Erik Hammar

I am sitting at Heathrow, waiting for a flight to Stockholm. For the journey, I picked up Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry from the library. Like MacIntyre’s other works, such as After Virtue, about which I have previously written, the book (originally a set of lectures) deals with the nature of philosophical and in particular ethical disagreement.

Modern philosophy, MacIntyre argues, is characterised by a set of intractable, seemingly irresolvable disagreements. This is most obviously so in ethics. Kantians, utilitarians and virtue theorists all advance different theses about the nature of morality, but the arguments are only compelling to those who shared their founding premises to begin with. At the metaethical level, similar conflict abounds over the very nature of ethical enquiry. It is this conflict which MacIntyre analyses as a rivalry between three different positions: The Enlightenment belief in universal progress, Nietzschean subversion of established traditions and assumptions, and the Aristotelian understanding of moral enquiry as participation in a particular intellectual tradition.

I approach MacIntyre’s text having just read an article about polygamy in Sweden. A report has shown that c.300 Swedish residents are in polygamous marriages, despite the fact that these are banned under Swedish law. The simple explanation is that Sweden has for some time nevertheless recognised polygamous marriages entered by individuals before they became Swedish residents. Recent years’ migration flows from African and Middle Eastern countries have consequently led to a relative prevalence of state recognised polygamous marriages. The Minister for Migration, Heléne Fritzon, now wants a complete halt to the official recognition of polygamous marriages.

Fritzon’s defence of her new intended policy was interesting. Asked on the radio ‘What is wrong with polygamy?’, she stumbled towards the answer that it does not align with Swedish values. When pressed, she clarified that the practice constitutes oppression of the women involved. I think we can discern two fundamentally different kinds of justification in these two answers. The first answer invokes Swedish values, using the word “värdegrund”, best translated as a set of guiding values. Companies and institutions typically have a värdegrund (akin to anti-discrimination policies, or “Our values” statements), and so, Fritzon suggests, does Sweden as a whole. The other answer invokes something seemingly more universal by calling the practice ‘oppressive’. The difference between these justifications can be gauged from the fact that a proponent of polygamy would likely agree that the institution does not form part of Swedish values, but disagree that it is oppressive.

This is because the first answer seems to be of the form “We don’t do that (around here)”, and so invokes a limited, particular identity and highlights certain demands placed on belonging to that identity. The second, on the other hand, is more like “That’s a bad thing (wherever it happens), and we don’t want bad things here”. The difference, in other words, is between grounding policy on values recognised as particularly ours, and on the other hand, on principles with supposedly universal force. And as may now be obvious, the first form of ethical argument would align with MacIntyre’s third ethical view, whilst the second would align with the first, universalistic view. Fritzon, then, reflected in her brevity a tension that goes to the very depth of the nature of moral enquiry and judgement.

Or at least, that is how I read it. Of course, it does not really matter if in this particular instance Fritzon in fact reflected this ambiguity. This is meant as a more general observation. As Sweden scrambles to accommodate the influx of people from cultures vastly differentiated from that of its majority population, questions of the appropriate justification of law and policy will force themselves upon us. For this reason, I think we better start thinking about the kinds of justification we want to guide our decisions.

25 January 2018