Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre Relativism, Thomism, and Philosophy Christopher Stephen Lutz My Ss LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham + Boulder + New York + Toronto + OxfordLEXINGTON BOOKS Published in the United States of America by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright © 2004 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lutz, Christopher Stephen, 1966- Tradition in the ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre : relativism, Thomism, and philosophy / Christopher Stephen Lutz. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7391-0749-6 (alk. paper) 1. MacIntyre, Alasdair C. 2. Ethics. I. Title. B1647.M124L88 2004 170'.92—de22 2003027016 Printed in the United States of America eS The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.For my father, Richard Norman Lutz (1925-2000)Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One A Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre Chapter Two Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality Chapter Three Is MacIntyre’s Theory of Tradition Relativistic? Chapter Four Is MacIntyre’s Philosophy Thomism? Chapter Five Is MacIntyre’s Thomism Philosophy? Conclusions Bibliography Index About the Author vii ix 33 65 113 161 197 205 211 217Acknowledgments It would take more pages than this book contains to give a fitting tribute to eve- ryone who has contributed to it. To my teachers, especially Fathers James Maximilian Pauli, C.Ss.R., and John Duffy, C.Ss.R., and Professors Antonio Cua and Russell Hittinger, to my colleages and students, and to my family, there is little that I can say but “thank you,” for instruction, patience, and friendship. I owe a particular debt to Father Brian Shanley, O.P., whose guidance and direction in the development of this work was truly invaluable. Fr. Shanley con- tinually challenged me to make the most of the opportunity that writing this book presented, and its publication is a credit to his standards. I also owe a considerable debt to Alasdair MacIntyre, not only for produc- ing the body of work that this book studies—a body of work that has opened philosophy to me in ways that my previous studies did not, but also for a few generous words of confirmation and encouragement that have made a great deal of difference to the completion of this work. The author and publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce extracts from the following works. From Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Revelation in Aquinas's Moral Science, published by the Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1997, used by permission of the publisher. From Robert George, “Moral Particularism, Thomism, and Traditions,” first published in Review of Metaphysics 42 (March 1989), used by permission of Review of Metaphysics. From Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Marxism: An Interpretation, SCM Press, 1953, used by permission of SCM Press.x Acknowledgments From Alasdair C. MacIntyre, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” first pub- lished in The New Reasoner, nos. 7 and 8, 1958-1959, used by permission of New Left Review. From Alasdair C. MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” first published in The Monist 60, no. 4 (October 1977), used by permission of The Monist. From After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, copyright 1984 by Alasdair Macln- tyre, published by University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, and Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, London. Used by permission of the author and publish- ers. From Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair MacIntyre. Copyright 1988 by Alasdair MacIntyre, published by University of Notre Dame Press and Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, London. Used by permission of the author and publishers. From Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Geneology, and Tradition (Gifford Lectures). Copyright 1990 by Alasdair MacIntyre, published by University of Notre Dame Press and Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, London. Used by permission of the author and publishers. From First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (Aquinas Lecture), by Alasdair MacIntyre, 1990, Marquette University Press. Used by permission. From Interview with Giovanna Borradori, originally published in Italian in 1991 and first published in English as “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” in Giovanna Borra- dori, ed., The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Put- nam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press. From Alasdair Macintyre, “How Can We Learn What Veritatis Splendor Has to ‘Teach?” First published in The Thomist 58 (1994). Used by permission of The Thomist. From ‘Thomas Nagel, “MacIntyre versus the Enlightenment,” first published in The Times Literary Supplement (July 8-19, 1988). Used by permission of The Times Literary Supplement. From Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, copyright 1948, Benziger Brothers, published by Christian Classics, Allen, Texas.Introduction Contemporary moral philosophy is in crisis. There are no more eloquent proofs of this than the annual meetings of the American Philosophical Association, at which one may hear lectures extolling the virtues of every imaginable moral position, from natural law and the right to life to radical human autonomy and the right to die. In some meeting rooms at these conventions modern philoso- phers discuss universal moral principles that people may discover through ra- tional enquiry. In other rooms, certain postmodern philosophers reduce all mo- rality to cultural influence or to consequentialism. In a few rooms, small groups of metaphysicians discuss the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other major figures of classical and medieval philosophy, but the major par- ties to the contemporary debates dismiss this work as “history” and look else- where for the answers to their questions. The level of disagreement demon- strated by these meetings lends credence to the conclusions of some of the postmoderns: morality is a product of culture; there is no universal moral “truth” as such, any more than there is universal human culture as such; all moral values are relative to culture and perspective. Nevertheless, all of the parties concerned have political and social agendas that they believe to be just; they work to enact these agendas because they believe that doing so is the right thing to do; and they are willing to impose them upon the unjust, the unreasonable, and the ty- rannical people who refuse to share their views. Successful enquiries are characterized by increasing consensus. Trust builds upon consensus. When trust in religious moral authority was undermined a few centuries ago, secular thinkers sought new, rational standards of morality and justice, and this gave birth to modern moral philosophy. Today, trust in modern moral philosophy has been undermined, in part by the interminable disagree-2 Introduction ments of philosophers. Nevertheless, we must continue to live together, and we must continue to regulate our social life, but the lack of a common philosophy is becoming a burden. It has already become much more difficult for contemporary people to discuss morality and justice in the public arena, as the debates over abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia, freedom of speech, hate crimes, hate speech, and the regulation of pornography have demonstrated. The problem is easy enough to see, but solutions to it seem impossible to find. Alasdair MacIntyre spent the first two decades of his career trying to re- spond to this crisis in contemporary moral philosophy from within the stand- point of modern and postmodern moral philosophy. His frustration with that task led him to try another approach, which yielded the diagnosis of the problem that this book explores. MacIntyre’s account of the role of tradition in ethics speaks of the strengths and shortcomings of modern, postmodern, and classical philoso- phical approaches with the authority of one who has studied and tried to adhere to all three. MacIntyre has been published as a Marxist and liberal Protestant philosopher of religion, as an atheist Hume scholar and historian of ethics, as a dissatisfied Aristotelian, and as a Catholic Thomist. MacIntyre has concluded that the crisis in contemporary moral philosophy is caused by the incoherence of modern and postmodern moral philosophy. Mac- Intyre argues that any quest for a tradition-transcendent moral philosophy of the kind proposed by modern philosophy must fail, as the modern quest has indeed failed, because the very notion of a tradition-transcendent philosophy is incoher- ent. MacIntyre finds that postmodern philosophers are quite right to reject mod- ern philosophy’s pretensions of objectivity, as well as the epistemology that early Neo-Thomists drew from Thomas Aquinas’s works. Nevertheless he finds a great deal of the postmodern ethical work to be self-contradictory. The post- moderns redefine truth in relativistic ways, but the very acts of communicating their ideas and engaging in enquiry seem to betray confidence in an objective truth. MacIntyre rejects the conclusions of many postmodern secular philoso- phers who follow Nietzsche in reducing traditional moral claims to expressions of the will to power; instead he finds the most reasonable response to the con- temporary crisis in the classical metaphysical tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. MaclIntyre’s response to the crisis in contemporary ethics took form through the transformations of his own philosophical convictions. For this reason, this book begins by exploring MacIntyre’s development through a rudimentary intel- lectual biography. Chapter 1 uses statements MacIntyre has made in published interviews to bring together the themes of his early works. We will see how the young MacIntyre, a fideist Christian Marxist analytic philosopher, lost his faith in fideist Christianity, in Marxism, and in analytic philosophy. We will see how Maclntyre’s early works set the foundations for the work that followed in After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Most importantly, we will see the unity of MaclIntyre’s philosophicalIntroduction 3 quest. We will see that MacIntyre’s changes and conversions were not the result of arbitrary choice, but the outcome of committed enquiry. Chapter 2 investigates MacIntyre’s account of the role of tradition in ethics. MacIntyre has been a consistent critic of the ethics of liberal individualism since his student days. Early in his career, MacIntyre proposed that we set aside the standard ethical theories of modern moral philosophy and look for a foundation for ethics in what emerges from history. In Afier Virtue MacIntyre argued that practices and narratives emerge in the historical development of a community to provide a basis for the ethics of the community. After Virtue found a wide audi- ence, but left many readers suspicious that a teleological ethics based on prac- tices and narratives could not escape relativism. In his “Postscript to the Second Edition” of After Virtue, MacIntyre called the project of that book a work in progress that needed to be completed by an account of rationality. He presented that account in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MaclIntyre’s theory of the role of tradition in ethics is bound up in his ac- count of rationality. Rationality is MacIntyre’s name for the resources by which a person or community estimates the truth and falsity of philosophical claims. MacIntyre borrows a paradigm for the development of rationality from Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn’s accounts of the development of science. Since we learn to judge truth and falsity through the resources of the tradition in which we are formed, MacIntyre says that rationality is tradition-constituted. Since we use our rationality to engage the world, and since that engagement may yield anomalous discoveries that force us to change the rational resources of our tradi- tions, MacIntyre says that rationality is also tradition-constitutive. Rationality is a practice, analogous to a craft, that may improve through the generations that adhere to a tradition of enquiry. Maclntyre’s theory of the role of tradition in ethics is bound up in his ac- count of rationality because MacIntyre holds that the quest for the good life for human beings is very much like other human investigations. People who under- stand themselves in a particular way, as members (or not) of a certain commu- nity, as followers (or not) of a certain religion, who have inherited the language and worldview of their predecessors, try to make sense of particular practical and moral questions. Given this description of the situation of the human en- quirer, one cannot but admit that tradition provides the starting point for moral enquiry, for at the outset of one’s own questioning, one’s rationality is largely tradition-constituted. Moral enquiry begins in tradition, but it need not end there. When a community of enquiry finds its moral resources to be flawed, progress in rational enquiry can transform the tradition, and in this way rationality be- comes tradition-constitutive in ethics. Moral enquiry begins in tradition and, if it is to have any lasting influence, ends in tradition. There is no such thing as tradi- tion-independent moral enquiry, even though a great deal of moral enquiry, in- cluding MacIntyre’s, aims at truths that are tradition-transcendent. MacIntyre’s account of the role of tradition in ethics generated a consider- able amount of controversy. The remaining chapters of this book give a more4 Introduction complete explication of MacIntyre’s position by responding to three of the most common critiques of MacIntyre’s later work. Chapter 3 addresses the charge that Maclntyre’s ethics is relativistic, and that moral philosophy, pursued as MacIn- tyre envisions it, cannot escape relativism. Chapter 4 investigates claims that MaclIntyre’s work is not legitimately Thomistic. Chapter 5 responds to the claim that if MacIntyre’s work is Thomistic, it is theological rather than philosophical. Chapter 3 explores the meaning of rationality, truth, and relativism in Mac- Intyre’s work. Rationality is MacIntyre’s term for the resources by which a per- son or community judges the truth and falsity of things. Truth, for MacIntyre as for Thomas Aquinas, is the adequation of a mind to its object. Relativism in varying forms is a philosophical position that since people and communities are more or less bound by traditions in the formation of their rationality, they can never reach the truth as such; they can only reach the apparent truth as under- stood from some particular perspective. MacIntyre distinguishes between two kinds of relativism. One is a realistic appraisal of the condition of human en- quiry that recognizes the ever-present possibility of more adequate answers to our questions. The other is a kind of intellectual despair before the difficulty of finding the truth that surrenders the search for the truth as such. MacIntyre re- jects the latter, but accepts the former. Quite a few philosophers have taken issue with MaclIntyre’s position on relativism, and chapter 3 examines the claims of nine of them. The nine are di- vided into three groups. The first group’s criticisms are based on misunderstand- ings of MacIntyre’s work. Correcting thes: isunderstandings allows us to see MaclIntyre’s position more clearly. The criticisms of the second group arise from some of the more difficult passages of After Virtue concerning “practices” and “goods internal to practices.” The response to these claims draws upon MacIn- tyre’s work since the publication of that book. The third group criticizes MacIn- tyre’s contention that the theories we take to be true are really just the best theo- ries so far. In my response, I support MacIntyre’s position that this kind of rela- tivism, one that recognizes the condition of human enquiry, need not entail the despairing kind of relativism that MacIntyre joins his critics in rejecting. The issues for chapter 4 arise directly from the conclusions of chapter 3. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Alasdair MacIntyre claims to be a Thomist, but a number of Thomists remained unconvinced. MacIntyre’s Thomistic critics could not see how Thomism could be compatible with any form of relativism, nor could they discern in MacIntyre’s major works a commitment to the me physics upon which Thomistic ethics is founded. Chapter 4 divides their crit cisms into three sets of objections: John Haldane objects that MacIntyre does not work out the metaphysical themes of Thomism that would allow MacIntyre, as a Thomist, to give an adequate presentation of the meaning of truth; Janet Cole- man contends that MacIntyre’s teleology is entirely conventional, and that this conventional teleology cannot support an objective natural law; Robert George argues that MaclIntyre’s particularism, that is, MacIntyre’s notion that different communities have different justices and different rationalities, is incompatibleIntroduction 5 with Thomas Aquinas’s universalism, and contradicts Thomistic natural law theory. The response to these objections investigates Maclntyre’s writings on metaphysics, looking to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and drawing heavily on Maclntyre’s lesser known Aquinas Lecture: First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues. The response begins by considering MacIntyre’s treatment of truth, and builds upon this to look into his accounts of teleology and natural law. In the end, we find that MaclIntyre’s understanding of the relationship of tradition- constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality to ethical traditions and moral reasoning is not only compatible with the objectivity of Thomistic natural law, but necessary to the defense of any notion of natural law. The fifth and final chapter addresses questions that arise from MaclIntyre’s embrace of the Thomistic tradition of philosophical enquiry: some contemporary philosophers hold that MacIntyre’s work, insofar as it is Thomistic, is theologi- cal rather than philosophical. Chapter 5 focuses on the criticisms of Martha Nussbaum and Thomas Nagel. Martha Nussbaum claims that MacIntyre has set aside the quest for truth and turned instead to the comfort of Thomistic ideology. Thomas Nagel suggests that MacIntyre is substituting religious belief for philo- sophical reason. Both criticize MacIntyre for limiting philosophical investiga- tion with a set of presuppositions. In response, | turn to MacIntyre’s compari- sons between encyclopaedia (modern philosophy), genealogy (postmodern rela- tivism), and tradition (Thomism) in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. The response leads to a counterquestion: Is it MacIntyre and the Thomists or is it Nagel, Nussbaum, and their secular colleagues who limit philosophical investi- gation with unfounded presuppositions? Nagel and Nussbaum criticize MacIn- tyre for his theological presuppositions, but show themselves to be no less bound to modern and antitheological presuppositions. While the objections and responses of chapter 5 belong immediately to MacIntyre and his critics, they have significance for every Thomist who prac- tices philosophy today. We may identify three questions that help to focus Mac- Intyre’s work: Why are modern philosophers unable to solve the modern prob- lem? Why is postmodern relativism not a compelling alternative to modern non- teleological ethical theories? And is there any reason to reconsider the modern dismissal of the metaphysical tradition? MacIntyre shows that the crisis in con- temporary philosophy is born of the inadequacies of modern and postmodern secular thought, and he gives his readers good reasons to believe that a more adequate solution to the questions of ethics may be found only by asking and answering the questions posed through the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. MacIntyre shows that Thomists may have an important con- tribution to make to the advancement of philosophical ethics beyond the impasse of its current crisis.Chapter One A Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre In this chapter, I will investigate the history of Alasdair MacIntyre through his writings. I begin by introducing the problem of universal moral judgments and briefly consider MacIntyre’s response to it. Then I present a skeletal intellectual biography. The purpose of this brief intellectual biography is twofold. First, I want to demonstrate the unity of Maclntyre’s work—MaclIntyre’s philosophical convictions have changed significantly over the years, but these changes have been the outcome of genuine moral enquiry, and the progress of that enquiry can be told in a continuous story. Second, I plan to show that his later work has evolved from his earlier work. In addition, I want to suggest that MacIntyre’s theory of tradition, and his account in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? of how one may choose between traditions, reflects something that he learned through his own philosophical development. This short history of MacIntyre ends with the publication of After Virtue. Many of the presuppositions of After Virtue and its successor texts will become clear in the course of this biography. Cultural Relativism and Universal Morality Alasdair Macintyre’s theory of tradition-constituted rationality provides an unusual answer to an unusual question, and challenges the prevailing currents in contemporary modern and postmodern moral philosophy. This is the question: How can an interested adherent of a peculiar intellectual and moral tradition, that has been significantly challenged by new discoveries or by rival intellectual and moral claims, objectively assess the intellectual resources of that tradition in order8 Chapter One to provide either a constructive refutation of the contending claims or a revolutionary reinterpretation of that tradition in order to advance that tradition in its quest for ontological truth? MacIntyre’s question challenges the canons of modern moral philosophy because it challenges the traditional distinction between the levels of moral theory: morality, normative ethics, and meta-ethics. Modern moral theorists have long held that these three levels are distinct.' Morality is made up of rules for action and is not necessarily theoretical. Normative ethics is