Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

The Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre

Thomas D. D'Andrea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351878296
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue provides the first comprehensive and detailed treatment of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. In this book Thomas D'Andrea presents an accessible critical study of the full range of MacIntyre's thought across ethical theory, psychoanalytic theory, social and political philosophy, Marxist theory, and the philosophy of religion. Moving from the roots of MacIntyre's thought in ethical inquiry, this book examines MacIntyre's treatment of Marx, Christianity, and the nature of human action and discusses in depth the development and applications of MacIntyre's After Virtue project. The book culminates in an examination of major internal and external criticisms of MacIntyre's work and a consideration of its future directions.

PART I
The Roots of MacIntyre’s Thought

Chapter 1

Re-Conceiving Ethical Inquiry

1.1 How Not to Conduct Ethical Inquiry

As noted, MacIntyre’s early interest in ethics was sparked in large part by A.J. Ayer’s lectures on the subject at University College, London which MacIntyre attended while a Queen Mary College undergraduate. This interest was to inspire the choice of The Significance of Moral Judgements as his MA thesis, a work written shortly thereafter, in 1951, at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Dorothy Emmet. Throughout the rest of his pre-After Virtue days, in what will hereafter be called the first phase of his career, ethical questions remained prominent for him, and by the time After Virtue is released in 1981, MacIntyre had written over twenty articles on ethical issues, a brief history of the subject (A Short History of Ethics: 1966d), and a number of related articles on action theory. What is the direction of his thinking in this period?

From the MA thesis onward he is gripped by a sense of the inadequacy of the dominant styles of English-speaking ethical theory, and working primarily within the idiom of Oxford ordinary language philosophy, he is attempting to formulate an alternative to supplant these. It is one, as it turns out, which will discover only after the fact its kinship with certain pre-modern forms of ethical thought. The Significance of Moral Judgements (henceforth Significance) is primarily concerned with the shortcomings of intuitionism and emotivism; it seeks to provide an alternative account of both the logical form of moral statements and of the logic peculiar to moral reasoning and argument. Though written in the slightly awkward and rambling style characteristic of a young graduate student, the work shows an unusual dialectical ability and imaginative resourcefulness for a 22-year-old – and the kind of intense personal engagement with an issue or set of issues for which MacIntyre has since become famous. It is also a valuable repository of themes and theoretical commitments which he has revisited throughout his career – it contains, for instance, the seeds of the sophisticated treatment of a number of issues in After Virtue – so in spite of its occasionally murky and elliptical arguments, it bears close examination.

What, according to Significance, is the problem with English-speaking moral philosophy at mid-century? The story the thesis tells goes roughly as follows. G.E. Moore, in his Principia Ethica, started the enterprise off on the wrong foot by setting the standards for ethical theory too high. Moore wanted to show that ethical beliefs have an epistemic status similar to beliefs in the natural and mathematical sciences: he wished for them to amount to knowledge after the fashion of perceptual and scientific beliefs, and even to enjoy something close to certitude (SMJ: 12). C.L. Stevenson rightly identified some of the flaws in Moore’s account of moral cognition, but Stevenson’s rival meta-ethical theory, for sharing presuppositions of Moore’s characterization of moral experience – and particularly for sharing Moore’s conception of the finality and self-containedness of moral appraisals – was itself variously flawed. Ethical theory, or so Significance will argue, cannot itself tell us how to solve our moral problems and to dispatch them in some neat and tidy rational or non-rational way: its deliverances can offer us no guarantee of the truth of our real-life moral judgements. But it can tell us what specific logic is in play when we are thinking ethically, and in that sense it can clarify our moral experience. Still, it can never render our moral deliberations amenable to some scientific algorithm:

The question for moral philosophy seems to be what we are doing when we … distinguish between good and bad reasons [for action] … Ethics is the science of practical problems. This is not to say that ethics tells us how to solve our moral problems, but it does tell us what kind of task we are undertaking in attempting to solve them. With this we must be content, and yet moral philosophers in the past have sometimes asked moral philosophy to do more than this. (SMJ: 4)

