort, deriving from the likes of Vico, Hegel, Marx, and R.G. Collingwood. Why, for MacIntyre, given his strong principled predilection for Aristotle, eminent philosopher of essential natures, the attraction to self-consciously historical philosophical inquiry? There are a number of distinct but in ways related answers to this question. The first is that MacIntyre sees a close parallel between the teleological understanding of nature in Aristotle and the notion of historical development and cognizance of that development (Entwicklungsgeschichte) in the historicizers mentioned above. It is no accident, MacIntyre will note, that Hegel and Marx, for instance, are in important ways Aristotelians. So one could say in MacIntyre’s defence that while Aristotle and his Hellenic contemporaries notably lacked a sense of linear time and of non-cyclic historical development (concerning which one can consult the famous study of Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade, 1971), the capacity of Aristotle’s thought to accommodate this addition was present from the start, and it was easy enough for thinkers under the influence of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam – religions with a highly defined sense of linear time built into them – to effect this enlargement. A specific case where the compatibility or, more strongly, the connection between telos and history can be seen is in the matter of human understanding conceived in an Aristotelian fashion. Here we can refer back to MacIntyre’s helpful exegesis of Aristotle’s notion of scientific knowledge (e0pisth&mh), or knowledge through causes, treated in Chapter 7 above (see Section 7.3). The human mind naturally seeks a knowledge of the essence or nature of the substances around it, and by a process of systematic observation and the formulation, criticism, and corroboration of judgements concerning the essential properties of those substances and the ordering of those properties, it gradually arrives at some measure of the knowledge it is seeking. Systematic human knowledge of the natural world, which goes beyond the immediate, common-sense awareness of the whatness of physical substances, involves therefore a non-intuitive, fallibilistic coming-to-know – that is, the mind coming to an increasingly adequate identification with the nature of things, as an Aristotelian like Thomas Aquinas would say. This coming-to-know takes place through an experiential-cum-dialectical process, which process can be portrayed as, because it indeed embodies, a dialectical history. And since much human inquiry and learning takes place in, and in dependence upon, a community of inquirers, it can be cast as a dialectical history with a social dimension. There is in consequence an interesting and logically relevant history, with a significant social dimension, of the mind’s coming to know essential natures, as Aristotle himself partially acknowledged, both in his theory and in his epistemic practice, and as Aquinas acknowledged in his theory and practice more fully.

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There are two additional epistemic reasons why MacIntyre is rightly drawn to a fusion of historicist with Aristotelian essentialist considerations. The first has to do with the style of Hegel’s, to MacIntyre’s mind, entirely successful critique of Kant’s transcendental project (upon which he comments in AV: 265–7): that any attempt to exhibit the way the human mind, nature, or the social world are must successfully show that it is not damagingly limited by parochial assumptions: assumptions liable to go unchallenged just inasmuch as they are parochial and liable also to be held complacently and in ignorance of their need for vindication with respect to rivals. So Kant’s mistake of taking for the basic principles of human scientific understanding as such what were really only the principles and presuppositions of Newtonian physics, can be avoided, as can Aristotle’s parochial assumptions about women, natural servitude, and manual labour, by a dialectical mindset with historical horizons: one that seeks to corroborate or falsify its tenets by dialectical encounters with rival views, especially across time and place, and one which is inherently fallibilist about its conclusions (this raises another issue about MacIntyre’s fidelity to Aquinas, to which I will return shortly). Here MacIntyre will want to retain essentialism in the theory of human nature while avoiding crude versions of it (such as he sees, for example, in Hume) which overlook or minimize the social and historical shaping of human nature and its desires, goals, and interests. However much, as Janet Coleman rightly insists, a Thomist must be committed to the universality of human thought and to the spontaneous availability to all properly functioning human minds of a like general (i.e. non-scientific) knowledge of the whatness of physical substances, it is in no way Aquinas’s position that the human mind has any direct access to the timeless structure of the essential natures of those substances – an access which would require a God’s-eye or creator’s perspective, and which form of access would alone yield the knowledge necessary for a full definition of the subject matter of a science (Josef Pieper’s famous study, The Silence of St. Thomas, can be consulted profitably on this matter; see Pieper, 1999). If it is scientific knowledge (scientia or e0pisth&mh) of things which is in question, with which alone comes an essential definition of things, given the way the human mind is situated with respect to the physical world – needing to learn about physical substances a posteriori by observation and experiment – the social shaping of human understanding in a tradition of inquiry is crucial to how the mind re-presents the world to itself. And this is where all of MacIntyre’s observations about practices of inquiry and their dialectical histories have application and are in no way incompatible with Aquinas’s understanding of scientia. A related matter here is the theory of rational refutation and vindication which MacIntyre has formulated, having learned much from the debates surrounding the work on the history and philosophy of science of Thomas Kuhn. In brief, and to restate the view: for theory T to refute rival and incommensurable theory S is for T to be able to tell S’s adherents a convincing story of S’s partial successes but overriding explanatory failures, exhibiting why these failures were inevitable from the thereby defective standpoint of S. The rational vindication of a theory, in MacIntyre’s view, is but the demonstration of its compelling-to-its-rivals historiographical explanatory

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power, but this is entirely compatible with Aristotle’s portrayal of the method of rational dialectic in the Topics and his execution of that method in, for instance, the Physics (for example, Book I) and the Metaphysics (for example, Book A). And it is even more compatible with Aquinas’s dialectical method as embodied in the Summa Theologiae. MacIntyre is entirely justified in holding that Aquinas, as a Christian, had the advantage over philosophical fellow traveller Aristotle of appreciating the historical dimension of human understanding, and that later Christians (Vico) or Christian-influenced thinkers (Hegel and his followers) were simply able to draw out more fully the consequences of the historicity of human thought for knowledgeclaims and their justification. The question remains, though, of whether a Thomist can be a fallibilist with respect to the first principles of human understanding – principles like that of non-contradiction, for instance? Is he or she not required, in fidelity to Aquinas, to assert that once the concepts in such propositions are adequately grasped, the strict apodictic necessity of their truth must likewise be seen – which is to say that the suitably informed human mind, as such, grasps these principles infallibly? It is certainly MacIntyre’s intention to follow Aquinas in these matters, and Aquinas clearly thinks that the first principles of human understanding, such as the principle of non-contradiction, delineate necessary, true-in-all-possible-worlds, truths. That is to say, Aquinas holds that the predicate in such principles in their propositional form necessarily belongs to the subject, and that the propositional elaboration of these principles in human thought captures the metaphysically necessary identity in reality of subject with predicate. Therefore, would not any human mind that fully understood the nature of subject and predicate understand their identity as something strictly necessary, and would not their knowledge of the truth of those propositions thereby be infallible? Here we must be aware that we are putting modern, post-Cartesian questions to a philosophical standpoint to which they are somewhat alien. In view of what MacIntyre has said in addressing this type of concern (see, for instance, WJWR: 170–75) it is open to him to answer that: (1) Aquinas nowhere states, in fact he denies, that humans are born with innate ideas and crystallized first principles of thought – he holds only that all humans have an intrinsic capacity to grasp these principles, which principles are presupposed by all acts of human thought as such (see, for instance, Aquinas’s Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Book IV, lesson 6, para. 599); for us to grasp the constituent concepts of such per se nota (selfjustifyingly true) principles requires experience and dialectical trial and error, hence a history; and (2) once such principles are grasped as necessarily true by means of their subject and predicate terms being properly understood, those in possession of such understanding are entitled to claim certitude about the propositions’ truth. The stress here in Aquinas’s way of thinking, however, is not upon the cognitive acts whereby the propositions’ necessary truth is seen or reflectively affirmed by the human mind (it is not psychological certitude which matters, a philosophically uninteresting concept for the most part anyway), but on the objective impersonal truth of such propositions and the necessary character of that truth. Can the human mind

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err in judging principles to articulate necessary truths? Of course. Can the human mind err in judging these principles to articulate necessary truths? Here MacIntyre will likely say that, beyond any conceivable doubt, or in view of any conceivable convincing evidence or argument to the contrary, no. But is this compatible with Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s view on the subject? Let us restrict ourselves to what, for both Aristotle and Aquinas, is the first principle of understanding, the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction (hereafter, PNC). Of this, Aristotle says: the most certain principle of all is that regarding which it is impossible to be mistaken; for such a principle must be both the best known (for all men may be mistaken about things which they do not know), and non-hypothetical. For a principle that anyone must have who understands anything is not a hypothesis …. Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect…. This then is the most certain of all principles, since it answers to the definition given above. For it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be, as some think Heraclitus says. For what a man says, he does not necessarily believe … (Metaphysics IV, 1 005b12–25, Ross trans.)

Aquinas glosses these remarks by referring to the principle as ‘the axiom of all axioms’ (Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, para. 604), and adds that, ‘evidently this principle is not based on an assumption. Indeed, insofar as it is by nature a starting point, it clearly comes unsought to the one having it and is not acquired by his own efforts’ (para. 605). Aquinas can plausibly be taken to hold here that the first principle is embedded (implicit and presupposed) in all human thought as such, from which it does not follow that all humans know that the principle is true (even philosophers such as Heraclitus seem confused about it), or that they know, moreover, that it is necessarily true, and even the most basic of necessary truths (i.e. as the truth presupposed by all other necessary truths). But it seems clear that Aristotle and Aquinas both think that adequately to understand the proposition, ‘the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect’ – that is, to be in possession of its constituent concepts – does give one absolute certainty. And here the Thomistic Aristotelian must part company with any absolute or dogmatic fallibilist – and MacIntyre presumably would do so as well. If, therefore, in contemporary philosophical parlance ‘absolutely certain’ is taken to include, as it typically is (see, for instance, the useful brief discussion of this by Alan Goldman in his entry, ‘Privileged Access’ in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy), the traits of infallibility, incorrigibility, and indubitability, then the contemporary Aristotelian must be committed to calling the PNC absolutely certain for those in critically reflective possession of the relevant concepts (the PNC is in this way not an epistemological first principle of a Cartesian sort). For those with an adequate grasp of the concepts, the PNC is infallible: that is, it is not deemed possible by the individual in question that the principle be false. If believed (crucial here

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again is the proviso that the believer understand the relevant concepts adequately), it is believed incorrigibly – that is to say, the belief cannot be corrected or overridden for he or she who holds it by anyone or anything else in the future. And, finally, the principle, once grasped, is indubitable, which means that the mind in possession of it can never have any grounds for doubting its truth. There is therefore, I would argue, no contradiction between MacIntyre’s view on the epistemological status of first principles and the views of Aristotle or Aquinas. 9.3 Anti-pluralistic Authoritarianism? One of the surprising charges critics have made against MacIntyre in view of his late enthusiasm for the thought of Thomas Aquinas and his related late allegiance to Roman Catholicism is that his thought supports some kind of authoritarian politics, with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in his desired society wielding political power and dictating fine details in points of law, social policy, and distributive justice (as Martha Nussbaum alleges; see Nussbaum, 1989: 40–41). A similar charge is that MacIntyre’s political theory requires some enforced conception of the good life to give it shape – one ‘agreeable to MacIntyre’s reason’, as Hilary Putnam puts it. Relatedly, Jeffrey Stout has called MacIntyre anti-democratic for wanting ‘discursive closure’ to come from rightly conducted rational dialectic in morals today (Stout, 2001: 333ff.). The second and third of these objections, dealt with partly in Section 8.1 above, are worth exploring in more detail now (and in one of his latest essays, ‘The ends of life, the ends of philosophical writing’, authored for his 2006 collection of selected essays, MacIntyre has by stressing on-going rational dialogue as an essential constituent of the philosophical life and of philosophical writing, gone some way toward addressing them explicitly himself, see TP: 125-42). The first objection, concerning theocratic politics, can be dealt with fairly quickly. As noted earlier, MacIntyre’s abiding ambition has been with developing a rationally compelling secular moral conception and theory of society, one which may indeed leave doors open to, and be compatible with, a religious (for instance, a Roman Catholic) understanding of the same, but into which the latter is in no sense built. Accepting Roman Catholic dogma as true in no sense commits MacIntyre to thinking that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (the college of bishops headed by the Pope) should exercise political authority in today’s political societies. The Roman Catholic Church hierarchy has long since abandoned, and has retrospectively criticized, any such aspirations to temporal political power. One can consult on this matter, for instance, the authoritative document of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, and its fourth chapter, ‘The Political Community’. As is stated there: ‘It is of supreme importance, especially in a pluralistic society … to distinguish clearly between the activities of Christians, acting individually or collectively in their own name as citizens guided by the dictates of a Christian conscience, and their activity acting along with their pastors in the name of the Church. The Church, by reason of her role and competence, is not identified with any political community nor

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bound by ties to any political system’ (para. 76, see Flannery, 1996: 984). One can also consult more recently the authoritative Vatican document ‘Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Public Life’ (Ratzinger, 1992), especially Section III, ‘Principles of Catholic Doctrine on the Autonomy of the Temporal and Pluralism’. It states, for instance: ‘It is not the Church’s task to set forth specific political solutions – and even less to propose a single solution as the acceptable one – to temporal questions that God has left to the free and responsible judgment of each person. It is, however, the Church’s right and duty to provide a moral judgment on temporal matters when this is required by faith or the moral law’ (Ratzinger, 1992: para. 3). These are teachings binding upon all the Catholic faithful, and as there is no evidence anywhere that MacIntyre dissents from them, there is no tension per se between his Catholicism and his radical democratic allegiances. That he, like any informed Catholic, thinks that the magisterium or teaching authority of the Catholic Church has a privileged epistemic standpoint with respect to understanding the demands of natural justice, and interpreting the dictates of the natural law needn’t mean any more than that he thinks the Catholic magisterium should play an advisory role with respect to political regimes – advising them, for instance, concerning abstract principles of justice and right, and advising them to some degree regarding those principles’ prudential application. It is true that MacIntyre devotes very little attention to the analysis, comparative or otherwise, of forms of political rule or political regime. He says little on these matters other than to identify himself as, in the vein of Marx, a radical democrat, and in that sense, presumably, a social egalitarian – one who takes class divisions in present society and the overcoming of those divisions very seriously (without thereby advocating anything like the abolition of private property or state ownership of the means of production). So a constant concern of MacIntyre’s has been to spell out the consequences of this social and moral ideal for present social and political orders, and the bulk of his effort in the theory of politics has been devoted to this task. The ‘post-Marxist ideology of liberation’ he has been interested in articulating aims to develop a conception of freedom somewhere in between the positive freedom of being able to follow the dictates of reason (and this includes, crucially, the dictates of rationally warranted authority) concerning the good, and the negative freedom of being able to pursue one’s own conception of self-realization without coercive or non-rational external interference. His last book, Dependent Rational Animals, is devoted in many ways to spelling out this in-between conception of freedom – by extolling and working between the virtues of independent practical reasoning and those of acknowledged dependence. It has been MacIntyre’s abiding criticism of the modern social world – a world, as he has it, that is defined primarily by its rejection of any intrinsic teleology to human nature as such – that is caught in an inescapable dialectic, both practical and theoretical, between a bottom-up anarchy of individualistic desire and a corresponding top-down culture of manipulative management exercised by elites (e.g. in political parties, the media, the corporate world and so on). This dialectical clash of opposites,

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as he notes, generates irresolvable social and ethical antinomies in the political order today, where rights claims, for instance, clash with incommensurable claims about the general utility or welfare, and where only non-rational, wholly political solutions to these conflicts can he had – as, on the personal level, only the exercise of what must be an arbitrary decision or choice can resolve conflicts between self- and otherregarding reasons for action. What we need instead, he has consistently argued, is to maintain a commitment to equality and autonomy with an acknowledgement of the impersonal demands of practical reason in determinate social contexts and a deference to the superior access to those impersonal standards for conduct had by the morally expert, both past and present (i.e. the technically and morally proficient or accomplished in practices). It is for this reason that he has stressed the relevance for the life of reason of both authority and tradition. The impersonal demands of practical reason are such that we discover them as written into our natures and written into the nature of practice-constituting activities, and they therefore do not derive their normative character from the mere fact that they are objects of our choice. Rather, we choose to recognize them and their authority over us because we discover their relevance, and even indispensability, for our species-specific good. Power inequalities in institutions and practices needn’t imply injustice or oppression, MacIntyre will say, nor need democratic equality require direct as opposed to representative democratic rule. What is crucial, he will say (see, for instance, his 1997 essay ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, reprinted in Knight, 1998: 235–52, esp. 250), is that all members of the political order be admitted to the debate about common-cum-personal goods as both presumed teachers and learners, so that each can make the shared ends of any social endeavour rationally his or her own – and this by uncoerced rational assent to those ends, or by the rational criticism and re-structuring of those ends. As he states in this important 1997 essay: ‘what is always oppressive is any form of social relationship that denies to those who participate in it the possibility of the kind of learning from each other about the nature of the common good that can issue in socially transformative action’ (in Knight, 1998: 250). We have seen how this theme of joint rational deliberation was central to Dependent Rational Animals. The exigence here is making possible for each citizen or worker (whether educated or plain person) that self-activity of which Marx spoke: that transformation of self through rational activity in social practices, where the self discovers the right ordering of means and ends and is able rationally to transform the ends or goals it initially finds itself seeking. Here, and in an Aristotelian vein, MacIntyre thinks that the opportunity for political participation is crucial, since politics, which he describes as ‘the set of activities through which goods are ordered in the life of the community’ (1995g: 6), when it is not corrupted into manipulative elitist management, ‘will be that activity which affords the best exercise of our rational powers’ (Knight, 1998: 13). The virtuous, those who rightly wield authority in such social practices, must aim to facilitate the self-education of their, in partial respects, subordinate fellow participants in a given practice (e.g. in a fishing crew or a physics laboratory), even as, that is, they are rationally answerable to and capable of learning from them

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about the shared goods which they jointly pursue. Oppression, manipulation and instrumentalization can be avoided where there are power inequalities in these settings as long as each member of a practice or a social order is bound by and accountable to common impersonal standards of justice, those ‘precepts of the natural law’ of which Aquinas spoke. These precepts, which are the enabling and sustaining conditions of social community as such, have to do with things such as truthfulness, fidelity to promises, fairness, and respect for the rational independence of persons; they require the corresponding exercise of virtues such as courage, patience, honesty, and selfcontrol. All of these, both precepts and virtues, are aimed at serving the common goods of a community or practice. So, while a social egalitarian, MacIntyre is clearly advocating a rule of the virtuous model of governance, since he will insist that knowledge of, by participation in, the good is necessary to ground judgements of social value and to provide the political order with public criteria for desert – for a rank-ordering of actions harmful or contributive to the common shared good within practices and across practices. Possession of the various virtues related to the goods internal to practices and to the good-of-a-whole-life-lived-in-community will bring with it a kind of expert knowledge for ordering the activities constitutive of practices and for ordering the practices that make up a social and moral community. There will necessarily be an epistemic asymmetry here between proficients and beginners in the virtues since, as MacIntyre notes, echoing a long-held tenet of the tradition of the virtues: ‘understanding the virtues adequately is possible only from the standpoint of a way of life in which they are lived out’ (Introduction to the Polish edition of After Virtue, 1995g: 5) – and it is the virtuous who reveal the good more fully to us. Initiates in the virtues, therefore, will need to take guidance in their actions from proficients on the basis of a rationally founded trust, and will often find their initial set of desires transformed in the process. But the authority of the virtuous must be answerable and accountable to the rational scrutiny of plain persons (workers, citizens and so on), and this means that the political order amenable to the practice of politics as MacIntyre understands it must necessarily be a small-scale one, just as the polis envisaged by Aristotle was. Here we have a central commitment of his moral-cum-political theory. MacIntyre sometimes gives the impression of fetishizing the small-scale, especially the rural small-scale, and though he may well overstate the case, his ‘small is beautiful’ outlook in social and political life is not without noteworthy reasons. The accountability of political authority to political participant and the conditions for rational participation and consent requires, he will argue with much plausibility, a kind of familiar and face-to-face relationship that is impossible if the social community is too large. Since it is the virtuous alone who have the rational warrant to rule, and since virtuous character or its opposite cannot be revealed except in non-compartmentalized social settings where, as he puts it, ‘one and the same set of individuals and groups will encounter each other in the context of a number of very different types of activity, moving between one sphere and another, so that individuals cannot avoid being judged for what they are’ (in Knight, 1998: 249),

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there is then an additional reason why politics must be local – local, that is, if it is to be that second-order practice, ‘through which other types of practice are ordered, so that individuals may direct themselves towards what is best for them and for the community’ (Knight, 1998: 249). What would make politics, thus understood, impossible is any social order in which moral agency is exercised in a series of divided compartments (e.g. domestic, commercial, civic), each with their own mutually inconsistent standards for moral conduct (e.g. vis-à-vis loyalty or truth-telling or respect for persons) and therefore each with their own incompatible conceptions of practical rationality. Since MacIntyre thinks that the political orders of advanced capitalist modernity, today’s nationstates, are precisely such mosaics of incompatible forms of practical rationality held together by counterfeit virtues such as ‘adaptability’ and ‘ironic detachment’, he thinks none of them can serve genuine human political interests and that they are generally only useful for providing important but low-level services such as physical convenience and security. Moreover, modern political orders, on his view, do not even provide public institutional forums in which rational debate between rival and incompatible conceptions of the good life can take place – debates essential to the flourishing of the Enlightenment ideal of political practice (which MacIntyre shares, for instance, with Kant) and whose outcome he thinks ought to be shaping public policy. As he has stated: What is lacking in modern political societies is any type of institutional arena in which plain persons – neither engaged in academic pursuits nor professionals of the public life – are able to engage together in systematic reasoned debate, designed at a rationally wellfounded common mind on how to answer questions about the relationship of politics to the claims of rival and alternative ways of life, each with its own conception of the virtues and the common good. (Knight, 1998: 239)

Joint rational deliberation about the ordering of the goods of the interlocking practices which make up our social community cannot be achieved unless we are all in some ways active participants, teaching and learning, and this requires a social community (which, as it happens, for MacIntyre, needs to be a moral community; more on this will be said below). We have already seen his statements about the corrosive effects on the smallscale social community of global capitalism and international markets, and his claim is that small, practice-based communities should avail themselves of the highly useful resources the large-scale political regime provides while being careful not to compromise or bargain away their integrity in the process. The large-scale nationstate, with its inherent moral contradictions, cannot serve the thicker goods of the small-scale and homogeneous community, and when it tries to, he notes, it inevitably disserves those goods – as he will say the regimes of Franco in Spain and DeValera in Ireland, for instance, significantly undermined (i.e. distorted, degraded, and discredited by mixing with their own ends) the social goods a predominantly Roman Catholic moral community is bound to seek (on this, see his recent essay ‘Toleration and the Goods of Conflict’, 1999c: 13).

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On the subject of community, MacIntyre is surely one of the great defenders in our time of the common life lived out in the more or less homogeneous and smallscale moral community: a community which he realizes may no longer be capable of existing as a sovereign political entity in today’s world of nation-states and global capitalism. Today’s homogeneous moral community, a society of friends with a shared though rationally evolving conception of the overall human good (i.e. and not an amalgam of strangers brought together by historical contingencies and pragmatic compromises), is more likely to need to exist on the margins, or in pockets of, the civil society of the modern nation-state, engaging in a politics of resistance and selfdefence to preserve the integrity of its moral outlook. As he stated in an interview several years ago: ‘I come from the fringes of modern Western culture and I have tried to provide an articulate voice for some of those who do not belong to and cannot identify with the metropolitan mainstream’ (interview for Voprosy filosofii, 1996a: 1). But what are the actual features he envisages such moral communities possessing? They are several. In the first place, this type of community will need to preserve a good measure of economic autonomy so that it can resist deformations of its moral order at the hand of international or large-scale economic markets: it will need to be as much as possible, as he puts it, a society of small, independent producers where economic exchanges are matters of genuine consent and where each is provided with the opportunity of being a productive member of the community, discovering their personal good while simultaneously contributing to the common good. It will also need to be, in his words: ‘a form of life in which participants pursue their own goods rationally and critically, rather than having continually to struggle, with greater or lesser success, against being reduced to the status of instruments of this or that type of capital formation’ (in Knight, 1998: xvii–xviii). These communities will have to pay the price, he admits – one he thinks well worth paying – of slower economic and technological development than that of the cosmopolitan societies of advanced capitalism. As to its moral outlook, its members will need to possess a largely common mind about the nature and rank-ordering of the community’s constitutive institutions and practices, and about the virtues and the moral precepts needed to sustain these – virtues and precepts which will have application across spheres of activity and social roles (domestic, inter-personal, commercial, political). Typically (MacIntyre sees abundant evidence for this in the history of pre-modern societies), such a community will draw the resources for its shared moral vision from some past moral tradition. But if it is to be a rational community, it will have to subject this vision to constant rational scrutiny, and it is here that MacIntyre thinks his envisaged political community must be of a non-exclusionary sort and for its own rational good. This is not to say, however, that because such a community would admit minoritarian standpoints it must be, in its own moral framework, neutral about the good, but rather that it must actively tolerate those minority and dissenting standpoints, not letting them set the terms of its basic moral framework, but letting them rationally challenge its ends and means and its account of the right and the good – and always

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remaining willing to learn from them in the process (as an example of this openmindedness, MacIntyre will speak of how Christian such communities, for instance, ought to behave towards Jewish members in their midst, though they have regularly failed to do so). A homogenous social (i.e. because moral) community today must therefore provide institutionalized forums for debate about the goods of practices and their ordering, and about whether present institutions are serving personal and collective goods, so that the modes of deliberation in the community are genuinely accessible to all, and so that the community’s institutions transparently serve the goods internal to the community’s practices. But all the assumptions and commitments of this type of community will be the subject of ongoing rational scrutiny and contestation, in MacIntyre’s view. We remember that one of the things that has left MacIntyre vulnerable to the charge of relativism is his emphasis on the moral starting point of agents in cosmopolitan post-modernity – an emphasis that sympathizers have found at times to have overly permissive implications for normative ethical theory. Rationality, not truth, though (really, truth-through-rationality), MacIntyre has maintained, is the telos of toleration, and both his meta-theory and his politicalcum-moral theory have had as their interest overcoming present social and moral fragmentation by the recovery, through rationally deliberative means (including dialectical conflict), of something like the social and moral homogeneity of premodern social orders, a homogeneity freed now, though, from forms of ideological domination based on gender, class, religion, or race. If the telos of toleration in a moral community is truth-through-rationality, the aim of the community should be to establish institutionalized forums for debate in which each contending voice can find its next rational step forward. Yet, as a moral and epistemological realist (and a realist about the nature and spontaneous aims of inquiry – namely, conformity of mind to mind-independent reality), MacIntyre has some measure of confidence that rightly conducted rational debate in and through such settings will lead in time to some measure of belief-convergence and social consensus. Where it does not, a moral community (and the dissenting moral subcommunities for which this moral community will provide a space and be happy to see flourish on their own terms within its own over-arching framework) will at least have the resources within itself for moral objectivity and progress in rationality. It will have, for example, socially recognized truth conditions for the application of shared moral terms such as honour, blasphemy, and insult, and a framework in which progress in argument can be measured. But it is precisely because MacIntyre makes so much of the reflective agent’s moral starting point – one’s moral upbringing in a moral tradition or mélange of traditions, one’s inherited social roles, one’s moral habits and moral history by the time one has reached the age of relatively full reflective autonomy, one’s background overall beliefs and so on – that he cannot be accused of any exclusionary sectarianism in his moral or political outlook. He has instead been much occupied with stating the social and intellectual conditions necessary for the re-building, albeit locally and starting from the small-scale, of some measure of robust, reasoned social consensus.