theoretical; it gives reasons for the moral rules and deals with the reasons for adopting particular moral norms, judgments, and principles. Meta-ethics is a second order inquiry into the underlying principles of normative ethics: We enter the sphere of meta-ethics when we reflect about what we are doing when we make a moral judgement, for instance, whether we are reporting on the nature of certain moral fact, or simply expressing our feelings, or reporting what we believe to be willed by God, etc. One goal of meta-ethics is to consider the rational justification of ethics, to seek some abstract explanation of moral judgment as such, that might in turn be used to assess the truth and validity of contending views of normative ethics and their particular moral norms. There is one application for this in cultural revolutions, as when long-held moral judgments regarding race and ethnicity were chal- lenged and rejected by leading Americans in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It has another application in problems of comparative ethics, in which questions arise regarding the relative truth and validity of the competing judg- ments and moral claims of conflicting traditions. Many hope that contemporary meta-ethics might provide some disinterested, objective criterion by which to evaluate such contending positions. A great deal is at stake with the questions of meta-ethics. As long as it seems impossible to provide some universal account of ethics, it seems that it will remain equally impossible to defeat the claims of moral relativists who deny the possibility of the objective truth of any moral claim. Practically speaking, the denial of the possibility of an objective criterion of justice or right would seem to make cultural tradition the ultimate arbiter in disputes over important issues of morality and justice, such as slavery, racism, segregation, and religious tol- eration. Thus the problem of the universal justification of moral claims is an important one, not only for philosophers engaged in the debates of meta-ethics, but for anyone inhabiting the modern world. Yet MacIntyre is deeply skeptical about the efforts of those who theorize about meta-ethics according to the can- ons of modern philosophy. Meta-ethics addresses questions of comparing, evaluating, and judging between alternative moral philosophies. MacIntyre’s question addresses these same issues, and so some philosophers have inferred that MacIntyre is doing meta-ethics. But this logical error overlooks the profound difference between Maclntyre’s approach and that of meta-ethics. MacIntyre does not draw the three levels of ethicsA Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 9 in the way that meta-ethicists do. For the Aristotelian MacIntyre, morality is about the pursuit of the good, which is understood through the study of ethics, so the distinction between morality and normative ethics is tenuous at best. MacIntyre finds the notion of a disinterested second order enquiry into ethics absurd; he finds instead that the practitioners of meta-ethics use the peculiar moral philosophy of modern culture to judge the beliefs and moral norms of alien cultures. For MacIntyre, comparative ethics is for interested adherents, not disinterested observers. The mask of the disinterested observer obscures the convictions of modern philosophers. Alasdair MacIntyre’s unusual question addresses the concerns of meta-ethics, but it takes a form very different from those of modern theorists. The question is striking because it begins by granting the claims of cultural relativists that the contents of differing moral traditions may be essentially untranslatable and incommensurable because of differences in their underlying forms of substantive rationality. Taking relativism of this kind as given, MacIntyre seeks to provide an account of the manner in which an interested adherent of a particular moral tradition may transcend the limits of his or her own tradition in order to arrive closer to the objective truth in both rationality and ethics. MacIntyre is looking for objective, metaphysical truth, even though he acknowledges that such truth is difficult to attain and may appear to be indistinguishable from traditionally held errors among those who possess a mixture of truth and error. At first glance, and certainly by modern standards, MacIntyre’s project may seem absurd. On one hand, he accepts relativism as a condition; he claims that there is no such thing as morality as such, only the morality of this or that community or tradition. On the other hand, he rejects relativism as a conclusion, and presents his work as a method of discovering the truth about morality: “I don’t think that cultural difference has the last word, for I am, after all, an Aristotelian. But I do think that cultural difference ought to have the first word.” He professes both the tradition-constituted nature of human rationality and the objectivity and accessibility of truth. For MacIntyre, rationality is an essential counterpart to truth. MacIntyre defines truth as adequatio mentis ad rem, that is, as the adequation of the mind’s judgment of a thing to the reality of that thing. For MacIntyre, rationality is the criteria one uses to judge truth and falsity. MacIntyre distinguishes two kinds of rationality: formal and substantive. Formal rationality includes the sorts of bare logical rules on which philosophers generally agree. Within logic, there is really little matter for disagreement. Substantive rationality, however, includes all those determinations and judgments about good reasons and acceptable evidence that arise through tradition and convention, and here we do experience disagreement: The resources of . . . [late-twentieth-century academic] philosophy enable us to elucidate a variety of logical and conceptual relationships, so that we can chart the bearing of one set of beliefs upon another in respect of coherence and inco- herence and in so doing exhibit as the shared inheritance of the discipline of10 Chapter One academic philosophy a minimal conception of rationality. But whenever and insofar as philosophers proceed to conclusions of a more substantive kind, they do so by invoking one out of a number of rival and conflicting more substantial conceptions of rationality, conceptions upon which they have been as unable to secure rational agreement in the philosophical profession as have Gifford lec- turers in expounding their rival and competing claims concerning natural theol- ogy and the foundations of ethics.* Even if it is possible to secure agreement concerning the bare formal structure of rational argumentation, consensus among philosophers is not guaranteed, and historically has not occurred, because the substantive elements of rationality are not determined by the formal. Alasdair MacIntyre holds that the bodies of principles and beliefs which make up substantive conceptions of rationality are developed through the experiences of traditional communities and inherited by those whose rationality is formed and educated in those communities. This is what he means by “tradition-constituted rationality.” We may see the point more clearly by considering Alasdair MacIntyre himself. Macintyre has worked within several different intellectual communities, each with its own substantive notions of rationality and justice. Each of these communities claims to have a self-consistent tradition, and his critics have invoked the standards of those traditions to condemn MaclIntyre’s changes as irrational. But MacIntyre’s wanderings have a rational trajectory. We can discern a continuous thread of moral enquiry through all of Maclntyre’s changes, and what we see in the way those changes came about foreshadows MaclIntyre’s account of how one might choose between traditions.* The Constitution and Conversion of MacIntyre’s Substantive Rationality Substantial biographical information on Alasdair MacIntyre is not easy to come by. In order to construct the bare skeleton of an intellectual biography of sorts, it is necessary to look to his work, and to consider the advent and development of certain movements and themes. Kelvin Knight’s introduction to The Macintyre Reader,° and three interviews, one with Giovanna Borradori, published in her book, The American Philosopher;’ another with Thomas D. Pearson, published in the journal Kinesis; and the third “conducted postally by Gordon Reddiford and William Watts Miller” which appeared in Cogito give considerable insight into the life of Professor MacIntyre, and provide a framework for observations drawn from his philosophical works. According to MacIntyre’s theory of tradition-constituted rationality, everyone learns to think and to judge within a particular culture. That culture provides the categories that its members use to organize their knowledge and experience. WhenA Short History of Alasdair Macintyre ul some new experience or rival concept of rationality gives the culture a challenge that it cannot assimilate, explain, or reject, those who understand the problem may face an epistemological crisis. This crisis can only be resolved by an improvement of the resources of the tradition. Following this same pattern, Alasdair MacIntyre’s life may be organized into four phases. We will call these phases (1) cultural inheritance, (2) organizing knowledge and experience, (3) epistemological crisis, and (4) traditional development. This division parallels MacIntyre’s own description of his academic career. For the Cogito interview, MacIntyre wrote: My life as an academic philosopher falls into three parts. The twenty-two years from 1949, when I became a graduate student of philosophy at Manchester University, until 1971 were a period, as it now appears retrospectively, of het- erogeneous, badly organized, sometimes fragmented and often frustrating and messy enquiries, from which nonetheless in the end I learned a lot. From 1971, shortly after I emigrated to the United States, until 1977 was an interim period of sometimes painfully self-critical reflection, strengthened by coming to terms with such very different perspectives on moral philosophy as those afforded by Davidson in one way and by Gadamer in quite another. From 1977 onwards I have been engaged in a single project to which After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry are central, a project described by one of my colleagues as that of writing An /nterminably Long History of Ethics? What I am calling Maclintyre’s period of “cultural inheritance” predates Maclntyre’s graduate studies. His period of “organizing knowledge and experience” belongs to the first ten years of his academic career. What I call his “epistemological crisis” begins in the late 1950s, his effort, beginning in 1971, to come to terms with that crisis yields the period of “traditional development” that began in 1977. Cultural Inheritance Alasdair MacIntyre was born on January 12, 1929, in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents were Eneas John and Margaret (Chalmers) MacIntyre, both of whom were physicians."° As the son of educated parents living in Glasgow, MacIntyre had the unusual opportunity of living at the border of two cultures, and during his childhood in Scotland the young MacIntyre became an heir to both of them. One was the tradition of the old Gaelic oral culture and the other was that of modern liberal rationalism. He described his dual inheritance in his interview with Giovanna Borradori: Long before I was old enough to study philosophy I had the philosophical good fortune to be educated in two antagonistic systems of belief and attitude. On the12 Chapter One one hand, my early imagination was engrossed by a Gaelic oral culture of farmers and fishermen, poets and story tellers, a culture that was in large part already lost, but to which some of the older people I knew still belonged with part of themselves. What mattered in this culture were particular loyalties and ties to kinship and land. To be just was to play one’s assigned role in the life of one’s local community. . . . Its concepts were conveyed through its histories, On the other hand, I was taught by the other older people that learning to speak or to read Gaelic was an idle, antiquarian pastime, a waste of time for someone whose education was designed to enable him to pass those examina- tions that are the threshold of bourgeois life in the modern world. The modern world was a culture of theories rather than stories. It also presented itself as the milieu of what purported to be “morality” as such; its claims upon us were allegedly not those of some particular social group, but those of univer- sal rational humanity. So, part of my mind was occupied by stories about Saint Columba, Brian Boru, and Ian Lom [sic], and part by inchoate theoretical ideas, which I did not as yet know derived from the liberalism of Kant and Mill.'! The young MacIntyre was faced with two distinct worlds, one a world of stories and the other a world of theories. These two worlds were separated both by their principles and by their languages: “I come from a bilingual culture, from a social order in which people, in my youth at least, still lived on a margin between two cultures, each with its own language.” In the Gaelic world, the world of stories, morality was something concrete; the answers to moral questions were to be found in the history of the experience of the culture. St. Columba, Brian Boru, and Iain Lom were not just mythical heroes, they were historical people. The legends of the lives of these men are not just fanciful stories or moral parables. Like the Old Testament accounts of David and Judith, they tell how real people made real choices in real situations, and as such they are models for imitation. More importantly, however, they show how Scottish and Irish people have dealt with particular social, political, and moral problems, and how later Scottish and Irish people have come to judge those actions and decisions, and as such provide a standard for later Scottish and Irish people to imitate. According to MacIntyre, “The boundaries of a language are the boundaries of some linguistic community which is also a social community.”'* The Gaelic language of the Scottish oral tradition, the canonical stories of that tradition, and the community to whom those stories were directed constituted a kind of organic whole.'* The young MaclIntyre’s other world, the world of concepts, spoke English, but was not the English world. It was, rather, the Enlightenment world, the modern world, the Encyclopaedist world,'® the world of “Kant and Mill.” For, to the extent that the Enlightenment has taken root in a culture, that culture loses its self- understanding as a community struggling to understand and to do justice through the resources of its own tradition, through its own history, language, religion, laws, and stories:A Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 13 What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational enquiry as embod- ied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standards of rational jus- tification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way in which they transcend the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition.' The English-speaking modern culture understood itself to be liberated from the opinions of traditions; it spoke English only because of incidental historical circumstances. The young MacIntyre was a native in both of these cultures: One in which the community’s reflection upon the history and tradition of its culture yields authoritative answers to moral questions, and the other in which individuals seek universal rational conclusions based on novel theories in order to provide conclusive answers to those same moral questions. This dual inheritance led, unsurprisingly, to intense philosophical incoherence. MacIntyre explains that in college he began to recognize the incoherence of his beliefs, but his university studies gave no easy remedy for his difficulty: The reading that first my undergraduate, and then my graduate studies required of me only accentuated the incoherence of my beliefs. I read Aquinas as well as Aristotle. Sometimes I would find myself thinking about justice in an Aristote- lian or Thomistic way, sometimes in a liberal way, without recognizing the full extent of my own incoherence. v Nonetheless it was in college that he learned the importance of having consistent beliefs: Philosophy taught me the importance of not holding contradictory beliefs. . . . Yet in the same period in which I became aware of the importance of coherence and consistency in belief, the incoherence of my own mind was growing rather than diminishing. My school and undergraduate studies were in Latin and Greek—literature, philosophy, and history—and I became aware of the radical difference not only between classical Greek culture and liberal modernity, but also between the ancient Greeks and Irish tradition. ® This recognition of the problem of incoherence, both as something present in his belief system and as something to be overcome, marks the beginning of a second phase in MacIntyre’s development. For, from this point on, he could no longer be the passive receiver of the goods of these traditions; he had to become the editor of his own coherent collection of them.14 Chapter One Organizing Knowledge and Experience When Alasdair MacIntyre was seventeen years old and living as a student in London, he discovered one more tradition: Marxism: I was fortunate enough . . . to be confronted by the local Communist Party’s critique of the local Labour Party. That critique was compelling on concrete terms, not in terms of large theories. As a result, I became convinced of the truth of some of the larger theories, for those theories appeared to explain and justify the local critique.'® The problem with the local Labour Party was that it espoused liberal political theories that preclude the pursuit of the common good. The common good is something that may only be sought by, for, and through a community. Under liberalism, however, individuals are free to pursue private goods, and this is possible only by restricting the pursuit of the common good: Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain kind of unacknowledged domination, and one which in the long run tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and cultural relationships. Liberalism, while im- posing through state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue what- ever they take to be their own good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the good, especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those traditional forms of human community within which this project has to be embodied.”° The insights Marxism provided about liberalism provided MacIntyre with the tools he needed to set about the task of bringing his many beliefs into coherence: “Certainly Marxism added another dimension of complexity. But it also represented a turning point. It was in thinking about Marxism that I began the work of resolving the conflicts in which I was trapped.””! Through a careful study and criticism of Marxism, MacIntyre was able to make some sense of his modern predicament. One of the first things MacIntyre addressed through Marxism was the status and practice of modem religion. Because Marxism had sprung from, and could only have sprung from Christian sources, MacIntyre found that Marxism could point the way for what he took to be the proper development of the Christian Church. He presented this theory in 1952 in a book called Marxism: An Interpretation.” Alasdair MacIntyre was then twenty-three years old. Marxism: An Interpretation begins with a theme familiar to readers of Macintyre’s later works: the unity of a whole life. Authentic religion, he says, needs to have significance for every part of a person’s life—the political, economic, and cultural—as well as the properly religious: “Religion as an activity divorced from other activities is without point. If religion is only a part of life, then religion has become optional. Only a religion which is a way of living in every sphere eitherA Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 15 deserves to or can hope to survive.”” Unfortunately, much of mainline Christianity has, in fact, divorced religion from the whole of life. By dividing the sacred from the secular in a way that makes each realm irrelevant to the other, modern Christianity risks reducing itself to a fetish. Speaking as a Liberal Protestant,“ MacIntyre wrote, “A religion which recognizes such a division, as does our own, is one on the point of dying.”** According to the young MacIntyre, modern Christianity has failed to provide, and in fact does not even attempt to provide, a comprehensive religious view of life to modern man. In order to give an example of a doctrine that has attempted to provide such a view, and can serve as a model for such an effort, MacIntyre turned to Marxism: The religious significance of Marxism is that it is the more important of the two major attempts in our post-Christian era to create an entirely secular view of the world. The other is modern positivism, which, however, is weaker than Marx- ism in that as a coherent doctrine it is a faith only for intellectuals. ... Marxism. . .. is a secularism which can give a positive account of the nature and function of religion in its own terms. Hence, Marxism is the most developed expression of the division between the secular and the sacred. For only Marxism envisages the whole of life in terms that explicitly deny the God-given character of the world.’ In Marxism: An Interpretation, the young MacIntyre embraced certain Marxist principles even as he presented an account of the failure of Marxism on its own terms. He showed how the Marxist rejection of religion had an inescapably religious character, and he pointed out that Marxist atheism ultimately failed in a peculiarly religious manner, when Communists reduced their revolutionary doctrines to an orthodox form: The corruption of Marx’s insight is the Marxism that turns man’s hope away from man and puts it instead in the party, in the doctrinally orthodox.” Marxism is not simply an economic doctrine: it is a doctrine about the uni- verse, and such doctrines are held with religious rather than with scientific attitudes, ... The existence of canons of orthodoxy within Marxism inevitably destroys any pretensions that Marxism may have to the status of science. . . . It is a typical corruption of religion rather than of science to confuse truth with or- thodoxy.”