Erik Hammar

I’ve just finished reading a book that has been with me for more than a year now: Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. I first started reading it as I was studying ethics at university. I then read the first chapters but, in the hectic life of one essay following on the heel of another, never got further. After graduating I picked it up at Blackwell’s, and started to read what proved to be a complex, challenging book. The first edition having been published in 1981, it soon became an iconoclastic challenger of modern moral philosophy. I try to discuss  my thoughts on the book below, but partly, I realise, in quite a technical manner not very inviting, perhaps, to those without background in the academic study of ethics. But who knows, maybe there are some interesting bits regardless. Either way, I can start by pointing you to the lecture by MacIntyre available on YouTube on the subject “On Having Survived Academic Moral Philosophy” (Part 1). In this first of what I hope will be two texts, I summarise MacIntyre’s argument and try to make clear his negative thesis. In a later text, I want to talk about his positive, Aristotelian thesis. But I have not yet managed to understand that argument well enough to discuss it publicly…

Interdisciplinary and Demanding

Let me begin from a genre angle. MacIntyre’s book is challenging partly because it encompasses a variety of what we normally think of as distinct disciplines: moral and political philosophy/theory, the philosophy of history and social science, the philosophy of action, history, literature, social theory, organisation theory. These are all bound up in what is basically a twofold thesis: a diagnosis of a crisis of modern moral and political life, one the one hand, and a positive argument about an Aristotelian approach to remedying this crisis, on the other. The moral philosopher William Frankena says in a critique quoted by MacIntyre in his post-script that “What bothers me is not distinguising [history from philosophy]”, illustrating the scepticism a reader schooled in analytical moral philosophy may feel after reading MacIntyre’s book. The presumed impossibility of “deriving an ‘is’ from an ‘ought'” is likely to entail at least initial scepticism about MacIntyre’s philsophical account which rests partly on descriptive, historical argument. Yet the apotheosis of the Humean is/ought dictum and the harmful arbitrary distinctions between disciplines are two of the many things MacIntyre wishes to challenge and overturn. And so, given that ambition, one must engage with the actual substance of MacIntyre’s argument and not attempt to win by default through appeal to preconceived notions of what moral philsoophy is about or how it is to be done. That is, as it were, the issue at hand.

Aristotelianism and the Main Argument

Now, engaging with MacIntyre’s argument is far from a straightforward thing to do. His drawing on everything from Marxist social theorists, to literary interpretations of Jane Austen, to Sartre’s theory of action, is very demanding of the reader. Nevertheless, the main thrusts of his negative and positive arguments are relatively clear. First, he argues that the present state of moral discourse in the Western world (those parts of the world where the Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman heritage forms the bulk of the intellectual tradition) is in incoherent, incongruous ruins. Moral debate in our time is characterised by in principle insoluble clashes between arguments; insoluble because the different arguments rely on incommensurable premises. Our moral vocabulary is broken, because it consists of pick’n’mix concepts the meaning-giving social context of which is long gone. This paved the way for emotivism in ethics, and for general relativism and moral and political intellectual stagnation. But there is a way out of this: We must rediscover and reapply a certain kind of Aristotelian virtue ethics which was lost long ago. In doing so, we can rediscover morality in a form not thus debased. This will do as a summary. Below I look at the arguments in more detail.

A current crisis – the negative argument

We must prohibit the use of certain substances to minimise immense suffering resulting from them, says the utilitarian. We must protect the inalienable right of every individual to do what they wish with their body, says the rights theorist. Though it is often said we must “weigh” such arguments against each other, MacIntyre convincingly argues that there is not rational way to do so, because the basic premises remain completely incommensurable. There is no way to arbitrate between them. The reason for this, centrally, is that our moral language, in which  we conduct our debates, is eclectically made up of remnants from the past and poor inventions of modernity. We use ideas of virtues bereft of, e.g., the Ancient Greek or medieval social context which made them meaningful (such as patriotism, honour, courage). We match such concepts against Enlightenment concepts like Millian utility and Lockean rights. We are, in effect, using a moral language which is void of the social context in which they acquired their meaning and the criteria by which they were employed in argument. Or alternatively, we are using a language which was created after the breakdown of the pre-Englightenment moral order crumbled. Concepts such as utility and rights, thus, all indeed fall victim to the is-ought argument, MacIntyre says, because they lack the social context which made ancient moral discourse meaningful (more on this below). They are constructions without the immersion in social practices which makes normativity intelligble. In other words: We, late Western modernity, have lost the way.

It is important that MacIntyre’s is not a general relativist argument, in the sense that emotivist theories of ethics are. Emotivism holds that all normative sentences are just expressions of emotions of approval or disapproval. This is a tradition that stems back from Hume (though what Hume’s exact view was is controversial), and was picked up properly in the twentieth century as a response to the British intuitionists (Moore, Pritchard) by people like A.J. Ayer. Emotivists hold that moral language necessarily is void of meaning in the way MacIntyre argues that our moral language is. Moral debates are in principle irresolvable because moral statements are simply expressions of emotions. MacIntyre’s thesis is another: Moral disputes are irresolvable in our culture because of certain historical, linguistic and philosophical features of that culture. In a nutshell, morality is broken, not by necessity, but by contingency. This broken culture – that of modern individualism – culminated in (and included) Nietzsche’s critique of its morality. But as penetrating as Nietzsche’s attack was, he failed to provide a positive alternative moral vision, because he remained fundamentally within the tradition he attacked, equally hampered by its shortcomings. However, Nietzsche’s critique did not attempt to attack the long since discarded moral theory of Aristotle. If Aristotle can be vindicated, MacIntyre thus reasons, Nietzsche will fail to get the last word, and there is a way out of our predicament. And this is where MacIntyre turns to his positive argument: For it turns out Aristotle can be vindicated.