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Summarizing and extrapolating, then, from his past work we can say that his ideal political-cum-moral community would be relatively small-scale and economically independent. It would be comprised in the main of a rationally self-critical, educated public formed by a common set of texts and sharing certain argumentative first principles and certain general assumptions about goods, rules, virtues, and their ordering. It would be a democratic community under the rule of the proficient in virtue, and a community which sees it as in its own rational best interest to provide dissenting standpoints which are willing to exist within its own basic moral framework with a space to develop and become maximally cogent (and therefore to become of maximal rational value to it). One need only paint this picture to see how vulnerable MacIntyre is to the charge of giving us a very suggestive theory of a politics of nowhere, so it is worth examining next the style of criticism of his work that portrays it as utopian. 9.4

Romantic Conservative Utopianism? The flourishing of the virtues requires and in turn sustains a certain kind of community, necessarily a small-scale community, within which the goods of various practices are ordered, so that, as far as possible, regard for each finds its due place within the lives of each individual, of each household and in the life of the community at large. Because, implicitly or explicitly, it is always by reference to some conception of the overall and final human good that other goods are ordered, the life of every individual, household or community by its orderings gives expression, wittingly or unwittingly, to some conception of the human good. And it is when goods are ordered in terms of an adequate conception of the human good that the virtues genuinely flourish. ‘Politics’ is the Aristotelian name for the set of activities through which goods are ordered in the life of the community. (Introduction to the Polish version of After Virtue, 1995g: 6)

Where are there today – or where and how could there be created? – the kind of homogeneous moral community of which MacIntyre speaks, in which social practices are harmoniously and hierarchically ordered so that the overall good for man, inseparably personal and common, can be sought – and in which the personal, the familial, the social, and the legal orders exist as complementary dimensions of one over-arching political-cum-metaphysical order? Clearly, MacIntyre thinks something like this has existed, and that such an ordering of things was even typical of pre-modern societies prior to economic modernization and the emergence of moral and social (and religious) individualism. We can recall his examples along these lines of certain kinds of ancient city, certain forms of the mediaeval commune, certain native North American tribes and so on. In the modern period he will invoke examples such as fishing villages on the west coast of Ireland, and he clearly thinks the societies of the Scottish Enlightenment were, for the most part, faithful to this ideal of ‘embody[ing] in their practice a particular conception of human good, of virtues, of duties to each other and of the subordinate place of technical skills in human life’ (1994a: 287). He also thinks that, borrowing an example from E.P.

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Thompson (see Thompson’s, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson, 1963), communities of hand-loom weavers of Lancashire and Yorkshire at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century approximated this ideal, though they lacked the theory to articulate and defend it. How optimistic, though, is he about recovering this form of community today? More so than he was when he first wrote After Virtue, no doubt (see, for instance, his avowal to this effect in the new Introduction to A Short History of Ethics, 1997b: xviii–xiv), though one still senses in him a lingering and unwarranted pessimism about the possibilities for the renewal of moral community today – based on tradition, rational authority and the virtues – in urban settings: MacIntyre always seems to have been beset by a bias for the rural and a prejudice against the urban. In any event, according to his broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of human nature, there is an ineradicable inclination towards the genuine human good in human nature, one which in spite of social and personal deformation can always reassert itself – a point on which he has written recently (see his ‘Theories of Natural Law in the Culture of Advanced Modernity’, MacIntyre, 2000). This innate inclination to the genuine good also finds its expression in those social contexts where that good is necessarily sought, that is, in socially established and shared practices: Aristotle’s ethics, in its central account of the virtues, of goods as the ends of human practices, of the human good as that end to which all other goods are ordered, and of the rules of justice required for a community of ordered practices, captures essential features not only of human practice within Greek city-states but of human practice as such. And because this is so, whenever such practices as those of the arts and sciences, of such productive and practical activities as those of farming, fishing, architecture, 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 rules necessary to achieve those goods, are in a flourishing state, then Aristotelian conceptions of goods, virtues, and rules are regenerated and reembodied in practice. This is not to say that those who practice them are aware that they have become to some significant degree, in their practice, although not commonly in their theory, Aristotelians. It is to say that Aristotelianism always has possibilities of revival in new forms in different cultures. (1997b: xviii)

Practices too, then, MacIntyre thinks, though always liable to institutionalized deformation (whereby the external goods of the practice are valorized over the goods internal to the practice), are also inherently capable of restoring themselves to right order (1995g: 6–7). What are the prospects, though, for MacIntyre’s envisaged well-ordered polity, which is the political embodiment of a genuine moral community, in today’s largescale, advanced capitalist social democratic political cultures? Why can’t these, given their ostensible commitment to social equality, provide institutional support for the virtue-based community of which MacIntyre speaks? The negative answer he has given to these questions is premised not merely on considerations of scope, but on considerations of conceptual and justificatory framework. According to his

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theory of the good and of human agency, the good life is the socially situated and politically engaged life of the virtues – virtues lived out in and through practices. But on the side of action, practices and their participants cannot flourish unless they are governed by shared (though contestable) moral standards for conduct which make possible the joint pursuit and attainment of the goods internal to those practices. And on the side of rational debate, actual and potential conflicts between practices cannot be overcome unless the political order is structured by some sense of the overall human good (again, one that can be the subject of ongoing rational scrutiny and criticism). Moral and metaphysical debate itself cannot be fruitful and enjoy the possibility of progress where there are not shared standards for rational justification, shared first principles, and a shared vocabulary. As MacIntyre will say: ‘it seems to me that our social and cultural experience over the last several decades shows that most public argumentative debate is sterile. It is sterile because we have not yet adequately identified the conditions which have to be satisfied in our type of culture if we are to enter upon fruitful cultural argumentative debate’ (1987f: 9). According to the degree to which MacIntyre’s moral community (he gives as examples neighbourhoods, rural communities devoted to farming or livestock or fishing, parishes) can self-defensively make its way today in the nation-states of advanced modernity, it will have to conduct arguments about the ordering of its interlocking practices both to and from a conception of the overall human good. Its social institutions will transparently have to serve the needs of each and of all, and no individual in the community will see her- or himself capable of answering the question ‘What is my good, and how shall I seek it?’ without simultaneously seeking to answer the question ‘What is our good, and how shall we seek it?’ The family will not be thought sufficient to answer the question about personal good, and so intermediate associations consonant with the practice of family rearing will be necessary. As an Aristotelian, MacIntyre of course thinks that the good life takes a village, but a village of a very particular sort – one, that is, which embodies a moral community. Here we can see why MacIntyre sees his own political and moral theory, contrary to widespread report, as coming down somewhere between those of a liberal individualist and those of a communitarian persuasion. With the latter, he has wanted to insist that practical inquiry into personal good and practical success in living the good life is impossible without active and critical participation in a whole set of social undertakings which are governed by shared norms and which yield shared, person-transcending (i.e. irreducibly social) goods. But with the former, he has wanted to acknowledge that there is nothing necessarily good about community or a Volk or cultural tradition as such, hence wanting to distance himself from any romanticism about community and from the charge by critics like Simon Blackburn that he has failed to distinguish his position from something that might promote ‘vicious small town bigotry’ (see Blackburn, 2000). However, it is a fair criticism of MacIntyre’s moral theory to say that he has failed to develop its internally driven universalizing requirements sufficiently, and that this leaves his theory vulnerable to the charge that it is capable of under-writing wicked practices and gravely immoral

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social, cultural, or political traditions in general (I make and develop this criticism at some length in ‘MacIntyre e il problema della practica malvagia’ in Da Re and De Anna, 2004: 203–32, while suggesting how MacIntyre can shore his position up in this area of significant vulnerability). Still, MacIntyre does acknowledge, if at later stages of his work, that communities may well have common, highly defective moral values. Consider the following remark: on one matter I am in complete agreement with liberals. No large-scale modern state could or should try to have the characteristics of a community in which there is an agreement on goods. For such agreement – or rather the appearance of such agreement – could be achieved on the scale of a nation-state only by being coercively and unjustly imposed. When a modern nation state claims to be the locus and source of community, it is always a dangerous threat to others. Contemporary nationalisms are of a number of different kinds and some of them are deeply inimical to genuine community, substituting for the bonds of the common good the bonds of ethnic prejudice. (1996a: 9)

What is crucial, he has wanted to say on his own terms, though, is as noted that the required community today be a genuinely moral community: one, that is, with a shared overall conception of the good (i.e. a society of friends with common loves), one that is egalitarian and in which each member is teacher and learner according to his or her needs and capacities, and one which is rationally self-critical – eager, that is, to entertain challenges to its moral and conceptual framework both from without and from within. In order for such critical consciousness to bear fruit for the community (we have seen MacIntyre’s claims that rational self-criticism bears little social fruit in the dominant culture of liberal individualism), there must exist in it appropriate institutionalized forums for debate and a decision-procedure rationally to adjudicate disputes; this is provided for it in part, MacIntyre will say, by the moral community’s overall conception of the human good (about which, he aptly notes, self-described communitarians say very little, if anything) and by its shared though evolving vocabulary, set of canonical texts and authorities, and standards of rational justification. The way that he sees this moral and political vision as distinct from that offered by the liberal social democracy of today’s nation-state can be usefully framed in terms of differing conceptions of hope the two offer. MacIntyre sees his radical Aristotelianism as offering the possibility of an improvement in quality of life in kind for the plain person, since it holds that through a critical and constructive engagement (by contribution and by learning) in common social practices, one is able to transform one’s view of the goods one should be seeking, and so transform oneself (one’s initial habits of judgement and desire) in the process. Constructive participation and personal rational consent in all the social practices in which one is a participant are crucial to this way of thinking about the social and political realms: MacIntyre’s well-ordered society is therefore an eminently personalist society. He contrasts all this with the politics of the nation-state whose aims are merely reformist, a politics which works within the culture of international capitalism (whether as classical liberal – that is, conservative – or as modern liberal) – with

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that culture’s inversion of the order of ends and means and its alienating effects with respect to a large segment of the population – and which buys off the masses with economic and technological benefit even as it denies them the greater benefit of rational participation and a measured and unified (non-compartmentalized) life. In a frequent refrain, MacIntyre will call the political regimes of today’s advanced capitalist countries ‘plutocracies disguised as liberal democracies’: political orders in which money and established interest have a grossly disproportionate influence in political decision-making, and in which a manipulative managerial elite (e.g. in education, in the media, and in politics) sets the terms of participation and ‘choice’ for the common man, excluding him from joint rational deliberation, frequently about the means, and often about the ends, of social action. This same managerial elite in the modern nation-state indeed often enough excludes the ends of social action from rational deliberation tout court. MacIntyre’s considered judgement on the prospects for the well-ordered polity today can therefore best be summarized in his own words as follows. Disagreeing with communitarians in taking ‘fundamental moral conflict to be both more widespread and more politically disabling’ than he thinks they characteristically do, he will add: ‘what is possible and important is for groups informed by an adequately shared conception of human good to build community at the level of particular institutions – schools, farms, other workplaces, clinics, parishes – in local environment’ (1991j: 90). The strategy of enduring the dominant culture of advanced capitalist modernity with a politics of local self-defence, while outlasting it, is the political solution (‘remedy’ being too strong a word here) which he finally calls for. And in this light, Jane Austen, with her treatment of the virtue of constancy and her keen attention to the local and the small-scale, must yet be, for MacIntyre (Martha Nussbaum again to the contrary: see Nussbaum, 1989), a highly relevant moral example for our time. One crucial lesson that MacIntyre thinks is to be learned from Marx (Marx’s critique of Feuerbach specifically – see MacIntyre’s important late essay ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road not Taken’, 1994a) and from the failure of Marxist politics, with its ambitions for large-scale social transformation, is that merely to diagnose the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the dominant social order of acquisitive, individualist modernity is to fall far short of supplanting that social order. Instead, one must create (or really, allow and help to emerge) that form of social life, with its constituent social practices, that embodies a right understanding of goods, duties, and virtues and their inter-relation. And this effort we ought to have learned by now, MacIntyre will insist with much justification, must be small-scale. Local regeneration and self-defence is the order of the day, according to the sum of his arguments, not large-scale transformation – nor, as he has consistently opposed, any kind of transcendental individualism (e.g. Christian, Stoic or otherwise), any kind of abandonment of the social as the realm for the good life. So, other than perhaps his romantic aversion to urban life, the charge that MacIntyre is in any other sense a romantic, particularly a conservative romantic, holds little weight given the abundance of discourse throughout his published works, and from the very beginning of his intellectual career, about the exigence of progress in and through

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intellectual and cultural traditions, and about the importance of attentiveness to historical conditions for the embodiment of forms of social life. 9.5

Reactionary Anti-modernism?

Is MacIntyre, though, finally a Golden Ager, according to Hilary Putnam’s charge? Does he, as Bernard Williams claimed, show a certain weakness for the myth of a Fall (Williams, 1985: 220, n. 7)? There can be no denying that the story he tells of the history of Western moral and political theory from Homer up to contemporary analytic philosophy is unabashedly a narrative of things coming apart – of a rise followed by marked decline – with intellectual and social developments at the end of the thirteenth century representing a kind of high water mark, followed by fragmentation and disunification thereafter. For instance: One of the claims I make [in After Virtue] is that it was primarily a transformation of the modes of practical activity in late medieval and early modern European society – and of the understanding of practical activity – that led first to a misunderstanding of and then to the rejection of the moral scheme articulated by Aristotelian theory and further developed by medieval Aristotelians, most notably by Aquinas. That scheme had integrated a conception of the virtues with corresponding conceptions of law, of the final human good and of the relationship of reason to the passions. One consequence of its rejection was a fragmentation of that scheme, so that the relationship between the virtues, law and the human good and that between reason and the passions became inherently problematic, matter for debate between new rival accounts … [which were] contributions to the Enlightenment project. About these accounts my claim is not only that they fail by Aristotelian standards, but, much more importantly, that they fail by the standards of the Enlightenment. (1995g: 7)

But it would be strange if MacIntyre’s narrative were taken to be highly implausible simply because it charted significant forms of decline – as if one could have in advance any highly warranted view of which way the historical process is likely to go and for how long it is likely to go that way. And MacIntyre is perfectly willing to have the plausibility of his (partially) anti-modern narrative rest on the explanatory value of its historiography: it is certainly here that critics have the best chance of rationally undermining that narrative by drawing on rival theories of the good and telling a different story based on these – one that aspires to be more illuminating concerning our present moral and social difficulties. We have noted MacIntyre’s list of the causes of moral decline – they are several, and in various ways inter-related: each of them puts pressure on, and acts as a solvent for, the kind of moral community (the virtuous, rationally self-critical, morally homogeneous community) in and through whose flourishing, he thinks, the good and the best life for persons can alone be had. Thus, we have seen his discussion of the corrosive effects of large-scale economic modernization – where economic progress and development cease to be adjusted to local needs and to the circumstances of persons – and of the other-worldly individualism of the Reformation, with its

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abandonment of the social-cum-political world as a realm in which the integral good life is to be sought. We have seen also his discussion of that fragmentation and disunification of academic inquiry begun in the late Middle Ages, where theological and philosophical inquiry cease to work in close inter-relation, and where both cease actively to bring their theses and overall outlook into systematic relation with the work of the sciences and the other disciplines of learning. With this intellectual fragmentation and the loss of a unified framework for moral and theoretical inquiry is lost also any way of marking intellectual progress – and any way of making debate about the big questions in metaphysics and morals intellectually and socially fruitful. We have seen his extended account of the failed attempts of modern theorists to identify these sources of moral and social decline and their consequently failed attempts rationally to justify a common moral outlook for our time. We have seen further his treatment of the failure of large-scale programmes of social reform, defective for relying undemocratically on methods of manipulative bureaucratic management – or on other elitist forms of non-rational persuasion, such as political violence in the case of Soviet Marxism – and so having proved incapable of re-constituting the social realm so that it can once again serve the flourishing of persons (i.e. humans-of-equal-moral-worth-in-relation). But critics have underestimated or overlooked the degree to which MacIntyre is also a progressive, one who in his very early work spoke of history as a series of developing purposes, but who never thereby adopted a theory of historical inevitability, and who in time has come to take a much less teleological view of the historical process as such. MacIntyre has regularly applauded the Enlightenment ideal of developing a shared, rationally justified moral outlook to give shape to public life; consider, for instance, his fairly recent remark that ‘the Enlightenment project was a heroic attempt to provide a shared morality acceptable to rational persons in a morally impoverished society, that of the ancien regime’ (1995g: 4). And he has also long rejected any form of cultural atavism, including those forms of atavism that look to Christian theology for their legitimation. The social and intellectual imperative for him instead has been coming to grips with the inadequacies of today’s large-scale political orders (the nation-states of advanced capitalist modernity), while seeking resources out of our civilizational past – and working with the natural inclination to the genuine and complete good, rooted in the person, and socially manifested in co-operative undertakings such as practices – in order, while functioning within that generally pragmatically useful if intellectually incoherent large-scale political framework, to be as unaffected by those inadequacies as possible, and to forge ahead with the project of building a rationally and morally progressive virtuous community. But does MacIntyre have anything good to say about the modern world? He certainly acknowledges its material benefits for the formerly dispossessed masses. What, though, of the distinctively modern embracing and defending of values such as autonomy and equality? And what of progressive social movements such as the abolition of slavery, the extension of suffrage, the women’s movement, the expansion of religious liberty, the civil rights movements in the United States and

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elsewhere, and the human rights movement generally? Is not MacIntyre a Golden Age reactionary for lacking in his moral and political theory any sense for the forms of large-scale moral progress such as the modern era is thought to have ushered in? A number of distinctions are called for here, and it will be enough first to recall his somewhat cryptic and unheralded statement in A Short History of Ethics that: ‘In our society the acids of individualism have for four centuries eaten into our moral structures, for both good and ill’ (SH: 266; emphasis added). We have seen from Short History that MacIntyre is actually rather drawn to accounts of collective moral progress (not surprising in an erstwhile Marxist) – for instance, the account present in the moral and political theory of T.H. Green. And we have seen his subsequent adoption of the notion of a unified secular narrative quest, partly inspired by his reading of Kant. So while it does seem true that he lacks any explanation of largescale moral progress, he is likely to defend himself against the accusation of being ungenerous to the modern world along the following lines. Moral modernity is distinguished by its rejection of a telos for human nature as such; political modernity is an adjustment in the rule-governed organization of society to this new anthropological outlook. But in abandoning the notion of the teleological ordering of human nature in their theories of practical rationality, modern moral theorists have bifurcated considerations of duty and considerations of utility or beneficial consequence – and they have created an incoherent conceptual framework for morals as a result. What we need contrariwise is a standpoint that integrates Kant and Mill – that is, we need Aquinas (i.e., even if MacIntyre thinks the moral doctrine of Aquinas is not always to be followed in all its details, see MacIntyre’s Tanner Lectures, ‘Truthfulness, Lies and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn from Mill and Kant?’, 1995b, reprinted in EP: 101–42, for an exemplification of this). Moderns have consequently been unable rationally to justify the traditional precepts of morality for all reasonable members of the social order as promised. Their defence of a value such as autonomy, for instance, is often really a defence of something like anomie, and one might note that the relative absence of a defence of autonomy rightly conceived in MacIntyre’s own moral theory is something he sought notably to redress in his latest book, Dependent Rational Animals: we recall DPR’s extended discussion of those virtues of independent practical reasoning by which the moral agent is able to liberate him- or herself from sub-rational and irrational dependencies so as to discover and rightly exemplify his or her individualdistinctiveness-in-community. Furthermore, moderns’ defence of pluralism is often really but a celebration of conceptual confusion and incoherence. Much modern moral theory is thereby responsible for the distorting moral framework with which many plain persons operate today according to which personal choice is the source and cause of value, instead of informed discovery concerning the good for human nature (i.e. human nature taken individually and as socially situated). Moreover, there is the unappealing social harvest of fragmentation that the modern world, having once sown its new seed, is now reaping – a social order populated by agents each seeking his or her own private and privately conceived notion of the good. We thus continue to witness

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the simultaneous rise of individualism, with its associated culture of defensive rights claims, and the rise of a corresponding manipulative bureaucracy which alone seems capable of managing the new anarchy of individuals’ desires. Without the possibility of any shared notion of the highest good to bring harmony and unity to practical deliberation, the moral life has also been fragmented into a set of spheres (personal, domestic, commercial, religious, political), each sphere with its associated roles, its own standards for success and its own (sham) virtues – sham virtues, MacIntyre will say, since a quality of mind or character which does not serve the self as such, but only the self-in-compartmentalized-role-x and relative to some limited perceived good y, is not a quality of mind or character perfective of the whole self in its movement towards its integral and complete good; it is therefore a counterfeit virtue. Finally, MacIntyre would likely say in defence of his pronounced anti-modernism, that with the modern world’s abandonment of a teleology for human nature as such comes intellectual and academic disunification. It is not so much in the early modern period and the early stages of the Enlightenment, but in the subsequent inheriting of the Enlightenment’s intellectual failures that we have witnessed the progressive professionalization and marginalization of academic inquiry. Theory has become severed from practice to the degree that the fruits of academic inquiry in the moral sciences have become the preserve of a specialized elite who are often unconcerned about the social exemplification of their labours. Meanwhile, political regimes and political leaders have increasingly immunized themselves from theoretical criticism and shown themselves incapable of giving any satisfactory and socially compelling non-pragmatic rational justification for their exercises of political power. Now all this, MacIntyre is likely to say in defending his pronounced anti-modern stance, is not something that makes him want to celebrate the various social and moral advances (with notable regressions) that we have witnessed in the development of modernity. Let others celebrate the achievements, seems to be his view, such voices are not in short supply. His interest, rather, has been corrective: with drawing our attention to the deep internal contradictions, both theoretical and practical, in the modern social and ethical project in its pure form. And his own account and defence of the tradition of the virtues as a tradition of rational inquiry is an account of a social community with the means for social and moral progress built into it: namely, an ongoing, systematically conducted dialectical inquiry, both practical and theoretical, concerning the good, carried out both internal to the tradition and externally in engagement with its rivals. On an opposite critical note, and in a thoughtful reaction to MacIntyre’s moral and political project, Gary Gutting has argued that MacIntyre, because of among other things his progressivist and historicist commitments, is a modern malgré lui (Gutting, 2001: 69ff., esp. 97–107). But in view of the preceding, it makes little sense to try to position Macintyre in some binary ancient versus modern scheme (e.g. as a disciple of Leo Strauss might). From at least the time of A Short History of Ethics to the present, there have been an abundance of detailed considerations in his work about how much is to be learned from modern and pre-modern thinkers alike.

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So the idea that MacIntyre somehow set out to be a rigorous anti-modern, and then failed on his own terms, is wrong-headed, although undoubtedly MacIntyre’s overall project has been preponderantly recoverist in nature – trying to reach back behind modernizing distortions of forms of pre-modern philosophical theory and ethical and political practice, all the while aiming to incorporate significant lessons learned from modern theorists (Montesquieu, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Mill and so on: for an interesting indication of just how indebted MacIntyre’s own conception of moral inquiry and the social community is to Mill see, for instance, MacIntyre’s Tanner Lectures, e.g. EP: 114–20, 135–41, and compare MacIntyre’s exegesis of Mill here with his own prior work on the relation between moral inquiry and social community). 9.6

Morality Justified?