* MacIntyre respected Marxism’s real insights. One of these was Marx’s condemnation of religiosity that merely served as an opium for the masses: In Marx’s thinking religion has a dual role to play. Throughout class society re- ligion performs two essential functions: it buttresses the established order . . and it consoles the oppressed. . . . It distracts men from establishing a now pos- sible good society on earth by turning their eyes toward heaven. Its sanctifica- tion of the existing social order makes it a counter-revolutionary force.”°16 Chapter One If this is a fair description of the role of religion in the modern world, then one would do well to ask whether this sort of religion seems like a God-given and good institution. MacIntyre believed that much of modern Christianity fell under this critique, but that Marxist criticism could not reach that part of the Christian community that remained true to the practical message of the Gospel. It does not speak to Christians who refuse to buttress the established order and who serve, rather than console, the oppressed: The religion which is untouched by the Marxist critique is that which proclaims not the justification of every social order, but the inadequacy of every social order. The grounds of this inadequacy spring from the radical nature of human sin and from the fact that no human order can ever be adequate to the perfec- tion which God ordains and which is displayed in Jesus Christ. Such a religion is one that will also be at odds with Marxism in that it will see the corruptibility of communist society as clearly as that of any other society.”° The lesson of Marxism for Christians is to recover this sort of faith. Besides the tendency of the modern Christian churches to legitimize the social, political, and economic status quo, MacIntyre pointed out another failure. They tend to understand themselves on exclusively doctrinal grounds: The message of the gospel is that Jesus Christ is the King and Head of our race, that mankind is in Him a new creation. The corruption of the gospel is the kind of preaching that restricts the new creation to those who are doctrinally ortho- dox and within the fold of the Church, however much this is modified to dis- guise what is really being said." This failure is only compounded by the failure of such orthodox bodies to live the life of a community: “The most important fact about conversion is that it is conversion into a community, and Communism has built up in the party a dedicated community of a kind rarely found outside the religious orders.”*? The kind of Christianity that the experience of Marxism impels us to recover must be one which understands that religious practice can only begin with community. Thus, we find another theme familiar to readers of After Virtue in the conclusion of Marxism: An Interpretation. According to the young MacIntyre, finding the truth of the gospel and the truth of Marxism confronted by the corruption of the Church and the corruption of the Communist Party leaves us in a quandary. What is the Marxist-Christian to do? “The task is to create a form of community which will exemplify the pattern of the gospel and which will be enabled to renew continually its repentance for its conformity to the patterns of human sin.”*? MacIntyre was already waiting “for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” By his condemnation of both Party and Church, the young MacIntyre put himself in a very difficult position. He had provided evidence that much of modernA Short History of Alasdair Macintyre 17 Christianity seems vulnerable to the Marxist critique. He had demonstrated the incoherence of a Marxism that seeks to free the human person from the irrational bonds of theistic religious orthodoxy through the power of an atheistic and agnostic religious orthodoxy. What he had not provided was a philosophical scrutiny of his religious beliefs.** He admitted this in the preface: “There are many questions not raised in this book. I have assumed the possibility of understanding the world in Christian terms, but I am well aware of the difficulties that these raise.”** Here MacIntyre had struck upon the most terrible limitation of modern thought. It is easy enough to work out abstractly the difficulties entailed by the consistent application of the principles of some substantive theory, like Marxism. It 1s easy enough to show empirically that Marxism as embodied in the twentieth- century Communist Party is no longer based on either insight or scientific theory, but on religious doctrine and dogmatic assertion. It is no easy matter, however, to cross over into the abstract criticism of substantive religious claims and the most difficult of such claims to address is also, for many people, the most important: How is one to justify religious faith in God? Alasdair MacIntyre was indeed “well aware of the difficulties” raised by Christian beliefs. In this period of his life he was a lecturer on the philosophy of religion, and seems to have been struggling with the problems of the justification of religious faith. Referring to the problem of incoherence in his beliefs at the time, MacIntyre told Borradori, “No wonder I found it increasingly difficult to discover adequate rational grounds for the belief in Christianity that I thought I had, and that faith came to look like arbitrariness.”*” This is not to say that he immediately rejected faith because it seemed arbitrary. On the contrary, he is alluding to a period in the 1950s when he embraced and published a fideistic theory of religious belief. In 1955, MacIntyre contributed an essay called “Visions” to New Essays in Philosophical Theology, a volume he coedited with Antony Flew, while he was a lecturer in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Manchester. In “Visions” MacIntyre defended three theses: First, that no experience less explicit than visions and voices could provide evidence for religious beliefs; second, that visions and voices could not in prin- ciple provide evidence of the existence of invisible and supernatural beings; and third, that, even if this were not so, over the claims made in connections with any particular vision or voice insuperable difficulties must arise.°* Ile argued that no evidence of any kind may be adduced as a basis for religious belief, yet MacIntyre remained committed to his Christian faith. In 1957, he published “The Logical Status of Religious Belief’ with essays by Stephen Toulmin and Ronald Hepburm in a book called Metaphysical Beliefs.” In 1959, he published a monograph called Difficulties in Christian Belief.” Both of these works demonstrate the stance toward the justification of religious belief that MacIntyre described in his interview with Borradori:18 Chapter One For a time, | tried to fence off the area of religious belief and practice from the rest of my life, by treating it as a sui generis form of life, with its own standards internal to it, and by blending a particular interpretation of Wittgenstein’s no- tion of a “form of life” with Karl Barth’s theology.“! Wittgenstein’s “form of life” has the nature of an internally coherent whole.’? Barth’s theology proposes that revelation must be accepted on faith alone, with no rational justification whatsoever. Hans Urs von Balthasar summarizes: This Revelation of the hidden God, his merciful self-disclosure, finds no ade- quate possibility of response in man. Man, who hears this Revelation, has no natural capability of accepting it. He possesses merely a “potentiality,” itself a grace: faith. God’s revelatory utterance cannot be related to man’s other types of knowledge. It is its own foundation and justification. Thus man’s acceptance of it cannot be based on any other motive except the very act of hearing and ac- cepting it.*? Maclntyre’s mixture of Wittgenstein and Barth is evident in all three of these early theological works; their central argument is that religious belief is not accessible to reason. The influence of Barth is very clear in Difficulties in Christian Belief. Here MacIntyre argues that Christian morality is not and should not be philosophically justifiable: In morality also we have no neutral standing ground between Christian moral- ity and other moralities. Certainly we can and do affirm that Christian morality is more adequate than non-Christian; but in doing this we rely on Christian standards of judgement. We merely affirm in another way our adherence to Christian morality.“* Christian morality is not philosophically justifiable because it is entirely based on a religious faith that is not philosophically justifiable: The Bible itself recounts a narrative without offering credentials. It never says: “Here is a cogent argument.” It ever says: “Thus saith the Lord.” .. . A God who was vindicated by geometrical demonstrations just would not be the God of the Bible.* He gives similar statements in “The Logical Status of Religious Belief”: What we say about God we understand in the familiar pictorial senses: we do not derive it from evidence, we recognize that the facts of nature and history do not provide any ground for what we say, yet we say it. Our ground for saying it is that we have the authority of Jesus Christ for saying it: our ground for ac- cepting what he says is what the apostles say about him; our ground for accept- ing the apostles? Here the argument ends or becomes circular; we either find anA Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 19 ultimate criterion of religious authority, or we refer to the content of what au- thority says.*@ According to the young MacIntyre, the best arguments for religious belief are not the theories of the philosophers, but the lives of the saints. The task of philosophers 1s far more narrow: What we know about God we do not learn from philosophy. All that philoso- phers can hope to do is to clear up misconceptions and by so doing partly neu- tralize the acids of scepticism. Scepticism itself is valuable in many ways to be- lief: it overthrows superstition and a too easy and credulous faith, not to speak of intellectual fraud. But neither sceptical argument nor philosophy, delimiting the possibilities for both believer and sceptic alike, has the last word. That re- mains with God.*” No philosopher who accepted the young MaclIntyre’s view of religion could hope to accomplish this task, however, for that view hamstrings reason with a fideism that can give no rational basis for any distinction between authentic faith and superstition, credulity, or fraud. Unfortunately, MacIntyre seems to have overlooked this possibility, and it is all the more unfortunate since the faith that he intended to defend in Difficulties in Christian Belief was in crucial respects incompatible with the content and methods of his defense, for that book invokes rational arguments from traditional authority in support of a novel theory. Consider first the kinds of religious beliefs that MacIntyre refused to justify. In chapter 4 of Difficulties in Christian Belief, MacIntyre took up a thesis on evil that has been defended more recently by John Hick.“® As Brian Davies explains, “Hick argues that the existence of evil is necessary for the perfect development of human beings.” Similarly, MacIntyre argues that God created evil in the world in order to provide opportunities for human moral achievement: [Human beings] were to be capable of moral achievement and moral growth; and the necessary concomitant of this is that they had to be capable of moral failure and refusal to grow. It was to rest with them what they made of the world; and it was necessary therefore that there should be found in the world obstacles to be overcome, diseases to be cured, worse states to be made better and so on. God could not have made free beings capable of moral achievement unless he had made a universe in which there were evils to be struggled against and overcome.*° Maclntyre presents this theory of evil again in “The Logical Status of Religious Beliefs” in examples that could have come from Moli¢re’s Tartuffe: The believer who catches smallpox does not conclude that God was either un- able or unwilling to keep him in good health: he praises God for an opportunity for the exercise of fortitude. If he dies, his believing friends do not say, “Poor20 Chapter One fellow! He thought that God loved him, but . . .” They say, “How good of God to take him to a better place.”*! It was in the defense of this “God” that MacIntyre embraced the fideism of Barth and Kierkegaard in a manner that must surprise readers more acquainted with Maclntyre’s later work: To believe in God resembles not so much believing that something is the case as being engrossed by a passion: Kierkegaard compares the believer to a mad- man; he might equally have compared him to a lover. . . . The inability of the believer to adopt an abstract, neutral, speculative attitude to his belief resem- bles the lover’s lack of objectivity. . .. An act like worship—or love for that matter—is obviously incapable of justification. .. . The only apologia for a re- ligion is to describe its content in detail: and then either a man will find himself brought to say “My Lord and my God” or he will not.° Both his theory of evil and his fideism are opposed to traditional Christian doctrine, but to the disciple of Barth who wrote Marxism: An Interpretation, the constraints of traditional orthodoxy held little authoritative force. Metaphysical Beliefs was republished in 1970 with a new preface by a changed Alasdair MacIntyre. In the preface to the 1970 edition, MacIntyre recanted the fideistic claims of “The Logical Status of Religious Beliefs,” citing three reasons for doing so. First, he realized that the positions he defended, especially with regard to evil, were at odds with the Christian faith. MacIntyre’s Christian belief turned out to be, in certain respects, a belief in a personal theory. Second, he realized the methods he employed to protect the faith from threats of skepticism left a religion that was no longer interesting to skeptics: For Christianity, as I defend it here, becomes a belief which is in practice ir- refutable at the cost of becoming a belief that is in practice vacuous. Where the criteria for truth of a position are laid down, so to speak, from within that posi- tion, then it does appear, at least in the present case, that the word “truth” is be- ing misused, for it becomes impossible to differentiate a position for which one claims truth (in the ordinary sense) and a position which one merely entertains because of its aesthetic power. Traditional Christianity is, of course, not vacu- ous and does claim in unambiguous terms to be true. The philosophy of religion of my essay is thus in yet another respect inconsistent with the faith it tried to elucidate. Here MacIntyre, in a preliminary way, distinguishes rationality from truth. He recognizes that there is a real distinction to be made between truth and the criteria for truth, but he also recognizes that his approach to the subject of religion collapses that distinction, and that it therefore cannot justify itself. Third, MacIntyre rejected the fideism of that essay because of its irrationalism, and he thanked his critics for freeing him from his error: “I now . . . regard its irrationalism as both false and dangerous. And am in the debt of those critics suchA Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 21 as Basil Mitchell and Antony Flew, who combined from different positions to make this clear to me.”** Basil Mitchell and Antony Flew both contributed to a discussion titled “Theology and Falsification” that appeared in New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Antony Flew, an atheist, argued that theological assertions about the nature of the world are not supported by our experience of the world, and that the experience of evil is incompatible with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent Creator.*> Basil Mitchell, a Christian, argued that the Christian keeps faith, in spite of the problem of evil, because of a commitment or trust in the character of God.** Both approaches contradict the one MacIntyre had held. Along with the philosophy of religion found in “The Logical Status of Religious Belief,” MacIntyre also rejected the Christian faith: 1 soon recognized that the claims embodied in the uses of religious language and practice are in crucial ways inseparable from a variety of nonreligious metaphysical, scientific, and moral claims, a conclusion I reached when reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s criticism of Barth. When I came to reject this strange philosophical mixture of a misunderstood Wittgenstein and an all-too-well un- derstood Barth, I mistakenly rejected the Christian religion along with it. But parts of Thomism survived in my thought from those times, together with some more adequate reflections on Wittgenstein.” The man who wrote the preface to the 1970 edition of Metaphysical Beliefs was no longer a Christian believer, and had not been for a number of years. We will now turn our attention to the consequences of the rejection of Christianity in his thought. Epistemological Crisis I do not intend to imply that one can simply take MaclIntyre’s theory of tradition-constituted rationality, with the stages in development that he describes, and then retrospectively force his life to fit into that schema. It is my contention, however, that a period in MacIntyre’s thought running from approximately 1958 to 1977 should be characterized as a long-running epistemological crisis. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” (1958)** marks the beginning of this period. MacIntyre set out his problems more clearly in Marxism and Christianity and by his own account reached the beginning of a resolution to this crisis in 1977 when he began to write the final draft of After Virtue. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I” begins with an arresting claim: “A position which we are all tempted into is that of the moral critic of Stalinism.”*' That we are all tempted into it seems inarguably true, but the wickedness of Stalinism seems so obvious and egregious—the betrayals, the purges, mass murder—that moral condemnation seems to be an imperative rather than a temptation. Moral criticism did appear as a temptation to MacIntyre, however, because he could not identify any moral theory that could justify that critique.22 Chapter One Echoing some of the themes of G. E. M. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy,”®* MacIntyre argues that neither Stalinism nor modern liberalism can provide any arguments against the abuses of Stalinism that cannot be reduced to arbitrary assertions. The Stalinist abandons moral judgment to the arbitrary mechanism of history, but the liberal dissolves moral judgment into the arbitrary choices of individuals: Our judgements on specific moral issues may be supported by the invocation of more general principles. But in the end our most general and ultimate princi- ples, because they are that in terms of which all else is justified, stand beyond any rational justification. In particular, they cannot be justified by any appeal to the facts, historical or otherwise. This isolation of the moral from the factual is presented as a necessary and ineluctable truth of logic. . .. And this has as its central consequences the view that on ultimate questions of morality we cannot argue, we can only choose. And our choice is necessarily arbitrary in the sense that we cannot give reasons for choosing one way rather than another; for to do this we should have to have a criterion in moral matters more ultimate than our ultimate criterion. And this is nonsensical.” In the conclusion of “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” MacIntyre questions whether some other critique may be possible, “which treats what emerges from history as providing us with a basis for our standards, without making the historical process morally sovereign or its progress automatic.” “Notes from the Moral Wilderness II” criticizes the modern divorce between inclination and moral action, and suggests that the goal of philosophical research should be some rehabilitation of the concept of nature that would allow us to understand social actions or moral actions as human actions. “Hume on ‘Is’ and “Ought,” published later that year, seems to be a preliminary step in this project. In that essay, MacIntyre argued that “the standard interpretation” of Hume’s famous passage on “is” and “ought” is “inadequate and misleading.”