In general, Significance faults the contemporary ethical theories of Moore and Stevenson – and the older modern theories of Kant and Mill – with having failed fully to respect the ordinary moral agent’s point of view. Because these authors have shared the desire to solve ethical problems abstractly and definitively, MacIntyre claims, they have, in order to attain this otherwise unrealizable goal, miscast the ethical experience of the ordinary agent. Instead of illuminating the ordinary agent’s moral experience, their theories obscure a number of its true features. The task of a suitably modest ethical theory, Significance argues, is to characterize lived moral experience, to show what is involved in the act of moral judgement, and to explain the nature and meaning of ethical disagreement. While ethical theory can and should lay bare the structure peculiar to ethical thinking, MacIntyre will claim – especially its concern with good versus bad reasons for action – it cannot itself tell us what a good or bad reason for action is, but must leave this up to something like philosophical anthropology, where rival accounts of human flourishing are debated (MacIntyre does not actually state this important conclusion in so many words, but it emerges from explicit arguments in the text. Interestingly, nowhere in the thesis does MacIntyre advert to, or seem fully cognizant of, the distinction between meta-ethics and first-order ethical theory (i.e. normative ethics).

In the course of its critique of Moore and Stevenson, and following its recipe for moral theory rightly understood, Significance sketches out the lineaments of an alternative moral theory: that is (a) a rival account of moral experience; (b) an anatomy of the moral judgement that is at the heart of moral experience, and an account of its significance for human living, and finally, (c) an account of the causes and possibilities for resolution of ethical disagreement.

Turning to the details of MacIntyre’s argument in Significance, his criticism of Moore shares much with other criticisms of Moore familiar at the time (especially Strawson, 1949). Few moral agents, he observes, would describe their moral experience as the intuiting of some mysterious, trans-empirical property – ‘goodness’, as Moore has it – though they would admit that they frequently distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ and ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ in their moral thinking (SMJ: 6). Moore’s theory also stumbles when it comes to the veridicality of alleged intuitions of the non-natural property goodness: if such intuitions were infallible, there would be no accounting for the fact of ethical disagreement; but, if fallible, this would imply that some standard exists in terms of which they could be corrected. If such a standard were to exist, then intuitionist accounts of the source of moral knowledge would no longer be true, so in either case the intuitionist theory of moral judgement is faced with a contradiction (SMJ: 8).

Why has Moore so erred, MacIntyre asks? Because he has been driven by a desire for ethical certitude – a wanting it to be the case that perceptions of ‘goodness’ are like perceptions of ‘yellow’, having the latter’s finality and self-referential validation. But our discrimination of moral goodness is not like this, Significance argues. In an account of moral cognition alternative to Moore’s, MacIntyre maintains that we judge x to be morally good in virtue of certain factual, non-moral evidence, which evidence may itself be incompletely or imperfectly grasped. So his claim will be that ethical facts are different from empirical facts – without this entailing that they are wholly non-empirical in Moore’s sense or purely emotive in Stevenson’s. In the concluding part of the thesis MacIntyre tries to show how, contra Moore and Stevenson, natural facts are logically related to ethical norms, albeit in a unique way (i.e. neither inductively nor deductively).

Before attempting this, MacIntyre, much in the manner of Wittgenstein in his post-Tractatus phase, faults both Moore and Stevenson in Significance with a priorism – with failing to respect the unique role and function of moral terms, and with a consequent failure to read the meaning of these terms off their customary use (SMJ: 19; compare Wittgenstein, 1929). While Moore has it that goodness is some sui generis property hovering above the empirical world and ready to be passively perceived and registered by the moral agent, for Stevenson, similarly, ‘moral properties’ are passively experienced by being read off of one’s inner life of feelings and of emotional aversions and attractions. Moral appraisal is in neither case seen as something actively discriminatory. MacIntyre concedes that although both theories pick out elements of what constitutes the ‘moral’ in ‘moral experience’, both have a deficient understanding of ‘experience’, missing its connotation of increase in facility and skill through time. Moore and Stevenson have not carried out an empirical investigation into what moral experience and the ‘morally experienced person’ are taken to be, he notes. Instead they have brought a priori constraints, an alien and Procrustean logic, to the characterization of that experience. This explains why neither the intuitionism of the Principia nor Stevenson’s emotivism can account for the skill element in moral cognition (SMJ: 16).