A frequent charge against MacIntyre’s work in ethics is that, for all its illuminating historical vistas and informativeness, its analytical or justificatory pay-off is slim. More fundamentally, in a short but suggestive review of After Virtue published some time ago, Philippa Foot has charged MacIntyre with failing finally to solve ‘the problem posed by Plato, and never solved … that of showing the rationality, for any man, of a thorough-going acceptance of the restraints of justice’ (Foot, 1981: 1 097). Foot’s claim is that the moral subjectivist or sceptic à la Nietzsche or Callicles or Thrasymachus might perhaps be brought on board to accept that the good life for man requires the subsidiary exercise of virtues like courage and patience (and, in Nietzsche’s case at any rate, a conformity to impersonal standards of justice among the equal). But none of these types of moral agent would be convinced by MacIntyre’s arguments to accept some robust concept of justice with its corresponding constraints on action. Both of these objections call for closer consideration. With respect to the first, it is true that at the end of the day, when all the comparative and historical words have been spoken, MacIntyre’s effort to justify rationally our submission to the positive and negative dictates of morality boils down to his distinction between goods internal and goods external to practices (or between goods of effectiveness versus goods of excellence) and the different means to their attainment. Or rather, it boils down to that distinction supplemented by considerations concerning the unity-of-anindividual-life-in-community. We can begin by considering the internal–external goods distinction. MacIntyre’s point here relies on some fairly straightforward philosophical psychology and some empirical claims about the conditions for human fulfilment and self-realization. Crucial, he has argued, to that self-realizing satisfaction and fulfilment which we are capable of and which we often, though not always, spontaneously seek (but which corresponds, in any event, to our deepest needs and desires) is that satisfaction which supervenes upon successfully achieved rational activity – the activity involved in things such as building, creating, solving practical and theoretical problems having to

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do with our physical survival and or our physical, emotional, aesthetic, or intellectual advancement; or, the activity involved in forming and sustaining affective bonds with one another, all the while learning from and teaching one another about the good in the process, or the work of establishing and maintaining impersonal norms of fairness (including fairness in intellectual debate and inquiry) to sustain us in our practical and theoretical endeavours, or in coming to an increasingly adequate reflective self-understanding, and so forth. But we are incapable of accomplishing much of anything in these domains without both an initial and a continuing reliance upon, and an active participation in, a social community which is also and inevitably a moral community. Furthermore, this supervenient satisfaction (incommensurable between the different rational activities upon which it supervenes) can only be had by participation in socially established and sustained practices (i.e. co-operative enterprises aimed at shared goals), as these practices are the indispensable context of rational human activity. Now one only takes satisfaction in what one is actually desirous of – satisfaction being, characteristically, a kind of resting in the object or goal of our desires once we come to possess it – and something typically had in proportion to the strength of our desires and the intrinsic capacity of the desired object to give satisfaction. Therefore, anyone who would seek to excel in practice-based activity of the kinds listed above solely or primarily for the sake of taking satisfaction in the instrumental benefits that such excellence-in-activity would bring ( the satisfaction brought by external benefits or goods, such as financial remuneration or social reputation or power) would thereby and to that degree be denying themselves the greater supervenient satisfaction of various forms of rational self-satisfaction and self-esteem. Crucial among these, as MacIntyre’s later work begins to elaborate more fully, is that satisfaction supervenient on the virtue of justice, or more precisely, the virtue of just generosity. Such individuals would show themselves to be value-deficient, having failed to measure up to the kind of goods and the kind of corresponding satisfaction or fulfilment of which our shared nature is capable. As for those parasites on the greater social community – and those unwilling to aid the less talented, the less physically fit, the less fortunate generally – these would be denying themselves high human achievements and supervenient satisfactions having to do with the exercise of characteristic human virtues such as fairness, just generosity, magnanimity, empathy, chivalry and so forth. Such individuals would be self-condemned to the enjoyment of largely solipsistic goods, and this to the attenuation of their full humanity. This is because, as Aristotle noted long ago, even rich men (and women, or powerful or genetically or socially fortunate men and women) need friends with which to share (i.e. communicate and receive) human goods – and fairness and reciprocity and generosity towards unequals are each crucial to the realization-through-social-enlargement of the self. It is not clear why MacIntyre need say more on the subject than this, other than to fill in the details. He has in fact written persuasively in Dependent Rational Animals about the way humans are born into a network of (roughly) symmetric and asymmetric relations of dependence – and of how it is accordingly incumbent

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upon a human being, from the very start of his or her life of reason, to acquire and exercise virtues of acknowledged dependence, such as the virtue of just generosity, particularly towards the disadvantaged, if he or she is to enjoy the goods having to do with a social realization of his or her individual humanity. On an opposite critical note, and in a very striking review of After Virtue, George Kateb has accused MacIntyre of precisely trying to justify the fundamental demands of morality rationally, thus denaturing morality in the process – as Kateb holds that all such attempts necessarily do, since morality, in the sense of justice, is neither in need nor capable of rational justification any more than ‘things that it resembles and that it nourishes and is nourished by – love, friendship, acquaintance, fellow feeling, collegiality, fraternity, solidarity’ (Kateb, 1982: 434). This is a helpful form of criticism because the answer it requires sheds valuable light on the recoverist nature of MacIntyre’s project in moral philosophy. There is a spontaneous natural morality, MacIntyre has maintained, that comes to life the human world over, and it is forged through time and by trial-and-error experience in practice-based human activity. Attainment of the goods internal to such activity in the context of a larger social community (a community with an identity through time) is what gives a system of moral precepts point and purpose. MacIntyre is perfectly aware that this spontaneous natural morality needs a faithful corresponding articulation in theory to defend it and to keep it on track – and that this natural morality may suffer corruption due to human weakness (an ineradicable tendency to give in to our lesser selves and the lesser goods of our lesser selves, which weakness may fairly easily become institutionalized), or, that it may be undergo ideological deformation: false and distorting theoretical frameworks, that is, may obscure or disguise for participants in practices the rationale for the prereflectively acknowledged and experientially discovered demands of what we have come to call morality. MacIntyre thinks that the modern rejection of a telos to human nature as such has spawned a number of such false and distorting frameworks, so he thinks that what we need to do today, when moral disagreement is rife, is first to see our present moral culture for what it is: a Babel of confusing voices derived from the inheritance of unacknowledged fragments of past incompatible theories of (to a large and potentially much greater extent) shared moral practice. Our way out of this confusion and back to moral coherence and the possibility of a robust social consensus in morals cannot lie in some allegedly neutral analysis of what ‘we’ mean by various moral concepts, since history teaches us that there are rival and incompatible understandings of ostensibly the same moral concept, deriving from rival and incompatible metaphysical outlooks. Nor can it be done on the basis of an appeal to any systematic organization of our ‘intuitions’, since how the world seems to us is a function of how the moral traditions we have inherited (which may already be, often enough are, in inconsistent tension) have conditioned us to think, to feel, and to judge. Nor will formalistic appeals to ‘rationality’ do the job, since rival and incompatible moral traditions house rival and incompatible conceptions of

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what is rational, and no largely formal conception of rationality will provide us with the means rationally to adjudicate conflicts between values, for instance, or between rights. We need therefore to think our way out of the confusion of present moral theorizing about our largely pre-reflective moral practice by re-learning forms of pre-modern moral theory (Aristotle’s pre-eminently), and these will help us to rediscover what we once partially knew – and are always capable spontaneously of coming to know by ourselves participating in social practices in good order. We need to re-discover, that is to say, that moral rules, some of them exceptionless, serve virtues which serve the flourishing of practices in and through which various shareable goods essential to a good human life can alone be had – and that moral argument should therefore centre on public argument about substantive goods and the preconditions for their attainment. Inasmuch as traditional societies may have rival and incompatible explicit understandings of the human telos, MacIntyre – as an essentialist and metaphysical realist (and who with respect to the mind–world relation subscribes, as Aristotle and Aquinas before him did, to a mind–world identity theory) – plausibly thinks that the possibility at least is surely present for such societies to correct or adjust their conceptions and converge toward a shared understanding of the good, inasmuch as each is experientially guided and truth-about-the-good-directed. He also thinks that within their constitutive practices, moral judgements will be capable of socially recognizable objectivity, and that social roles will have socially recognized correlative duties (i.e. where is will entail ought), so that rational, socially accepted moral progress internal to those societies will always be possible and can serve as a basis for subsequent moral convergence between traditions. It is not as if MacIntyre denies that modern moral theory is rich with partial truths – in fact, he thinks that is its outstanding characteristic: Mill, for instance, capturing its appeal to the desires of our rational nature and its teleological character, but missing (with Aristotle as well, in some ways) morality’s at times categorical demands; Kant understanding its categorical demands, but misconstruing its warrant as law, and therefore being incapable of specifying morality’s substantive content and accounting for its intrinsically motivating character; rights theorists and contract theorists (or the Übermensch ethics of Nietzsche) overlooking the fact that one the deepest and most enriching desires we have as humans is to build and make a contribution to a shared social and political life, and to find and achieve our good in so doing. Such modern accounts consistently miss the mark, MacIntyre has argued, owing to their methodologically individualist theorizing, and this is their inevitable lot for having rejected the pre-modern teleological framework for morals. In the aftermath of this rejection of a teleological framework for human nature as such, we have instead the ideologization of virtue – the identification of virtue, monistically conceived, with some narrow content depending on the partial perspective some social group or theorist wishes to give it relative to some partial aspect of, or constraint upon, or goal of the practical life (e.g. one having to do with rights or utility or duties or fairness or

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subjective preference-maximization). However, without a common, teleologically ordered nature to which to appeal (i.e. human nature integrally considered), human choice or decision must finally become sovereign, and we will lack any capacity to decide rationally between sets of rival moral rules. Purely instrumental rationality, MacIntyre will note, cannot help us individually, and, more pointedly, it cannot help us socially in solving inevitable value conflicts and rule conflicts. Hence after virtue, emphasis singular, in MacIntyre’s eponymous study means to direct our attention to the task we face today in recovering the plenary sense of the term: virtues are those qualities of character and mind necessary for a unified-life-incommunity and which minister to the pursuit of the goods internal to practices and to the overarching good or summum bonum of discovering the objective hierarchy between those goods and ordering personal and collective action in accord with that summum bonum (in other words, the narrative quest). MacIntyre is eminently a social discoverist in morals, and he has always argued compellingly that we need to recover, so to speak, the sense of moral discovery. He also thinks there is a space for all these incomplete truths about our practical and moral lives (rights, hypothetical imperatives, morality as categorical law, general utility, teleology, autonomy, rational equality, and respect for persons) – a framework in which they can co-exist without incoherence or mutual destruction – and that is in the moral thought of Thomas Aquinas, the theorist par excellence of natural, and in that respect pre-modern, morality. Thomas Aquinas, the naturalistic, teleological, aretaic, deontologist whose moral theory, in its roots and in MacIntyre’s re-formulation of it, is capable of speaking both to theist and agnostic non-theist alike. But far from seeking some impossible Archimedean justification of morality from the outside it remains for MacIntyre that practice has primacy in morals, and that the solutions for our moral predicaments must be sought first there; he so fully acknowledges that it is barren to seek to ‘justify morality’ theoretically. As he states: What is required is a type of agreement to be rationally worked out and secured in practical activities, those of building and maintaining a variety of social and institutional arrangements. Agreement in theory from this standpoint is by itself barren. Agreement on practical reasoning is always agreement arrived at and embodied in practice. Theoretical reasoning about practice is correspondingly defective unless its agreements are consonant with and derive from reflection upon the agreements of practical reasoning. (1990c: 376)

However, this his own anti-theoretical insistence about appropriately justifying morality, should come as welcome news, he thinks, for the traditional Thomistic moralist because, as he also states – and it is perhaps not inappropriate to conclude this study with MacIntyre’s own words on Aquinas and practical rationality: ‘it is Aquinas’s view that rational persons, who are able to develop their practical rationality in undistorted ways, become natural Thomists without having to read Aquinas’ (1990c: 360).

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Works by Alasdair MacIntyre (1950), ‘Analogy in Metaphysics’, in Downside Review, 1950–51, pp. 45–61. (1951), The Significance of Moral Judgements, Manchester: University of Manchester Library, MA Thesis 7580. (1953), Marxism: An Interpretation, London: SCM Press. (1955a), ‘Visions’, in A. MacIntyre and A.G.N. Flew (eds), New Essays in Philosophical Theology, London: SCM Press, pp. 254–60. (1955b), ‘A Note on Immortality’, in Mind, 64 (July), pp. 396–9. (1955c), ‘Cause and Cure in Psychotherapy’, in Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 29, pp. 43–58. (1956a), ‘Manchester: The Modern Universities and the English Tradition’, in The Twentieth Century, 159 (February), p. 948. (1956b), ‘A Society without a Metaphysics’, in The Listener (13 September), pp. 375–6. (1956c), ‘Marxist Tracts’, in Philosophical Quarterly, 6, pp. 366–70. (1957a), ‘Determinism’, in Mind, 66 (January), pp. 28–41. (1957b), ‘The Logical Status of Religious Beliefs’, in Metaphysical Beliefs: Three Essays by Stephen Toulmin, Ronald W. Hepburn and Alasdair MacIntyre (Preface by A. MacIntyre), London: SCM Press, pp. 157–201. (1957c), ‘What Morality is Not’, in Philosophy, 32, pp. 325–35, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 96–108. (1958a), The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1958b), ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness I’, in New Reasoner, 7, 1958–59 (Winter), pp. 90–100. (1959a), ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness II’, in New Reasoner, 8 (Spring), pp. 89–98. (1959b), ‘Hume on “Is” and “Ought”’, Philosophical Review, 68, pp. 451–68, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 109-24. (1959c), ‘Difficulties in Christian Belief, London: SCM Press. (1959d), ‘Straw Men of the Age’, in New Statesman, 58, October, p. 433. (1960a), ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, in Out of Apathy, introduced by E.P. Thompson, London: Stevens and Sons, pp. 195–240. (1960b), ‘Positivism in Perspective’, in New Statesman, 59 (April), pp. 490–91. (1960c), ‘Comment upon “Commitment and Objectivity”’, Sociological Review Monograph 3 (August), pp. 89–92.

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(1960d), ‘Purpose and Intelligent Action’, in Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 34, pp. 79–96. (1961), ‘Marxists and Christians’, in The Twentieth Century, 170 (Autumn), pp. 28–37. (1963a), ‘A Mistake about Causality in the Social Sciences’, in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society (2nd series), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 48–70. (1963b), Review of John Robinson, Honest to God, in Encounter (September), pp. 3–10, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 12–26. (1963c), Review of Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, in Encounter (December), pp. 73–8, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 52–9. (1964a), Review of Heinrich Meng and Ernst I. Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, in New York Review of Books (February), p. 7. (1964b), Review of R.H. Tawney, The Radical Tradition, in New York Review of Books (July), pp. 21–7, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 38–42. (1964c), Review of Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, in New York Review of Books (September), pp. 15–16. (1964d), ‘Pascal and Marx: On Lucian Goldman’s “Hidden God”’, in Encounter (October), pp. 69–76, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 76–87. (1964e), ‘Against Utilitarianism’, in T.H. Hollins (ed.), Aims in Education, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–23. (1964f), ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’, in J. Hick (ed.), Faith and the Philosophers, London: Macmillan, pp. 115–33. (1964g), ‘Existentialism’, in D.J. O’Connor (ed.), A Critical History of Western Philosophy, New York: Glencoe Free Press, pp. 509–29. (1964h), ‘Marx’, in M. Cranston (ed.), Western Political Philosophers, London: Bodley Head, pp. 99–108. (1964i), ‘Freudian and Christian Dogmas as Equally Unverifiable’, in J. Hick (ed.), Faith and the Philosophers, London: Macmillan, pp. 110–11. (1965a), Reviews of C.G. Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols, and M. Phillipson, Outline of Jungean Aesthetics, in New York Review of Books (February), pp. 5– 6. (1965b), Review of Georg Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann, in Encounter (April), pp. 64–72, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 60–69. (1965c), Pleasure as a Reason for Action’, in The Monist, 49 (April), pp. 215–33, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 173–90. (1965d), ‘Imperatives, Reasons for Actions, and Morals’, in Journal of Philosophy, 62, pp. 513–24, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 125–35. (1965e), ‘The Psychoanalists: The Future of an Illusion’, in Encounter (May), pp. 38–43, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 27–37. (1965f), (ed. with Introduction) Hume’s Ethical Writings: Selections from David Hume, New York: Collier Books.

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(1966a), Reviews of Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History, and Herbert Rosinski, Power and Human Destiny, in New York Review of Books (March), pp 24–6. (1966b), ‘Recent Political Thought’, in David Thomson (ed.), Political Ideas, London: Watts, pp. 189–200. (1966c), ‘The Antecedents of Action’, in Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (eds), British Analytical Philosophy, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 205-25, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 191–210. (1966d), A Short History of Ethics, New York: Macmillan. (1967a), ‘Sociology and the Novel’, in Times Literary Supplement, 27 (July), pp. 657–8. (1967b), Review of Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History, in Encounter, 29 (August), pp. 76–8. (1967c), Review of Ved Mehta, The New Theologian, in Encounter, 29 (August) pp. 78–80. (1967d), ‘The Idea of a Social Science’, in Aristotelian Society Supplement, 41, pp. 95–114, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 211–29. (1967e), Secularization and Moral Change, London: Oxford University Press. (1967f), Articles in P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan: ‘Being’, ‘Brunner, Emil’, ‘Egoism and Altruism’, ‘Essence and Existence’, ‘Existentialism’, ‘Freud, Sigmund’, ‘Jung, Carl Gustav’, ‘Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye’, ‘Myth’, ‘Ontology’, ‘Pantheism’, ‘Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch)’. (1967g–1968), Review of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, in Yale Law Journal, 77, pp. 1 032–6, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 48–51. (1968a), ‘Secularisation’, in The Listener (February), pp. 193–5. (1968b), ‘Noam Chomsky’s View of Language’, in The Listener (May), pp. 685–6. (1968c), Review of George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays, in New York Review of Books (May), pp. 26–8. (1968d), ‘Death and the English’, The Listener (June), pp. 719–20. (1968e), ‘The Strange Death of Social Democratic England’, in The Listener (July), pp. 7–8. (1968f), ‘Who Gets Killed? – Alasdair MacIntyre Discusses the Death of Senator Kennedy’, The Listener (July), pp. 80–81. (1968g), Review of Arthur Koestler, Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955–67, in The Listener (September), p. 342. (1968h), Review of Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway (eds), Lenin: The Man, the Theorist, the Leader, in Encounter (May), pp. 71–4, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 43–7. (1968i), Review of Paul Foot, The Politicis of Harold Wilson, and Tyrrell Burgess (ed.), Matters of Principle: Labour’s Last Chance, in The Listener (October), p. 476. (1968j), Review of Jean Meynaud, Technocracy, in The Listener, (November), pp. 723–4. (1968k), Marxism and Christianity, New York: Schocken Books.

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(1969a), Review of David Sills (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, in New York Review of Books (February), pp. 14–16. (1969b), Review of F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, in Encounter, 32 (April), pp. 79–82. (1969c), ‘The Debate About God: Victorian Relevance and Contemporary Irrelevance’, in A. MacIntyre with P. Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism, The Bampton Lectures in America, delivered at Columbia University, 1966, New York: Columbia University Press. (1970a), ‘Gods and Sociologists’, in Encounter, 34 (March), pp. 68–74. (1970b), Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic, London: Fontana. (1970c), ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’, and ‘The Idea of a Social Science’, in Brian R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 62–77. (1970d), with Stephen Toulmin and Ronald W. Hepburn, Metaphysical Beliefs: Three Essays, New York: Schocken Books (2nd edn with Preface by A. MacIntyre). (1970e), (ed.) and introduced with Dorothy M. Emmet, Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, New York: Macmillan. (1971a), ‘A Perspective on Philosophy’, in Social Research, 38, pp. 655–68. (1971b), Review of Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1966–70: A Personal Record, in The Listener (July), pp. 150–51. (1971c), Review of Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921, in New York Review of Books (August), pp. 24–5. (1971d), Against the Self-images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy, London: Duckworth, reprinted by Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978. (1971e), ‘Conversation with A. MacIntyre: Philosophy and Social Theory’, in B. Magee (ed.), Modern British Philosophy, London: Secker and Warburg, pp. 191– 201. (1972a), Review-essay on John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, in Boston University Law Review, 52 (Spring), Centennial Edition, pp. 330–34. (1972b), Review-essay on Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action, in Review of Metaphysics, 25 (June), pp. 737–44. (1972c), ‘Predictability and Explanation in the Social Sciences’, in Philosophic Exchange, I, 3 (June), pp. 5–13. (1972d), Review of Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, in The Listener (December), pp. 835–6. (1972e), ‘Hegel on Faces and Skulls’, in A. MacIntyre (ed.), Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, pp. 219–36. (1972f), ‘Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?’, in P. Laslett, W.G. Runciman and Q. Skinner (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society, Oxford: Blackwell, reprinted in MacIntyre (1971d), pp. 260–79. (1973a), ‘Ideology, Social Science and Revolution’, in Comparative Politics, 5 (April) pp. 321–42.

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(1973b), ‘The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts’, in Ethics, 86 (October), pp. 1–9. (1974a), Review-essay on David Daube, Civil Disobedience in Antiquity, and Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order, in Arion, N.S., I, pp. 425–30. (1974b), Review of Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work, in New York Review of Books (March), pp. 35–6. (1974c), ‘How Virtues Become Vices: Values, Medicine and Social Context’, in H.T. Engelhardt and S.F. Spicker (eds), Evaluation and Explanation in the Biomedical Sciences, Vol. I, Series in Philosophy and Medicine, Boston, MA: Reidel, pp. 97–111. (1974d), ‘Sunningdale: A “colonial” solution’, in The Irish Press (5 June). (1974e), ‘Irish Conflicts and British Illusions’, in New Statesman, 88 (July), pp. 75–6. (1975a), ‘Has Science Any Future?’, in Nicholas Hans Stenech (ed.), Science and Society: Past, Present, and Future, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 356–62. (1975b), Review of Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, in The Yale Review, 65, pp. 251–5. (1975c), with S. Gorovitz, Toward a Theory of Medical Fallibility, in Hastings Center Report (December), pp. 13–23. (1976a), Review of Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, in The Listener (February), p. 251. (1976b), Review of C.B. Macpherson, On Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 6, pp. 177–81. (1976c), ‘Power and Virtue in the American Republic’, in The Case For and Against Power for the Federal Government, Ripon: Ripon College Press, pp. 16–20. (1976d), ‘Causality and History’, in J. Manninen and R. Tuomela (eds), Essays on Explanation and Understanding, Studies in the Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Reidel. (1977a), ‘Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?’, and ‘A Rejoinder to a Rejoinder’, in H.T. Engelhardt Jr and D. Callahan (eds), Knowledge, Value and Belief, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Hastings Center, pp. 25–43; 75–8. (1977b), ‘Patients as Agents’, in S.F. Spicker and H.T. Engelhardt (eds), Philosophical Medical Ethics: Its Nature and Significance, Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Reidel, pp. 197–212. (1977c), ‘Utilitarianism and the Presuppositions of Cost-benefit Analysis’, in Kenneth Sayre (ed.), Values in the Electric Power Industry, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 217–37. (1977d), ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science’, in The Monist, 60, pp. 453–72. (1978a), ‘How to Identify Ethical Principles’, in The Belmont Report: Ethical Principals and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, I, Washington, DC: DHEW Pub. No. (OS) 78-0013.

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(1978b), ‘Behaviorism: Philosophical Analysis’, in Warren T. Reich et al. (eds), Encyclopaedia of Bioethics, New York: Macmillan, pp. 110-15. (1978c), ‘Kissinger-Brinkley Horror Comic’, in New York Times (3 February). (1978d), Reviews of Sisela Bok, Lying, Charles Fried, Right and Wrong, and Paul Ramsay, Ethics at the Edges of Life, in New Republic (6 May), pp. 28–30. (1978e), Review of E. Flower and M.G. Murphy, A History of Philosophy in America, in New England Quarterly, 51, pp 439–42. (1978f), Review of E. Gellner, The Legitimation of Belief, in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 29, pp. 105–10. (1978g), ‘The Right to Die Garrulously’, in Ernan McMullin (ed.), Death and Decision, American Association for the Advancement of Science Selected Symposium 18, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 75–84. (1978h), ‘What has Ethics to learn from Medical Ethics?’, in Philosophic Exchange, 2 (Summer), pp. 37–47. (1978i), ‘Objectivity in Morality and Objectivity in Science’, in H.T. Engelhardt and D. Callahan (eds), Morals, Science and Sociality, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Hastings Center, pp. 21–39. (1979a), ‘Ethical Issues in Attending-Physician Resident Relations’, in Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 55 (January), pp. 57–61. (1979b), ‘Seven Traits for the Future’, in Hastings Center Report (February), pp. 5–7. (1979c), Review of B. Knie-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, in American Historical Review, 84 (February), pp. 113–14. (1979d), ‘Corporate Modernity and Moral Judgement: Are They Mutually Exclusive?’, in K. Sayre and K. Goodpaster (eds), Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, pp. 122-35. (1979e), ‘Power Industry Morality’, in Symposium, Washington, DC: Edison Electric, pp. 94–108. (1979f), Reviews of S.M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil, and H. Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today, in Hastings Center Report (April), pp. 28–9. (1979g), Review of I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories, in New Republic (9 June), pp. 34–5. (1979h), ‘Why is the Search for the Foundations of Ethics so Frustrating?’, in Hastings Center Report (August), pp. 16–22. (1979i), ‘Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority’, in Maria J. Falco (ed.), Through the Looking Glass: Epistemology and the Conduct of Enquiry. An Anthology, Washington, DC: University Press of America pp. 42–58. (1979j), Review of John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, in London Review of Books (20 December), pp. 4, 6. (1979k), ‘Theology, Ethics and the Ethics of Medicine and Health Care: Comments on Papers by Novak, Mouw, Roach, Cahill, and Hartt’, in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 4, pp. 435–43.