® “Against the Protestants Hume reasserted the founding of morality on human nature. . . . And the virtue of Hume’s ethics, like that of Aristotle, and unlike that of Kant, is that it seeks to preserve morality as something psychologically intelligible.” We will retum to consideration of this project later. In the closing chapter of Marxism and Christianity, MacIntyre expanded his criticism of Stalinism to include Marxism. Marxist theory can provide no objective basis for the moral condemnation of Stalinism. He suggests again that this demonstrates the need for a new critique. As Marxism had shown the failure of liberalism, this new critique would show the general failure of modernity: If I have been preoccupied up to this point with the weaknesses of Marxism, it is partly because of the urgency of the task of providing for contemporary soci- ety a critique on the scale of Marx’s critique of classical capitalism. . .. The only way of showing that it is possible to rescue Marxism from its errors, and still to retain those truths about the human condition which cannot as yet beA Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 23 found elsewhere, would be to actively carry through the type of contemporary critique I have proposed. MaclIntyre’s critique of contemporary society—modem culture—led him to tecognize that Marxism could not be rescued from its errors because Marxism was uself an embodiment of modern culture. Afier Virtue was the outcome of MaclIntyre’s critique of modernity, as he explained in the preface to the book: The conclusion which I reached and which is embodied in this book—although Marxism is itself only a marginal preoccupation—is that Marxism’s moral de- fects and failures arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world, and that nothing less than a rejection of a large part of that ethos will provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and to act— and in terms of which to evaluate various rival and heterogeneous moral schemes which compete for our allegiance.” MacIntyre would make sense of morality by returning to Aristotle. “At last,” writes Kelvin Knight, “MacIntyre, by combining historical sociology with Aristotelian ethics, could discern an intellectually compelling way to avoid the epistemological self-righteousness shared by the followers of Enlightenment philosophers, of Marx and of Weber.””” In order to elucidate more clearly the character of the long-running epistemological crisis that led from “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” to After Virtue, we will take a closer look at his rejection of the Christian faith and his recognition of the moral failure of Marxism. The key texts for this portion of our work are Marxism and Christianity, A Short History of Ethics, two lectures published in The Religious Significance of Atheism, and the essays “What Morality ts Not” and “God and the Theologians.” MacIntyre’s epistemological crisis’ does not seem to have been a moral crisis. He did not lose his moral compass with his Christian faith. In fact, it was precisely lus morality, his intellectual honesty, that led him to atheism in the first place. In “God and the Theologians,” MacIntyre explained that he had become an atheist because the only other options seemed to be superstition or dishonesty. He argued that several of the leading Protestant theologians of the twentieth century had advanced theories so evacuated of theistic content that they actually amounted to atheistic philosophies. Citing a remarkable survey of popular opinion regarding icligion and religious practice, he further claimed that the Christian faith in England renerally amounted to the wishful thinking of an actually atheistic nation. He summed it ‘YP well with his conclusion: The difficulty lies in the combination of atheism in the practice of the life of the vast majority, with the profession of either superstition or theism by that same majority. The creed of the English is that there is no God and that itis wise to pray to him from time to time.24 Chapter One His decision to discard his religious beliefs was a decision to discard what appeared more and more to be an indefensible ideology in order to pursue the truth about things. The same Alasdair MacIntyre whose intellectual honesty led him to reject “the belief in Christianity that I thought I had,””? had already begun to grapple with the problem of the moral condemnation of Stalinism. That problem arises because Marxism developed within the antimetaphysical realm of modern philosophy, and, for MacIntyre, decisively refuted the nonmetaphysical moral theories of modernity. This leads to a quandary. If a Communist were to reject the Communist Party on moral grounds, citing any of the atrocities of Stalinism, for example, how would he justify that judgment? A Communist who broke with his Party on account of such an action, and who did so not merely because he felt such actions to be imprudent from the Com- munist standpoint, but because he believed them to be wrong, was and is pecu- liarly vulnerable to the questions: “What do you mean by ‘wrong’?” and “How do you justify a belief that some action is wrong?” In the antimetaphysical environment of modern philosophy, the only options open to such a person seem to be either utilitarianism or some appeal to moral absolutes. But on the one hand, utilitarianism is ultimately analyzed into consequentialism, so that its judgments are merely practical, and so it cannot provide a “moral” condemnation. On the other hand, according to modern individualist thinkers, moral absolutes can take their authority only from individual choice, and this choice cannot claim authority over other individuals. MacIntyre therefore suggests a third alternative, which would provide “for contemporary society a critique on the scale of Marx’s critique of classical capitalism.””* It took twelve more years to produce that critique as it is found in Affer Virtue. That book only became possible a decade after Marxism and Christianity because it required a crucial trans- formation in MaclIntyre’s thought. That was no small task. We may look at A Short History of Ethics” as a kind of inventory of MacIntyre’s ethical resources as of 1966. In no part of that book does MacIntyre make any positive metaphysical claims, and there is no theory in that work that could justify objective moral judgment, much less condemnation. There is only the abiding conviction, demonstrated in numerous judgments, that recognizes the moral evils of Hitler’s Germany, and that resists reducing moral valuations to statements of taste; but these convictions (as honorable and true as they are) seem almost out of place in an otherwise thoroughly relativistic work; MacIntyre acknowledged this fact in the Borradori interview: In that book I decided to counterpose two forms of moral utterance: on the one hand, the morality of those who use morality to express their membership in some particular type of society; on the other, the morality of those who use it to express their individuality, or social diversity.A Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 25 In either case, morality is reduced to the outcome of an individual’s choices. MacIntyre realized that this would seem unpalatable, but he was nonetheless willing to argue for its truth as a conclusion from the premises of modern philosophy. “Emotivism and prescriptivism initially alienate us,””® he says, because they would reduce moral valuations to judgments of personal taste or personal opinion: If that is what I do say, then certainly what I say will have no authority but that which I confer upon it by uttering it. My attitudes and my imperatives have au- thority for me just because they are mine. But when I invoke words such as ought and 1 good J at least seek to appeal to a standard which has other and more authority. However, there are wide variations and conflicts in the resources and criteria proposed by differing cultural traditions for making moral judgments. Therefore, the consistent thinker must realize that moral criticism requires the use of a particular moral vocabulary, and that the use of any moral vocabulary presupposes adherence to the principles that make that vocabulary intelligible. Such adherence to a particular moral vocabulary requires a personal choice: Conceptual conflict is endemic in our situation, because of the depth of our moral conflicts. Each of us therefore has to choose both with whom we wish to be morally bound and by what ends, rules, and virtues we wish to be guided. . .. 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.®° This is a devastating conclusion for ethics. For if it were true, moral philosophy would be as powerless before the morally scrupulous as before the licentious, both of whom seem to be objectively tortured by the errors of their choices. Indeed, as he noted in Marxism and Christianity, “The cost of moving away from the public utilitarian frameWork seems to be moral privacy and moral solipsism.”*! More importantly, however, setting all morality upon personal choice in this manner seems to render every moral vocabulary empty. Every moral vocabulary would be susceptible to the argument MacIntyre advanced against “choosing to believe” Christian dogma. If one believes a factual proposition, no choice is needed. If one needs to choose to believe, then it seems that no belief is really present: Anything that is summoned up by an act of will does not qualify as belief— although it may qualify as a hope or wish... But if belief in truths of a factual kind cannot be chosen, then belief that can be chosen cannot have as its object truths of a factual kind.26 Chapter One Moral vocabularies might therefore be looked upon not so much as accounts of the ways of the world as arbitrary codes of belief and action for social membership. MacIntyre has certainly realized this. He criticized it very concisely in the interview with Borradori: In a genuine morality it is the rules that have authority, not the individuals. The notion of choosing one’s own morality makes no sense. What does make sense is the much more radical notion of choosing to displace and overcome morality. So A Short History of Ethics should perhaps have ended by giving Nietzsche the final word, instead of leaving him behind two chapters earlier. If this is so, then we must ask what made After Virtue and its successor texts possible. For in these later works moral agents and moral thinkers are still required to make decisions about the criteria for judgments and valuations. Yet, in these later works, such decisions are no longer considered criterionless. What has changed? In 1971, MacIntyre began to take his epistemological crisis more seriously, moving into a period of careful study that would later bear fruit in After Virtue: Any adequate narrative of my life would have to emphasize a radical change in it around 1971. Before then I had had a number of disparate and sometimes conflicting sets of concerns and beliefs, and I was unable to move decisively towards any resolution either of the problems internal to each particular set of concerns or beliefs or of those which arose from the tensions between them. . . . The essays collected in Against the Self-Images of the Age brought this pe~ riod to a close. I set out to rethink the problems of ethics in a systematic way, taking seriously for the first time the possibility that the history both of modern morality and of modern moral philosophy could only be written adequately from an Aristotelian point of view. In the same period, after 1971, I had occa- sion to rethink the problems of rational theology, taking seriously the possibil- ity that the history of modern secularization can only be written adequately from the standpoint of Christian theism, rather than vice versa. . . . But already by 1977, when I began to write the final draft of After Virtue, I had identified in main outline the framework and central theses of my subsequent enquiries. Some of the first fruits of this work appeared in two essays published in 1977. These help to mark the beginning of the next phase in MacIntyre’s life and work.A Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 27 Traditional Development In 1977, Alasdair MacIntyre returned to the problem of the moral condemnation of an evil ideological regime, this time addressing the problem of moral obligation in Nazi Germany. In “Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?” MacIntyre wrote that real morality makes unconditional obligations, including, “most strikingly, the simple obligation upon all of us to give up our lives rather than allow certain evils of Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. Any account of morality which does not allow for the fact that my death may be required of me at any moment is thereby an inadequate account. ”** How then was MacIntyre, an antimetaphysical atheist, to account for objective and exceptionless moral obligation where so many other secular thinkers had failed? In that article, MacIntyre recommended “a renewed criticism of the individualist framework [of modern philosophy] and of the social institutions that sustain it and are sustained by it.”** He argues that only a teleological ethical theory can serve to ground objective, exceptionless moral obligation, and that only the life of the culture and society as a whole can provide the telos for such an account. This solution is like the one proposed in “Notes from the Moral Wilderness II,” and it seems to offer little escape from the problem of relativism. How can it be enough to place individuals within the histories of peoples? Where individual consequentialists once sought whatever they liked, or whatever they took to be in their own best interests, whole societies could arbitrarily define the common good. This does not seem to improve the situation. This same article began with examples of the complicity of reputable medical professionals in Nazi crimes against humanity, perpetrated in the name of the common good. The Nazi Party was only too aware of their conception of the national identity of the German people. The Nazis were only too aware of their history of the German people. The Nazis were only too ready to identify the good of the individual German with their interpretation of the good of the whole German nation. Replacing the individual’s arbitrary judgment of the personal good with arbitrary social definitions of the common good does not seem to solve the problem. One might protest that the Nazis were wrong. They certainly were. Nevertheless, if this judgment were verified only by the consequences of the Nazi regime, it would be locked into the same consequentialism that MacIntyre intended to escape. Looking to the life, culture, and history of a community as the te/os of the human moral life cannot guarantee a toundation for the kind of moral obligation that MacIntyre finds so necessary. If a modern teleology of national identity, or social identity, or historical ilentity is capable of extracting people from the contextless individualism of modern liberalism, it nonetheless leaves nations and societies and historical communities as contextlessly unrelated as modern individuals had hitherto been. Subjectivism is merely traded for cultural relativism, unless there is some universal28 Chapter One truth about human identity and human history to which all cultures may aspire. By what means, then, may relativism be overcome? In order to answer the questions surrounding exceptionless moral claims conclusively, it is necessary to realize that, fundamentally, those questions are neither historical nor practical, but metaphysical, and that if the metaphysical answers to these metaphysical questions have merit, there will be evidence in their favor in both history and practice. MacIntyre seems to hint at this in an article published in October of 1977, in which he evaluated the relative merits of two theories of the history of science: those of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos.*” Here he observed that the concern of scientists to work toward the convergence of the sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology must be understood as a concern for ontological truth: “Were it not for a concern for ontological truth, the nature of our demand for a coherent and convergent relationship between all the sciences would be unintelligible.” Presuppositions in modern science pointing to an underlying order in the world must be recognized as metaphysical presuppositions: It seems to be a presupposition of the way in which we do natural science that fallibilism has to be made consistent with the regulative ideal of an approach to a true account of the fundamental order of things and not vice versa. If this is so, Kant is essentially right; the notion of an underlying order . . . is a regulative ideal of physics. We do not need to understand this notion quite as Kant did, and our antitheological beliefs may make us uncomfortable in adopting it. But perhaps discomfort at this point is a sign of philosophical progress.” MacIntyre was beginning to make a positive move toward metaphysics. In After Virtue, MacIntyre would ask the question “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” and choose Aristotle. In the next chapter we will tum to After Virtue and its successor texts, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry to take a close look at MacIntyre’s theory of tradition-constituted and tradition- constitutive rationality. This theory recapitulates several themes that we have already seen in this brief survey of Maclntyre’s earlier works. Alasdair MacIntyre did not make philosophical progress by discovering any set of universal rational principles; rather, he worked his way toward a more coherent and more adequate ethical theory through a critical engagement with the peculiar substantive rationalities of several different traditions in which he was enmeshed. This was necessary because these different traditions had constituted his rationality in an incoherent manner. To judge is to measure according to criteria that have been developed within a tradition in which one has been formed, but MaclIntyre’s simultaneous formation in rival traditions left him with competing criteria for judgment. It was possible for him to progress toward more coherent rationality, however, because the same traditions that are the bearers of rationalities are not the ultimate measures of rationality. In the progress through his epistemological crises, MacIntyre’s rationality became tradition-constitutive; he went beyond received opinions to provide a moreA Short History of Alasdair Macintyre 29 adequate, more truthful rationality to those who might follow him. If MacIntyre is correct about rationality, modern meta-ethics proves to be a false path, and the only way to overcome differences in rival moral schemes is through respectful engagements with their traditions. Notes 1. H. J. McCloskey, Meta-ethics and Normative Ethics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 1. 2. McCloskey, Meta-ethics and Normative Ethics, |. 3. “Kinesis Interview with Professor Alasdair MacIntyre,” interview by Thomas D. Pearson, Kinesis 20, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 46. 4. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry Encyclopaedia, Ge- nealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 11— 12. 5. An entry in World Authors 1985-1990 gives little more than a list of details, and seems to lack many of those that are of greatest interest to a student of MacIntyre. 6. Kelvin Knight, ed., The Macintyre Reader (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). The MacIntyre Reader appeared in time for the 1998 A.P.A. conven- tion, well after this chapter was written. Knight’s introduction gives the best brief sum- mary I have seen of MaclIntyre’s life and works. I have revised the text to include some of the insights that Knight brings to the study of MacIntyre. 7. Giovanna Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle: Alasdair MacIntyre,” in The Ameri- can Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), originally published as Conversazioni americane con W O Quine, D. Davidson, H Putnam, R. Nozick, A C. Danto, R. Rorty, S. Cavell, A. Macintyre, Th S Kuhn (Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1991). This interview has also been reprinted in The MacIntyre Reader. 8. Knight, The MacIntyre Reader, ix. 9. “An Interview for Cogito,” Cogito 5, no. 2 (1991), reprinted in The MacIntyre Reader, 267-275. 10. Vineta Colby, ed., World Authors 1985-1990: A Volume in the Wilson Authors Series (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1995), s.v. “MacIntyre, Alasdair (Chalmers),” 517. 11. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 139-140. St. Columba (521-596) was the fist Christian missionary to Scotland. Brian Boru, a High King of Ireland, died after lcading the Irish in the Battle of Clontarf on Good Friday 1014, which liberated Ireland liom the Norsemen. Iain Lom (John Macdonald) (c1624~c1710) was Charles II’s poet laureate in Scotland. 12. Kinesis, 46. 13. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: Uni- versity of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 373. 14. Professor MacIntyre’s decision to illustrate this point with the examples of a pest, a poet, and a king seems to allude to Vico’s theory of history, which MacIntyre mentions in several works.30 Chapter One 15. MacIntyre introduces the term “encyclopaedia” in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry to describe the worldview of the editors and contributors of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 16. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 7. 17. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 141. 18. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 140. 19. Kinesis, 44. 20. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 143. 21. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 143. 22. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Marxism: An Interpretation (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1953). 23. Marxism, 9. 24, Kelvin Knight reports, “When young, MacIntyre trained to be a Presbyterian minister. For a time, he tried to combine Christian faith with his political commitments and his sociological and historical understanding of religion, exploring Karl Barth’s fide- istic and antinomian standpoint as a particular form of life. Faith lost out. After Virtue was the result of a long period of reflection upon how morality might be justified apart from faith.” The MacIntyre Reader, 24. 25. Marxism, 10. 26. Marxism, 10. 27. Marxism, 71. 28. Marxism, 101. 29. Marxism, 79. 30. Marxism, 83. 31. Marxism, 77. 32. Marxism, 106. 33. Marxism, 121. 34. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 263. 35. The question of the philosophical justification of religious faith would remain an important one for MacIntyre until his turn to atheism and has reemerged as a theme in MacIntyre’s later writings. 36. Marxism, 5. 37. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 141. 38. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Visions,” in New Essays on Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 254. 39. Stephen Toulmin, Ronald W. Hepburn, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Metaphysical Beliefs: Three Essays (London: SCM Press, 1957). 40. Alasdair MacIntyre, Difficulties in Christian Belief (London: SCM Press, 1959). 41. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 142. 42. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, the English text of the third edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), §§ 19, 23, 241, pp. 174, 226. 43. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. John Drury (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 61-62. 44. Alasdair MacIntyre, Difficulties in Christian Belief (New York: Philosophical Library 1960; OSCM Press Ltd., 1959), 108. 45. Difficulties, 115.A Short History of Alasdair MacIntyre 31 46. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Logical Status of Religious Belief,” in Metaphysical Beliefs (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1957; repr. with preface by A. C. MacIntyre, 1970), 190. 47. Difficulties, 118-119. 48. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2d ed. (London: Pelgrave Macmillan, 1977), 372ff. Cited in Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 238. 49. Brian Davies, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 34. 50. Difficulties, 36. 51. “The Logical Status of Religious Belief,” 170. 52. “The Logical Status of Religious Belief,” 194-195, 53. Alasdair Macintyre, preface to the 1970 edition of Metaphysical Beliefs, xi. 54. Metaphysical Beliefs, xi-xii. 55. Antony Flew, “Theology and Falsification,” §D, in Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 107. 