I said I would have a look at Alastair MacIntyre’s After Virtue once I had completed the Mansfield Park essay. I have now in a manner completed the essay (though I am tweaking it as I post it) and have had a chance to have a quick look at After Virtue. Here are my initial thoughts. (Incidentally, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy has an article on Political Philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre by Ted Clayton that looks reasonable.)
MacIntyre opens the prologue to the third edition with the confident statement that ‘If there are good reasons to reject the central thesis of After Virtue, by now I should certainly have learned what they are.’ This is too good an opportunity to miss. OK, its late, I am in The Sidewinder, I have had a wee dram of Laphroaig to sustain me (you have been warned), but lets see what we can find.
Firstly, I will put on the table the things MacIntyre and I agree on:
Modern thought has become deeply confused on ethics.
Ethical judgements don’t travel well between systems of (coherent) ethical thought, such as Aristotle’s and Nagarjuna’s systems. We certainly shouldn’t expect one system to be able to ‘refute’ the other.
Modern subjective sentimentalism (MacIntyre calls this ‘emotivism’; I will return to this below) is not such a coherent system of ethics. It is simply not fit for purpose.
Modern discussions of ethics tend to be shrill and emotive (and when they aren’t rather devoid of ethical content).
Jane Austen’s novels are a significant contribution to modern ethical development, being grounded in a coherent ethical system.
Now for the fun part, the disagreements.
What I have been calling sentimentalism MacIntyre calls emotivism: X is good because I say so. Macintyre says ‘In the eighteenth century Hume embodied emotivist elements in the large and complex fabric of his total moral theory’ (p. 14) and that Kant was trying for ‘a rational vindication of morality’ (p. 47), but, as I understand it, MacIntyre hasn’t noticed the gap between the packaging of Hume’s and Kant’s ethics and their actual structure. Kant’s and Hume’s ethics, and the utilitarians, and all modern Enlightened ethics is essentially sentimental. Hume’s was crudely sentimental, whereas Kant and his successors more subtly so, but they all fit under Hume’s maxim of making reason the slave of the passions.
In the first place what is to guide the Kantian legislating process that will give us the laws that we are expected to adhere to? It is difficult to see how we can avoid adopting the laws we like, no? And then what keeps us stuck to those laws: well, sentiment of course. (See The Post-rational Civilisation for more on this.) The utilitarians have the same issue, relying on sentiment to adhere to the Greatest Happiness Principle.
This is the problem with reductive systems of ethics that disdain to soil themselves with psychological realities and refuse to undertake to promise happiness as a consequence of the ethical life. Even trying to squeeze ethics into a rational framework leaves the moral philosopher relying on sentiment, finally, to do the heavy lifting. I have noted, initially to my surprise (now I see how naive I was), that any attempt to suggest to moral philosophers that ethics results in happiness, and that such arguments should be embedded in the system as so many classical systems have insisted on doing, seems to meet a deep resistance, reminding me of how all modern ethics, just as Hume said they should be, are deeply grounded in sentiment. Moderns really don’t want reason to go ‘all the way down’ but to preserve a sentimental gap between belief and action. (Note that nowhere do I say that feeling or sentiment shouldn’t play its part, and indeed it can’t be excluded from judgement, any more than reason can or should be; reason and sentiment ought never be separated.)
(Marilynne Robinson says this in a different way, noting a similar tendency to disempowerment: ‘Lately Americans have enjoyed pretending they are powerless, disenfranchised individually and deep in decline as a society, perhaps to grant themselves latitude that responsible people do not have or desire. In fact, our ability to do harm, by act or omission, is great beyond all reckoning, and greater by our refusal to accept this fact and its implications.’)
So MacIntyre doesn’t seem to have grasped (from what I have seen so far) how sentimentalism (or ‘emotivism’ as he calls it) is deeply embedded in modern thought.
Indeed MacIntyre seems very much caught up in this Enlightened cage, everywhere worrying about ethics from the same place that classical physics is done, the Newtonian View from Nowhere. The central problem, as he sees it, is that different ethical systems may adopt incompatible ethics without being able to refute each other, yet a relativist, subjective ethic is worse than useless, being anti-ethical.