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(1979l), Review of S.I. Benn and G.W. Mortimer (eds), Rationality and Social Sciences, in American Journal of Sociology, 85, pp. 217–19. (1980a), ‘Regulation: A Substitute for Morality’, in Hastings Center Report, 10 (February), pp. 31–3. (1980b), ‘The American Idea’, in D.N. Doyle and O.D. Edwards (eds), America and Ireland 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 57–68. (1980c), Reviews of G.E. MacDonald (ed.), Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A.J. Ayer with his Replies to Them, and Cora Diamond and Jenny Teichman (eds), Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G.E.M. Anscombe, in London Review of Books (17 April), pp. 9–10. (1980d), Reviews of Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, and Ted Honderich and Myles Burnyeat (eds), Philosophy As It Is, in London Review of Books (June), pp. 15–16. (1980e), Review of Eric Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice, in American Historical Review, 85 (June), p. 605. (1980f), Review of J.S. Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamiltin’s Philosophy, in London Review of Books (October), pp. 13–14. (1980g), Review of Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, in London Review of Books (November), pp. 14–15. (1980h), ‘Contexts of Interpretation: Reflections on Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method’, in Boston University Journal, 26, 3, pp. 41–6. (1980i), ‘Rumpelstilskin’s Rules’, in Wellesley Wragtime (December), p. 6. (1980j), ‘A Crisis in Moral Philosophy’, in H.T. Engelhardt (ed.), Knowing and Valuing the Search for Common Roots, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Hastings Center, pp. 18–35. (1981a), Review of Hans Küng, Does God Exist?, in London Review of Books, (February), pp. 7–8. (1981b), Review of Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, in London Review of Books (April), pp. 15–16. (1981c), ‘Why is the Search for the Foundations of Ethics so Frustrating?’, in D. Callahan and H.T. Engelhardt (eds), The Roots of Ethics, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Hastings Center, pp. 16-22. (1981d), ‘The Nature of the Virtues: From Homer to Benjamin Franklin’, in Hastings Centre Report, II (April), pp. 27–34. (1981e), Review of Donald P. Warwick, The Teaching of Ethics in the Social Sciences, in Teaching Philosophy (April), pp. 170–71. (1981f), Review of P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart’s Philosophy, in Ethics, 91 (July), pp. 667–8. (1981g), After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press (2nd edn 1984). (1981h), Review of R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, in New York Times Book Review, 86 (November), p. 7.

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(1982a), ‘Contemporary Moral Culture’, in Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs Annual 1982, Notre Dame, IN: Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs, pp. 26–34. (1982b), Reviews of Gary Wills, Explaining America, and David Hoeveler, James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition, in London Review of Books (February), p. 14. (1982c), Review of M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, in Political Theory, 10 (February), pp. 129–32. (1982d), Review-essay on Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit, in London Review of Books (June), pp. 15–16. (1982e), ‘Philosophy, the ‘other’ Disciplines, and their Histories: A Rejoinder to Richard Rorty’, in Soundings, 65 (Summer), pp. 127–45. (1982f), ‘Risk, Harm and Benefit Assessments as Instruments of Moral Evaluation’, in T. Beauchamp, R.R. Faden, R.J. Wallace Jr and L. Walters (eds), Ethical Issues in Social Science Research, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 127–45. (1982g), ‘Review of E. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, in Commonweal (September), pp. 471–2. (1982h), Review of Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth Century Harvard, in William and Mary Quarterly, 39 (November), pp. 687–9. (1982i), Review of A.J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, in New York Review of Books (November), pp. 3–26 (1982j), ‘Comments on Frankfurt’, in Synthese, 53 (November), pp. 291–94. (1982k), ‘How Moral Agents Became Ghosts or Why the History of Ethics Diverged from That of the Philosophy of Mind’, in Synthese, 53 (November), pp. 295– 312. (1982l), ‘Intelligibility, Goods, and Rules’, in Journal of Philosophy, 79, (November), pp. 663-5. (1983a), ‘The Indispensability of Political Theory’, in D. Miller and L. Siedentop (eds), The Nature of Political Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 17–33. (1983b), ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’, Charles F. Adams Lecture, Brunswick, MN: Bowdoin College (28 February). (1983c), ‘Moral Rationality, Tradition, and Aristotle: A Reply to Onora O’Neill, Raimond Gaita and Stephen R.L. Clarke’, in Inquiry, 26 (Spring), pp. 447–66. (1983d), ‘Moral Arguments and Social Contexts’, in The Journal of Philosophy, 80 (October), pp. 590–91. (1983e), ‘The Magic in the Pronoun “My”’, in Ethics, 94 (October), pp. 113–25. (1983f), Review of V.R. Mehta, Beyond Marxism, in Political Theory, 11 (November), pp. 623–6. (1983g), Review of P. Caws, Sartre, in Journal of Philosophy, 80 (December), pp. 813–17. (1983h), ‘To Whom is the Nurse Responsible?’, in C.P. Murphy and H. Hunter (eds), Ethical Problems in the Nurse–patient Relationship, Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 73–83.

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(1983i), with Stanley Hauerwas (eds), Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (1984a), ‘Bernstein’s Distorting Mirrors: A Rejoinder’, in Soundings, 67 (Spring), pp. 30–41. (1984b), Review of Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica, in Teaching Philosophy, 7 (April) pp. 168–70. (1984c), Review of D.F. Norton, David Hume: Commonsense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician, in Nous, 18 (May), pp. 379–82. (1984d), ‘A Perspective on Philosophy’, in Social Research (Summer), pp. 477–91. (1984e), ‘Philosophy and Politics’, in Philosophy and Human Enterprise, United States Military Academy Class of 1951 Lecture Series 1982–83, West Point, NY: USMA, pp. 131–61. (1984f), ‘The Claims of ‘After Virtue’, in Analyse und Kritik, 6, pp. 3–7. (1984g), Is Patriotism a Virtue?, The Lindley Lecture, Lawrence, KS: Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas. (1984h), ‘Hegel on Faces and Skulls’, in T. Honderich (ed.), Philosophy Through its Past, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 318–34. (1984i), After Virtue (2nd edn with additional chapter responding to critics), Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (1984j), The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past’, in R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–48. (1984k), ‘Does Applied Ethics Rest on a Mistake?’, in The Monist, 67 (October), pp. 498–513. (1984l), ‘After Virtue and Marxism: A Response to Wartofsky’, in Inquiry, 27 (Winter), pp. 251–4. (1985a), Review of H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in American Journal of Sociology, 90 (January), pp. 924–6. (1985b), ‘How Psychology Makes Itself True – and False’, in S. Koch, and D.E. Leary (eds), A Century of Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 897–903. (1985c), Review of Michael Slote, Goods and Virtues, in Faith and Philosophy, II (April), pp. 204–7. (1985d), ‘Relativism, Power and Philosophy’, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 59, 1, pp. 5–22. (1985e), Review of N.J.H. Dent, The Moral Psychology of the Virtues, in The Review of Politics, 47 (July), pp. 436–8. (1985f), ‘Medicine Aimed at the Care of Persons Rather than What?’, in E.J. Cassell and M. Siegler (eds), Changing Values in Medicine, Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, pp. 83–96. (1985g), ‘Rights, Practices and Marxism: Reply to Six Critics’, in Analyse und Kritik, 7, pp. 234-48. (1986a), Reviews of D.B. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, and J.T. Noonan Jr, Bribes, in Ethics, 96 (January), pp. 429–31.

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(1986b), Review of A. Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity, in Ancient Philosophy, 6, pp. 242–5. (1986c), ‘Positivism, Sociology, and Practical Reasoning: Notes on Durkheim’s Suicide’, in A. Donagan, A.N. Perovich Jr and M.V. Wedlin (eds), Human Nature and Natural Knowledge, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 87–104. (1986d), ‘The Intelligibility of Action’, in J. Margolis, M. Krausz and R.M. Burian (eds), Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 63–80. (1986e), ‘Which God Ought We to Obey and Why?’, in Faith and Philosophy, III (October), pp. 359–71. (1986f), ‘The Humanities and the Conflicts of and with Traditions’, in Interpreting the Humanities 1986, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 17–33. (1987a), ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’ in G. Haydon (ed.), Education and Values, London: London University Press, pp. 15–36. (1987b), ‘Can One Be Unintelligible to Oneself?’, in C. McKnight and M. Stchedroff (eds), Philosophy in its Variety: Essays in Memory of François Bordet, Belfast: The Queen’s University at Belfast, pp. 23–37. (1987c), ‘Post-Skinner and Post-Freud: Philosophical Causes of Scientific Disagreement’, in H. Tristam Engelhardt Jr and A.L. Caplan (eds), Scientific Controversies: Case Studies in the Resolution and Closure of Disputes in Science and Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.295–311. (1987d), ‘Philosophy: Past Conflicts and Future Direction’, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. Supplement to Vol. 61 (September), pp. 81–7. (1987e), ‘Traditions and Conflicts’, in Liberal Education, 73 (November/December), pp. 6–13. (1987f), How to Be a North American, Washington, DC: Federation of State Humanities Council. (1987g), ‘Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure’, in Irish Philosophical Journal, 4, pp. 3–19. (1987h), ‘J.N. Findlay 1903–87’, in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 16 (Autumn/Winter), pp. 4–7. (1988a), ‘Rival Justices, Competing Rationalities’, in This World, 21 (Spring), pp. 78–87. (1988b), ‘Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats’, in V. Bell and L. Lerner (eds), On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 145–58. (1988c), ‘Sophrosune: How a Virtue Can Become Socially Disruptive’, in P.A. French, T.E. Vehling Jr and H.K. Wettstein (eds), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 13, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 1–11. (1988d), Review of Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan, in Ethics, 98 (April), pp. 587–8. (1988e), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

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(1989a), Review of S.D. Hudson, Human Character and Morality, in Nous, 23 (June), pp. 389–90. (1989b), with Eduardo Nolla Blance, ‘¿Qué puede aprender la Nueva Europa de la vieja América?’, in Venti Uno, I (Verano), pp. 74–85. (1989c), ‘Imaginative Universals and Historical Falsification’, in G. Tagliacozzo and D.P. Verene (eds), New Vico Studies, 6, pp. 21–30. (1990a), ‘The Form of the Good, Tradition and Enquiry’, in R. Gaita (ed.), Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, London: Routledge, pp. 242–62. (1990b), ‘Despues de Trans la Virtud’, in Atlantida, I, 4, pp. 87–95. (1990c), ‘“The Privatization of Good”: An Inaugural Lecture’, in Review of Politics, 52 (Summer), pp 344–61. (1990d), ‘Moral Dilemmas’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50, Supplement (Fall), pp. 367–82. (1990e), ‘Individual and Social Morality in Japan and the United States: Rival Conceptions of the Self’, in Philosophy East and West, 40 (October), pp. 489– 97. (1990f), ‘The Gifford Lectures: Some Modest Proposals’, in Scots Philosophical Newsletter, 3 (October), pp. 4–6. (1990g), ‘The Return to Virtue Ethics’, in Russell E. Smith (ed.), The Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Vatican II, Braintree: The Pope John Centre, pp. 239–49. (1990h), First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. (1990i), ‘Rejoinder to My Critics, Especially Solomon’, in Review of Politics, 52, pp. 375–7. (1990j), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (1990k), Review of R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, in Journal of Philosophy, 87 (December), pp. 708–11. (1990l), ‘Books for Christmas’, in The American Spectator (December). (1990m), Review of A.R. Jonsen and S. Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, in Journal of the History of Philosophy, 28 (October), pp. 634–5. (1991a), Review of Jonathan Sacks, The Persistence of Faith, in The Tabletm 7 856, 23 (February), pp. 240–42. (1991b), ‘Precis of Whose Justice: Which Rationality?’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51 (March), pp. 149–52. (1991c), ‘Reply to Dahl, Baier and Schneewind’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51 (March), pp. 169–79. (1991d), ‘Community, Law, and the Idiom and Rhetoric of Rights’, in Listening, 26 (Spring), pp. 96–110. (1991e), Review of A. Broadie, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy, in Philosophical Quarterly, 41 (April), pp. 258–60.

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(1991f), Review of N. Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, in Mind, 100 (July), pp. 415–16. (1991g), Review of T.B. Strong, The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Place, in Ethics, 101 (July), pp. 878–9. (1991h), How to Seem Virtuous Without Actually Being So, Occasional Paper Series, I, Lancaster: Centre for the Study of Cultural Values, Lancaster University. (1991i), ‘How is Intellectual Excellence in Philosophy to be Understood by a Catholic Philosopher?’, in Current Issues in Catholic Higher Education, 12 (Summer), pp. 47–50. (1991j), ‘I’m not a communitarian, but …’, in The Responsive Community, I (Summer), pp. 91–2. (1991k), ‘Reply to Roque’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51 (September), pp. 619-20. (1991l), Review of Gregory Elliott (ed.), Louis Althusser: Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, in ISIS, 82, 313, pp. 603–4. (1991m), Review of C. Gill (ed.), The Person and the Human Mind: Issues in Ancient and Modern Philosophy, in Arion 1, 3, pp 188–94. (1991n), Review of I. Ker and A.G. Hill (eds), Newman After a Hundred Years, in Philosophical Books, 32, pp. 154–6. (1991o), ‘Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation Between Confucians and Aristotelians about the Virtues’, in Eliot Deutsch (ed.), Culture and Modernity. East–West Philosophic Perspectives, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 104–22. (1991p), ‘An Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre’, in Cogito, 5, 2, pp. 67–73. (1991q), Review of Yves Simon, An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Knowledge, in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 65 (Winter), pp. 112–14. (1992a), ‘Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods’, in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 66, 1, pp. 3–19. (1992b), ‘Virtue Ethics’, in L.C. and C.B. Becker (eds), Encyclopedia of Ethics, New York and London: Garland, pp. 1 276–82. (1992c), ‘Colors, Culture and Practices’, in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling Jr. and H.K. Wettstein (eds), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 17, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 1–23. (1992d), Review of T. Pangle, The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Age, in The Review of Politics, 54 (Spring), pp. 311–13. (1992e), Review of Ross Poole, Morality and Modernity, in Radical Philosophy, 60 (Spring), pp. 57–8. (1992f), Review of R. Cessario, The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics, in The Thomist, 56 (April), pp. 339–44. (1992g), ‘What Has Not Happened in Moral Philosophy’, in Yale Journal of Criticism, 5 , pp. 193–9. (1992h), Review of A.N. Balslev, Cultural Otherness: Correspondence with Richard Rorty, in Philosophy East and West, 42 (October), pp. 682–4.

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(1992i), Review of A.O. Rorty, Mind in Action, in Nous, 26, pp. 101–2. (1992j), ‘Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Social Practice: What Holds Them Apart?’, in Arbejdspapirer, 113, pp. 1–22. (1993a), Review of I. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, in New York Times Book Review (January), p. 9. (1993b), ‘Are Philosophical Problems Insoluble? The Relevance of System and History’, in P. Cook (ed.), Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 654-82. (1993c), Review of J. Finnis, Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision and Truth, in Ethics, 103 (July), pp. 811–12. (1993d), ‘Some Sceptical Doubts’, in S.M. Cahn (ed.), Affirmative Action in the University, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 264–68. (1993e), ‘Ethical Dilemmas: Notes from Outside the Field’, in Anthropology Newsletter, 34 (October), pp. 5–6. (1993f), ‘Miller’s Foucault, Foucault’s Foucault’, in Salamagundi, 97 (Winter), pp. 54–60. (1993g), ‘The Objectivity of Good’, The Kathryn Fraser Mackay Lecture for 1988, St Lawrence, NY: St Lawrence University, pp. 1–17. (1993h), ‘Niepokojaca Sugestia’, Prelozyl Adam Chmielewski, in Odra, 33, 6, pp. 42–8. (1993i), ‘Venner og Fremmede-en problematik vedrorende aristoteliske dyder’, in Slagmark, 20 (Winter), pp. 19–36. (1994a), ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken’, in C.C. Gould and R.S. Cohen (eds), Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice, pp. 277–90. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (1994b), Review of J. Elster, Political Psychology, in Ethics, 105, 1, pp. 183–5. (1994c), ‘Critical Remarks on The Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54 (March), pp. 187–190. (1994d), ‘Hume, Testimony to Miracles, the Order of Nature, and Jansenism’, in J.J. MacIntosh and H. Meynell (eds), Faith, Scepticism and Personal Identity, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, pp. 83–99. (1994e), ‘How can we learn what Veritatis Splendor has to teach?’, in The Thomist, 58 (April), pp. 171–95. (1994f), ‘Moral Relativism, Truth and Justification’, in L. Gormally (ed.), Moral Truth and Moral Tradition, Dublin: Four Courts. (1994g), Review of Kai Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy, in International Studies in Philosophy, 26 (Winter), pp. 151–2. (1994h), Review of Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue, in Ancient Philosophy, 14, 4, pp. 410–11. (1994i), ‘A Partial Response to my Critics’, in J. Horton and S. Mendus (eds), After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair McIntyre, Oxford: Polity/Blackwell, pp. 283–304.

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(1994j), ‘My Station and its Virtues’, in Journal of Philosophical Research, 19, pp. 1–8. (1994k), ‘Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre’, in Kinesis, 20 (Spring), pp. 34–47. (1994l), ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle?: Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre’, in Giovanna Borradori, The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn, trans. by Rosanna Crocitto, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 137–52. (1995a), Reviews of D. Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics, and S. Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, in Radical Philosophy, 70 (March/April), pp. 34–5. (1995b), ‘Truthfulness, Lies and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn from Mill and Kant?’, in G.B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 16, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, pp. 309–61. (1995c), Marxism and Christianity, reissue of 1968 edn with new Introduction, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (1995d), ‘An Extended Conversation’, in S. Martin (ed.), Colin Haycraft, 1929–94, London: Duckworth, pp. 72–4. (1995e), ‘Thomism and Philosophical Debate’, in The Maritain Notebook, 3 (Fall), pp. 1–2. (1995f), Histories of Moral Philosophy’, in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1995g), ‘To the Polish Readers of After Virtue’, Introduction to Polish edn of After Virtue. Unpublished English version. (1996a), Interview with Dmitri Nikulin, in Voprosy filosofii, 1, pp. 91–100. (1996b), ‘Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas’, in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 26, 1, pp. 61–83. (1996c), Reviews of R. Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, and S. Blackburn (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, in Philosophical Books, 37 (July), pp. 183–6. (1996d), Review of J. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, in The Review of Politics, 58 (Fall), pp. 807–9. (1996e), Review of James Tully (ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, in The Philosophical Quarterly, 46 (October), pp. 522–4. (1997a), Review of Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, in The Philosophical Quarterly, 47 (January), pp. 94–6. (1997b), A Short History of Ethics (reprint of 1967 edn with new Introduction), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1997c), Foreword to Frederick R. Will, Pragmatism and Realism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. ix–xii. (1997d), with Hans Fink, ‘Introduction’, in Knud Ejer Logstrup, The Ethical Demand, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. xv–xxxviii. (1997e), ‘Natural Law Reconsidered’, review of Anthony Lisska, Aquinas’s Natural Law Theory: An Analytic Reconstruction, in International Philosophical Quarterly, 37, pp. 95–9.

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(1998a), ‘Aquinas’s Critique of Education: Against His Own Age, Against Ours’, in A.O. Rorty (ed.), Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 95–108. (1998b), ‘What Can Moral Philosophers Learn from the Study of the Brain?’, review of Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 58, pp. 865–9. (1999a), Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, London: Duckworth. (1999b), ‘Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency’, in Philosophy, 74 (July), pp. 311–29. (1999c), ‘John Case: An Example of Aristotelianism’s Self-subversion’, in John O’Callaghan and Thomas Hibbs (eds), Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 71–82. (1999d), ‘Moral Pluralism without Moral Relativism’, in Klaus Brinkmann (ed.), Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy, Vol. 1, Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, pp. 1–8. (1999c), ‘Toleration and the Goods of Conflict’, in Susan Mendus (ed.), The Politics of Toleration: Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Life, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 133–55. (2000), ‘Theories of Natural Law in Advanced Modernity’, in Edward B. McLean (ed.), Common Truths: New Perspectives on Natural Law, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, pp. 91–115. (2001), ‘Once More on Kierkegaard’, in John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd (eds), Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, Glencoe, IL: Open Court Press, pp. 339–55. (2005), Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913-1922, Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (2006a), The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2000b), Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Works by Other Authors Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney (1963), The Civic Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Aquinas, Thomas (1995), Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (trans. John Patrick Rowan), South Bend, IN: Dumb Ox Books. Anscombe, G.E.M. (1981), Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Volume III: Ethics, Religion, and Politics, Oxford: Blackwell.

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Kuhn, Thomas (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Larmore, Charles (1989), Review of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, in Journal of Philosophy, 86, pp. 437–42. Leach, Edmund (1954), The Political Systems of Highland Burma, London: Ball. Lewis, H.D. (ed.) (1963), Clarity is Not Enough, London: George Allen & Unwin. MacDonald, Margaret (1954), Philosophy and Analysis, Oxford: Blackwell. McMullin, Ernan (1992), The Inference that Makes Science, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Malinowski, Jacob (1952), The Sexual Life of Savages in North-western Melanasia, London: G. Routledge & Sons. Melden, A.I. (1961), Free Action, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Monk, Ray (1990), The Duty of Genius, London: J. Cope. Murphy, Mark C. (ed.) (2003), Alasdair MacIntyre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, Nancey (1995), ‘Postmodern Non-relativism: Imre Lakatos, Theo Meyerbing, and Alasdair MacIntyre’, in The Philosophical Forum, 27, 1 (Fall), pp. 37–53. Nagel, Thomas (1995), Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969–9, New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha (1989), Review of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, in The New York Review of Books, 36, pp. 36–41. Owens, Joseph (1985), An Interpretation of Existence, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Pieper, Josef (1999), The Silence of St. Thomas, South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press. Polanyi, Karl (1944), The Great Transformation, New York: Farrar & Rhinehart. Popper, Karl (1957), The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Prichard, H.A. (1949), Moral Obligation: Essays and Lectures, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Putnam, Hilary (1970), ‘Is Semantics Possible?’, in Metaphilosophy, 1, pp. 187– 201. —— (1995), ‘Pragmatism, Relativism, and the Justification of Democracy’, in John Arthur and Amy Shapiro (eds), Campus Wars: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 264–73. Rawls, John (1999), Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal (1992), Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Public Life, Vatican City: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (24 November). Rescher, Nicholas (1991), Baffling Phenomena and Other Studies in the Philosophy of Knowledge and Valuation, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press.

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—— (1994), American Philosophy Today and Other Philosophical Studies, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press. Ryle, Gilbert (1949), The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson’s University Library. —— (1971), Collected Papers, 2 vols, London: George Allen & Unwin. Scheffler, Samuel (1983), Review of After Virtue, in The Philosophical Review, 93 (July), pp. 443–7. Strawson, Peter (1949), ‘Ethical Intuitionism’, in Philosophy, 24, pp. 23–33. Stout, Jeffrey (2001), Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (2nd edn), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Toulmin, Stephen (1949–50), ‘Knowledge of Right and Wrong’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 50, pp. 139–56. —— (1956), ‘Principles of Morality’, in Philosophy, 31, pp. 142–53. Tully, James (ed.) (1989), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Williams, Bernard (1985), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winch, Peter (1958), The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, (1929), ‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplement to Vol. 9, pp. 162–71.