56. Basil Mitchell, “Theology and Falsification,” §C, in New Essays in Philosophi- cal Theology, 103-105. 57. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 142. 58. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” New Reasoner 7 (Winter 1958-1959): 90-100. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness II,” New Reasoner 8 (Spring 1959): 89-98. These essays have been reprinted in The Macintyre Reader. 59. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). 60. “An Interview for Cogito,” 268. 61. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” 90. 62. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958): 1-19. Maclntyre did not entirely agree with Anscombe’s assessment of the history of philoso- phy. He wrote, “Miss G. E. M. Anscombe has recently suggested that the notion of a morality of law was effectively dropped by the Reformers; I should have thought that there were good grounds for asserting that a morality of law-and-nothing-else was intro- duced by them.” “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought,”” Philosophical Review (1959), reprinted in Igainst the Self Images of the Age (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 124. 63. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” 92. 64. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” 100. 65. “Hume on ‘Is’ and “Ought,” 110. 66. “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought,”” 124. 67. MacIntyre’s essay “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ generated considerable contro- versy. R. F. Atkinson published a reply in the Philosophical Review 70 (1961). Both es- says, and various others on the is-ought problem, appear in the two books Kelvin Knight lists in his “Guide to Further Reading.” Knight reports that MacIntyre “edited Hume's /thical Writings (Collier-Macmillan, 1965; Notre Dame, 1979) when still sympathetic to their author. For critical discussions of his attempted co-optation of Hume to his project by means of an interpretation of Hume’s treatise that he was later to revoke, see W. D. Mudson, ed., The Is-Ought Question (Macmillan, 1969) or V. C. Chappell, ed., Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays (Doubleday, 1966, Macmillan and Notre Dame, 1968) and,32 Chapter One with regard to Maclntyre’s later work, Murray MacBeth, “‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ in Context,” (Hume Studies 17, 1992).” The MacIntyre Reader, 278. 68. Marxism and Christianity, 139-140. 69. After Virtue, x. 10. The MacIntyre Reader, 7. 71, What I am characterizing as MacIntyre’s “epistemological crisis” coincides with his rejection of the Christian faith, but the two are not identical. MacIntyre rejected his fideistic religious beliefs for intellectual reasons. His epistemological crisis was centered on the question of how to justify morality without faith, or how to provide a moral con- demnation of Stalinism. 72. “God and the Theologians,” Encounter (Sept. 1963), reprinted in Against the Self-Images of the Age, 26. 73. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 141. 74. Marxism and Christianity, 125. 75. Marxism and Christianity, 140. 76. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History Of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1966, repr., New York: Touchstone, 1996). 77. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 146, 78. A Short History of Ethics, 264. 79. A Short History of Ethics, 265. 80. A Short History of Ethics, 268. 81. Marxism and Christianity, 127. 82. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Fate of Theism,” in The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 22-23. 83. Borradori, “Nietzsche or Aristotle,” 146. 84. “An Interview for Cogito,” 267-68. 85. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?” in Knowledge, Value and Belief, The Foundations of Ethics and Its Relationship to Science, vol. 2 (Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Hastings Center, 1977), 26-27. 86. “Can Medicine Dispense,” 42-43. 87. A full treatment of the theories of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos and of Mac- Intyre’s assessment of them is beyond the scope of the current project. I will discuss these issues, and especially MacIntyre’s use of Lakatos’s notion of “research programs” later, in chapter 2. 88. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Phi- losophy of Science,” The Monist 60, no. 4 (October 1977): 470. 89. “Epistemological Crises,” 470.Chapter Two Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality MacIntyre holds that substantive rationality, both theoretical and practical, is tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive. This is MacIntyre’s theory of the tole of tradition in ethics. His theory embodies his criticism and rejection of the Enlightenment project of justifying morality, as well as his criticism and rejection of the conclusions of postmodern efforts to explain morality away. Therefore, in order to elucidate MacIntyre’s account of rationality, we must place it in the context of his criticism of Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment thought. My account moves through six stages. (1) I begin by addressing the inadequacy of the standard theories. Like Elizabeth Anscombe, MacIntyre realized by 1958 that neither Kant’s deontology nor Mill’s utilitarianism could provide a solid foundation for ethics. In place of the standard theories, MacIntyre proposed considering “what emerges from history” as a source of standards in ethics. (2) Next, I address MacIntyre’s concepts of “practice” and “narrative.” These emerge {rom history as sources for our standards. (3) In the light of this account, I show that MacIntyre sees “rationality” as a practice, and note the obvious danger of relativism that accompanies this definition. (4) Then I discuss the paradigm of a culturally subjective, tradition-bound quest for the truth of things that comes to us from the philosophy of science, which has been very influential in MacIntyre’s account of tauonality. (5) In the fifth section I reconstruct MaclIntyre’s criticism of liberal individualism and of Nietzschean nihilism in the light of tradition. (6) Finally, I draw this account together in order to consider the biographical account of chapter ! in terms of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality. 3334 Chapter Two The Insufficiency of the Standard Theories One way to exhibit the limitations of a theory is to show that it fails to explain the obvious. Among those who take morality seriously, there is an abiding conviction that morality sometimes demands self-sacrifice, and even death. In “Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature” (1977), Alasdair MacIntyre used this principle to show the limitations of modern moral theories. Morality does require self-sacrifice. Often these sacrifices clearly redound to one’s own benefit, as when forgoing some small pleasure here and now, in favor of a more prudent course of action, may bring greater happiness later. Sometimes these sacrifices do not seem to benefit the agent. Sometimes morality requires one to endure unjust punishment, or even death, in order to avoid complicity in evil. Thus it would be a great sign of the insufficiency of modern ethical theories if they could not justify the obligation to lay down one’s life to avoid evil. In “Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?” Alasdair MacIntyre argued that there is a whole class of wicked actions that every moral agent must avoid, even if the avoidance of those actions necessitates his or her death. “The simple obligation upon all of us to give up our lives rather than to allow certain evils of Auschwitz and Ravensbruck”' is among such duties. Thus MacIntyre writes, “Any account of morality which does not allow for the fact that my life may be required of me at any moment, is thereby an inadequate account.” A Kantian might explain this obligation in terms of the categorical imperative. A utilitarian might remind us that “the readiness to [serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own] . . . is the highest virtue which can be found in man.”* But the challenge of explaining an obligation to choose death over complicity in evil is more challenging than it first seems, because to do so one must be able to explain such a choice as a rational human action. Social practices, including the development of and adherence to socially recognized moral standards, are human actions and may only be understood in the way that individual deeds are understood: “That is to say, we make both individual deeds and social practices intelligible as human actions by showing how they connect with characteristically human desires, needs and the like. Where we cannot do this, we treat the unintelligible piece of behaviour as a symptom, a survival, or a superstition.”* MacIntyre sees the moral life as a social practice which is intelligible only in the light of the purposes and desires that guide adherence to it. Any sufficient ethical theory must be able to explain moral action and obligation in terms of its motivations. Writing as an atheist, MacIntyre found that it is simply impossible to make sense of demanding moral obligations in any individualistic framework that does not make recourse to divine justice and life after death. Nevertheless, this is precisely the goal of modern ethics. The moral theories of modern liberalism seek to provide a purely rational account of individual moral obligation that does notTradition-Constituted and ‘Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 35 borrow authority from religious or cultural traditions. MacIntyre finds that the attempts of modern moral philosophy to do this fall into two categories. Some modern liberal thinkers characterize moral standards in terms of human desires. This is the method of Hume, Bentham, and Mill. This approach has great intuitive appeal, because it makes moral rules and obligations intelligible. If 1 want to be happy, then I should follow the rules, etc. If adherence to moral standards is to make sense in the way that any other human behavior does, then a teleological account of this kind seems indispensable. However, the modern thinkers who follow this path define happiness in strictly individualistic terms; even the “Greatest Happiness Principle” is calculated as an aggregation of private happiness. As a result, these theories distort and misrepresent moral obligation.’ Teleological moral theories like these may justify rules against self-destructive behavior, but they cannot justify sacrificing one’s own life. Reading Aristotle along similar lines, MacIntyre makes this point very cogently. In “Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?” MacIntyre listed “two . . . defects in Aristotelian ethics”: ‘The first is the dreadful banality of the true end for man when its content is fi- nally 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 class Athenian gentlemen devoted to metaphysical enquiry. . .. Any attempt to specify the true end for man by describing some state of affairs, the achieve- ment of which will constitute that end, is bound to fail in a parallel way. . . . A closely related defect in Aristotle's view is that he is forced to take an entirely negative attitude to suffering and death. . . . For Aristotle, as for utili- tarianism, my death, if it comes too soon, simply frustrates the moral quest.° MacIntyre’s point is beyond question, even if his interpretation of Aristotle is not.” It is impossible to develop a fully individualistic explanation of morality that can account for a duty to choose death before wickedness, dishonor, or disgrace. “Rational belief in moral precepts cannot find its only basis in individual feelings or goals.”® Indeed, MacIntyre finds a natural connection between individualistic teleological ethics and the complete rejection of ethics in Nietzsche and Stalin. For the Stalinists, there were no moral absolutes, only the amoral mechanism of history: The Stalinist identifies what is morally right with what is actually going to be the outcome of historical development. History is for him a sphere in which ob- jective laws operate, laws of such a kind that the role of the individual human being is predetermined for him by his historical situation. . . . The “ought” of principle is swallowed up in the “is” of history.” There is no morality in a clockwork history; nor did MacIntyre find real morality in the utilitarian alternative: “The counterpart to a mechanical theory of society is a means-ends morality. But so too the counterpart of a rejection of a mechanical36 Chapter Two theory may be a very similar sort of morality.”'° To MacIntyre, utilitarianism and Stalinism seemed two sides of the same coin. For in either case, public policy and moral pronouncements emerge as ad hoc consequentialist conclusions to practical puzzles. Neither approach allows for any real distinction between moral imperatives and practical choices. The modem alternative to individualized teleology in ethics is the research program of Kant. For Kant and his successors, objective moral standards are not determined by human desire. But MacIntyre found that by distinguishing practical judgments from moral injunctions, philosophers since Kant have only made objective morality unintelligible: The “ought” of morality is divorced from the “is” of desire. This divorce is most strikingly presented in the position taken by Kant that it is a defining characteristic of moral actions that they shall not be performed “from inclina- tion”. It is repeated in contemporary terms by those writers who deny that one moral judgement can be based on anything except another more fundamental moral judgement, on the grounds that no “is” can entail an “ought” and that en- tailment is the only logically respectable relationship between statements. . . . [I]t is obvious that to represent morality in this light is to make it unintelligible as a form of human action. It is to make our moral judgements appear like primitive taboos, imperatives which we just happen to utter. It is to turn “ought” into a kind of nervous cough with which we accompany what we hope will be the more impressive of our injunctions.'! According to MacIntyre, the moral theory that emerges from Kantian ethics leaves moral standards practically indistinguishable in kind from the old Polynesian taboos. MacIntyre’s comparison of modern moral “ought” language to Polynesian taboo is a recurring theme in his ethical writing. Two more examples illustrate the point of his comparison. The first comes from his 1977 essay, “Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?” Elsewhere I have compared the “ought” discussed by Prichard with “taboo” as used in the late eighteenth century in the Pacific Islands. . .. We do not take ta- boo seriously; why then should we take seriously Kant’s or Prichard’s ought?" Macintyre uses the comparison again in After Virtue: Why should we think about our modern uses of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo? And why should we not think of Nietzsche as the Kamehameha II of the European tradition? For it was Nietzsche’s historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher . . . not only that what purported to be appeals to ob- jectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for philosophy."Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 37 MacIntyre finds that Nietzsche’s criticism is correct when applied to modern theories. He only questions whether Nietzsche’s criticism is also applicable to every kind of moral theory. In fairness to Kant, MacIntyre does recognize that Kant saw the problem of intelligibility raised by the divorce of inclination from moral action. Kant dealt with this problem in the second part of the Critique of Practical Reason. But rather than accepting heteronomy by postulating a role for the faculty of desire in moral action, Kant chose to employ the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as a deus ex machina to redeem his system, by making desire coincide with moral action. Kant writes, “Therefore also the existence is postulated of a cause of the whole of nature, itself distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact coincidence of happiness with morality.”"* Kant argues that moral obligation requires the existence of God, not as a precondition, but rather as a consequence, to tidy up the relationship of morality to happiness. MacIntyre criticized the apparent arbitrariness of this conclusion, and argued (in “Can Medicine Dispense . . . ?” 1977) that it was just as rational to reject both the existence of God and the objectivity of moral duty. Given the commonplace observation that morality and happiness do not seem to coincide, it may indeed seem that we should reject both. Thus the divorce of desire from morality remains, for MacIntyre, an enormous flaw in the Kantian program.'* A second critical flaw m the Kantian program is its ahistorical treatment of moral obligation: “The [Liberal] moral critic [of Stalinism] puts himself outside history as a spectator. He invokes his principles as valid independently of the course of historical events. . . . lhe ‘ought’ of principle is completely external to the ‘is’ of history.”'* The Kantian program unreasonably ignores the historically bound predicament of the human person. There may be timeless truths in ethics, and MacIntyre certainly believes that there are, but human rationality is nonetheless unable to consider such timeless truths in any way that is not conditioned by history. Over the past forty years, MacIntyre has taken the inability of modern ethics to provide a rational basis for (1) the moral condemnation of Stalinism,'” (2) objective and demanding moral standards,'* or (3) the settlements of its own interminable ternal disputes’? as compelling evidence of the general failure of modern moral philosophy. On MacIntyre’s view, modern liberal theorists have failed to do these things because they could not make sense of the social practice of morality in terms of human action. Modern liberal individualist moral philosophers of both Kantian and utilitarian camps are equally unable to do this. For utilitarians, the purposes of the good life ure individually defined and cannot justify self-sacrifice; for Kantians, the standards «ic so divorced from human desires that moral behavior is unintelligible. MacIntyre tound that if moral imperatives were to be explained meaningfully, if the social plactice of morality was to be understood in terms of human action, then it would le necessary to propose a new project, founded on the study of history. The Enlightenment project was loath to make any reference to history, or to any kind of substantive knowledge for that matter as a foundation for its theories;38 Chapter Two for the goal of that project was to produce a moral theory in which traditional moral authority was displaced. J. B. Schneewind explains it this way: Kant did not deny the moral importance of beneficent action, but his theoretical emphasis on the importance of obligation or moral necessity reflects his rejec- tion of benevolent paternalism and the servility that goes with it, just as the centrality of autonomy in his theory shows his aim of limiting religious and po- litical control of our lives.”° In Kant’s own words: Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from an- other. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sa- pere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.”" The standard of success for Enlightenment ethics is the production of a moral theory in which traditional authority has no role. Kant’s approach was to proclaim the necessity of the categorical imperative as a guide to the self-legislation of autonomous individuals. Mill advanced the greatest happiness principle and the principle of utility for the same purpose. Yet Kant’s arguments for the universal moral obligation against lying, and Mill’s allowance that some pleasures may be really better than others, demand and in fact announce and embody the reintroduction of moral authority. Kant argues his point about lying, but to whom? If he is arguing to other enlightened people, then why? If he is speaking with the authority of a teacher, then he seems to be giving moral legislation to others, and thereby violating his own standards. Likewise, when Mill allows that some pleasures may be better than others, Mill concomitantly allows that some may know better than others what is good and what is not, and this disparity of knowledge usually establishes authority, which Mill had intended to displace. Both Kant and Mill plainly state that a large part of the people must be guided by authority. Kant would grant intellectual freedom, but wants to ensure the public peace with authoritative rule: Only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows, and who has a nu- merous and well-disciplined army to assure public peace, can say: “Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, only obey!” A republic could not say such a thing. ... A greater degree of civil freedom appears advantageous to the freedom of the mind of the people, and yet it places inescapable limitations upon it; a lower degree of civil freedom, on the contrary, provides the mind with room for each man to extend himself to his full capacity.”Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 39 Mill counsels his readers to seek the greatest happiness, but notes that most are not competent to judge rightly between higher and lower pleasures: Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favorable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.” Mill’s “Principle of Liberty” in law does not displace experiential authority in morals. It seems that Kant and Mill are not interested so much in displacing all authority, as in replacing religious authority and other traditional moral authorities with another authority, namely, the bourgeois elite. Thus, Enlightenment moral practice fails by its own standards, and could not but have failed. MacIntyre’s Turn to History In 1958, Alasdair MacIntyre claimed that we must look to what emerges from history to find a basis for our moral standards. He derived this insight from Marx’s view of history and it has been at the heart of MacIntyre’s research pro- gram ever since. Marx found that there is a great human desire for community. Since this desire for community brought with it a desire for the morality that could support community, MacIntyre concluded that the desire for and maintenance of human community could provide the necessary link between the social practices of morality and the desires of the human agent. The deepest desires of modern indi- viduals can only be met through membership in a community and this requires ad- herence to its standards. One meets the anarchic individualist desires which a competitive society breeds in us, by a rediscovery of the deeper desire to share what is common in human- ity, to be divided neither from them nor from oneself, to be a man. And in this discovery moral rules reappear as having point. For their content can now be seen as important in correcting our short term selfishness, and thus helping to release desire. Moral rules and what we fundamentally want no longer stand in sharp contrast. To discover what we share with others, to rediscover common desire, is to acquire a new moral standpoint.