Words&Dirt

Several chapters from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue were instrumental in my undergraduate thesis, but I never got around to reading the whole book until now. This is a grand and fascinating journey through the history of ethics, fueled by MacIntyre’s argument for a modern renaissance of Aristotelian thought.

He begins with this assertion:

The language of morality is in…[a] state of grave disorder…What we possess, if this view is true, are fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have––very largely, if not entirely––lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. (2)

According to MacIntyre, the language of contemporary morality lacks the common ground necessary to measure moral assertions as true or false; people cannot agree on matters of moral veracity because their respective moral universes have so little in common with one another. This is because we have fallen under the spell of emotivism, “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling” (11-2, emphasis his).

When claims about moral value are reduced to mere whimsy or opinion, they fail to appeal to some overarching conception of the common good, and are thereby stripped of the stature traditionally given to statements about right and wrong. The resulting moral relativism undercuts our ability to agree on the requisite premises for moral debate, as well as to collectively imagine and enact solutions to moral quandaries.

MacIntyre’s project is to demonstrate how a revitalized version of Aristotelian morality can “disentangle from these rival and various claims a unitary core concept of the virtues” that will restore order to our moral expressions and endeavors (186). This interpretation of virtue is not an outright rejection of pluralism, but rather an attempt to recover a shared space where effective moral discourse can empower a radically diverse human world. The question of whether MacIntyre achieves this goal has little bearing on the overall value of his contribution to moral theory. As a work of cultural critique, After Virtue is a magnificent accomplishment.

Taking up this text more than 35 years after its original publication, I was surprised by the enduring relevance of its arguments, especially as they pertain to American politics. Emotivism helps explain how politicians deploy saccharine moral language to equivocate and disguise ideological agendas, and how the rhetoric of opposing political camps can become so divergent as to preclude meaningful debate and compromise.

In a brilliant breakdown of the most fundamental conflict in American politics, MacIntyre writes:

A aspires to ground the notion of justice in some account of what and how a given person is entitled to in virtue of what he has acquired and earned; B aspires to ground the notion of justice in some account of the equality of the claims of each person in respect of basic needs and of the means to meet such needs. Confronted by a given piece of property or resource, A will be apt to claim that it is justly his because he owns it––he acquired it legitimately, he earned it; B will be apt to claim that it justly ought to be someone else’s, because they need it much more, and if they do not have it, their basic needs will not be met. But our pluralist culture possesses no method of weighing, no rational criterion for deciding between claims based on legitimate entitlement against claims based on need. (246)

I find it difficult to imagine any such “rational criterion” that would easily resolve this conflict, but MacIntyre would probably attribute this failure to the emotivist milieu in which I am caught. At any rate, his diagnosis of the problem is dead on. This contentious standoff has only intensified since After Virtue first hit the shelves. How to resolve it? MacIntyre would assert that a new form of virtue, one everyone can agree on, is the key.

But what does that form of virtue look like? How do we define it? MacIntyre’s answer hearkens back to Aristotle’s conception of political life:

Estimates of the population of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries vary widely, but the number of adult male citizens clearly ran into some tens of thousands. How can a population of such a size be informed by a shared vision of the good? How can friendship be the bond between them? The answer surely is by being composed of a network of small groups of friends, in Aristotle’s sense of that word. We are to think then of friendship as being the sharing of all in the common project of creating and sustaining the life of the city, a sharing incorporated in the immediacy of an individual’s particular friendships.

This notion of the political community as a common project is alien to the modern liberal individualist world. This is how we sometimes at least think of schools, hospitals or philanthropic organizations; but we have no conception of such a form of community concerned, as Aristotle says the polis is concerned, with the whole of life, not with this or that good, but with man’s good as such. (156, emphasis his)

So, if we are to regain the unified polity of Aristotle’s Athens, we need a new version of virtue rooted in human relationships, one that focuses on the “good as such” for humanity and that eschews petty squabbles about particular goods.

But how to reconcile the pursuit of particular goods, which exist in wide variety and are essential to human life, with the virtuous pursuit of the “good as such”? MacIntyre suggests we do so by exploring the historical and narrative circumstances that frame the lives of individuals and groups. This is the most compelling aspect of After Virtue, the place where MacIntyre’s philosophical prowess truly shines.

In order to understand how MacIntyre analyzes human behavior, we have to take up his idea of a “practice”:

By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human power to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (187)

A practice is more complex than a particular skill, but less complex than an institution. Digging a hole is a skill, but gardening is a practice, and a business that sells gardening equipment (like Home Depot) is an institution. All practices have internal goods and modes of excellence which may or may not correspond with greater social definitions of those same terms (e.g. one can acquire the goods internal to a financial pyramid scheme and excel at the practice of running the scheme, but still not meet society’s definition of a “good” or “excellent” person). Also, each practice has a historical narrative, a story that justifies and explains the practice to practitioners and non-participants alike.

Every human is inescapably embedded in a vast network of practices whose explanatory narratives arise from history:

The history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history of the tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the history of each of our own lives is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions. (222)

If we are to understand ourselves, we must interrogate the practices in which we find ourselves participating: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (216). The intelligibility of our behavior is derived from how well we achieve the goods and standards of excellence internal to our practices, of how well we play our various roles in the stories we live out. But, according to MacIntyre, it’s not enough to simply satisfy the internal requirements of practices. After all, certain practices can be evil, and to be a perfect practitioner doesn’t guarantee that one’s actions are sensitive to the common good.

Just as MacIntyre looks to Aristotle to supply a unifying idea of the good around which we can all rally, he also wants us to understand individual human lives as unified wholes. Each life, he claims, possesses a “narrative unity” that helps the subject make the leap from a concern with individual goods to a concern with the common good:

In what does the unity of an individual life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask ‘What is the good for me?’ is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. To ask ‘What is the good for man?’ is to ask what all answers to the former question must have in common…It is in looking for a conception of the good which will enable us to order other goods, for a conception of the good which will enable us to extend our understanding of the purpose and content of the virtues. (218-9, emphasis his)

If we carefully examine our practices with the goal of revealing what goods internal to those practices are also by necessity goods for other people, we can begin to build a bridge between the particular human and his or her greater community, thereby extending access to essential goods while still preserving the particular goods that are a matter of preference. The intelligent execution of this process constitutes phronêsis, “that intellectual virtue without which none of the virtues of character can be exercised” (154).

Conspicuously absent from this book is the perspective of the natural sciences, which many contemporary thinkers (myself included) view as an essential platform from which to build out and reinforce a notion of the common good founded on our evolved predispositions, biological needs and the principles of pain and suffering. Surely these matters are paramount when trying to identify overlaps in goods that are merely internal to certain practices and goods that are more or less universal for all of humankind. Happily, there is nothing in MacIntyre’s reasoning that leads us to believe he would reject such an approach, given the caveat that science be prevented from becoming the sole method by which we conceive of the common good. After Virtue can therefore be seen as an indispensable precursor to modern forms of naturalized ethics.

In the final analysis, After Virtue is an exercise in overcoming Western individualism, in rolling back the great lie that we can forsake any allegiance to the common good and do whatever we please. Does MacIntyre believe he has saved us from the emotivist moment? Hardly. His final message proves even more accurate and chilling today than it must have been in 1980:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead––often not recognizing fully what they were doing––was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. (263, emphasis his)

Rating: 9/10