Index

Abelard, Peter 261–3 abduction 228, 230 abnormal behaviour 166, 176 abortion 228 absolute dependence 135 absolutism 48, 104, 118, 194, 404 abstract ethics 71, 78, 112 academic forums 374 academic institutions 339–40, 341–3, 363, 372–4 academic philosophy 63, 108, 239, 290–91, 364–5 academic professionalization 108, 114, 429 accountability 276, 370–71, 395, 417 achievements 65, 69, 270, 295, 351–2, 360, 387, 409, 431 acquisitiveness 280, 395 action-dispositions 59, 267, 268 action-enjoining utterances 74 action-guiding rules 12, 16, 19, 41, 46, 69–70, 119, 238, 311, 360, 386–7 action-types 11, 257, 313, 386–8 actions 8, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19, 28, 36, 46–7, 55–6, 67, 99, 104, 157, 242, 265–6, 273, 303, 307, 312, 318, 345, 363, 370, 376, 392, 417 and beliefs 177–8, 189–90, 203–4 causality 191 discrete 191 dispositions 179, 192–3, 196, 388 dual-aspect model 180–81 explanation of 45, 75, 102, 168–9, 171, 174, 178–80, 184–8, 191–2, 217–18, 245–6, 275–6 external causes 181 and freedom 171, 172–4 interpretation 218–19 intrinsic qualities 158 methodology 186–7 and modern ethical dilemmas 71 political 199–200

rational 173–4, 177, 179, 189, 190, 303, 304 right 256 self-created 180 social context 178–9, 184–5, 189ff., 199 and volition 179–83 see also activities; moral action; reasons for action activities 28, 64–5, 269, 271, 377, 395, 409 small-scale 396 adultery 257 advantage-maximizing decisions 202 advice-giving 19, 22 Aesthete 234, 244, 281 aesthetic life 54–5, 130, 238, 244, 280; see also Aesthete Aeterni Patris 346, 352–3 aetiology 227 Africa 198 After MacIntyre (1994) 29, 332, 403, 410 after-life 35, 38, 61, 124–5, 147, 313, 392 agents 11, 15, 20, 24, 40, 60, 69, 97–9, 102–3, 175–6, 178, 192, 217, 219–20, 311–13, 318, 361, 376, 378, 385, 391–2, 399, 430 actions 180–81, 185 beliefs 177, 201 causal 210 competency 9 context 275 political 200 rational actions 173–4, 179, 303–4 self-critical 193–4 self-understanding 186–7 unpredictability 202 and virtues 273–4, 279 see also moral agents agreement 293, 328, 336, 342, 365, 368, 424, 434 see also consensus ahistorical approach 229, 231–2, 292, 346–7, 352, 398

454

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akratic persons 302 Alan of Lille 263 Albertus Magnus 354 Alcibiades 297 Alexandria 29 alien social orders 24, 145, 190, 191, 323 alien traditions 328–30, 367 alienation 41, 79, 91–2, 111, 114–16, 398–9, 425 Almond, Gabriel 205 alternative arrangements 73 altruism 31, 34–5, 37, 42–3, 76, 148, 233, 242, 281, 318, 380 ambiguity 219, 348 American Founding Fathers 85 amorality 47 analogy 85, 123, 128, 143, 176, 191, 351, 363, 370 analytic philosophy 21, 80, 85, 96, 119, 120–21, 225, 227, 231, 243, 246, 261, 275, 290–91, 357, 364, 385, 397, 400 analytic propositions 13 Anderson, John 259 animals 175–6, 375–6 anomalies 219 Anscombe, Elizabeth 73–4 Anselm 152 antecedent conditions 102, 190, 193, 199 anthropology 143–4 anti-foundationalism 69, 85 antinomianism 156 antinomies 369 anti-relativism 48 apodictic principles 310, 358, 412 apodosis 15 appearance 212 application 10–12 appraisal, moral 11, 13–14, 19, 21, 318, 386 apprentices 69, 349–50, 352 approval 7, 8, 10–11, 229 Aquinas, Thomas xvi, 13, 30, 62, 96, 123, 125, 130, 136–7, 264–7, 273, 290, 308–13, 322, 330, 349, 352–3, 355, 365–6, 376, 398, 407, 410–11, 428, 434 achievement of 363 and Aristotle 264–6, 294, 308–9, 311–13, 330, 354–6, 361, 412–13

and Augustine 354–6 conceptual schemes 359–60 doctrine of analogy 128 faculty of will 182 method 308, 310, 353, 355–6, 359, 363, 402, 412, 413 moral theory 311, 360 procedural achievements 402 Summa Theologiae 264–5, 310, 355–6, 360, 366, 392, 412 virtues 265–6, 310, 360 see also Thomism; Thomist-Aristotelian tradition arbitrariness 84, 228, 239, 244, 283–4, 416 aretaic considerations 387 arguments 353; see also moral argument; public argument aristocracy 251, 301 Aristotelianism 50, 72–4, 157, 246, 249, 260–62, 289, 292–3, 306, 309, 316, 330–31, 355, 362, 375, 390, 400–405, 410, 424, 426 decline of 313, 317–18 see also Thomist-Aristotelian tradition Aristotle xiv, 27–9, 30, 32, 36, 40, 53, 60, 61–2, 71, 75, 154, 161, 171, 176, 210, 245, 250, 253, 255–61, 264–6, 268, 273, 299, 300–305, 308–9, 316, 318, 321, 354, 357, 361, 375–6, 378, 380, 389, 398–9, 403, 407–10, 412, 422–3, 431, 433 achievement of, 305–6 criticism of 258–61, 264, 303 defective acts 257 ethical theory 255–9 first principles 357, 413 goods 256–7, 265, 301–3 and great-souled man 375, 380 and justice 300–302 Metaphysics 412 method 301, 353, 411–12 moral community 257–8 moral theory 407 Nicomachean Ethics 27, 255, 257, 258, 264, 265, 271, 375, 387 Physics 210, 412 Politics 271, 301 practical reason 255–6, 261, 299, 304 principle of non-contradiction 413

Index on rational desire 303–4 social limitations of 258–60, 271, 303 teleology 259–60, 271 virtues 301–3 see also Aristotelianism; ThomistAristotelian tradition armed conflict 82 Arnauld 317 artistic practices 351–2; see also aesthetic life assertions 127–8 associations 377, 379, 381, 387 astronomy 213–14 asymmetry 211, 380, 394, 431 atavism 427 atheism 87–8, 141, 143, 150, 151–7 Athens 28, 53, 58, 75, 252–5, 297 atomisation 275, 398 attitudes 6, 7, 10, 14, 144, 198 audiences 341, 348 Augustine 62, 148, 294, 306–8, 312–13, 392, 398; see also Augustinian tradition Augustinian tradition 309, 312, 330, 336, 353–5, 362 Austen, Jane 285, 425 Austin, J.L. 119, 400 authoritarianism 27, 414 authorities, belief-producing 329 authority 17, 36, 50, 64–6, 68–70, 77, 329, 352, 360, 370, 392, 399 ethical 385 explanatory 188 managerial 221–2, 248 political 414–15, 417 religious 130–31, 150, 155, 158–9 traditional ethical 238–9 see also authorities, belief-producing; moral authority; rational authority autonomy 21–3, 38, 66, 68, 84, 97, 103, 117, 235, 240–41, 243–4, 367–8, 387, 392, 398–9, 419, 427–8, 434 Averroes, 354–5, 362 Ayer, A. J., xvii, 3, 46, 231, 243 Azande, 187–8 Bachelard, Gaston 344 background beliefs 74, 189–91, 218, 228, 343, 400, 420

455

background causal processes 210 ‘bad’ 13, 257, 311 barbarians 264 bargaining 325, 380, 394 Barth, Karl 125, 132, 141, 159, 163 base-superstructure framework 40, 96, 98, 393 Baynes, T.H. 372 Bedoiuns 81 behaviour 8, 11, 148, 166–7, 186–7, 386–7 dissimulation 192 emotions 194–7 overt 196–8, 218–19 predictable 173, 182 purposive 176–8 rational 173–4 verbal 196 behaviourism 168, 171, 178, 181, 191, 194–7 being 90; see also ontology belief schemes 84, 87, 95 alien 143–5, 187–8, 329 beliefs 4, 12, 74, 96, 116–17, 119, 199, 200–201, 235, 328–30, 363–4, 370 and action 177–8, 189–90 agents 186–7 change 201–2, 333 conflicting 332 core 330 differences 86 discrete 191 dispositional 196 kernel of 153 normative 106 perceptual 344 rationality of 189–91, 214–15 social 203–4 see also background beliefs, belief schemes; false beliefs; shared beliefs benefits 375, 379 benevolence 34, 42, 53, 239, 281, 318 Bentham, Jeremy 42–3, 67, 72, 85, 104, 242, 310 Bergson, Henri 179 Berlin, Isaiah 146, 254, 284 Bernstein, Richard 217 Bible 90, 136, 160, 262, 264, 353–4 biblical criticism 137 biology 207, 260, 264, 375

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Black, Max 73 Blackburn, Simon 423 Blackstone, Sir William 316–17 blasphemy 81, 160 body 370, 375 Boenhoeffer, Dietrich 141 boundary conditions 208 Boyle, Robert 68 Bradley, F.H. 42, 44–5, 50, 389, 398 Braithwaite, Richard 127, 145 British intellectual culture 101–2 British Labour Party 111 Broad, C.D. 124 Brown, Thomas 36 Bultmann, Rudolf 141 Bureaucrat 234, 245 bureaucratic managers 67, 79, 82–3, 220–22, 247–8, 281, 395, 427 Burke, Edmund 42, 65, 110, 314 Butler, Joseph 34–5, 366 Callicles 254, 295, 430 Calvinism 31, 177–8, 315, 317–18, 331 Cambridge Platonists 33 Campbell, George 139 capacities 39, 260, 265, 350, 360, 376–7, 387, 409 capitalism 35, 41, 81, 91, 93–4, 98, 100, 104, 114, 117, 177–8, 280, 394–6, 418–19, 425 care 72, 78, 379–80 Carlyle Lectures, Oxford 290 Carnap, Rudolf 143–4, 231, 243 Carus Lectures (1997) 374 categorical aspect 60, 241, 433 categorical imperative 62, 237–8, 312 Catholicism xvi, 53–4, 99, 353, 414–15, 419 causal bonds 210 causal monism 211 causal power 182 causal relation 210–11 quadratic 210 cause 7, 102, 124–5, 134–5, 138–9, 148, 167 additive model 211 antecedent physical 180–81, 193 efficient 32, 183, 245 final 182, 245 formal 182

and history 211 of human actions 169, 171, 173, 177, 179–83, 189, 191 in social sciences 177, 200, 208–11, 222 uncaused 182 univocal 208 Celts, medieval 370 Cephalus 25 certitude 4, 5, 15, 17, 412–13 chain 82 change 23–5, 29, 32, 39–40, 49, 55–6, 72, 92, 103, 149, 156, 220, 285, 404 behavioural 201 in belief 201–2, 333 conceptual 145–6, 201, 351 see also social change character 28, 105, 134, 232, 234, 260, 262, 265, 276–7, 303 improvement of 350 character traits 34, 82–3, 167, 192, 251, 257, 270, 350, 375, 387–8, 392, 409, 434 characters 128–9, 232, 234, 238, 247 charity 262, 307, 313, 361 chastity 283 chess 70, 78, 408 choice 17, 25, 41, 44, 46, 51, 54, 70, 131, 175, 179, 182–3, 193, 239, 337, 358, 405, 428 criterionless 55, 69, 97, 231, 238, 254, 273 pre-modern 251 Christ 30, 89, 131, 137, 160, 361 Christian ethics 18–19, 21, 29–30, 32–3, 41, 53–6, 137–8, 141, 153, 154–63, 238, 390 universalism 306, 308 Christianity xvii, 29–33, 35, 39, 62, 95, 99, 119, 249, 261–4, 294, 306–13, 390–93, 410, 412, 427 and Aristotle 157, 261–2, 308–10 belief in 124–5, 127, 129ff., 138, 142–3, 146–7, 149, 152–3, 163, 397 decline of 155–6 discourse 126, 128–9, 132 and history 131, 235 and Marxism 87–9, 91, 93, 109–10 modern crisis 142, 146–7, 151, 152–3, 155–6

Index moral beliefs 137–8, 141, 148, 153, 154–63 rationality of 124, 130 and revelation 137, 156, 158 and social context 142, 147, 149, 151, 154–6 teleology 262, 263 worship 127–30 see also Christian ethics; Christians Christians 137, 147–8 and philosophy 132–4 Church 141, 315, 317 Cicero 306–7, 310 citizens, Greek 254, 302 city-states, Greek 29, 81, 2513, 258, 263, 302, 399 civic virtues 83, 107, 252–4 civilization 110 clarity 73, 342 class, social 27, 29, 41, 51, 61, 85, 91, 93, 100, 103–4, 107, 114, 149, 210, 259, 320, 415 classical ethics 238, 240; see also Greek philosophy classical theory of value 75 classification 125–6, 190, 219, 246, 344 cognition 46, 52, 212, 231 cognitive processes 6, 11 coherence 81, 229, 432 cohesion 73 Coleman, Janet 410–11 Coleridge, S.T. 108 collective activities 271–2, 352 Collingwood, R.G. 45, 56, 92, 227, 310, 398, 410 commands 19, 22, 363; see also divine commands commitments 364–5, 381–2, 390, 400 commoditization 94 common good 22, 37, 45, 75–6, 161, 255, 257, 270, 296, 369, 380–81, 394, 399, 409, 416–17, 419 decline of 313 common interest 315 common life 100, 256, 267 common practices 198, 269 common sense 34, 36, 107, 319, 322–3 common standards 215, 227 Communist Party xvi–xvii, xviii, 87

457

communitarianism 54, 62, 75, 396, 423–5 community 20, 29, 39, 48, 50, 51, 53, 60, 62, 75, 78, 79, 81, 83, 92–3, 100, 105, 257, 272, 286, 349, 351, 376–7, 379–81, 387–8, 395, 417, 419 breakdown of 66, 156–7, 280, 282 defects 424 and divine obedience 161–2 egalitarian 115, 424 new forms of 64, 94 pre-industrial 149 romantic 423–4 self-criticism 424 small-scale 396, 399, 423, 425 social 329 see also moral community; political communities comparative politics 197 compartmentalization 275, 345, 399, 418, 425, 429 compassion 88, 92, 94 compatibilism 172 compensation 206 computers 175, 245 concepts 185–6, 201, 240, 300, 389–91, 413–14 disagreement about 143 and divine command 161 see also social concepts conceptual change 40, 121, 281 conceptual differences 335–6, 359–60 conceptual schemes 143–5, 152, 187–8, 246, 309, 360 conceptual work 118–19 conceptualization 55, 344 conclusions 14, 325, 344, 356, 358, 386 conditions 12, 201, 208 Condorcet 65, 246 confessional institutions 374 conflict 18, 59, 80, 83, 220–21, 282, 291, 309, 325–6, 331, 367–8, 373, 405 goods of 259, 268, 273 Greek 253–5 see also moral conflict confusion 45, 48, 50, 74, 229, 253, 283, 339, 342, 428, 432–3 conscience 35, 37–8, 312 conscientia 312, 322 conscientious objector 8, 10

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consciousness 112, 128, 194, 276 consensus 57, 66, 83, 84, 86, 204, 219–20, 228, 292, 329, 332, 342, 345, 364–5, 368, 373, 420–21, 432 consequences 16, 35, 60, 67, 118 consequentialism 31, 34, 97 conservatism 27, 65, 110, 282, 425 consideration 318 consumers 104, 394–5 content 48, 60–61, 70, 76, 124, 232, 237–8, 277, 311, 358 context 6, 10, 18, 74–5, 77, 86, 126, 192, 215, 228, 254, 279, 292, 329, 346, 352, 356 see also social context contingency 31, 58, 136–7, 346 continuity 204 contract 10, 12, 31–2, 72, 290, 321, 433 control 222 convention 25, 28 cooperation 53, 149, 269, 380 Copernicus 214 corporate world 66, 79–81 correlation 186 correspondence 6, 333 corruption 65, 92, 200 cosmic law 263 cosmic order 25–6, 29, 81, 119, 240, 251, 294, 399 cosmological argument 135, 136–7 cost-benefit analysis 66, 79 counter-examples 203, 205–6, 219, 220, 231, 305, 323, 386 counter-factual conditionals 108 courage 58, 77, 253, 265–7, 270, 272, 278, 296, 310, 381–2, 408 covenant 157, 161, 262 crafts 349–53, 360, 381 authority in 352 progress in 351–2 second-order 350 subordinate 351 and theological inquiry 353–4 see also social practices craftsmen, master 350 creativity 65, 81, 94, 116, 204, 211, 271, 398, 408–9, 430 Creator 390–91

criteria 10, 24–5, 28, 40, 41, 43–4, 46–7, 77, 126, 179, 185, 204, 225, 227, 323 absence of 54, 57, 78 impersonal 80, 233 shared 81 critical inquiry 105–6, 108, 152, 234, 254 see also rational criticism; rational inquiry criticism see rational criticism cross-cultural analysis 143, 188, 198 culpability 206 cultural critics 227 culture 23, 58, 151, 156, 227 moral crisis 84, 152, 153 curriculum 107 Cynics 26 Cyrenaic 26 Da Re, Antonio and De Anna, Gabriele 424 Dahl, Robert A. 326 Dalrymple, James see Stair, Lord D’Andrea, Thomas D. 424 data 344 Davidson, Donald 335 De Anna, Gabriele see Da Re, Antonio and De Anna, Gabriele death 77, 78–9, 81, 82 debates 234, 277, 364, 374, 420, 423, 424 see also moral debates debts 379 deception 12, 202, 244 decision-making 15–16, 181, 201–2, 381 deconstruction 370–71 deduction 13, 129, 264, 316–18, 356, 358 defective acts 157, 257, 266, 272–3 defective practical reasoning 304 deficiencies 377 definitions 12, 13 Defoe, Daniel 33 deism 152 deliberation 181–3 demands 59–60 democracy 90, 105, 233, 414–16, 421 demonstration 356 deontology 60, 363, 387 dependence 136, 375–6, 378–9, 381 acknowledged 375–6, 415, 431 symmetric and assymetric 380–81, 431

Index Descartes, R. 211, 214–15, 317, 349, 357, 404 description 10, 13–15, 24, 120, 125, 167–8, 178–9, 228, 327 of physical actions 217 descriptivism 47, 53 desert 161, 274, 282, 302, 324, 417 desiderata 49, 59, 188 ‘Designing Our Descendants’ symposium 81–2 desires 20–21, 25–8, 30–32, 35, 43–4, 46, 75, 155, 157, 235–6, 241, 307, 360, 376–7, 388, 399, 409, 430–31 Aristotle on 302–4 and capitalism 104–5 education of 256–7 Homeric 295–6 and morality 99–100 rational criticism of 49, 104–5, 303–4, 389 satisfaction 26, 99, 104, 156, 295, 395 transformation 157, 254, 389 determinism 31, 96–8, 100, 102, 111, 116, 167, 169, 174, 181–2, 199, 245–6, 252, 393 developmental studies xiv–xv diachronic concepts 188, 323, 389, 409 dialectical conflict 415–16, 420 dialectical inquiry 292, 332, 382 traditions of 327, 334–6, 362–3 dialectical materialism 93 dialectical reasoning 36, 298–301, 304–5, 316, 334, 353, 356, 358–9, 360, 363, 404, 410, 412 dialectical solution 229 dichotomy 118–19, 380 Diderot, D. 100, 234–6, 246, 283, 326, 366 differences 56, 229, 322, 335–6, 341–2, 348, 367 see also disagreement; rival moral theories difficulties 277 Dilthey 212 disadvantaged people 432 disaffected masses 29 disagreement 6, 10, 12, 14, 25, 143, 215, 253, 281, 290, 293, 328–9, 331–2, 336–7, 345, 367–8, 373 in ethics 386

459

first-order 342 second-order 342–3 see also moral disagreement disapproval 8, 9 disciplines 342–3, 362 discourse 55, 126, 128, 190–91, 228–9, 281, 291 discovery 52, 162, 334, 352, 399, 404, 408, 428, 434 discrepancy 353 disembodied persons 125 dishonesty 273 dispositions 8, 75, 179, 192–3, 195–7, 267–9, 274, 350–51, 388 stable 272 dispossessed people 376 disputatio 353 dissensus 204, 228, 290, 321, 323–4, 328–9, 343, 369, 373, 401 dissent 419–21 dissimulation 202 distinctio 353 distortion 217, 222, 432 distribution 270, 295 disunity 80, 111, 429 diversity 293, 335, 373, 403; see also pluralism divine commands 54, 138, 158–63 reasonableness of 162 divine law 22, 31, 33, 68, 155, 158, 160–62, 263–4, 307–8, 312, 390 divine omnipotence 146 divine omniscience 146, 155 divine will 154 division of labour 114 doctine 123 dogmatism 123, 214, 367, 393 domination 371, 395 Donagan, Alan 231 Dostoevsky 153 The Devils 127 doubt 133, 137, 142, 146, 215 Douglas, Mary 85 drama, Greek 253, 297 dramatic narratives 62, 213 dualism 165, 167–9, 192 Duns Scotus 362–3 Durkheim, Emile 183, 186–7

460

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duty 13–14, 16, 35, 38, 44, 53, 55–6, 99–100, 156, 308, 322, 369, 433 pre-modern 251, 306 Dworkin, Ronald 77, 250 dynamic aspect 11 early modern period 35, 283–4, 314 economic conditions 33, 91, 398–9 economic change 107, 156, 280 economic modernization 280, 313, 317, 390, 426 economics, small-scale 419 educated public 106–9, 341, 345, 364, 372, 403, 421 education 105–9, 205, 302, 341–3, 381 liberal 108 reform 107 see also moral education; moral training educators 108–9 effectiveness 254, 294, 295–8, 306, 407, 430 effects 134–5, 209 ego 169 egoism 31, 34–5, 237–8, 255, 281–4, 368, 380 electio 312 elenchus 298, 299 Eliade, Mircea 410 Elie, Paul 397 Eliot, T.S. 153 elites 62, 105, 108, 115–16, 220, 234, 248, 284, 291, 395, 416, 425, 427, 429 emancipation 371 embeddedness 41, 156, 273, 277 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 68–9 Emmet, Dorothy 3 emotional-attitudinal causes 6, 10 emotions 19, 35–6, 46, 135–6, 167, 194–7, 392 emotivism 3, 5, 6–9, 10, 12, 15, 22, 46, 56, 229–35, 243–4, 385 analytic philosophers and 231 and self 233–4 social content 232 empathy 309, 318, 332, 369, 431 empirical concepts 201 empirical facts 5, 13, 20, 47, 56, 60, 127, 203, 323

empiricism 43, 68, 93, 97, 103, 119–20, 124, 127, 145, 147–8, 152, 177, 192, 198, 209, 211, 216, 228, 247, 301, 310, 322, 329, 385, 407, 408 error 321, 344 liberal 109, 110 encratic persons 302 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Ninth Edition 345, 356, 366–7, 372 Encyclopaedist 346–7, 349, 352, 360, 368 Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) 52, 165 ends 31, 44, 53, 61–2, 65, 75, 91, 103–4, 118, 149, 233, 234, 237–8, 240, 245–6, 271, 297–8, 358, 362, 376, 395, 398, 416 Aquinas and 265–6, 313, 361 Aristotelian 256, 259–60, 268, 318 choice of 175 moral 51 non-moral 51 rational 247–8 temporal 62 see also goals; purposes; teleology Engels, F. 93, 115, 117, 149, 177, 248, 393 England 314–17 Enlightenment 65, 82, 101, 106, 235–7, 244–5, 247–9, 292, 328–9, 340, 345, 356, 365, 404, 418, 426–7, 429 failure of method 327, 332, 339, 345, 368–9 and Thomism 366–9 entities 168–70 social 200–201 Epicureans 29 epistemic status 4, 138, 152, 219–20 epistemic task 49–50, 52, 229 epistemological crisis 153, 213–15, 330, 331, 333–4, 336, 355 epistemological turn 349 epistemology 26, 52, 72, 74, 85–6, 93, 113, 152, 217, 317, 319, 324, 392, 410–11, 413 see also epistemological crisis; epistemological turn equality 33, 101, 105, 118, 284, 391, 415, 417, 424, 434 equity, principles of 316 error 206–7, 321–2, 371 essence 136

Index essentialism 51, 321, 358, 411 ethical codes 41, 58 ethical commitments 11, 17, 82 ethical conceptions 48 ethical consensus 50 ethical dilemmas 59, 70–73 ethical facts 5 ethical ideals 375 ethical life 75 ethical rationalism 35; see also rationality ethical theorists 229 ethical theory 4, 403, 405–7 first-order 4 lack of common standards 229 see also moral theories ethics 3, 227, 385 see also moral philosophy; morality; normative ethics eudaimonism 53, 62, 237, 387 Euthyphro dilemma 137–8 evaluation 15, 16, 18–19, 24, 47, 174, 191, 200, 240, 251, 339–40, 401 modern conflicts of 58–9 evaluative criteria 47, 49–50, 59, 63, 227, 233 for social practices 65–6 evaluative principles 228, 230 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 144 events 180, 181, 208–9, 220 evidence 5, 8, 138, 216 evil 42, 60–61, 82, 88, 110, 133–4, 142, 146–7, 262, 272 evolving social activities 271 example 300, 323 excellence 35, 49, 69, 269, 294–6, 298, 306, 407, 430–31 exclusion 372–3 exemplars 300–301, 379 existence 136 existentialism 15, 48, 156, 275, 397 expediency, principles of 316 experience 5, 6, 10, 68–9, 130, 139, 264, 316, 350, 412 private 126 experimental observations 215, 316, 357, 411 explanada 186, 190–91 explanans 139, 186 explanation 102, 129, 168, 206, 208, 359