*40 Chapter Two This new moral standpoint, MacIntyre hoped, would provide a powerful criticism both of the blind mechanistic collectivism of Stalinism, and of the despotic anarchism of Liberal individualism: “As against the Stalinist it is an assertion of moral absolutes; as against the liberal critic of Stalinism it is an assertion of desire and of history.”’> MacIntyre believed that “a theory which treats what emerges in history as providing us with a basis for our standards””* could return intelligibility to ethics, Nearly two decades after writing “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” Maclntyre wrote: If sacrifice is to be an intelligible notion, the individual has to be understood as a participant in the larger history of a group or an institution. . .. The most ba- sic moral question for each agent is, therefore, of what histories am I a part?”” For MacIntyre, history and tradition are the keys to the discovery of the foundations of ethics. The claim that individualism cannot support serious moral obligation is interesting, but it does not entail that the individualistic presuppositions of modern culture are false. Marx’s observation that people seem to have a deep desire for life in community is no proof that individualistic analyses of the moral life are misleading. It may well be that Nietzsche is correct, that morality is nothing but “prudence, prudence, prudence, mixed with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity,’** that there is nothing to morality but the clever deliberations of individuals in pursuit of pleasure and subjective happiness. Another conclusion to Maclntyre’s criticism of modern ethics may be that if there is anything beyond individual pleasure on which to base one’s prudential judgments, then perhaps philosophy is not the tool for its discovery. Perhaps demanding moral precepts may only be justified by theological considerations. If Kierkegaard is correct, and assent to the existence of God may only be the product of an irrational leap, then perhaps MacIntyre’s criticism of modern ethics leads us to an ultimatum between rational agnosticism and irrational fideism. This is the crisis of modern ethics. It is also, as we have seen in chapter 1, the epistemological crisis at the heart of MaclIntyre’s career. It is a crisis about the limits of rational enquiry. MacIntyre has approached this problem by investigating the very meaning of rationality, to discover whether or not prevailing liberal orthodoxies have blinded modern philosophers from recognizing a third solution to the crisis. What Emerges from History: Practices and Narratives Alasdair MacIntyre has found that two things emerge from history as bases for our standards: Practices and Narratives. Practices are fundamental to Maclntyre’s theory of rationality. He describes them in detail and discusses their relationship toTradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 41 the virtues in chapter 14 of After Virtue. For our present purpose, however, which is to investigate the meaning of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality, a more skeletal account of practice will suffice. Defined broadly, practices include a broad range of human activities ranging trom chess to nuclear physics: By a “practice” I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human ‘ 29 conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Practices are the sources of standards. There are no standards prior to practices, because standards arise organically from the practices themselves. Excellence at golf or chess can only be understood according to the factors that arise from the games themselves. Excellence in scientific research or architecture can only be assessed in relation to the achievements, difficulties, and possibilities of those activities. Practices are not static; they change. Their goals and standards of excellence ae continually reconstituted by the prudential judgments of their participants: “Practices never have a goal or goals fixed for all time—painting has no such goal nor has physics—but the goals themselves are transmuted by the history of the activity.”*° To consider the history of a practice is to consider the development of the standards of that practice along lines dictated by the practice itself, and made intelligible and possible only by the preceding events of that same process of development. If we take the example of professional football, the history of that practice traces the development of standards of excellence in strategy, physical conditioning, and protective equipment, and it is closely linked to developments in the practices of audience accommodation. That history would show that our contemporary standards were largely unforeseeable when the first professional football games were played less than a century ago. Yet these standards have cmerged organically from the practice of professional football as the standards that this practice has come to demand. The same is true of other practices. The standards of astronomy have emerged trom the practice of astronomy. The practice of astronomy demanded the rejection of scriptural arguments about the arrangement of the universe as a precondition for further progress in understanding the motion of the planets. The practice of astronomy has demanded ever improved instruments and ever larger telescopes as a condition for progress in understanding the cosmos. Practices are the sources of standards. It is easy to see how practices can be the sources of standards of skill and art, but they are also the bearers of moral standards. For an honest and committed pursuit of the “standards of excellence” of42 Chapter Two a practice is possible only through the realization of “the goods internal to that form of activity.” Pursuing the goods internal to practices entails the development of certain moral qualities, and it is as a consequence of this that practices are bearers of moral standards. MacIntyre illustrates this point with the parable of the chess-playing child. An adult offers to teach a child to play chess. The adult promises to give the child candy for playing, and promises to give the child more candy for winning. Motivated by candy, the child agrees. As long as the child is motivated only by candy, an external good, he or she can be expected to cheat whenever the opportunity arises. But if the child takes an interest in the game of chess itself, and wants to become an excellent chess player, then the motivation to cheat evaporates, since cheating would ruin the child’s chances of becoming excellent. In the same way, external goods may motivate a person to work toward a kind of success in any practice. But the motivation provided by external goods need not lead one beyond the mere sembiances of excellence. A person so motivated may reasonably cheat in order to get his or her reward. However, when a person is motivated to achieve true excellence in a practice, cheating becomes counter- productive. The pursuit of true excellence demands honesty and fairness, or what St. Thomas Aquinas would call justice. In the pursuit of true excellence, true failure becomes more desirable than false success because it can teach a lesson that may further the quest. These virtues of fairness and honesty, or justice, are necessary for the pursuit of the goods internal to practices, and they are motivated by that pursuit. MacIntyre wants to argue that the good life for man, the moral life, is also a practice. The good life is a practice because human conceptions and understanding of what constitutes “living well” change over time. Slavery and racism provide striking examples of policies and activities once held to be just and reasonable by otherwise apparently virtuous men and women that have come to be rejected as unjust and wicked. In every particular culture, the moral life also involves shared prescriptions and proscriptions regulating practical decision making in everyday life. It deals with substantive issues of property, retribution, sexual propriety, and honor, and these cannot be reduced to any simple formula like the categorical imperative or the greatest happiness principle. Our experience of cultural differences proves this. The moral life is a practice, and its standards develop over time as reflections on the experience of a person or tradition enables people to make general judgments about the justice and prudence of human actions. Thus in the moral life, too, the standards of living well have emerged from the practice of the moral life; but here we encounter a challenge. There is no single practice that carries the name of “the moral life.” On the contrary, history and contemporary experience present a host of practices, and each of them has its own account of what the moral life should be. With many accounts, and many practices, it may seem intuitively obvious that history cannot serve as a basis for ethics. In fact, the idea that standards emerge from practices seems to provide a strong argument for relativism, for if culture is central to the practice of morality, then morality must be as relative as culture.Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 43 There seem to be only two paths by which to escape from this kind of relativism. First, we may take the path of fideism and argue for the precedence of our own culture over others along purely religious lines. The fideist argues that his moral system is true because it is revealed by God, and he believes it to be true because he believes it to be revealed by God. For the fideist, no natural argument for his morality is necessary, and in many cases it may not even be possible. Many cultures make such claims, and to embrace any one of them fideistically would be to abandon philosophy. A combative certainty that dismisses its opponents, that refuses to countenance the claims of its rivals, and refuses to be challenged by compteting claims does not solve the difficulty; it merely closes the debate." Another approach is to offer a neutral rational argument for the superiority of one account of morality over all others. This at least attempts to address the difficulty rationally. However, in MaclIntyre’s view, this effort is misguided and lacks self-understanding, for there is no neutral external position from which to adjudicate conflicting moral claims between cultures. Without recognizing that he is doing so, the so-called neutral judge merely imposes the standards of his own culture upon those that he judges. This kind of rationalism is only an unacknowledged form of fideism, since it places its unquestioning faith in a peculiar set of presuppositions; thus it only wraps the difficulty in another layer of confusion. The futility of both of these approaches helps to bring out a further point. Like the moral life, rationality itself is a practice. So, again like the moral life, there are various forms of rationality. The claim that rationality is a practice has two crucial implications. First, a certain kind of apparent relativism is part of the human condition. Second, insofar as rationality is a practice, real improvement in rationality is possible, and some forms of rationality may be better than others in assessing the truth and falsity of our judgments about the world. Rationality is not universal, but tradition-constituted, yet this need not lead to relativism. According to MacIntyre there is no tradition-independent judging between traditions. There is only the judgment of other traditions by the standards of my own, and the judgment of my own tradition by its capacity to make the world intelligible. In order for me to judge another culture rightly I must first make it my own: “One has, so to speak, to become a child all over again and to learn this language—and the corresponding parts of the culture—as a second first language.”** We will return to this issue at a later point,”® but here I want to consider the source of this judgment of my own tradition. If we are to escape from relativism as a conclusion, then we must learn how tradition-constituted rationality becomes tradition-constitutive. If I may judge my own moral tradition, then I need to account for the standard of such a judgment. Standards emerge from practices, but practices emerge with narratives. Narratives are the myths, histories, and theories that specify the methods, principles, standards, and purposes of practices. Narratives constitute the self- understandings of, and set the constitutional limits for, the practices they define. So44 Chapter Two practices emerge from history as the enactments of narrative accounts that interpret the significance of past events: One of the features of the concept of a virtue which has emerged with some clarity from the argument so far is that it always requires for its application the acceptance for [sic] some prior account of certain features of social and moral life in terms of which it has to be defined and explained.”* A particular culture’s practice of the moral life with its peculiar understanding of the virtues only becomes intelligible in the light of the narrative account of the good life that it enacts. Narratives are constructed through their authors’ interpretations of events. Since narratives often prove to be faulty, they must be constantly reconstructed to account for the continuing experiences of the adherent community. Even the acceptance of canonical books cannot overturn the process of revision in a tradition, for the interpretation of those books takes the form of a narrative in itself, and is no less subject to revision over time. Changes in narrative express changes in rationality, and the effects of changes in narratives are borne out in language. Thus changes in rationality affect every part of a culture. Every field of cultural expression, be it science, art, philosophy, or religion, needs to stay abreast of the rationality of its culture, in order to remain intelligible on its own terms to its culture, and to avoid being misinterpreted by a culture that can no longer understand it. Even the most cherished canonical texts must be reinterpreted to meet changing rational standards or face rejection as irrational myths and fairy tales. MacIntyre demonstrated how cultural changes affect the interpretation of canonical texts in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by comparing three translations, made in three different centuries, of Homer’s psychological description of a moment of indecision in the Jliad*° A literal translation of this passage would have proven unintelligible in any of the three periods. Therefore, each translator was compelled to provide an intelligible “equivalent” expression in the English of his own time, recasting Homer’s narrative according to his own contemporary psychology: “Each translator cannot but, if he is to be intelligible to his intended audience, blend Homer’s idiom with that of his own age, and the better the translator the more subtly it will be, transmuting Homer’s quite alien preconceptions into familiar ones.*° We cannot read Homer with full comprehension unless we grasp his understanding of the world, unless we learn Homer’s Greek as “a second first language.” If we care to read Homer without making that effort, then we must expect that some of his ideas will remain untranslatable, and we must rely on the guidance of someone who has learned Homer’s Greek, and who is therefore able to render Homer’s meaning into sensible if only approximate English expressions. In 1959, MacIntyre cited “Sidney Webb’s view that there can only be the history of this or that particular institution, but that there can be no such thing asTradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 45 history as such.”*” In MacIntyre’s subsequent work, it has become more and more clear that he sees the same to be true of myth and scientific theory. Like history, myth and scientific theory are embedded in the development of particular institutions. There is something deeply unsettling about this. We may be willing to admit that myth, history, and theory are all species of interpretative accounts, but we would like to reserve a degree of objectivity for theories that we would never grant to myth. On MacIntyre’s account, however, the main differences between myth, history, and theory as narrative accounts have to do with the methods used to characterize their author’s interpretations. Truth in myth, history, and theory is assessed in the same way, if not always in the same sense. A narrative account must be scrutinized in terms of its capacity to make the world intelligible. People who subscribe to an atheistic narrative of nature may take evolution to be a sufficient explanation of the origin of life, and reject all religious narratives as myths. People who subscribe to a Biblical Fundamentalist narrative of creation reject evolution as a myth. Neither of these narratives can claim to be true, however, unless it can make sense of all of our experiences. Most contemporary Christians find natural science, especially the fossil record, to give ample evidence against the fundamentalist approach, while historical religious experiences give significant evidence against the atheist view. To them (myself included) both narratives seem somewhat mythical, because they fail to make sense of the whole of human experience. Conflicts at the level of narrative are vexing because they are conflicts of presuppositions. Presuppositions are inescapable. One may come to modify one’s presuppositions over time, but one cannot avoid having them. This is why MacIntyre finds that there can be no common set of standards by which to resolve radical conflicts between conflicting versions of the same practice. What counts as a good reason in one version of a controversial practice may not count as a good reason in another. Moral conflicts between conflicting traditions are not really about the conclusions of arguments; they are about the premises of those arguments, and about the standards of rationality by which we judge the truth and tclevance of premises in rational argumentation. In some practices conflict may arise over the rationality of some particular principle. The conflict between the Fundamentalist and the modern scientist, for example, ultimately concerns the truthfulness of the Bible and the reliability and limitations of the scientific method. The conflicts of contemporary ethics involve the ends and purposes of the good life, as well as the characterization of the virtues and the role of authority. The conflict between MacIntyre and modernity concerns the very meaning of rationality.46 Chapter Two Conceiving Rationality as a Practice Alasdair Maclntyre’s central argument about the role of tradition in ethics is that rationality is itself a practice emerging from history with a narrative, with all of the culture-bound and tradition-constituted qualities of any other practice. Consequently, MacIntyre holds that the tradition-eschewing rational standpoint of liberal individualism is the product of a false myth: It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment . . . to provide . . . standards and methods of rational justification by which alternative courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would displace author- ity and tradition.* The principles of reason sought by Enlightenment thinkers would be universal and necessary, transcending all differences of culture and language, recognizing the ability and dignity of all people regardless of background to engage in enlightened rational discussion. However, according to MacIntyre’s account of rationality, this Enlightenment view turns out to be an expression of the peculiar anthropological and epistemological theories and narratives of the Enlightenment. According to MaclIntyre’s reading of history, the practice of rationality is no more fixed and unitary than the practices of painting or architecture: So rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history: indeed, since there are a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than justice.” Rationality itself is a practice emerging from a history, or rather as an enacted form of a narrative interpretation of the events of a history. The Enlightenment account of rationality is only one account among many, just as its set of presuppositions is only one among many. Therefore, insofar as the Enlightenment understood itself as possessing the form of rationality, freed from all presuppositions, the Enlightenment narrative of rationality turns out to be false myth. Rationality is not only the judge of history, but a product of history. This move from the relativism of practices to the relativism of narratives may not seem immediately helpful, but it is, in fact, the key to MacIntyre’s recovery of objectivity. If we are to escape relativism, then we must first show how it is possible to derive an “ought” from an “is.” MacIntyre has shown that our oughts, the standards of our moral life, are the enactment of our narrative account of what is. Therefore the key to escaping relativism rests in the criticism of this narrative. Macintyre believes that his historical approach to the foundations of morality can escape from relativism as a conclusion, because narrative accounts speak of the nature of the world and are therefore objectively testable, and because he believesTradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 47 that he can vindicate the necessity of virtue for the achievement of the goods internal to practices. MacIntyre does embrace a kind of apparent relativism as the condition of enquiry. According to MacIntyre, we need to be aware that our most rational arguments for our soundest theories cannot provide us anything but the best theories so far according to the best form of rationality so far. We enquire as interested participants in the struggles of life and as interested adherents in the struggles of traditions. This kind of subjectivism is, for us, the condition of enquiry, for we cannot but approach the world as members of a culture and as adherents to a set of presuppositions. For MacIntyre, then, the most crucial question in ethics has to do with escaping the limits of this subjectivism, and the only way to do this is through the criticism of one’s own subjective narrative. Once again, there is something disquieting in this, but moral philosophers may take comfort in the fact that we share this awful predicament with our friends in the physical sciences. Paradigm for Progress from the Philosophy of Science In 1977, MacIntyre published “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science.” In that essay he suggested looking to the philosophy of science to find a paradigm for progress in rational enquiry. He discussed the conflicting theories of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, and proposed a middle way between them. The claim that the methods and achievements of the practice of modern science are the result of centuries of development within the tradition of Western civilization is hardly a matter for debate. We are only a few centuries removed from times when some of the finest minds engaged in serious research into alchemy and astrology—fields that modern scientists dismiss as false and superstitious because they are based on false and irrational presuppositions. Alchemy, a field that claimed such noted minds as Avicenna, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, and Issac Newton, is now an object of universal derision, and hardly seems related to science except as a predecessor. Practices, and conflicting versions of practices, are defined in part according to their goals. Alchemy was the effort to transmute base metals into gold. Georgius Agricola described the study briefly in the preface to De Re Metallica: ‘These masters teach their disciples that the base metals, when smelted, are bro- ken up; also they teach the methods by which they reduce them to the primary parts and remove whatever is superfluous in them, and by supplying what is wanted make out of them the precious metals—that is, gold and silver—all of which they carry out in a crucible.