Significance argues further that these two theories falter also with respect to explaining moral disagreement. MacIntyre notes here how Moore and Stevenson both deny that once agreement is attained about the morally relevant facts of the matter there can be any rational progress with, or resolution of, remaining ethical disagreement. In this sense, both theories take account of that part of moral disagreement which concerns non-moral matters, but neither can account for that part of experience which involves specifically moral disagreement. In accord with the overall effort of Significance to split the difference between Moore’s cognitivist intuitionism and Stevenson’s non-cognitivist emotivism, MacIntyre will argue that as regards moral disagreement, Moore, with his claim that such results from disagreement about the presence of some non-natural property, misses the moral in ‘moral disagreement’, and Stevenson, with his claim that all such disagreement is emotional-attitudinal, is unable to account for the element of genuine (i.e. because cognitive) disagreement (20–22).

How, then, does MacIntyre think in Significance that such disagreement should be interpreted? Admitting more affinity with Stevenson’s view than with Moore’s, he argues that specifically moral disagreement stems not so much from factual or emotional-attitudinal causes as procedural ones. As he states: ‘[n]either consider that moral disagreement might be neither about the facts nor in the attitude but rather as to how to attack a practical problem’ (22). His own theory of moral judgement will have yet to spell this how out, but the main object of his criticism is what might be called a correspondence-referential picture of the moral: the notion that moral terms simply pick out some non-natural fact or express some emotional-attitudinal state. According to this picture, when different parties fail jointly to perceive the presence of the moral x in question, moral disagreement is rationally insurmountable: it is insoluble by any rational dialectic. So, in both the non-naturalist and the emotivist account of moral disagreement, Significance observes, we lose sight of the specifically moral (versus the purely cognitive or the merely psychological), with the result that the focus of moral discussion becomes the factual ‘is’ instead of the moral ‘ought.’

By way of a further criticism of Moore and Stevenson (and now H.A. Prichard: see Prichard, 1949: 21), MacIntyre notes here how the immediacy upon which these thinkers wish to rest moral convictions renders baffling the often discursive nature of moral argument: this is because their theories are more concerned with ethical situations and lack the ethical agent’s own context of the ‘problems of living’ (SMJ: 25). Because he sees Stevenson’s theory as a more serious contender than Moore’s, the bulk of the thesis is devoted to a detailed examination and criticism of the Stevenson of Ethics and Language.

Stevenson, he states at the outset of the thesis, ‘sharpens the distinction between science and morals at the cost of blurring the distinction between morals and feelings’. So Stevenson’s attempt to analyse moral concepts into emotive ones without remainder turns moral judgements into persuasive arguments pure and simple, and their intrinsic significance is lost (28). Moral argument and moral reasoning become strictly identified; personal moral deliberation becomes the non-rational jostling of subjective desires. What MacIntyre wishes to show is how moral judgements have intrinsic significance (specifically, rational significance) for the agent herself or himself. So, in examining Stevenson’s feeling analysis of moral judgements, he maintains that it does not hold up well as an interpretation of common moral experience. To illustrate this with reference to an example, Significance notes that when one deliberates about whether one ought to defend democracy by enlisting in the army to fight in a war, or whether one ought instead to oppose war by conscientious objection, one’s thoughts have a self-transcendent reference: they are governed in a certain sense by cognitive considerations about external states of affairs. Such deliberation seems not at all merely to involve the introspective weighing of one’s inclinations as Stevenson has it. So while Stevenson allows for a distinction between moral and non-moral uses of terms, he still under-describes the moral (32).

MacIntyre’s own list of the marks of the moral point of view in Significance runs as follows: (1) the use of certain distinctive terms – for instance, ‘immoral’, ‘wrong’, or ‘duty’ – as opposed to terms such as ‘dislike’, ‘unpleasant’ and so on; (2) the appeal to principle instead of personal preference (he gives the example of opposition to the opening of cinemas on Sunday because Sunday is the Sabbath rather than because one dislikes the noise and the traffic such would cause), and (3) reference to the seriousness of the consequences of actions envisaged (SMJ: 34). Whereas for Stevenson, MacIntyre notes, the distinctively moral appears in reference to attitudes of sin, guilt, remorse and so on, this begs the causal question at issue. Common usage – for instance, psychologists’ discussions of irrational guilt, or the distinction we ordinarily make between proper and improper remorse – suggests that such feelings frequently follow upon the perception of moral wrongdoing. Such perception involves the application of certain distinctive concepts – ‘wrong’, ‘obligatory’ and so on – and a recognition of the binding character of these concepts and the seriousness of the consequences of acts carried out in their violation.