461

causal 169, 171, 173, 179–84, 189, 211 functional 188 historical 229–30 of human actions 168–9, 171–97, 208, 245–6, 275–6 logical 171, 174, 184 social aspect 178–9 in social science 183–8, 196, 197ff., 208 see also social explanation expressivist view 14, 46, 236 see also moral experience extension 205 external critique 52, 55, 118, 145, 331–2, 336 external events 7 external objects 404 external purposes 175 external standards 18, 331 fact-value distinction 10, 15, 20, 46–7, 110, 117, 227, 239–40 facts 5, 8, 11–13, 15, 22, 47, 97, 117, 120, 129, 212, 214, 240, 246–7, 333 of the matter 6, 55, 387–8 relevance of 16 see also fact-value distinction failure 60, 222, 252, 348 fairness 77, 149, 373–4, 388, 408, 431 faith 30, 54, 89, 127, 132, 137, 140, 361–2, 404 fallibilism 206, 214, 301, 310, 410–13 false beliefs 321, 338 false consciousness 39, 41, 112, 185 falsifiability 49, 93–4, 98, 127, 137, 152, 170, 358 falsity 48, 321, 328, 333 fame 65 family 16, 278, 280, 316, 377, 379, 381, 408, 423 farming communities 408, 423 fear 195–6 feelings 6–8, 21, 34, 36, 105, 144 Feuerbach, L. 88, 90, 92, 114–15, 152–3, 425 fictional narratives 127–9 fictions 242, 244, 247, 339, 346, 348, 371 fideism 152, 158–9, 355 finitude 117, 136–7, 398–9 first-order disciplines 133

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first-order moral theory 4, 344 first-person function 46–7, 319 first principles 36, 72, 84, 107, 137, 281, 292–3, 299, 310–11, 315–18, 322, 334, 343, 353, 356–7, 401, 404, 406, 412–14 common 421, 423 practical 357–8 fishing communities 408, 423 fixity 348 Flannery, Austin P. 415 flattery 175 Flaubert, G. 13 Flew, Anthony 165, 172–3 flourishing 376; see also human flourishing flux 325 Foot, Phillipa 47, 430 forgiveness 262 form of life 163 formalism 432 Forster, E.M. 16 forums 81 Foucault, M. 348 fragmentation 49, 66, 77, 79, 80, 86, 150, 228–9, 241, 281, 283–4, 363–4, 372, 387, 403, 426–9 fragments 48, 76, 85, 102, 248, 337, 432 framework 15, 18, 29, 40, 53, 63, 87, 95, 119–20, 131, 142, 149–50, 179, 247, 282, 297, 335–7, 344, 353, 359, 363–5, 398, 402, 423, 427–8, 433–4 Christian 262 commensurating 408 distorting 432 Liberal 324 pre-modern 251 France 235; see also French philosophy Frankena, William 73, 227, 233 Franklin, Benjamin 268–9, 271 Frazer, J.G. 367 free speech 119–20, 205 free will 134, 172–4, 264 freedom 32, 39–40, 44, 89, 101–3, 115, 171–2, 181, 183, 243, 415 positive and negative 103–4 see also free will; liberation free-riders 270 Frege, G. 231 French philosophy 36–8

Freud, Sigmund 101, 138, 153, 159, 165–70 friendship 28, 53, 75, 130, 162, 253, 258, 262, 281, 296, 431–2 fulfilment 34–5, 54, 99 function 15, 106, 108, 118, 188, 198, 205, 240, 272 future 11, 17, 65, 67, 79, 82–3, 92, 103, 107, 116, 201, 204, 219, 299, 350 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 211–13 Galileo 31, 213–14, 330 Geach, Peter 47, 231 Gellner, Ernest 388 genealogical inquiry 248, 332, 346–9, 352, 360, 369, 379–71 general principles 11, 15, 231, 313 general public 342 generalizations 68–9, 182, 184, 195–6, 378 causal 185 law-like 180, 197–8, 199, 203, 205–8, 219–22, 245–6, 248 generosity just 379–81, 409, 431 genres 190–91, 201, 341, 346, 370 George, Robert 403 Germany 39, 235 Gert, Bernard 231 Gewirth, Alan 231, 243 Gifford, Adam 341, 343–5, 372 Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh (1988) 341ff. Gilson, Etienne xiii, xv, 352 giving 375, 379–80, 393 globalization 107, 395, 418 goals 31–2, 42, 61, 64–5, 94, 99, 102–3, 117, 194, 245–6, 259–60, 262, 351, 354, 356, 376, 404, 416 common 49 rational criticism of 105 see also ends; purposes God 21, 28, 30–31, 36, 54, 56, 61, 95, 99, 119, 125, 137, 140–41, 153, 155, 158–9, 160, 162, 241, 262, 313, 316, 345, 353–5, 361, 389, 390–91, 404, 411, 415 belief in 124 discourse about 126–8, 131, 143 existence of 127, 129–30, 134–6, 392 hypothesis 129–30 perception of 132 will of 154

Index see also divine commands; divine law; divine oniscience Godwin, William 42 Goethe 112 Goffman, Erving 80, 196, 249, 399 Goldman, Alan 413 ‘good’ 46–8, 240 good / goodness 5, 13, 21, 35, 42, 52, 134, 249–50, 279, 312, 345, 351, 358, 376–7, 387–8, 390, 393, 404, 408–9 Aristotelian 256–7, 265, 301–3 Homeric 24, 294–5 for man 64, 80 modern 314 Platonic 26–7, 255 in practices 274, 422 private 280, 283 Thomist 360 see also good life; goods good life 25, 29, 30, 43, 50, 72, 277, 287, 294, 360, 376, 388, 390, 392, 409 Aristotelian 27–8, 258, 268, 301–2 Platonic 298 shared 49 social context 378–9 and virtues 423 good will 45 goods 27–8, 75, 161–2, 246, 378–9, 380–81, 420, 434 availability of 303, 304 common 270, 416–17 conflict between 259, 268, 273, 279 of effectiveness 294, 295–8, 306, 407, 430 of excellence 294–6, 298, 306, 407, 430 external 28, 43, 65, 269–71, 280, 294–5, 395, 430–31 first-order 277 Greek 256–7, 294–8, 300, 302–4 hierarchy 257 incommensurable 242 internal 28, 43, 45, 6–5, 68–70, 77, 269–70, 273, 278, 280–81, 294–5, 387–8, 395, 420, 430–31, 434 lesser 271 Platonic 298 practice-based 396 rank ordering of 67, 274, 302–4 and rational action 303–4

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shared 259, 272, 417 solipsistic 378, 431 thicker 418 Gorovitz, Samuel 206 government 320, 321 Grabmann 352 grace 148, 307, 313, 361, 392, 393 grammatical form 21–2 gratitude 195–6, 379 Great Britain 34, 53, 71, 80, 84, 108, 149, 317 greatest happiness principle (GHP) 43, 108–9, 242 Greek drama 253, 255 Greek philosophy 21, 24–30, 42, 45, 53, 74–5, 109, 253–61, 294–306 Greek social order 81, 89, 99, 251–3ff., 294–6 Greek villages, modern 81 Green, T.H. 42, 44–5, 50, 389–90, 398, 428 Gregory VII, Pope 308, 391 Grene, Marjorie xvii–xviii Guevara, Che 113 guilt 7, 60 Gutting, Gary 429 Habermas, J. 391 habit 42, 265–6, 282, 404 habits of character and mind 28, 296, 387 Haldane, John 332, 403 Hamlet 213 Hampshire, Stuart 182 happiness 27–8, 30, 32, 34–5, 38, 42–3, 54, 60–61, 75, 99, 307, 322, 361–3, 366, 368–9, 389–90 hardship 379 Hare R.M., 18–19, 22–3, 46–7, 73, 85, 231, 403 harm 206, 302, 320, 376 harmony 34, 81, 149, 259, 277, 311, 409 Hart, H.L.A. 210 health care 65, 157, 351 hedonism 242 Hegel, G. 39–40, 50, 62, 68, 89–90, 101–2, 105, 112, 114–17, 147, 189, 192–4, 212, 227, 283, 292, 310, 389, 398, 404, 410, 412, 430 idealistic rationalism 90 and Kant 411

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Phenomenology of Spirit 192 Heidegger, M. 212 Hellenic culture 253 Heraclitus 413 Herder, G. 62 hermeneutic tradition 211 heroic cultures 250–53 heuristic approach 123, 165, 273 hierarchy 31, 34, 106, 210–11, 218, 246, 254, 257, 272, 301–2, 306, 316–17, 345, 356, 409 higher goods 257, 271, 277 historians 227 historical approach 23–4, 29, 40, 45, 53–6, 85–6, 126, 230–31, 258, 261, 374, 410–12 lack of 229, 367 historical inevitability 113 historical inquiry 131, 202, 337, 410–12 historical materialism 98 historical narratives 62–3 historical process 39, 45, 50, 61–2, 69, 97, 114–15, 393, 426 historical rationalism 328, 338, 404 historiography 103, 225, 411, 426 history 88–90, 95, 97, 100, 106, 193–4, 199, 203, 206, 208–11, 233, 260, 276–7, 299, 329, 333, 342, 345, 349, 352, 359, 386, 390, 400–401, 404 causality and 211 Hume and 321 Marx and 91–2, 102, 112 present crisis and 226–7, 228–9, 230–31, 235–45, 252 and rationality 215–16 sacred 353 and telos 410 history of science 205, 215–16 Hobbes, Thomas 31–2, 37, 39, 100, 179, 181, 310, 317, 360 holism 112, 126, 131, 149, 276, 364, 400 see also whole; whole life Homeric social order 24–5, 161, 250–53, 268, 294–6, 305 honesty 149, 272, 360, 378, 381–2, 388, 408 Honoré, A. 210 honour 28, 75, 81, 249, 251, 254, 258, 282, 295 hope 37, 82, 94, 116, 361, 390, 396, 424

households 274, 280, 285 human agency see agents; moral agents; rational agents human dignity 391, 399 human existence 400; see also life; whole life human faculties 27 human flourishing 4, 22, 35, 50, 236, 238, 256, 259–60, 268–9, 271, 303–4, 312, 379–81, 387 definition of 376, 409 thwarting of 237 human happenings 178, 180 human nature 20, 25, 30–31, 35, 37, 44, 54, 56, 68, 76, 102, 117, 156–7, 198, 233, 236, 240, 271, 301, 322, 350, 361, 388, 393, 404, 433 accidental qualities 51 essential 50–51, 58, 80, 239, 252, 255, 258, 321, 405 Marx and 92, 100, 110 pre-modern view 251 shared moral end of 51 theory of 237 thick conception 408 human possibilities 98, 100 human qualities 272–3, 278–9, 350, 408 human rights 76–8, 243–4 human sciences 171–2, 177, 192, 208–9 mechanistic theories 246 see also social sciences human weakness 432 humanism 117, 398 humanities,339, 342, 397 Hume, David 9–10, 20–21, 34–5, 39, 53, 129, 134, 139–40, 177, 179, 181, 208, 235–6, 239, 283, 310, 314, 319–21, 366, 411 emotivism of 236 ideas theory 319–20 passions 319–21 political theory 320–21 practical rationality 321 Hume’s Ethical Writings (1965) 21 humility 262, 308, 360, 378, 390–91 Hutcheson, Francis 34, 314, 316–19 Huxley T.H., 146 hypnotism 185 hypothesis 129, 167–9, 239, 312

Index hypothetical aspect 60 hypothetical injunctions 238 hysterical paralysis 166–7 Iceland 58 ideal types 74, 154, 161, 300 idealism 90–93, 114, 300 ideals 41, 44–5, 49–50, 61, 64, 69, 104–6, 202, 232, 300–301, 398 ideas 319–20 identity 31, 65, 79, 204, 249, 277, 348, 370 personal 276, 375 social 186, 220, 233, 278 ideology 118–19, 165, 185, 204, 217–22, 338–9 components of 119 concealment 221–2 deception 220 definition of 221 distortion 217, 432 end of 120 rational 400, 407 idiom 335, 359 Iliad 250–51, 253, 293–4 illusion 202, 215, 322 images 114, 297, 299 imagination 378 imaginative fictions 145 immanence 89 immorality 15, 237, 283, 424 impartiality 349 impasse 49, 328, 331, 369, 406 imperatives 9, 21–2, 31, 35, 387, 434 imperfection 262, 304, 361, 363, 380 impersonal standards 11, 15, 28, 38, 69, 75, 80, 82, 105, 228–9, 230–31, 233, 272, 295, 314, 316–17, 348, 352, 405, 416 impressions 319–20 inclinations 38, 44, 350 incoherence 49, 54 incommensurability 59, 63, 67, 74, 84, 86, 187, 254, 355, 431 of goods 242 of intellectual differences 341–2 of moral arguments 228, 238, 282, 347, 401, 416

465

of theories 215–16, 298–9, 306, 308–9, 328, 331–3, 335–6, 346, 359–60, 405–7 of traditions of inquiry 327–8, 337, 373 incompatibility 41, 43, 328, 332, 336–7, 418, 432 incompetence 9 incorrigibility 413–14 independence, rational 381 indicative mood 22 indignation 244 individualism 25, 29–31, 33, 35–36, 39, 41–3, 45–6, 53, 62, 240–41, 273, 281, 285–6, 380, 415 critique of 48–9, 63, 75–6, 83, 234, 263, 398, 425, 427–9 individuals 24, 26, 29, 32, 35, 39–41, 44, 47, 76, 92, 96, 103, 117, 154–6, 232, 234, 286, 313, 324, 338–9, 369, 378, 394–5 autonomous 68, 71, 240, 315 and practices 70 social identity 185–6 and utility principle 67 indubitability 413 induction 9, 168, 196, 201, 323 industrialization 142, 149–50, 156 inequality 118, 320, 416 infallibility 412, 413 infants 379 inference 9, 15, 124, 132, 135–6, 138, 167, 231, 240, 243, 325 infinite regress 179, 182 infirmity 379, 381 initial conditions 199, 208, 219 initiates 234, 370, 417 injunction 11, 35 injustice 88–9, 391, 394 inner moral sense 317–19 innovation 65, 201, 219–20, 245, 330, 335, 350 inquiry see moral inquiry; rational inquiry instability 200–201, 204 institutions 27, 37, 64, 70, 76, 115–16, 142, 198, 200, 217, 219, 270, 277, 326, 329, 338–9, 362, 377, 395, 418, 420, 423 academic 374 and change 72

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conflict in 221 for debate 424 see also social practices Institutions of the Law of Scotland, 315–16 instruction 378–9 instrumental efficacy 387 instrumentalism 105, 108, 149, 214, 234, 434 insult 81 integrity 80, 84, 273, 275, 280, 397, 409 intellect 312, 363 intellectual life 94 intellectual traditions 338; see also traditions of inquiry intellectuals 101–2, 106, 108, 114, 146, 165, 171 intelligence 174–6, 349 intelligence testing 174 intension 205 intentio 312 intentions 13–14, 21, 38, 102, 148, 168–9, 180–81, 184, 190–91, 196, 199, 200, 202, 217–18, 263, 276, 312 social aspect 178, 275 internal critique 52, 331–2, 337, 344 internal goods see goods internal meaning 102, 328, 331 internal perspective 144–5 interpretation 58, 120, 211, 213, 349, 358, 365, 398, 400–401 of actions 218–19 epistemic problems 217, 219 see also interpreter; social interpretation interpreter 145, 217 intersection 338, 341 intrinsic properties 358 intrinsic qualities 7, 158, 200, 376, 409, 412 intrinsically defective acts 157, 257, 266, 272–3 intuitionism 3, 5–6, 15, 46, 54, 56, 78, 284, 346, 385 intuitions 85, 432 Ireland 81, 418, 421 irony 219, 381, 418 irrationalism 215, 249, 405 irrationality 37, 176, 189–91, 304, 428 ‘is’ 6, 10, 14, 20, 56, 240; see also ‘ought’ Ischomachus 53 Islam 129, 249, 261, 370, 397, 412

Isocrates 300 isomorphism 358 Jacobins 284 James, Henry 234 Jaucourt, Louis chevalier de 366 Jews, 372 see also Judaism John of Salisbury 263 joking 219 Joy, Lynn Sumida xviii Judaism 30, 89, 128, 129, 160, 249, 261, 306, 367, 391, 397, 412 judgements 204 see also moral judgements Jung, Carl 165, 170 jurisprudence 315 ‘just’ 24; see also generosity, just; justice justice 20, 28, 33, 35, 37, 58, 94, 161–2, 200, 258, 267, 282, 284–5, 391 Augustinian 307–8 Graeco-Roman 3–6, 307 Greek conflicts 253–4 Hume 320–21 liberal 324–5 rival theories 290–91 robust concept 430 Scotland 314–16 virtue of 270, 272–4, 278, 296–7, 299, 310, 377, 379–81, 409, 431 justification 9, 15–16, 18, 32, 35, 68, 77–8, 80, 106, 187, 212, 235, 237, 278, 297, 322, 345–6, 352–3, 356, 399, 405 moral 430–34 Plato and 298 rational 230, 241 religious 129, 158–9, 161 teleological 242 theory 328 traditional 154 traditions of inquiry 332, 334–5 Kant, Immanuel 4, 9, 15–16, 37–41, 44–5, 47, 54, 60–62, 68–9, 85, 138, 179, 181, 211–12, 231–2, 235–8, 241, 243, 246, 283–4, 293, 310, 324, 363, 366, 380, 390, 398, 428, 433 failure of 236, 368, 411 and moral justification 237

Index Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone 61 second Critique 61, 237 and theism 156, 158 Kateb, George 432 Kierkegaard, S. 41, 55, 68–9, 132, 147, 234, 236, 238–9 Enten-Eller 235, 238 kindness 380 kinds 198, 206, 301 kinship 156, 251–3; see also family Knight, Kelvin 389, 416, 418 ‘knowing how’ 11, 15, 17–18 knowledge 17–18, 107, 193, 222, 274, 285, 298–9, 301, 342–3, 404, 410 see also moral knowledge Koestler, Arthur 16 Korsgaard, Christine 15, 385 Kuhn, Thomas 215–16, 310, 344, 353, 411 labour 91–2, 104, 259, 394–5, 411 Laidlaw, W. Alison xvi Lakatos I. 216 language 144, 153, 175, 178, 212, 218, 335, 423 analagous 123 univocal 123 see also moral language; ordinary language; religious language large-scale commitments 364–5 large-scale communities 379, 395–6, 417–18, 427 large-scale theories 113, 285, 344, 425 Larmore, Charles 290 law 30, 49, 54–5, 60–61, 68, 75, 77, 83, 155, 258, 263, 273, 302, 304, 306 English 316–17 just 161 moral 89, 154–5, 263 Scottish 315–16 laws, scientific 207–8, 210–11 Leach, Edmund 145, 190 learned people 402 learners 379, 424 learning 104–5, 219, 259, 349–50, 353, 362–3, 376–7, 416–17, 420, 431 lectures, university 341, 345–6 legal positivism 159 legal reasoning 10, 12, 18

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legal system 326 Leibniz 313 leisure 408 Lenin, V. 112, 118, 286 Leo XIII, Pope see Aeterni Patris Lévi-Strauss, Claude 152 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 143–4 liberal arts 108 liberalism 21, 45, 57, 65, 85, 95, 97–8, 100–101, 109–10, 116–18, 142, 225, 267, 282, 289, 314, 323–7, 339–40, 342, 398, 424–5 and ideology 120–21 and individualism 117, 273, 286 justice 324–5 practical rationality 325 rival theories 324, 326–7 self 324–6 social order 325–6 theory of 323–4 and Thomism 366 as tradition 326–7 universities 373 liberation 104, 119, 398–9, 415 liking 9, 229 life 55, 71, 75, 82, 130, 145, 251–2, 269, 361, 370 narrative structure 275–6, 392 telos of 277 unity of 273–6, 281 see also whole life linguistic function 22 linguistic usage 13, 21, 25 literature 13, 16, 238 living 4, 6, 17 Livy 62 local communities 29, 116, 287, 396, 399, 418, 425 local moral standards 24–5 Locke, John 32–4, 317 logic 3–4, 7–10, 13, 16, 19, 26, 121, 133, 165, 176, 188, 191, 231, 239–40, 348 and beliefs 190 and religious language 125, 127, 144 logical positivism 88, 123 logically relevant consideration 173 Logstrup, Knud 398 Lonergan, Bernard 401

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loss 271 love 130 Lukács, Georg 111, 286, 398, 407 Luther, Martin 30–31, 155, 398 lying 9, 12 MacDonald, Margaret 165 Machiavelli, N. 30–31, 398 machines 103, 175 MacIntyre, Alasdair academic career xvii–xviii, 397 and academic disagreement 341–5 anti-modernism of 426–30 and Aquinas 30, 123, 128, 264–7, 294, 310–13, 349, 352, 355, 363–4, 376, 398, 401–2, 411–13, 428, 434 and Aristotle 27–9, 60–62, 157, 258–61, 264–6, 268, 271, 289–90, 300–306, 375–6, 398, 401, 407, 410–13 and behaviourism 197 beliefs of 146 birth and family xvi and Christianity xvii, 30, 62, 110, 113–14ff., 123–4, 127ff., 132–8, 140–42, 146–8, 151, 155, 157, 163, 262–5, 306–13, 390–93, 414–15 and creative revival 81 definition of morality 73 education of xvi–xvii evaluative criteria of 49–50 and Freud 165–8 and Hare 18–23, 46–7, 50 and Hegel 39–40, 50, 89–90, 112, 189, 192–4, 310, 398 historical method of 261, 410–12 and Homer 24 and Hume 20–21, 139–40, 235–6, 320–21 and individualism 49, 53, 62–3, 75–6, 398, 428 intellectual virtues of 397 and Kant 38, 60–62, 236–8, 390, 398, 428 and liberalism 109, 117–18, 120–21, 225, 289, 323–7, 339–40, 398 MA Thesis 3 and Marxism xvii, 40–41, 51, 62, 87–104, 107–19, 225, 286, 289, 390, 393–6, 398–9, 409, 425

and metaphysics 95–6 and moral philosophy 385–6 moral theory of 50–51, 267–71, 289, 328–9, 332–3, 338, 375, 378, 386, 405, 408, 420, 423, 430–34 and Nietzsche 41–2, 248–51, 285, 346–9, 398 philosophical range of xiii–xiv, 397 philosophical style of 261, 289–90, 400–401 and Plato 26–7, 398 political theory of 63, 414–21, 423–5 progressivism of 427, 429 rational theory of 365–6 recoverist project of 352, 430, 432 as religious thinker 388–9 and relativism 50–51, 271, 331–2, 403–5, 420 and self-liberation 398–9 and social transformation 395–6, 399 theory of rational vindication 405–7, 409, 411–12 totalizing tendency of 399–400 on university reform 374 and utilitarianism 104–6, 241–3 utopianism of 421, 425 and virtues 377–81, 429 Works: ‘After Virtue and Marxism: a Response to Wartofsky’ 115, 394 After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory xiv, 3, 48, 51–2, 68, 106, 118, 189, 387, 393, 401, 405, 417, 430, 432 aim of 225–8 crisis scenario 226 criticism of 289–90 decline of virtue tradition 280–87 definition of virtue 268–79 historical approach 226–8 philosophical approach 228 structure 228 Against the Self-images of the Age 52, 112, 118, 119–21, 165, 189, 399–400 ‘Against Utilitarianism’ 104–6 ‘Analogy in Metaphysics’ 123 ‘The Antecedents of Action’ 177, 179–83 ‘Are There any Natural Rights?’ 78

Index ‘Behaviorism’ 194–5 ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’ 101–4 ‘Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective?’ 59–63, 390 ‘Causality and History’ 206, 208–11 ‘Comment on “Commitment and Objectivity”’ 133 ‘Contexts of Interpretation’, 211–13 ‘Corporate Modernity and Moral Judgement: Are They Mutually Exclusive?’ 79–81 ‘The Debate about God: Victorian Relevance and Contemporary Irrelevance’, 151–4 Dependent Rational Animals 41, 374–82, 415–16, 428, 431 ‘Determinism’ 171–4, 178 Difficulties in Christian Belief 132–8 ‘Emotion, Behavior and Belief’ 194–5 ‘The End of Ideology and the End of the End of Ideology’ 118–19 ‘The Ends of Life, the Ends of Philosophical Writing’ 414 ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science’ 212–16 ‘The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts’ 197, 201, 203–6 First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues 324, 356–8 ‘God and the Theologians’ 141 ‘Hegel: On Faces and Skulls’ 189, 192–4 ‘How Not to Write about Lenin’ 112 ‘How to Identify Ethical Principles’ 73–7 ‘How Virtues Become Vices: Values, Medicine and Social Context’ 57–9 ‘Hume on “is” and “ought”’ 20–21 ‘Hume, Testimony to Miracles, the Order of Nature, and Jansenism’ 134, 138–40 ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’ 106–9 ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ 177, 183–8 ‘Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution’ 217–20

469 ‘Imperatives, reasons for action and morals’ 21–3 ‘Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?’ 197–200, 217 ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’ 142–8 ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief 125–32, 137 new introduction to 163 ‘Marx’ 113 Marxism: An Interpretation 87–9, 93–6, 109–10, 113 new introduction to 87, 94 Marxism and Christianity 87, 113–15, 117–18 new introduction to (1995) 87, 117, 260, 394, 407 ‘Marxism of the Will’ 112 ‘Marxist Mask and Romantic Face: Lukács on Thomas Mann’ 111 ‘Marxists and Christians’ 109–10 ‘A Mistake about Causality in the Social Sciences’ 177–9, 181 ‘Moral Relativism, Truth and Justification’ 309, 324 ‘A Note on Immortality’ 124–5 ‘Notes from the Wilderness I’ 97–8, 100 ‘Notes from the Wilderness II’ 98–100 ‘Objectivity in Morality and Objectivity in Science’ 68–70 ‘Ought’ 23, 52–5 ‘Pascal and Marx: on Lucien Goldmann’s Hidden God’ 112 ‘Patients as Agents’ 63–6 ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’ 416 ‘Post-Skinner and Post-Freud: Philosophical Causes of Scientific Disagreement’ 168 ‘Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure’ 324 ‘Predictability and Explanation in the Social Sciences’ 197, 200–3 ‘Psychoanalysis: the Future of an Illusion?’ 165, 170 ‘Purpose and Intelligent Action’ 171, 174–8 ‘Rationality and the Explanation of Action’ 188–92