“ A definition of a practice that considers only its practical goals remains incomplete. A sufficient definition must also describe the self-understanding of the adherents.48 Chapter Two So the Aristotelian alchemist is one who sought to change the substantial form of the matter of base metals in order to transform them into gold. The modern chemist emerges as one who explains the failure of alchemy through an account of the elemental nature of the metals, and of the indivisibility of elemental atoms (at least in a crucible). The nuclear physicist appears somewhat later as the heir to the classical cosmologists, whose history of matter tells of the origin of all elements from hydrogen. To the nuclear physicist, turning lead into gold (in infinitesimal quantities) is not theoretically impossible, but remains practically impossible. But if the nuclear physicist endeavored to turn lead into gold, he would be no alchemist, for he is engaged in an entirely different research program. These differences between the alchemist, the chemist, and the nuclear physicist reflect changes in the fundamental principles of scientific rationality. The changes are the result of centuries of continuous engagement between received theory, critical observation, and rational interpretation. The differences between the pre- modern and modern views of the world are not merely differences of factual knowledge. Many improvements in factual knowledge are the result of improvements in the narrative that constitutes the self-understanding of the practice of science, and that sets the constitutional limits for the enquiries it defines. The differences between the alchemist, the chemist, and the nuclear physicist concern the presuppositions that govern the interpretation of observation. The history of science, as interpreted by Thomas Kuhn and by Imre Lakatos, is a history of the formulation, development, degeneration, and replacement of a series of macro-theories that have governed the interpretation of scientific data. Kuhn calls these macro-theories “paradigms.” Imre Lakatos calls them “scientific research programmes.” According to Lakatos, the research program is the fundamental unit of scientific enquiry. Having some general theory as its core, the research program is made up of the whole body of theory and investigation that arises for the elucidation, extension, and defense of the general theory. Newtonian science, for instance, is not simply a set of four conjectures—the three laws of mechanics and the law of gravitation. These four laws constitute only the “hard core” of the Newtonian Programme. But this hard core is tena- ciously protected from refutation by a vast “protective belt” of auxiliary hy- potheses. And, even more importantly, the research programme also has a “heuristic”, that is, a powerful problem-solving machinery, which, with the help of sophisticated mathematical techniques, digests anomalies and even turns them into positive evidence.” A research program consists of a set of core theories, surrounded by auxiliary theories which explain and defend the hard core. But the mark of a good research program is not its ability merely to defend itself, rather it is its ability to extend itself. According to Lakatos, the crucial mark of a good research program is its ability to predict events or discoveries that had otherwise been entirely unexpected,Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 49 such as the regular return of Halley’s Comet, or the discovery of the planet Neptune: The hallmark of empirical progress is not trivial verifications. . .. What really counts are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions." Thus, in a progressive research programme, theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts. In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts.® A working, progressive scientific research program proves itself through its ability to predict the hitherto unknown. Crisis in a scientific research program emerges when its predictive power fails. Degenerating programs are marked by a reactionary movement in which new auxiliary theories are proposed and others modified in order to defend the hard core against anomalies arising from newly discovered facts. Degenerating scientific research programs may eventually be falsified. According to Lakatos, however, this 1s possible only in the light of a better theory. “There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.”“* “Thus the crucial element in falsification is whether the new theory offers any novel, excess information compared with its predecessor and whether some of this excess information is corroborated.” It is only the superior predictive and explanatory power of a superior research program that is able to justify the rejection and falsification of a degenerating research program. Once again the history of astronomy offers a striking example of a change in research programs. The earth-bound astronomers of the Renaissance were deeply perplexed by the inaccuracy of Ptolemaic astronomy. They tried diligently to adjust the Ptolemaic model to make it more accurate, but to no avail. The only data vailable to them were their observations of the movable stars. The only principles available to them were those of common sense, Scripture, and the philosophical (radition, all of which supported the conclusion that the planets, the sun, and the fixed stars all orbited the earth. Renaissance astronomers were perplexed because it was impossible to make their observations match their principles, even Copernicus’s heliocentric model failed to accommodate the observational data, because its orbits were circular. It took the scientific discipline and diligence of Johannes Kepler to transform the flawed suppositions of Copernicus into modern astronomy. In keeping with the prevalent mythology, however, MacIntyre credited Galileo with restoring order to the science of astronomy: The old mythological empiricist view of Galileo saw him as appealing to the facts against Ptolemy and Aristotle; what he actually did was to give a new ac- count of what an appeal to the facts had to be. Wherein lies the superiority of Galileo to his predecessors? The answer 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50 Chapter Two Padua, the work of Copernicus himself at last all fall into place. Or, to put mat- ters in another and equivalent way: the history of late medieval science can fi- nally be cast into a coherent narrative. Galileo’s work implies a rewriting of the narrative which constitutes the scientific tradition.*” It is reductive and anachronistic to reduce Kepler’s contribution (described here as Galileo’s) to an appeal to the facts against Ptolemy and Aristotle, because the observations to which he appealed were, although more precisely measured, essentially the same as those available to Ptolemy and Aristotle: Certain lights in the sky change position in a reliable, predictable manner. The facts about those observations, however, involve interpretation of the data. In After Virtue, MacIntyre writes: The twentieth-century observer looks into the night sky and sees stars and plan- ets; some earlier observers saw instead chinks in a sphere through which the light beyond could be observed. What each observer takes himself or herself to perceive is identified, and has to be identified by theory-laden concepts."* Facts are not preconceptual or pretheoretical data, but interpretations of perceptions, identified through theory-laden concepts. Kepler did not simply make an appeal to the facts against Ptolemy and Aristotle. By engaging with precisely measured data, Kepler came to reinterpret their significance. He transformed the facts by rigorously testing his suppositions against the available data. Kepler’s elliptical, heliocentric model of a solar system of planets and moons whose motion was governed by three planetary laws gave birth to a new research program in astronomy. Later it became the foundation for Newton’s discovery of gravitation, which launched a whole new research program in physics. Newtonian physics gained authority because it was able to answer the questions that had arisen during the degeneration of its predecessor. However, the ability of a theorist to construct a model that accommodates all of the known data is not enough to keep a research program alive. A theory becomes authoritative and its rivals are falsified only when the logical extension of the principles of the theory lead to the discovery of new data, which could not have been expected or taken into account by the theorist. The discovery of Neptune in 1864 by J. C. Adams and U. C. Leverrier was one such triumph for Newtonian physics. When applied to theories in the physical sciences, Lakatos’s account of the methodology of scientific research programs seems to make good sense. It accounts for the failure of Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy, and the success of Newtonian physics. Lakatos’s philosophy of science also accounts for the replacement of Newton’s theory by Einstein’s. Yet there seems to be something strange about importing this kind of theory into ethics. Astronomy and physics are hard sciences in which theories may be experimentally verified under controlled conditions. By contrast, as Aristotle warned us, the study of ethics does not allow for absolute certainty.”° Ethics displays none of the sure footed progress that we seeTradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality SI in the physical sciences. The analogy seems immediately strained. What counts as a discovery in ethics? What could constitute experimental verification? The problem of subjectivism in science mirrors the problem of subjectivity in ethics because it is the problem of the prospective blindness of traditions. Insofar as moral traditions are the outcome of human experience, we must recognize that they may be incomplete, and that new experiences and developments may necessitate developments in traditional moral claims. Anomalous discoveries are unforeseeable events, whether they overturn an insufficient physics, geography, or anthropology. lhe arrival of Columbus’s ships in the Caribbean islands was such an event. We may only wonder what the arrival of Europeans meant to native Caribbean cosmology, geography, and anthropology, and what it did to the narratives that supported native cultures. Similarly, Medieval and Renaissance just war theorists could not have foreseen the development of the astonishing weapons now wielded by modern armies. It is impossible to foresee the anomalies that might challenge a traditional narrative or research program. Thus we would do well to treat our theories with a certain tentativeness, bearing in mind their analogy to myths. Changes in ethical theory mirror changes in scientific theory in another way. Our experience is not falsified; only the narrative that informs our understanding is. The object of the observation remains the same, but the observations change because the new paradigm or research program redirects our attention so that different details take precedence. The difference that yields new information is a change in the presuppositions; it is a change in rationality. The adoption of the heliocentric model of the universe is an excellent example of this, as MacIntyre explained in “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science.” What Ptolemaic and early modern astronomers saw in the sky remained the same,°? but the new theory transformed inexplicable Ptolemaic anomalies into Newtonian normalcy: The criterion of a successful theory is that it enable us to understand its prede- cessors in a newly intelligible way. It, at one and the same time, enables us to understand precisely why its predecessors have to be rejected or modified and also why, without and before its illumination, past theory could have remained credible. It introduces new standards for evaluating the past. It recasts the nar- tative, which constitutes the continuous reconstruction of the scientific tradi- tion. What changes are the substantive principles of rationality. This change is brought bout through criticism of the received narrative of the research program. The philosophy of science turns out to be a philosophy of narrative. Scientific theory, MacIntyre argues, turns out to be a peculiar kind of narrative, so the criteria «developed for the criticism of scientific narrative may be adapted to assess other kinds of theoretical and historical narratives: One very striking conclusion, however, will also emerge. For I shall want to re- inforce my thesis that dramatic narrative is the crucial form for the understand-52 Chapter Two ing of human action and I shall want to argue that natural science can be a ra- tional form of enquiry if and only if the writing of a true dramatic narrative— that is, of history understood in a particular way—can be a rational activity. Scientific reason turns out to be subordinate to, and intelligible only in terms of, historical reason. And if this is true of the natural sciences, a fortiori it will be true also of the social sciences.” Indeed this is true of every narrative that attempts to explain the nature of the world, because every narrative presents a research program. As Lakatos notes, “Newton’s theory of gravitation, Einstein’s relativity theory, quantum mechanics, Marxism, Freudianism, are all research programmes, each with a characteristic hard core stubbornly defended, each with its more flexible protective belt and each with its elaborate problem solving machinery.” After Virtue attempts to explain the failures of the modern antimetaphysical, antiteleological research program for investigating human action. After Virtue does this by providing a new narrative about human action and its necessary connections to purpose, practice, character, society, and history. If modern ethics is taken to be a particular kind of philosophical research program, then we may objectively assess its capabilities and limitations according to its own standards. We may identify and distinguish its hard core from its auxiliary theories, and we may consider its merits relative to rival research programs in ethics. Three Rival Ethical Research Programs Conceiving conflicting accounts of morality as rival research programs provides a key to overcoming the problem of relativism, for this fundamentally redefines those conflicts. Instead of asking whether or not some forms of behavior should be universally prescribed or proscribed, we may ask instead whether or to what extent the narrative that supports the rule in question is true, that is, whether it conforms to reality, or not. Rather than criticizing behavioral rules, which in themselves are neither true nor false, we criticize the underlying narratives and theories, which can be judged as either true or false, and we allow our critical assessment of the narratives and theories to inform our treatment of the rules which enact them. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, Alasdair MacIntyre identifies three rival ethical research programs. Each is a different version of the practice of ethics; each emerges with a different narrative about human life, human society, and human reason. These programs are distinguished by their goals, their presuppositions, standards, methods, and the historical settings in which they arose. Each has a distinctive hard core. Each has a distinctive set of auxiliary theories. “Encyclopaedia” is the ethical research program of modern liberal individualism. Its hard core is derived from the thought of Descartes, Kant, and Mill, and generally consists in a rejection of metaphysical speculation andTradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 53 traditional moral authority, and in the belief that substantive human rationality is of only one kind, so that ethics may be advanced by rational argumentation that ignores anthropological and sociological factors: For Adam Gifford and almost all his educated Edinburgh contemporaries it was a guiding presupposition of thought that substantive rationality was unitary, that there is a single if perhaps complex, conception of what the standards and the achievement of rationality are, one which every educated person can with- out too much difficulty be brought to agree in acknowledging. The application of the methods and goals of this single and unitary conception to any one par- ticular distinctive subject matter is what yields a science.” All rational people, they believed, could agree with objectively sound arguments. Traditions were superfluous, and their pronouncements irrational—unless they could be backed up by arguments that Enlightenment thinkers could accept. According to MacIntyre, a peculiar set of beliefs about the interpretation of experience arose from the encyclopaedists’ unitary conception of rationality that colored their understanding of the encounter between the person and the world: It was part of what I am calling their unitary conception of rationality and of the rational mind that they took it for granted not only that all rational persons conceptualize data in one and the same way and that therefore any attentive and honest observer, unblinded and undistracted by the prejudices of prior com- mitment to belief would report the same data, the same facts, but also that it is the data thus reported and characterized which provide enquiry with its subject matter.’ The encyclopaedist conception of rationality had a certain once-and-for-all character to it, “for a blindness to the possibility of genuine alternative conceptual schemes is a necessary part of the encyclopaedist’s point of view.”** Encyclopaedic rationality would replace orthodoxy with reason. So it is ironic that among these Enlightenment academicians the mark of rationality, the sign of eligibility to join in the free discussion of philosophical matters, including ethics, seems to have been agreement with their orthodox opinions. The genealogical account of rationality and morality arose as a rejection of encyclopaedia. Whereas encyclopaedists had taken rationality-as-such and the truth-as-such as given, Friedrich Nietzsche took them both to be mere intellectual artifacts. The rejection of these artifacts comprises the hard core of genealogy: Nietzsche, as a genealogist, takes there to be a multiplicity of perspectives within each of which truth-from-a-point-of-view may be asserted, but no truth- as-such, an empty notion, about the world, an equally empty notion. There are no rules of rationality as such to be appealed to, there are rather strategies of in- sight and strategies of subversion.”54 Chapter Two However, Nietzsche’s rejection of the once-and-for-all nature of the modern narrative had a once-and-for-all character of its own. MacIntyre argues that genealogy’s dogmatic rejection of metaphysics entails a crucial inconsistency, since the very activity of genealogical research is possible only if the researcher possesses the kind of metaphysical identity that he rejects.°* MacIntyre finds the genealogical criticism of the modern narrative to be insightful, but the genealogical narrative that follows from that criticism is itself incoherent. Maclntyre’s third version of moral enquiry is tradition. The hard core of tradition is the self-conscious recognition that the good life, the standards of the good life, and the practices conducive to the good life can only be known and developed through the accumulated wisdom of a tradition. Tradition rejects both the once-and-for-all rationality of encyclopaedia, and the once-and-for-all relativ- ism of genealogy. Tradition is the classical approach to rational enquiry. Plato often refers to predecessors in the dialogues as he presents the authoritative voice of his own teacher. Likewise, Aristotle typically begins his works by critically engaging the opinions of his predecessors. Thomas Aquinas, too, uses traditional opinions, setting out the negative objections to his disputed questions in order to set the criteria for his positive responses which also refer to authoritative traditional opinions. The particular tradition that MacIntyre advances as “Tradition” in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry is the metaphysical research program that looks to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas as its principal authors. However, there is a distinction to be made in the consideration of tradition as a version of moral enquiry. We may consider the particular tradition that he names. In this sense “tradition” names the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical tradition. In another sense, however, Maclntyre is arguing that tradition, as exemplified in this work by the Thomistic tradition, is also exemplified in all of the other moral traditions on earth, and is the true model of human rational moral enquiry. Therefore, both encyclopaedia and genealogy, which explicitly reject tradition, must also be understood as traditions. MacIntyre argues the latter point very forcefully in “Liberalism Transformed into a Tradition” in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?