Yet MacIntyre refuses to abandon his Enlightened View From Nowhere, concluding that as we can’t club people into the Aristotlian system that he believes is ‘the one’, we have to wait for the current order to collapse under its contradictions so that the new coherent order can be born.
My observations.
Give up the Enlightened View From Nowhere: it is a hopeless place from which to do ethics.
The world never has adopted a single system of ethics and it almost certainly never will, so let us not look to Utopian schemes for solutions. If history is any guide we will be waiting a long time.
It seems to me that the different traditions that have proven themselves—Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.—have the potential to work in the cultural contexts they have evolved in, provided (and this is a big if) the modern confusions can be dissolved and they can be renewed.
There are certainly adherents to these traditions, including some very great thinkers and practitioners and large numbers of people, that do understand their traditions and perfectly understand the age of great degeneration that we live in, and have rolled up their sleeves and are endeavouring to (a) preserve these traditions and (b) dissolve the delusions. They are making constructive contributions and they are not preaching despair.
Liberal democracy, like life generally, is messy and a never-ending project, but it has proven itself to be a quite serviceable framework within which different traditions can coexist and we do live in a diverse interconnected world that seems to require it. The problem isn’t this framework or the traditions, but the delusions, the selfishness, the corner-cutting, not least the great Utopian delusions that came out of the Enlightenment and are still very much among us.
I am probably fortunate in my primary tradition (Buddhism, in my case Tibetan Buddhism), being a thoroughgoing rationalist tradition (and I don’t mean this in any superior sense), is based on a philosophy that places great emphasis on the dependent nature of reality, and so quite tolerant to different metaphysical and ethical systems with their own logic and coherence, while totally rejecting relativism. That said, all religions and wisdom traditions seem to reject relativism and have liberal traditions that respect other traditions, and Buddhism certainly has its fair share of bigots (as I said, no basis for superiority). But for the purposes of philosophising it is certainly convenient to have a coherent philosophical system to hand that does the job.
Just to make it clear: having the whole community sharing a single system simplifies some things (yet, as with monocultures in general, perhaps, has it own risks), but it is certainly no guarantee–none at all–that the community will be wise or harmonious. The task is to minimise selfishness, confusion and delusion, and again that is best achieved with the support of a culturally-sensitive wisdom tradition, but if there is no acceptable tradition then it has to be accomplished without any tradition (David Hume seems to have managed quite well, for example).
Alasdair MacIntyre seems to understand many of these points yet still seems to see a need for the very modern Utopian project, rather as Galileo rejected Kepler’s non-Aristotlian elliptical planetary orbits while himself trying to demolish the academy’s medieval Aristotle fetish. In the original preface to After Virtue MacIntyre says that his enquiry started with him wondering what the moral basis for rejecting Stalinism could be and one gets the impression that he is still trying to answer this question, and I can’t help but feeling that the writings of John Gray might be relevant.
[I ended up writing a longer article than I intended, finishing the article at home.]
After Virtue: First Thoughts
MacIntyre opens the prologue to the third edition with the confident statement that ‘If there are good reasons to reject the central thesis of After Virtue, by now I should certainly have learned what they are.’ This is too good an opportunity to miss. OK, its late, I am in The Sidewinder, I have had a wee dram of Laphroaig to sustain me (you have been warned), but lets see what we can find.
Firstly, I will put on the table the things MacIntyre and I agree on:
Now for the fun part, the disagreements.
What I have been calling sentimentalism MacIntyre calls emotivism: X is good because I say so. Macintyre says ‘In the eighteenth century Hume embodied emotivist elements in the large and complex fabric of his total moral theory’ (p. 14) and that Kant was trying for ‘a rational vindication of morality’ (p. 47), but, as I understand it, MacIntyre hasn’t noticed the gap between the packaging of Hume’s and Kant’s ethics and their actual structure. Kant’s and Hume’s ethics, and the utilitarians, and all modern Enlightened ethics is essentially sentimental. Hume’s was crudely sentimental, whereas Kant and his successors more subtly so, but they all fit under Hume’s maxim of making reason the slave of the passions.