470

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue ‘Recent Political Thought’ 113 ‘Regulation a Substitute for Morality’ 83 ‘Relativism, Power and Philosophy’ 331 The Religious Significance of Atheism 151–7 ‘The Right to Die Garrulously’ 77–9 Secularization and Moral Change 141–2, 148–51 ‘Seven Traits for the Future’ 81–3, 390 A Short History of Ethics 3, 20, 23–52, 110, 225, 237, 268, 389, 428–9 aim of 23 descriptive thesis 48–9 diagnostic thesis 49 historical approach 23–4 new Introduction to (1997) 38, 50, 422 The Significance of Moral Judgements xvii, 3–18, 33, 45–6, 48, 50, 386 ambiguities in 18 conclusions of 17–18 ‘Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority’ 217, 220–22 ‘Social Structures and their Threat to Moral Agency’ 80, 111 ‘The Socialism of R.H. Tawney’ 110–11 ‘A Society without a Metaphysics’ 95–6 ‘Some more about “ought”’ 23, 52, 55–7 ‘Theology, Ethics and the Ethics of Medicine and Health Care’ 157–8 ‘Theories of Natural Law in the Culture of Advanced Modernity’ 422 ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: a Road Not Taken’ 394, 425 Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry xiv, 309, 332, 337, 341–56, 359–74, 401 aim of 346 failure of academy 341–3 future of rational inquiry 372–4 Introduction 343 lack of educated public, 341, 345 ‘Toleration and the Goods of Conflict’ 419 ‘Towards a Theory of Medical Fallibility’ 206–8 ‘Trotsky in Exile’ 110

‘Truth as a Good: a Reflection on Fides et Ratio’ 401 ‘Truthfulness, Lies and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn from Mill and Kant?’ 428 The Unconscious 165–6, 169, 170 ‘Utilitarianism and Cost-Benefit Analysis: an Essay on the Relevance of Moral Philosophy to Bureaucratic Theory’ 66, 79 ‘Visions’ 124, 135 ‘What has Ethics to Learn from Medical Ethics?’ 70–73 ‘What Morality is Not’ 18–20 ‘Which God Ought We to Obey and Why?’ 158–63 Whose Justice? Which Rationality? xiv, 13, 41, 187–8, 213, 342, 362, 390–92, 401 descriptive claim 327 normative claim 327 recommendations 337–40 structure of, 290, 293 ‘Why Is the Search for the Foundations of Ethics So Frustrating?’ 83–5 McMullin, Ernan 135 Maimonides 354 Malebranche 317 Malinowski, B. 183–4 managers see bureaucratic managers Manchester University xvii, 3, 132 Mandeville, Bernard de 34 Mandonnet 352 manipulation 26, 113, 232–3, 241, 245, 248, 297, 395, 416 Marcel, Gabriel 391 Marcuse, Herbert 113, 115–17 marginalization 221, 282, 364, 419, 429 Maritain, Jacques 401 markets 107, 280, 418–19 Marquette University 356 Marx, Karl 40, 50–51, 62, 87–8, 90–93, 96, 101–2, 104, 107, 111–14, 117–18, 153, 233, 259, 284, 286, 380, 389, 393–6, 399–400, 410, 416, 430 The Communist Manifesto 93 Das Kapital 92, 115 The German Ideology 91–2, 248 National Economy and Philosophy 91–2

Index The Poverty of Philosophy 91 Theses on Feuerbach 112 Marxism xvii, 40–41, 87–104, 109–19, 149, 185, 199, 211, 248, 285–6, 289, 390, 393–6, 399, 409, 425 and Christianity 87–9, 91, 93, 109–10 criticism of 92–4, 96–100, 119, 225, 286, 393–4 and history 91–2 scientific theory of 92–4, 119 and utilitarianism 118 ‘Marxist Tracts’ 96 materialism 31, 88, 90–91, 111–12, 333 mathematics 4, 9, 123, 357 maturity 301–2, 376–7 maxims 19, 39, 60, 199, 237, 286 Mayans 370 meaning 7, 10, 56, 126–8, 153, 171, 178, 194 means 31, 51, 103–4, 118, 234, 237–8, 248, 265–6, 298, 395, 416 internal 268 mechanistic theories 102–3, 167, 176, 245–6 medical profession 58–9, 62–3, 65–6, 206 errors 206 ethical dilemmas 70, 72–3 fragmentation 66 goals 65 and virtues 58 medieval kingdoms 81 Melden, A.I. 179–80, 182 memories 170, 351 Meno paradox 350 mental ideas 167 mental representations 212, 319–20 mercy 88 meta-ethics 4, 24, 55, 73, 76, 230, 389 metaphors 128 metaphysics 33, 44, 51, 57, 59, 61, 63–4, 86–7, 95–6, 123, 128, 131–2, 134, 140, 153, 228–9, 321, 344, 348, 354, 357, 393, 401, 412 Marxism and 93, 110 premises 136 and inquiry 327, 332 meta-theory 406, 420 meteorology 207 methodology 9, 31, 71, 121, 185, 186–7, 189, 212–13, 290–93, 297, 299, 301,

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330, 339, 353–6, 359, 363–4, 402, 412, 433 Middle Ages, High, 20–22, 54, 75, 79, 249, 261–6, 349, 353–6, 362–4, 427 middle class 85 Mill, John Stuart 4, 15–16, 42–3, 60, 62, 86, 104, 108–9, 177, 208, 232, 242, 247, 269, 428, 430, 433 Mills, C. Wright 103 Milton, John 54 mimesis 212 mind 82, 167, 192, 211, 251, 257, 270, 296, 358, 404, 410–11, 420 and world 212–14, 333, 344, 355, 357, 371, 401, 433 minorities 419 miracles 133–5, 139–40, 153 moderation 377 modern moral predicament 47–9, 54–5, 57, 71–2, 83–5, 99, 104, 108, 155–6, 225, 275, 281–5, 289, 416, 428, 432–3 contemporary theorists and 227 and history 226, 228–31, 235–45 nature of 226, 239–41, 244, 247 and past cultures 248–9ff. Scotland 314–19 social nature of 226–7, 234 solutions to 64, 72–3, 76–7, 80–81, 86, 226, 229, 247–51, 293, 323, 327ff., 337–40, 401, 434 and theory failure 226–7 modern social order 23–4, 48–50, 55, 57–9, 76, 78, 108–9, 225, 279, 280–87, 313–14ff., 401, 415–19, 422–9 anti-metaphysical 95–6 breakdown of 66, 80, 83–4, 151, 155–7 evaluative criteria for 49–50 modernity 44, 49, 55, 57–9, 63, 67, 78–9, 156, 252, 281, 396, 418, 422–3, 425, 427–9 post-Enlightenment 106–7, 244 see also modern moral predicament; modern social order modification 305, 309, 329–30, 370; see also revision monastic communities 285–7 money see wealth monism 242

472

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

Monk, Ray 169 monotheism 138 Montesquieu 36–7, 389, 430 Moore, G.E. 3–6, 15, 45, 73, 230, 232, 243–4, 400 ‘moral’, senses of 240 moral action 127 self-obliging 17 moral agents 5–7, 10, 12, 29, 44, 46–8, 56, 63, 95, 233–4, 237, 243, 375, 430 modern 55, 71–3, 80–82, 238, 418 and right action 256 social context 232 see also ordinary moral agent; rational agents moral argument 3, 6, 12–13, 16, 300 irresolvability of 57–8, 63, 72, 228, 238, 281 see also moral judgements; moral reasoning moral authority 238–9, 385, 399 moral beliefs 3–4, 17, 19, 46, 127, 154, 228, 235 moral claims 327–8, 338 moral cognition 5 moral community 49–50, 64, 75, 257–8, 403–4, 418–20, 431 decline of 150, 283 examples of 421 in modern era 422–6 small-scale 399 moral concepts 12–13, 25, 33, 55, 85–6, 121, 158, 386, 389, 405, 432 distinctiveness of 6–7 history of 23, 53 non-naturalist 14 origin of 231 revision of 242 and social change 23–4 moral conflict 425 moral debates 8, 85, 104, 108, 150, 281–5, 324, 401 interminability of 228–9, 238–9, 281, 325–6 moral decline 426–7 moral development 302 moral dilemmas 304–5 moral disagreement 4, 16, 33–4, 46, 56, 71–2, 367, 386, 406

among modern philosophers 73–4, 228, 322 in modern social order 76, 228–9, 244, 322–3 Moore and Stevenson on 6 moral education 256–7, 281, 292, 300–302, 311 moral experience 4–6, 385 common 7 moral inquiry 51–2, 64, 86, 327, 342, 388, 403, 404–5 as craft 350–51 and modern crisis 84–5, 108 rival traditions of 365–6, 405 social nature of 73 see also rational inquiry; traditions of inquiry moral judgements 4–5, 8–9, 33–4, 229, 301–2, 304, 351, 386, 399 cognitive content 231, 319 descriptive 10 and desires 235–6 failure of 80 function 15 and human agency 99 impersonal 230 intrinsic significance of, 6–7 justification of 15, 18 modern 57–9 objective 433 operation of 45 performative 16, 17 purposes 386 rationally calculative function 10 and theory 403 in traditional societies 81 moral knowledge 11 moral language 5, 7, 13–15, 22–4, 46, 55–6, 229, 282 historicity of 53 modern 55 pre-modern 251 social nature of 48 moral law 154–7 moral norms see norms, ethical moral outlook 154, 387, 404 differences in 56 moral philosophy 13, 26, 231–2, 239, 246, 318, 385, 401

Index dissatisfaction with 225 English-speaking 3–4 modern British 34–6, 53, 71, 73, 80, 84–5, 108 moral precepts 51, 99, 237–8, 312–13, 388, 417, 419 negative 409 moral principles 10–15, 17, 20, 34, 73–5, 119, 279, 310–11, 319, 322, 346, 386 fundamental 55 justification of 15 reconstruction o, 76–7 self-validating 14 see also first principles moral reasoning 3, 6, 9–10, 386, 404 justification of 15 structure of 12–13 see also moral argument moral rules 10–11, 26, 31–3, 68–9, 85–6, 237, 267, 386, 388, 409, 434 liberal 325 and modern ethical dilemmas 71–3 in modern social order 76, 242 moral schemes 254 differences among 229 variety of 225 moral sciences 108 moral sense theory 34 moral statements 3, 7, 8 moral tenets 346 moral terms 24–5, 47–8, 230 historicity of 45 moral theology 30–31 moral theories 4, 22, 24, 26, 30, 59–60, 74, 85, 231, 310, 322, 387, 389, 403, 407–8 Aristotelian 256–8, 407 change in 32, 54 empirical criteria 323 and medical ethical dilemmas 70–73 failed modern 248–9 incommensurable 215, 298, 306, 308–9, 328, 331, 333, 335–6, 365–6, 405 negativity 239 and ordinary moral experience 4 social content 232 see also rival moral theories moral training 75, 108, 282, 298, 301, 409

473

see also moral education moral truths 387, 404–5 moral valuations universalizability of 18–20, 38–9 moral values 75, 119 morality 385–7 demands of 59–63 and desire-fulfilment 99–100 Enlightenment view 366–7 and human agency 98–9 individualist 76 justification of 430–34 modern philosophers and 73 narrative quest for 392–3 natural 432, 434 new concept of 235 primary 109 reinterpretation of 99 secondary 104, 108–9 secular 390–91 and self 44 and social framework 44 substantive content 433 traditional 154–5 Victorian 345–6 More, Henry 33 motion, medieval theory of 330 motivation 26, 31, 34, 38, 43, 156, 168–9, 184, 242, 246, 271, 312, 358 Münzer, Thomas 110 murder 13–14, 257 Murphy, Nancey 328 mystery 134, 147 myth 24, 62, 90, 94–5, 114, 128–30, 190, 299, 370 Nagel, Thomas 388, 393 Namier, Lewis 103 narrative accomplishment 213 narrative quest 61–2, 261–2, 277, 390, 392–3, 409, 434 narratives 24, 50, 62–3, 127–9, 131, 202, 212, 215–16, 218, 225, 230, 261, 275–6, 321, 340, 348, 371, 392, 399 of decline 227–8, 426 pre-modern 251 of progress 347 self 274

474

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

see also narrative accomplishment; narrative quest National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 73 nation-states 50, 282–3, 287, 381, 396, 418–19, 424, 427 Native American traditions 370, 421 natural concepts 203 natural facts 14–15, 20 natural justice 162 natural kinds 401 natural law 30, 43, 134, 139, 307, 311–12, 317, 360–61, 363, 381 natural man 25 natural particulars 203 natural rights 33, 43 natural sciences 4, 31, 68, 152, 181, 184, 193, 196–7, 209, 213–14, 219, 246, 313, 340, 343, 345, 373, 411 naturalism 25, 35, 37, 47, 53–4, 140, 432, 434 nature 33, 37–8, 42, 68, 70, 91–2, 95, 119, 131, 136, 139, 209, 243, 298, 353, 386 Nazi, moral re-education of 265–6 necessary being 136 necessary conditions 199, 201, 209, 211 necessary truth 412–13 needs 20, 26, 46, 60, 155, 243, 376, 380, 408, 430 neo-Platonism 307 network 191, 379–80 neurosis 167, 176 neutrality 47, 53, 55, 59, 73–4, 76, 118, 200, 204, 221–2, 245, 247–8, 309, 314, 324, 333, 342–5, 365, 374, 401, 405–6, 419 new beliefs 214–15, 329 new circumstances 329, 353 New Essays in Philosophical Theology 172 New Testament 126, 129, 141, 160, 390 Newman, John Henry 133 Newton, Isaac 134, 330, 411 Nicias 297 Nietzsche, F. 42, 100, 230, 248–51, 285, 332, 342, 346–9, 366, 371, 398, 405, 430, 433 critique of objectivity 346–7

Zur Genealogie der Moral 346ff. nihilism 42 nobility 303 non-cognitive moral theories 57, 59, 244, 319 non-contradiction principle of 190, 357, 412–13 non-interference 76, 78 non-moral terms 7 non-natural facts 6, 14 non-naturalism 47, 86 non-particular moral judgements 11 normative assessment 187–8 normative claim 327 normative commitments 205 normative ethics 4, 15, 51, 69, 74, 86, 385–8, 403, 408 normative standard 236, 238 norms, ethical 10–13, 18, 22, 36–7, 39–41, 46, 52, 64–5, 70, 99, 119, 154, 243, 399 impersonal 231 see also shared norms Norse sagas 53, 251 noumenal realm 72 novices 69 Nozick, Robert 85, 282 Nussbaum, Martha 392, 414, 425 Oakeshott, Michael 103 obedience 160–61, 308, 314, 316, 363 objectivity 11, 18, 44, 51–2, 66, 68–70, 80, 150–51, 200, 205, 221, 230–31, 238, 244, 248–50, 254, 272, 279, 388, 412, 433 of activities 395 critique of 346–8, 371, 404 objects 26–7, 128, 143, 182–3, 265–6, 312, 320, 355, 404 obligation 14, 16, 22, 36, 53–6, 156, 243, 249, 363, 392, 408 see also duty obscenity 81 observer 201–2 occupational roles 185 Ockham, William 146, 363–4 Odyssey 250, 253, 293–4 Old Testament 130, 157, 160, 390 Genesis 62

Index ontological argument 134–5, 137 ontology 168, 170, 194, 206, 245, 401 open texture 12–13, 201 open-ended activities 271 openness 215, 382, 420 operational concepts 206 optimism 286–7, 395, 422 ordinary language 13, 22, 56, 123, 126 see also ordinary use ordinary moral agents 4, 9, 13, 15, 38, 54, 59, 63, 200, 227, 229, 243, 318, 323, 337, 360, 367–8, 385–6, 402, 417 and disagreement 73–4 interminable moral debates 239 see also plain persons ordinary use 7, 14, 23, 42, 47, 55 organizational theory 221, 247 orthodoxy 373 others 8, 11, 19, 26, 37, 44, 53, 62, 73, 100, 196–7, 218, 237–8, 241, 331, 377–8, 381, 405, 409 dependence on 379–80 learning from 379 ‘ought’ 6, 10, 13–15, 19–20, 22, 35, 38, 46, 48, 52–7, 60–61, 240, 363, 367–8 historical uses 53–5 intuitionist view 56–7 modern 55 see also fact-value distinction Out of Apathy 101 Owens, Joseph 137 pagan deities 160–61 pain 42–3, 242, 301–2, 319–20 Paley, William 35 parable of Last Judgement 88, 94 parable of sheep and goats 91 paradigms 176, 213, 330 paradox 9, 147, 241 parasites 431 Pareto, V. 177 Paris University 354–5, 372–4 parochial assumptions 411 partiality 349, 433 participants 65–6, 69, 144–5, 269–70, 279, 349, 417–19, 423 participation 75, 272, 349, 416–17, 423–4, 431

475

particularism 9, 11, 51–2, 82, 198–9, 203, 297–8, 403 particulars 206–8, 240, 278–9, 301 anomalous 207–8 predictable 207–8 see also social particulars partizanship 205 parts 31, 112, 151, 276 Pascal 112, 152 passions 35–7, 56, 76, 235–6, 303, 314–15, 318, 360, 392 education of 256–7, 302 Hume and 319–21 see also desires passivity 103, 106 past, sense of 79, 116, 145, 252, 276, 368 past beliefs 215, 225, 338 past cultures 23–4, 49, 56–7, 62, 64, 74–6, 102, 106, 117, 248–55ff., 267–8, 419 choice of 51 and present moral crisis 84–5, 153, 248, 252 rationality of 190 see also pre-industrial societies; premodern social orders past history, of practices 65, 69, 350–52, 360 patience 262, 274, 408 patients 63, 66, 72, 166 patriotism 283 pedagogy 30, 52, 233, 298, 302, 340, 374, 379 Peirce C.S., 358 per se nota 412 perceptions 5, 135–6 perfection 134, 138 performative function 10, 11, 16–17 Pericles 294, 296–7, 300 perseverance 377 personal choice 50 personal identity 276, 375 personal judgements 19 persons 50, 117, 240, 249–50, 271, 349, 369, 409, 434 perspectivism 309, 328, 332, 347, 352, 404 persuasion 10, 19, 46, 49, 52, 232, 300, 404 pessimism 37, 287, 297, 340, 422 Peters, R.S. 165

476

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

phenomenology, moral 20, 86, 95, 99, 174, 227, 329, 332–3, 385–6, 389 philosophers 13, 63–4, 73–4, 84, 96, 101, 103, 108, 120, 231, 261, 364–5 Greek 253–4 philosophical anthropology 4, 51 philosophical history 149, 151, 261, 314, 349 philosophical inquiry 133, 274, 393, 407 see also rational inquiry philosophical theology 316–17, 319, 343, 355, 362, 402 philosophy xiii, 59, 89, 94, 96–7, 211, 225, 227–8, 239, 317, 349, 389–90, 397, 400, 407 Anglo-American 363–4 medieval 354, 362–4 ordinary language 3 and practice 115, 290 and religious belief 133–4, 158, 388–9, 393, 402 rival traditions of 107 Scottish 106–7, 317 social science and 191–2 and society 63, 90 see also analytic philosophy; moral philosophy; philosophy of history; philosophy of science philosophy of history 29, 216 philosophy of science 63, 207, 216, 219, 247, 344, 353, 397 physical indeterminism 172 physical movements 180, 196–8, 217–18, 275 physics 68–9, 411 physiology 166–7, 192–3, 217 Pieper, Josef 411 plain persons 322, 402, 417–18, 424, 428 Plato 25–8, 30, 32–3, 35, 53, 60, 138, 154, 161, 200, 232, 254–5, 294, 297–9, 305, 310, 349, 389, 398, 430 forms 299 Gorgias 26, 254, 298, 349 Laches 298 method 298–9 Phaedo 27 Republic 25–7, 297–9, 349 Symposium 27 theory of justice 299

pleasures 25, 27–8, 42–4, 238, 242, 260, 319, 320 Greek view 296 higher 269–270 incommensurability of 67 lower 269 plot 128 pluralism 49, 51, 57–8, 63, 74, 85, 151, 324, 405, 428 causal 211 poets 253–4 Polanyi, Karl 280 polis see city-states, Greek political communities 81, 161–2, 274, 380–81, 414–15, 417, 419 large-scale 379, 418, 427 small-scale 280, 417 and virtues 417 political institutions 198, 200 political liberties 115 political life 75 political parties 198 political science 200 political theory 32, 37, 63, 97, 314, 320–21, 414–21, 423–5 politics 26–8, 31–3, 37, 45, 90, 92, 94, 110–11, 117–18, 263, 274, 280, 286 7, 308, 363, 392, 416–18, 425 comparative 197–200, 396 Greek 253 Polynesia 58, 85–6, 145 Popper, Karl 97, 103, 116, 179, 358 positive argument 49 positive law 77–8, 316 positivism 191, 202, 216–17 possibilities 103, 116–17 post-modernism 342, 405, 420 potential 27, 98, 301 power 25–6, 31, 65, 159, 270, 295, 394, 395 inequalities 416–17 see also will to power practical inquiry 358 practical life 75, 358 practical moral problems 4, 6, 15–17, 290, 337, 342, 385 practical rationality 289–90, 311, 387 Aristotelian 255–6, 261 Hume 321 Liberal 325

Index theory 289–93, 408–9 see also practical reason; practical reasoning practical reason 31, 38, 183, 216, 228, 231, 242, 265, 416 medieval 294, 306–13 modern 313–23 pre-modern 293–306 pure 237–8, 243 Thomist 306–13 see also practical rationality practical reasoning 40, 51–2, 66, 79, 304, 363, 378, 415, 428, 434 growth in 376–7, 378 utilitarian 118 see also practical rationality; practical reason practical syllogism 304 practical wisdom 256, 303 practice 17, 63, 73, 92–3, 107, 110, 222, 247, 311, 329, 337, 396, 402, 429, 434 religious 130–31 see also praxis; social practices practices see social practices practitioners 66, 70–71, 272 praxis 63, 92, 94, 400; see also practice prayer 94 predicates 24, 27, 95, 135, 178, 193, 412 prediction 16, 92, 180, 194–5, 197, 200–203, 218, 245–6, 386 pre-industrial societies 149, 151 prejudice 42, 424 premises 14, 20, 63, 72, 84, 104, 129, 136, 139, 240, 353, 356, 358, 378 incommensurable 228, 282 major 13 minor 13 shared 74 subordinate 358 pre-modern social orders 29–30, 32, 64, 75, 79, 93, 151, 155, 231, 238, 249– 56ff., 281, 370, 396, 419–21 lessons from 81, 430 moral concepts 240–41, 250–51, 267, 369, 433 see also traditional societies Presbyterianism 315–16 pre-scientific cultures 151–2

477

prescription 10, 19, 22, 28, 53–5, 158–9 prescriptivism 231, 318, 385 present 145, 153, 350 pretence 219 Price, H. H. xiv Price, Richard 36, 284, 366 pride 307–8, 320, 371, 391 primitive societies 53, 55, 143–5, 151, 187, 190 principia 356–7 principles 19, 314–17, 406, 408, 412–13 see also first principles; moral principles Prior, Arthur 240 prior beliefs 124, 333 prior moral maxims 39 Prichard, H.A. 6, 45, 55–7, 60–61, 230 private language 126 private morality 263, 280, 283 private sphere 105, 263 problematization 58–9, 72, 293, 330–31, 333–4, 336, 338, 354, 359, 364–5, 369 procedural recommendations 229, 337–8 proceduralism 6, 76, 402–3 process 39, 210, 382 professions 63, 66, 107, 364, 429 proficients 353, 360, 417, 421 progress 65–6, 117, 299, 305, 321, 327, 340, 342–3, 350–52, 364–5, 373, 387–8, 390, 408, 427, 429 moral 50, 52, 61, 367, 393, 428–9, 433 prohibitions 85, 345 promise-keeping 28, 239 promise-making 77 proof 135–6 properties 5, 168, 193, 203, 358, 410 moral 34, 45–6 property rights 91, 115, 307, 314–15, 317, 320–21 prophecy 93–4, 249 propositions 13, 320, 412–13 Protagoras 25 protasis 15 protest 244 Protestantism 20–21, 30–31, 56, 89, 99, 141–2, 155, 235, 399 Proudhon 92 proxies 381 prudence 267, 296, 310, 361, 378, 408