Ordinary usage also attests to our recognition that our collective moral instincts may be askew, as moral reformers in the past and present have convincingly argued. Thus, MacIntyre notes, both the expressions ‘This is wrong although most people approve of it’ or ‘This is permissible although most people feel sin, guilt, or remorse over it’ are intelligible to us and seen to involve no contradiction – but Stevenson’s theory, he argues, would have to be stretched quite a bit to account for this (35–6).

Significance notes as a further explanatory weakness of Stevenson’s emotivism its tendency to obscure the differences in meaning and logical form between various expressions of approval in ordinary English. So MacIntyre observes that ‘I like x’, ‘I approve of x’ and ‘x is good’ are all expressions of approval, but the first alone is standardly emotion-referential, whereas the second typically involves the citing of external reasons for one’s approval, and the third the citing of such reasons in a more explicit and robust form (37). On Stevenson’s account, though, all such statements would share the logical form of ‘x pleases me’, and all moral judgements would be reduced to statements of perceived subjective relations. And yet, MacIntyre notes, even as far as the mild approval statement ‘x is pleasant’ goes, such a reduction does not hold.

He therefore bids us to consider the case of wine-tasting experts debating the merits of two different wines: here the experts’ approval is given not in measure of their subjective approval, but by the application of shared standards. MacIntyre will concede that in cases such as whether the statement ‘Turkish delights are pleasant’ is true or not, we are restricted to perceptions of subjective relations, that is, to rendering a verdict on that statement based upon the evidence of our own taste sensation. By the nature of this type of case there are no non-subjective standards to which there can be appeal (39). But Significance will want to argue that this is conspicuously not so with respect to moral statements.

MacIntyre provides an example here whose object lesson is fundamental to the justification of his own account of moral judgement. It concerns a dispute in wartime between a willing conscript (C) and a conscientious objector (O). In their dispute about whether to become part of the war effort or not, C and O agree about the facts with respect to which a decision must be made, and agree about certain principles, such as the abhorrent nature of fascism and of war itself. They agree both about the kind of evidence relevant to settling the dispute and the kind of principles that might be invoked to settle it. Thus, they can and do argue meaningfully up to a point: by adducing, for example, different factual considerations, or by giving different weight to the same factual considerations, or by predicting different outcomes on the same factual basis. Such discourse is not mere sloganeering, MacIntyre notes – mere trading in sentiments inspired by different subjective dispositions – and it is difficult to see how emotive theory can distinguish it from this. Indeed, he observes, in moral debate we frequently are eager to give weight to other persons’ considerations (40). Here as elsewhere in Significance, it must be noted, MacIntyre does not think he is providing definitive objections to Stevenson’s emotivism – only showing the strains on its plausibility and its phenomenological weaknesses with respect to the moral; clearly, for example, the emotivist could think it important for the development of one’s ethical outlook that one take the thought and behaviour and moral appraisals of others into account.

It is particularly by a close examination of Stevenson’s logical analysis of approval statements, Significance argues, that we can see where his larger theory goes off the rails. For Stevenson, ‘I approve/disapprove of x’ is equivalent to a verbalization of my introspectively discovered feeling of affinity/aversion for x. But this analysis, MacIntyre notes, surely rests on a crude philosophical psychology. S’s disapproval of smoking is hardly his occurrent feeling of aversion (as in twinges of some sort) whenever S observes smoke, smokers, tobacconists or the like. Rather, it is at least a disposition to act and react a certain way with respect to smoking and related phenomena, in the future as well as the present. It is, for instance, for S to ban his children from smoking, or for him to criticize the government’s policy with respect to tobacco imports, or for him to express verbal disapproval of smokers when he comes across them. Moral appraisals then are not mere psychological reports of occurrent emotional states: they have a behavioural significance, a connectedness with thought and action, which far transcends that of a transient or even habitual emotional state.

This does not seem a very impressive argument, as an emotivist could respond that e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Roots of Macintyre’s Thought
• Part II: The After Virtue Project
• Part III: Future Directions
• Select Bibliography
• Index