In the first place what is to guide the Kantian legislating process that will give us the laws that we are expected to adhere to? It is difficult to see how we can avoid adopting the laws we like, no? And then what keeps us stuck to those laws: well, sentiment of course. (See The Post-rational Civilisation for more on this.) The utilitarians have the same issue, relying on sentiment to adhere to the Greatest Happiness Principle.
This is the problem with reductive systems of ethics that disdain to soil themselves with psychological realities and refuse to undertake to promise happiness as a consequence of the ethical life. Even trying to squeeze ethics into a rational framework leaves the moral philosopher relying on sentiment, finally, to do the heavy lifting. I have noted, initially to my surprise (now I see how naive I was), that any attempt to suggest to moral philosophers that ethics results in happiness, and that such arguments should be embedded in the system as so many classical systems have insisted on doing, seems to meet a deep resistance, reminding me of how all modern ethics, just as Hume said they should be, are deeply grounded in sentiment. Moderns really don’t want reason to go ‘all the way down’ but to preserve a sentimental gap between belief and action. (Note that nowhere do I say that feeling or sentiment shouldn’t play its part, and indeed it can’t be excluded from judgement, any more than reason can or should be; reason and sentiment ought never be separated.)
(Marilynne Robinson says this in a different way, noting a similar tendency to disempowerment: ‘Lately Americans have enjoyed pretending they are powerless, disenfranchised individually and deep in decline as a society, perhaps to grant themselves latitude that responsible people do not have or desire. In fact, our ability to do harm, by act or omission, is great beyond all reckoning, and greater by our refusal to accept this fact and its implications.’)
So MacIntyre doesn’t seem to have grasped (from what I have seen so far) how sentimentalism (or ‘emotivism’ as he calls it) is deeply embedded in modern thought.
Indeed MacIntyre seems very much caught up in this Enlightened cage, everywhere worrying about ethics from the same place that classical physics is done, the Newtonian View from Nowhere. The central problem, as he sees it, is that different ethical systems may adopt incompatible ethics without being able to refute each other, yet a relativist, subjective ethic is worse than useless, being anti-ethical.
Yet MacIntyre refuses to abandon his Enlightened View From Nowhere, concluding that as we can’t club people into the Aristotlian system that he believes is ‘the one’, we have to wait for the current order to collapse under its contradictions so that the new coherent order can be born.
My observations.
I am probably fortunate in my primary tradition (Buddhism, in my case Tibetan Buddhism), being a thoroughgoing rationalist tradition (and I don’t mean this in any superior sense), is based on a philosophy that places great emphasis on the dependent nature of reality, and so quite tolerant to different metaphysical and ethical systems with their own logic and coherence, while totally rejecting relativism. That said, all religions and wisdom traditions seem to reject relativism and have liberal traditions that respect other traditions, and Buddhism certainly has its fair share of bigots (as I said, no basis for superiority). But for the purposes of philosophising it is certainly convenient to have a coherent philosophical system to hand that does the job.
Just to make it clear: having the whole community sharing a single system simplifies some things (yet, as with monocultures in general, perhaps, has it own risks), but it is certainly no guarantee–none at all–that the community will be wise or harmonious. The task is to minimise selfishness, confusion and delusion, and again that is best achieved with the support of a culturally-sensitive wisdom tradition, but if there is no acceptable tradition then it has to be accomplished without any tradition (David Hume seems to have managed quite well, for example).
Alasdair MacIntyre seems to understand many of these points yet still seems to see a need for the very modern Utopian project, rather as Galileo rejected Kepler’s non-Aristotlian elliptical planetary orbits while himself trying to demolish the academy’s medieval Aristotle fetish. In the original preface to After Virtue MacIntyre says that his enquiry started with him wondering what the moral basis for rejecting Stalinism could be and one gets the impression that he is still trying to answer this question, and I can’t help but feeling that the writings of John Gray might be relevant.
[I ended up writing a longer article than I intended, finishing the article at home.]