478

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

Prussian state 40, 90, 115 pseudo-science 165–6 psychoanalysis 119, 138, 165–71, 397 critique of 166–71 popularity of 170–71 theory 166–7, 170–71 psychology 6, 8–9, 14–15, 21, 26–7, 42, 76, 138, 171, 174, 177, 200, 236, 307, 320, 332, 342, 363 Ptolemy 213 public argument 433 public good 34, 43, 284, 295, 326 public law 155 punishment 33, 302 Puritanism 27, 33 purity 262 purposes 26, 102, 140, 149, 169, 175, 176–8, 180, 217, 245–6, 254, 256, 259, 337, 432 higher-order 176–7 life 273–4 see also teleology; telos Putnam, Hilary 120, 203, 386, 414, 426 quadrivium 361 quaestio 353, 356 quest 61, 65, 68, 390; see also narrative quest questions 145, 329 Quine, W.V.O. 246 radically contingent beings 136–7 rational activity 103, 271–2, 303–4, 430–31 rational agents 237, 243 rational authority 65–6, 299 rational beings 34–5 rational choice theory 213–14, 216 rational criticism 36, 43, 49, 52, 84, 140, 272, 331–2, 335, 377–8, 416, 419–20 in crafts 349–50 of ideologies 118–19 and theology 353 rational decision procedure 291 rational desire 303–4 rational dialogue 414 rational gains 387–8, 404 rational ideology 400, 407 rational inquiry 214–15, 266, 323–4, 381

communal 329 failure of 372–4, 429 method of 292–3, 299 rival traditions 309, 328–31, 349 universities and 372–3 see also traditions of inquiry rational myth 87, 94–5, 393, 400 rational superiority 216, 289, 359–60, 365–7, 372 rational theory 121, 214, 289, 291–3, 345, 365–6 rational-performative function 10 rational vindication 366, 405–9, 411–12 rationality 17, 37, 65, 77, 86, 116, 138, 213–16, 399, 420 and action 173, 177, 179, 189, 190 animals 375–6 anti-Cartesian 334 anti-Hegelian 334 and beliefs 189–91, 214–15 and community 64 of different social orders 188–91 and disagreement 229–230 historiographical theory of 216 Marxist 88 of modern moral argument 57–8, 63, 71–2, 85, 229ff. of moral judgements 9–10 preconditions for 381 of religious belief 144 and satisfaction 430–31 standpoint independent 365 and truth 214 unmasking of 347–8 see also practical rationality; practical reason Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph 415 Rawls, John xiv, 85, 231, 250, 252, 282–3, 326, 391, 398 realism 84, 92, 154, 214, 309–10, 332, 334, 348, 354, 359, 369–71, 388, 420, 433 reality 44, 92, 309–10, 358–9, 390, 420 reason 30, 32, 35, 68, 101, 138, 162, 204, 239, 314, 316, 318, 362, 409 historicity of 215–16 and the passions 235–6, 320 rival theories 349 see also practical reason; rationality

Index reasoning 176; see also practical reasoning reasons 12, 22, 34, 57, 84, 138, 173, 378 see also practical reasoning; reasons for action reasons for action 4, 9, 16–17, 46, 75, 155, 182, 184–5, 189, 191, 232, 246, 303, 320, 325, 363, 376–7, 380, 386, 392 Christian 154 extrinsic 160 Greek 296 intrinsic 160 preference-based 74 process 182 receiving 375, 379–80 reciprocity 431 reconciled man 111 redemption 89–90 reductivism 193–4 reflection 173, 175, 230, 260, 300, 318, 322 Reformation 21, 31, 35, 54, 155, 426–7 refutation 119, 152, 298, 328, 331, 335, 365, 406, 411 regret 60 regularity 200 regulation 83 Reid, Thomas 10, 36, 107, 319, 322–3, 331, 366 reification 111 relationships 72–3, 82, 156, 171, 232, 241, 315, 378, 380 symmetric and asymmetric 380–81 relativism 25, 36–7, 50–51, 144, 213, 254, 271, 309, 328, 331–2, 337, 365, 403–6, 420 religion 27, 31, 33, 62, 82, 88–9, 95–6, 361, 397, 410 membership of 130 see also Christianity; Islam; Judaism; theism; theology religious attitude 127–8, 130–32, 163 religious belief 91, 124–5, 127, 129ff., 138, 142–3, 146–7, 149, 152–3, 163, 235, 355, 363, 388 and philosophy 133–4, 389, 402 religious concepts 143–4 religious discourse 126–30 religious experience 124, 132, 135–6, 148 religious language 125–32, 143–4 remorse 7

479

repentance 94 repressed emotions 167 republicanism 83 reputation 28 Rescher, Nicholas 400, 407 resentment 195 resistance 396, 419 resources 62, 291, 336, 355, 420 response 11 retroduction 135 revelation 137, 156, 158, 361, 389, 393 Revelation, Book of 91 revision 49, 305, 309–10, 329 revolution 42, 101, 111–13, 116 revolutionaries 217, 220 rewards 302 rhetoric 26, 297–8, 300, 362 rhetorical task 49–50, 52 Ricoeur, Paul 151 right 13, 36, 42, 59, 250, 252, 254, 259, 316–17, 319, 321, 386, 409 rights 32, 76–9, 243–4, 282, 369, 434 discourse 241, 416, 429, 433 political 90 rigour 342 rituals 145, 147–8 rival moral theories 25, 41, 43, 49, 51–3, 73–4, 83–4, 86, 121, 156, 238, 267–8, 281–5, 290, 309, 317, 321–2, 326, 366–72, 408, 432 adjudication between 52, 57, 59, 63, 71–2, 76, 291, 293, 299, 305, 323, 333, 338, 359–60 incommensurability of 228, 298, 327, 346, 406 of justice 290–91 and liberalism 324, 326–7, 366 Robinson, Bishop John 141 Romanticism 56, 111 Rome 29, 263, 287, 306 rootedness 82 rootlessness 149, 229 Rorty, Richard 326, 381 Ross, David 25 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37–8, 389, 398, 430 rules 26, 48, 64, 65–6, 325–6, 345, 378, 386 action-guiding 12, 16, 19, 41, 46, 69, 70, 119, 238, 360 institutional 70

480

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

of practice 68–70, 388 recognition 174–5 of religious authority 130–31 social 154, 179, 184–5 see also moral rules rural communities 422–3 Russell, Bertrand 146, 152–3, 400 Ryle, Gilbert xiii, xv, 9, 11, 165, 168–9, 179–80, 182 sacred realm 88–9 sacrifice 62, 271 St Basil 133 St Benedict 285–7 St Just 284 St Paul 30, 129–30, 134, 148, 306 sanctions 206 Sartre, Jean-Paul 19, 80, 156, 230, 233, 275, 398–9 Satan 54, 159–60 satisfaction 35, 270–71, 361, 430–31 scepticism 33, 147, 152, 214–15, 324 Scheffler, Samuel 243, 271 Schleiermacher, F. 135–6, 212 Scholasticism 363–4 science 6, 9, 17, 73, 92–4, 123, 135, 170, 192, 207, 226, 236, 317, 354, 387 and comparative politics 197–200 see also natural sciences; social sciences scientific beliefs 4 scientific inquiry 68, 70, 152, 210, 301, 316, 357 theories of 206–8 scientific knowledge 197, 358, 410–11 and politics 197–200 in social science 200–222 theory of 208 scientific theories 219 rival 215–16 Scotland 81, 106–7, 235, 314–17, 372, 421 Scottish Enlightenment 106–7 second-order account 292–3 second-order activity 133 second-order purpose 175–6 second-person function 46 Second Vatican Council Gaudium et Spes, 414–15 secular moral precepts 41, 391 secular societies 30–31, 57–8, 82

secularism 88–90, 99, 142, 146, 148–51, 153, 155, 235, 264, 367, 390–92, 414 seems-is distinction 352 self 17, 44–5, 92, 95–6, 196, 233, 249, 271, 274–5, 285, 319–20, 348, 370–71, 379, 401, 416 divided 80, 339 Greek 253, 259 liberalism 324–6 modern 240–41, 243 transcendental 169 unity of 398–9 self-assertion 252, 371 self-authenticating experiences 135–6 self-awareness 39, 98 self-contradiction 370–71 self-control 360 self-criticism 254, 298, 300, 350, 360, 381, 424 self-deception 176, 196, 218, 220, 244, 339 self-defence, local 425 self-description 218 self-determination 55, 71, 76, 174, 181 self-development 65, 377 self-discipline 298 self-esteem 431 self-estrangement 89 self-evident principles 10, 36, 45, 56, 85, 357 self-interest 31, 33–4, 53, 83, 114, 220–21, 321, 339, 368 self-justification 318 self-knowledge 25, 166, 274, 285, 377 self-love 34, 37, 307, 316, 318, 361, 371, 391 self-presentation 249 self-realization 39–40, 44–5, 103, 105, 116, 272, 415, 430 failure in 60 self-transcendent reference 7 self-understanding 398 sensations 125, 183 sentiments 21, 56, 229, 317, 321 see also feelings; passions sexual relations 81 Shaftesbury, Earl of 34, 53, 317–18 shame 60 shared beliefs 204, 329

Index shared criteria 81, 142, 406 shared goods 259, 272, 296, 313, 423 shared moral concepts 149–50, 204, 386, 423, 433 shared norms 10, 16, 49, 74, 149–50, 370, 382 lack of 59, 83, 229, 282 shared principles 12, 406, 423 sharing 269, 272, 295, 421, 433 Sidgwick, Henry 53–4, 242–3, 366–8 sight 125 simpliciter 182, 331, 357 simulacra 278 sin 7, 88–90, 262 singulars 219 skills 5, 11, 175, 269, 279, 350 Skinner, B.F. 168 Skinner, Quentin 148 slaves 376 small-scale communities 64, 107, 116, 280, 285, 287, 417–19, 421, 425 romantic view of 423–4 Smith, Adam 36, 283 Smith, William Robertson 367, 372 social action 103 social animals 375–6 social change 23–4, 29, 32, 51, 53–6, 103, 107, 117, 142, 146, 149–50, 156, 230, 235, 240, 278–9, 390 large-scale 394–5, 399 social communities 48, 380–81, 417–18, 431–2 social concepts 201, 203–6 contestability 204–6, 220–21 social conditioning 41, 44, 90, 98, 260 social consensus 364–5 social constructivism 51 social constructs 205 social context 13, 15–16, 23, 35, 39, 55–6, 58–60, 63–4, 69, 72, 74, 79, 99, 102–3, 144, 243–4, 271,278, 292, 323, 364, 369, 377–8, 386, 390, 407 and modern agents 71, 275 social democracy 424–5 social engineering 248 social entities 200–201, 278 social events 209 social explanation 102–3, 196 social groups 333

481

conflicting theories of 290–91 social institutions 423 social interpretation 145 social life forms of 23, 45, 48–9, 144, 187, 228 game-theoretic 245 social orders 24–6, 32–3, 39–40, 48, 96–8, 107, 184, 187, 230–32, 244, 319, 321, 323, 364, 380, 389, 405, 407 alien 143–5, 251, 323 change in 146 determinate 25, 321, 324, 333 differences between 188 explanation of action 178–9 future 116 Greek 254, 294–6 individualist 241 interest-based 314–15 internal criticism of 145 liberal 325–6 majority members of 99 principle-based 314–15 rationality of beliefs in 189–91 rival 25, 228, 267, 314–15, 321, 408 Scottish 317 small-scale 395, 399 traditional 154–5 transformation of 394–5, 399, 425 virtues and 58–9 see also modern social order; premodern social orders; social practices social particulars 199–200, 202–6, 233, 278 social practices 23, 49, 58, 63–6, 69–70, 77, 184, 198, 233–4, 278, 329, 364, 369, 377–9, 381,387, 393, 395–6, 408, 416, 420, 431, 433–4 and beliefs 204 comparison of 188 criticism of 272–3 decline of 270 definition of 64, 269 deformation of 422 embedded 273, 277 evolving history of 70 goods of 422 Homeric 294–6 past history of 65, 69 and philosophy 407

482

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

progress in 351–2 and rights 78–9 rules of 70, 144 and virtues 269, 272, 350, 422–3 see also crafts; participants; practitioners; social traditions social process 382 social reform 43, 90, 101, 116, 242, 247, 286–7, 427 social relations 37, 315 social roles 24, 31, 35, 39, 41, 44, 53, 55, 72–3, 80, 107–8, 156, 196, 232–4, 240–41, 251–2, 268, 275, 278, 392, 419, 433 social sciences 103, 171, 174, 183–8 causation 177, 200, 208–11, 222 conflict in 220–21 explanation 183ff., 196–7ff. law-like generalizations 197–9, 203, 205–8, 219–22 epistemic challenges 219–20 ideology in 221–2 method 185–7, 189 and philosophy 191–2 positivistic 217 prediction 197, 200–203, 245–6 social scientists 205–6, 219–22 social status 270 social structures 31, 64, 95, 105, 220–1, 247–8 social theorists 219, 221, 427 social theory 63, 97, 103, 397–8, 401 social traditions 269, 277–9 see also traditions of inquiry social warrant 386, 388 socialism 41, 91, 98, 100, 110, 112–15, 117 society 25, 31, 34, 36, 38–40, 42, 48, 58, 60, 64, 75, 84, 90–91, 119, 142, 154, 316, 379, 408 classless 114 general theory of 98, 102–3, 119 modern view of 76 open and closed 179 Stalinist view of 97 Victorian 345 see also social change; social context; social orders; social practices socio-cultural task 49–50 sociological analysis 148, 179

Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, 188 sociology xvii, 22, 44–5, 63, 73–4, 84, 231–2 Socrates 16, 24–6, 53, 298–9, 305 Solomon, David xiv sophists 24–6, 31–2, 254, 295–6, 298, 300, 305–6 Sophocles 253–4, 259, 294, 296–7 Antigone 16, 62, 253 Oedipus Tyrannus 297 Orestes 62, 253 Philoctetes 253, 297 soteriology 31 sources 119, 121, 243 sovereign 30, 31 sovereignty 130, 159, 234, 240, 392 Soviet Union 95, 286, 427 Spain 418 Sparta 304 specialization 107 species 376, 379, 409 Spinoza B., 32, 317, 389, 430 stability 204–5 Stair, Lord 314–17 Stalinism 97–8, 111, 116, 118 standards 5, 8, 11, 32, 65–6, 69, 162, 338, 348, 350, 352, 406 see also impersonal standards state 32, 42, 90, 110 statements 194 statistical analysis 221–2 status quo 315, 321 Steiner, Fritz 85 Stevenson, C. L. xvii, 4–11, 46, 56, 229–31, 243 Stewart, Dugald 36, 107, 319, 322–3, 331, 366 Stoicism 29–30, 39, 261, 263, 283, 306, 398–9 stories 94–5, 128–9, 131, 250, 276 story-telling 250, 253 Stout, Jeffrey 414 strangers 72, 78, 251, 379 Strawson, P. 5 strength 297 structure 48, 186, 354 students 97, 101, 108, 340 sub-communities 420

Index subject 195, 211, 412 subject matter 215, 342, 344, 353, 358, 369, 406–7 subjective criteria 46–7, 50–51, 55, 63, 70, 97, 230–31, 324–6 subjective desires 6, 232, 300 subjective feelings 7, 8, 10, 35, 56, 229, 232–3 subjective states 148 subjectivists 150–51, 398, 430 sub-narratives 218 subordinate truths 310–11 substances 168, 410–11 substantive criteria 336 substantive theory 228, 324, 338, 406, 408 sub-theories 365 success 252, 348, 350 suffering 91, 147, 301, 379 sufficient conditions 102, 199, 201, 209, 211 suicide 186–7 summum bonum 28, 31, 61–2, 231, 262, 265–6, 360, 399, 434 superstition 82, 367 superstructure 40, 96, 98, 248, 270, 393 surd 361 syllogism 9, 15, 176, 325 symbolic truths 89 symbols 89 symmetric relationships 380, 431 synchronic concepts 188, 323, 389, 409 synderesis 312–13, 322, 369 synthesis 355, 359, 362, 368 systematic philosophy xiii, xv, 354, 363–4, 400–401 taboos 56–7, 61, 85, 145 Tanner Lectures 428, 430 tautology 283 Taylor, Charles 148 teachers 340, 349–50, 424 technical expertise 221–2, 234, 245, 247–8, 373 technocrats 247 teleology 30, 50, 60–61, 69–70, 102–3, 106–7, 135, 140, 157, 235, 237, 240, 242, 244, 245–7, 271, 276, 283–4, 369, 390, 393, 401, 428, 433 Christian 262 Greek 249, 252, 259–60

483

pre-modern 250 social 271 telos 116, 157, 233, 260, 262–3, 274, 277, 299, 301, 351, 420, 428, 432 see also purposes; teleology temporal index 351–2 tenets 220, 336, 346, 357, 361, 378, 401 derivative 406 testability 147–8, 170, 204, 215, 220, 310, 334, 369–70, 387 see also falsifiability testimony 131, 139–40, 184, 191 texts 211, 329, 339, 353–4, 370, 421 canonical 106, 373–4 theft 257 theism 62, 74, 140, 141, 143, 388–93 crisis for 152–3, 156 and ethics 158–63 see also religion; theology theology 37, 56, 141, 151–2, 156, 313, 345, 362 craft of 353–4 and ethics 389 and philosophy 355, 402 see also philosophical theology theories, incommensurability of 215–16, 298–9, 306, 308–9, 328, 331–3, 335–6, 344, 359–60, 405, 406–7, 432 theory 92–4, 98, 102–3, 119, 166, 171, 212, 215, 247, 342, 344, 366, 386, 398, 400–401, 403, 420, 432 failure of 226–7, 429 of human behaviour 219 of inquiry 328 of justification 328, 405–7 liberal 323–4 and practice 94, 97, 107, 110, 402, 429 of rational theory 214, 289, 291–3, 328 of rational vindication 405–7 second-order 344 of truth 328 Therapist 234, 244–5, 281 therapy 166, 169, 170 theses, philosophical 74, 228, 353, 362–3, 400–401, 407 Thomas the Apostle 137

484

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

Thomism 158, 163, 336, 342, 346–7, 349–50, 352–6, 359–72, 375, 401–2, 411–12 and crafts 349, 352, 360 and Enlightenment liberalism 366–70 failure of 361–4 and genealogical inquiry 369–71 moral inquiry 360–61 reason 349 and rival theories 365–72 truth 370 vindication 366 see also Aquinas, Thomas; ThomistAristotelian tradition Thomist-Aristotelian tradition 30, 308–9, 311–12, 347, 356–8ff., 401, 410 see also Aquinas, Thomas; Thomism Thompson, E.P. 101, 421–2 thought 8–9, 11, 90, 92, 412–13 and material culture 333 Thrasymachus 200, 298, 305, 430 threats 22 Thucydides 294, 296–8 ‘tickets’ 9, 386 Tillich, Paul 141, 147 time 45, 65, 67, 79, 214, 220, 270, 273, 276–7, 299, 311, 330, 333–4, 348, 351, 367, 370–71, 375 timeless truths 109, 118, 333–4, 345–6, 348 tokens 300, 329 toleration 116, 119, 129, 146, 419, 420 torture 272 totalitarianism 284, 286 totalizing viewpoint 93, 399–400 Toulmin, Stephen 15, 20, 165 tradition 57, 64–6, 82, 84, 105–6, 141, 149, 215, 220, 279, 292, 350, 356, 389, 399, 420 hybrid 330 liberal 326–7 religious 130 rival 309 see also social traditions; traditions of inquiry; traditional societies traditional societies 78–9, 81, 95–6, 154–5, 225, 250–56ff., 369, 408, 433 traditionalists 291 traditions of inquiry 214, 327–40, 387 alien 329–30

allegiance to 338–9 core beliefs 330 determinate 405 dialectical encounter 334–6 external criticism 331–2, 336 internal criticism 331–2, 337 epistemological problems 330–31 justification 334–5 members of 328–9, 334, 338–9 nature of 329, 334 process of development 329–30, 334–7 and relativism 403–4 rival 328–31, 333–40, 359–60, 405–6 tragedy 59, 62–3, 255, 259, 264, 279, 304, 361 transcendence 27–8, 62, 82, 89, 127, 131, 154, 159, 162, 390 transcendentalism 211 transformation 115–16, 119, 285, 395, 399, 416, 424–5 translation 335–6, 342, 365 trivium 361 Trotskyism xvii, 110, 286–7 trust 53, 58, 66, 72, 137–8, 352, 354, 360, 378, 417 truth 4–5, 18, 28, 33, 52, 58, 70, 77, 84, 109, 154, 211–13, 254, 299, 301, 304, 309–10, 334, 355, 382, 401, 420 analytic 13 apodictic 310, 412 and beliefs 189 first principles 357 ideological 221 moral 387, 404–5 necessary 412–13 religious 131 substantive 406 theory 328, 365 Thomist 359, 370 truth-claims 116, 347–8, 370 truthfulness 58, 239, 270, 272, 273 Tucker, Abraham 35 Tully, James 148 types 300, 329; see also action-types uncertainty 82, 93 unconditional moral demands 59–60 unconcious mind 167–9 undecidability 244, 254

Index understanding 154, 212–13, 356–7, 410 unified curriculum 107 United States xviii, 83 unity 80–81, 102, 107, 156, 256, 259, 267, 269, 317, 362–4, 398, 402 of life 273–6, 388 of self 398–9 universal reason 68–9 universalism 9, 11, 17–20, 24, 29, 37–8, 58, 71, 76–7, 233, 252, 254, 264, 268, 292, 314, 316–17, 319, 322, 342, 344–5, 366–7, 372, 388, 404, 408, 411 Graeco-Roman 306–7 and justice 297 and religious belief 135, 306–8 versus particularism 51–2, 297–8 universalizability test 38–9, 47, 60, 237 universals 193, 206, 300 universities 102, 339, 342, 346, 372–4 future of 374 pre-modern 372–3 University College, London xvii, 3 unmasking 244, 248, 347–8, 370–71 unpredictability 201–2, 204, 220–21, 245 urbanization 149–50, 422 use 5, 7, 13, 16, 23, 230, 317 utilitarianism 14, 42–4, 53, 59, 66–7, 72, 79, 104–6, 109, 118, 149, 156, 241–3, 366–7 utility principle 59, 67, 104, 242, 296 utopianism 42, 62, 64, 94, 110, 421, 425 utterances 190–91 value-free judgements 187, 191, 227 values 32, 47, 110, 117, 142, 249, 325, 388 see also evaluation; fact-value distinction Van Steenberghen 352 vanguard 113, 116 variables 221–2 Verba, Sidney 205 verification 322; see also falsifiability vices 257–8, 260, 262, 264–5, 283, 302, 307, 320, 350–51, 369, 391 Vico 62, 398, 410, 412 Victorian society 152–3, 244, 344, 345–6, 368 villages 423

485

Vincennes, university of 374 vindication 18, 52, 63, 212, 402–9 theory 289, 405–7, 411–12 virtue 30, 32, 34, 399, 433–4 concept of 77, 263, 267, 269, 270, 279 decline of 280–84 modern meaning of 283 virtues 28–9, 45, 61, 75, 157–8, 255, 349–51, 389, 408, 417, 419, 429, 431–4 Aquinas and 265–6, 310, 360 Aristotelian 256–60, 265, 296, 301–3, 375–6 corporate 79–80 disagreement about 253–4 external 269 historicity of 40 Homeric 294–6 Hume 320 lists of 58, 77, 267, 281, 408 MacIntyre on 377, 379–81 and medical profession 58 Platonic 298 and practices 269, 273–4, 422–3 pre-modern 251 rank orderings 264, 267, 281, 408 restoration of 284–5 rival traditions 267–9 secondary 149 shared 49 and social order 58–9 table of 30, 254, 258–9, 260, 262, 264, 274 unity of 256, 272, 281 see also virtue virtuous persons, 302–3 vision, 45, 49, 93–4, 100, 104, 250–51, 398, 419 visions, 124 volition, 46, 174, 179–83 voluntarism 230, 236, 363, 405 voluntary activities 79 vulnerability 375 Waismann, Friedrich 12, 203 wants 20, 26, 55, 155, 316 war 8, 10, 60, 228 weakness, moral 61, 63; see also human weakness

486

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

wealth 28, 65, 75, 270, 295, 395 Weber, Max 177, 247–8, 254, 286 weighing 183 weighting 174, 183 Weil, Simone 147 well-being 53, 89, 243, 267, 386–7, 409 Weltanschaung 113, 119, 364 West 58, 63, 74, 95, 99, 151–2, 226–7, 237, 239, 247, 268, 290, 340, 349, 426 Western Political Philosophers 113 whole 34, 44, 58, 74, 94, 95, 112, 149, 255, 276, 345, 393, 400 whole life 27, 29, 49, 71, 73, 75, 252, 275 will 179–83, 262, 313, 363 defective 307, 311 faculty of 182–3, 392 will to power 41, 248, 339, 368, 371 William of Occam 159–60 Williams, Bernard 405, 426 Winch, Peter 144–5, 183–8

Wittgenstein, L. 5, 125–6, 163, 167, 169, 198, 400 Wokler, Robert 29 women 303, 376 words 143, 178 work 82, 259, 280, 377, 398–9 working class 41, 91, 94, 100–101, 113, 115–17, 149–50, 284, 303, 376, 394–5, 422 world and mind 212–14, 333, 344, 355, 357, 371, 401, 433 worship 127–31 wrongdoing 41 wrongness 13 Xenophon 53 Yale University 341 youth 301–2, 304, 377