® and in “Genealogies and Subversions” in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Liberalism began with the rejection of the authority of tradition on the grounds that the manifest rationality of true moral laws could be recognized and agreed upon by all rational people, but it ends up locked in controversy over the definition of the universal rational principles whose existence it dogmatically asserts: Liberalism, which began as an appeal to alleged principles of shared rationality against what was felt to be the tyranny of tradition, has itself been transformed into a tradition whose continuities are partly defined by the interminability of the debate over such principles.Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 55 The inconclusiveness of the debates within liberalism as to the fundamental principles of liberal justice . . . reinforces the view that liberal theory is best un- derstood . . . as itself the articulation of an historically developed and develop- ing set of social institutions and forms of activity, that is, as the voice of a tradi- tion. Like other traditions, liberalism has internal to it its own standards of ra- tional justification. Like other traditions, liberalism has its set of authoritative texts and its disputes over their interpretation. Like other traditions, liberalism expresses itself socially through a particular kind of hierarchy. The self-understanding of encyclopaedic liberalism as the emancipation of reason from traditional orthodoxies turns out to be self-deceptive. The self-understanding of genealogy as the liberation of humanity from the deceptions of metaphysics and academic dogmatism also turns out to be self- deceptive, and it is self-deceptive in three ways. First, genealogy does not truly escape metaphysics because it depends upon metaphysical presuppositions. Genealogists communicate verbally in the form of rational arguments. If Nietzsche’s works are intended to communicate his commitments, then it is necessary to recognize in them a metaphysical appeal to timeless rational standards: This appeal to impersonal, timeless standards, so often taken for granted in the post-Enlightenment world by those who take themselves to have rejected meta- physics, is itself only to be understood adequately as a piece of metaphysics. In making his or her sequence of strategies of masking and unmasking intelli- gible to him or herself, the genealogist has to ascribe to the genealogical self a continuity of deliberate purpose and a commitment to that purpose which can only be ascribed to a self not to be dissolved into masks and moments, a self which cannot but be conceived as more and other than its disguises and con- cealments and negotiations, a self which just insofar as it can adopt alternative perspectives is itself not perspectival, but persistent and substantial.* Hence once again it seems to be the case that the intelligibility of genealogy re- quires beliefs and allegiances of a kind precluded by the genealogical stance. © Thus the self-understanding of genealogy as a research program aiming at the liberation of humanity from metaphysics turns out to be another self-deception. So MacIntyre finds that Nietzsche’s works presuppose a certain metaphysics of writing and reading that alone could explain the stability of meaning in the written word, but this is not the only metaphysical presupposition that genealogy requires. Genealogy is self-deceptive in a second way because it constitutes a research program and has become a tradition of enquiry: The problem then for the genealogist is how to combine the fixity of particular stances . . . with the mobility of transition from stance to stance. . . . The re- search program of the post-Nietzschean enterprise, so prodigally endorsed by56 Chapter Two Nietzsche for his intellectual heirs, is to find out by trying and either failing or succeeding in a systematic attempt to carry through that program.’ Nietzsche endorsed a research program. In doing so, he offers his body of work to new generations of thinkers for further research and elaboration, and here we may ask, “Toward what end?” If the goal is to discover the truth, then genealogy has set out to do what it holds to be impossible. If the goal is something else, then the genealogical project, considered as a research program, is unintelligible. Genealogy is self-deceptive in a third way, in that it is unable to justify its own claims, and has perpetuated itself as a research program only by reverting to a dogmatic, academic voice. MacIntyre takes the life and work of Michel Foucault to be a most impressive example of post-Nietzchean genealogical research,®’ but Maclntyre finds that even Foucault ends up speaking in the academic mode: Certainly, Foucault himself became a professor of professors, restoring Nietzsche’s project to the professorate from which Nietzsche had rescued it. I do not mean by this only that whereas Nietzsche began as a professor but be- came a homeless wanderer . . . , Foucault began as a transient . . . , but ended up with nearly fifteen years speaking ex cathedra from the College of France; but also that this inversion symbolizes Foucault’s movement towards and final arrival at the plain academic style of the Histoire de la sexualite and the even plainer explanations offered in that wearisome multitude of interviews in which the academic deference evident in the questions is never rejected by Foucault in his answers. The striking conclusion to be drawn from the comparison of these three rival ethical research programs is that all three are traditions, even though only one of them understands itself as such. Therefore, the narrative accounts of both encyclopaedia and genealogy are demonstrably false on this point. The formative influence of tradition, far from being an antiquated and irrational constraint on rationality, turns out to be a necessary and inescapable starting point for all rational moral enquiry. This is the fundamental insight of tradition-constituted rationality. Rationality is developed within the tradition of a community. But now that it seems reasonable to reject antitraditional ethical research programs, we are really no closer to our goal. If there are rationalities rather than rationality and justices rather than justice, how are we to ask and answer the title questions of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? For an answer to this question we must consider MacIntyre’s theory in use.Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 57 The Research Program of Tradition-Constituted Rationality According to MacIntyre’s account, rationality is inseparable from tradition, because substantive rationality, whether speculative and practical, is a kind of practical art. Like every practical art, substantive rationality develops within a community of practitioners who measure it by common standards. Rationality is not something separate or even separable from traditions through which traditions may be judged; rather, it is something arising from traditions themselves, and bound up with traditions. This is so, even though our own intellectual formation may not support this observation. Two of Maclntyre’s statements on this point bear repeating: What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational enquiry as embod- ied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standards of rational jus- tification themselves emerge from and are part of a history.” Rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history: indeed, since there are a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than justice.”" If rationality is analogous to practical arts, then the autonomous rational individual of modern liberalism turns out to be a self-deceived dogmatist. If this is the case, then by what means may one overcome relativism? To avoid misunderstanding tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality, MacIntyre counsels his readers to bear four considerations in mind. First, given that rationality arises from the experience of a tradition, rational justification must be seen in terms of particular traditions. “To justify is to narrate how the argument has gone so far,””” writes MacIntyre. Philosophical theories are justified in terms of superiority “to all previous attempts within that particular tradition.” Second, theories and doctrines are not judged according to an abstracted, neutral, timeless, and objective criterion of truth: From the standpoint of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive enquiry, what a particular doctrine claims is always a matter of how precisely it was in fact advanced, of the linguistic particularities of its formulation, of what in that time and place had to be denied, if it was to be asserted, of what was at that time and place presupposed by its tradition, and so on. Doctrines, theses, and arguments all have to be understood in terms of historical context.”” The standpoint of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality judges «lcvelopments in traditions according to their relationships to those traditions, rather than importing foreign standards in either an anachronistic or atavistic manner.58 Chapter Two Third, MacIntyre’s account of rationality does not separate communities in a way that locks them in insoluble, radical disagreement. On the contrary, it gives the best account to date of the reason for the diversity of rational standpoints. As a result it offers a pathway to the resolution of radical disagreements. Radical disagreements about moral rules arise from disagreements in the underlying traditional narratives of human life. If we can overcome differences in narratives, then we can come to terms with radical disagreements about rules: How and under what conditions they {differences between rival and incompati- ble traditions] can be so resolved is something only to be understood after a prior understanding of the nature of such traditions has been achieved. From the standpoint of traditions of rational enquiry the problem of diversity is not abolished, but it is transformed in a way that renders it amenable of solution.”® Tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality is the diagnosis for the problem of radical disagreement, and through our understanding of it, we may find the cure. MacIntyre’s fourth consideration is that tradition-constituted and tradition- constitutive rationality may only be explained through history. “It is crucial that the concept of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rational enquiry cannot be elucidated apart from its exemplifications.””’ The theory is exemplified at both the personal and the social level. At the social level, it is most strikingly exemplified when traditions change, but that kind of social exemplification is only the result of many changes in opinion among the adherents of that tradition. The Renaissance revolution in astronomy provides a good example. Thinkers like Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton experienced that revolution first. Other astronomers and physicists eventually followed. MacIntyre chose to explain tradition-constituted rationality with examples he found in the traditions of the Greek polis, Augustinian Christianity, the Scottish Enlightenment, and modern liberalism. I have tried to exemplify it through the life of Alasdair MacIntyre himself. While it would be a mistake to try to read too much of MacIntyre’s theory back into his biography, the rough intellectual biography that provides the starting point for this book provides a useful metaphor to illustrate MacIntyre’s theory. Any adequate biography of Alasdair MacIntyre must show his development to involve a series of epistemological crises and their tentative and increasingly adequate resolutions. This is what his theory is really about: It is an account of the subjective condition of the narrative quest for objective truth. Maclntyre’s theory is an account of the subjective condition of the pursuit of truth, because whether we philosophize alone or in a community, we enter upon the quest only with what we already have, and this includes our native language and culture, and its presuppositions. There is no once-and-for-all, tradition-independent philosophical standpoint that can light the way for us. We may begin as academic historians, we may commit a great body of literature to memory, but philosophyTradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 59 begins for us as it did for Aristotle, when we recognize the limitations of even the greatest of our predecessors and begin to sift the works of our traditions critically. MaclIntyre’s theory is an account of the dynamics of the narrative quest for the truth. The history of philosophy is a story about the human quest for truth. Its main plot is the one taught in college history of philosophy courses, but its subplots include the biographies of all the philosophers in that history. MacIntyre’s theory considers the manner in which academic philosophers and ordinary people encounter the questions that bring about changes in the way we view human life and action. It is an account of the quest for objective truth. MacIntyre’s theory has to do with the confirmation, emendation, and rejection of received theories about justice and morals, but all of this development is senseless unless it aims to discover the truth about human life and action. In his account, MacIntyre strives to do justice to the tradition-bound character of subjective rationality, but he also endeavors to show how the objective truth of things may impinge upon false forms of rationality, giving rise to the questions that bring about change. As Aristotle writes, “With a true view all the data harmonize, but with a false one the facts soon clash.””* The truth of things can bring about epistemological crises through the experience of anomalous events, forcing interested questioners to reevaluate and to develop more adequate accounts of the way things are. When an epistemological crisis is general cnough, and the reformulation is adequate enough, the reformulation may take the place of its predecessor in the tradition. Tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality cannot serve as a meta-ethical theory, at least not in the ordinary sense. MacIntyre is not proposing a theory that will allow disinterested observers to adjudicate the claims of conflicting traditions. Modern meta-ethical theories belong to the encyclopaedic research program that MacIntyre so enthusiastically rejects. At the same time, however, it also becomes clear that MacIntyre’s theory is better than any meta-ethical theory so far in answering the questions that meta-ethics attempts to address: Good people try to do what they understand to be best, but this understanding can only arise from within their own experience, thus differences are not to be overcome once and for all through appeal to universal rational principles (because none are to be found); instead, specific differences between particular traditions are to be overcome through mutual understanding and critical reassessment of conflicting elements in the narratives that provide the reasons for moral rules. Epistemological crises cannot be manufactured. We live most of our lives like the complacent prisoners of Plato’s cave. We do not question the shadows before us because we have no reason to do so. We are usually caught in Meno’s paradox. We do not know what we do not know, and so we do not seek it. Tradition-constituted rationality recognizes the extremity of this condition. Epistemological crisis only emerges when this natural complacence is broken by a real experience of significant challenge to the tradition, either from within, or from without. Rationality becomes tradition-constitutive when it discovers a more adequate narrative by which the crisis is both diagnosed and overcome.60 Chapter Two When an epistemological crisis does arise, there are only three possible courses of action. One may ignore the question and opt for an irrational adherence to the traditional account; one may surrender to the question and allow it to lead to relativism; or one may face the question. Philosophy impels one to engage the question, hoping to advance the explanatory power of the tradition by answering the question, even at the risk of changing or rejecting the traditional account. The biographical narrative of the previous chapter, sketchy and inadequate as it is, shows that the life of Alasdair MacIntyre has been characterized by courageous philosophical struggles with a series of epistemological crises. By his account, his struggles were precipitated by his initial formation, in which he gave his allegiance to both the Gaelic tradition and the modern liberal individualist tradition. His studies in analytical philosophy highlighted the inconsistencies in these rival accounts of justice and rationality. His first encounters with Marxism provided an account that made his difficulty intelligible to him, and led him to reject the ethics of modern liberal individualism. Maclntyre did not allow his philosophical commitments to affect his religious commitments at the beginning of his career. So his first published works included defenses of an individualist irrationalist version of the Christian faith. When other thinkers criticized his fideism, picking him up and turning him around (to borrow a metaphor from Plato’s cave) he came to see the emptiness of his manner of belief, and rejected both the form and content of his faith. Maclntyre’s rejection of Christianity ushered in a second phase in his career, in which he sought the basis of ethics in history. In “What Morality is Not” (1957), Macintyre had already produced some criticisms of contemporary moral philosophy that paralleled those of Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy.” In 1958, in “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” echoing some of the concerns of Anscombe’s famous article, MacIntyre proposed a research program that aimed to develop a satisfactory philosophy of psychology, a basis for our moral standards, in “what emerges from history.” In the succeeding decades, this quest led him first to the Nietzschean views of his Short History of Ethics (1966). However, the breakthrough manifested in “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science” (1977), in which MacIntyre took up a narrative interpretation of history, led to the qualified Aristotelian conclusions of After Virtue and the more Thomistic conclusions of the works that followed. In the early 1980s, Macintyre also came to reject atheism when he joined the Catholic Church. MaclIntyre’s own development has been much like his theory. His rationality was constituted by what he had received, and this limitation was the source of his difficulty. When this limitation caused epistemological crises to arise in the face of anomalies, MacIntyre employed his limited resources with courageous determination, until by the discovery or development of a more sufficient narrative, he was forced to recognize the failure of narratives he had once believed. In passing on his findings to others, MacIntyre’s rationality has become tradition-constitutive.Tradition-Constituted and Tradition-Constitutive Rationality 61 Notes 1. “Can Medicine Dispense,” 27. 2. “Can Medicine Dispense,” 26-27. 3. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considera- tions On Representative Government, ed. H. B. Acton, Everyman’s Library (London: |.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1991), 7. 4, Alasdair MacIntyre, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness II,” 89. 5. “Can Medicine Dispense,” 28. 6. “Can Medicine Dispense,” 38. 7. Aristotle seems to disagree in Nicomachean Ethics 9.8 [1169a 17-1169b 2]. 8. “Can Medicine Dispense,” 42. 9. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” 91. 10. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” 95. 11. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” 90. 12. “Can Medicine Dispense,” 30-31. 13. After Virtue, 113. 14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (India- napolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1956), 129 [125]. 15. The problem of understanding moral action as human action remains the focus of Alasdair MacIntyre’s criticism of Kant. He revisited these issues in a discussion of J. B. Schneewind’s Invention of Autonomy, which I attended at the APA Eastern Division Meeting, December 29, 1998. 16. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” 91. 17. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I & II,” and Marxism and Christianity. 18. “Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?” 19. After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. 20. J. B. Schneewind, “Autonomy, Obligation, and Virtue: An Overview of Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 311. 21. Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?, in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck, Library of the Liberal Arts 113 (New York: Macmil- lan, 1990), 83. 22. What is Enlightenment?, 89 [42]. 23. Mill, Utilitarianism, 11. 24. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness II,” 95. 25. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness II,” 96. 26. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I,” 100. 27. “Can Medicine Dispense,” 39-40. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), section 198. 29 After Virtue, 187. 30 After Virtue, 193-194. 31. Fideism is the doctrine that religious faith cannot be, and should not be, de- fended rationally. Theological voluntarism in ethics is the doctrine that God gives laws according to his will (voluntas), not as wise counsels leading people to happiness, but as arbitrary fiats demanding obedience to the divine will. The underlying notion is that