Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition

Alasdair MacIntyre

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780268160562
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Alasdair MacIntyre—whom Newsweek has called "one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world"—here presents his 1988 Gifford Lectures as an expansion of his earlier work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He begins by considering the cultural and philosophical distance dividing Lord Gifford's late nineteenth-century world from our own. The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth century: that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris.

The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges.

VIII

Tradition against Encyclopaedia: Enlightened Morality as the Superstition of Modernity

It became inescapably clear, when the issues which divide the adherents of the encyclopaedic mode of moral enquiry from those of Nietzschean genealogy and Thomistic tradition were first posed at the beginning of these lectures, that their radical disagreements extended beyond the questions of how moral enquiry is to be conducted and what its conclusions are to that of how those disagreements are themselves to be characterized. For it also at once became clear that what is at issue is in key part whether and, if so, how far the three antagonistic standpoints must or can agree upon the standards and criteria by which their respective claims should be evaluated. It was a central presupposition of the major contributors to the Ninth Edition, and one sometimes made explicit, that on questions of standards, criteria, and method all rational persons can resolve their disagreements. And it is an equally central contention of the heirs of Nietzschean genealogy that this is not so.

Yet, it may be asked, why at this point in time continue to treat the standpoint of the Ninth Edition as a serious contender in the debate? After all, as I remarked at the outset, nobody now shares the standpoint of the Ninth Edition, so that it may seem absurd to give to it the kind of critical attention which suggests that its claims to our intellectual and moral allegiance still deserve to be taken seriously. But there are three good reasons for denying that this is in fact absurd.

The first is that those who in the earlier part of this century abandoned the beliefs, attitudes, and presuppositions characteristic of the Ninth Edition left a good deal of unfinished business behind them. Just because they were unable to see the dimensions and the significance of what they were doing in the perspective in which we can now view them–they for the most part saw a series of piecemeal intellectual and moral rejections, revisions, and innovations, where we can identify a general rupture with an overall weltanschauung–their work of criticism was partial and incomplete.

Secondly, even now the organized institutions of the academic curriculum and the ways in which both enquiry and teaching are conducted in and through those institutions are structured to a significant degree as if we still did believe much of what the major contributors to the Ninth Edition believed. So we often still behave as if there is some overall coherence to and some underlying agreement about the academic project of just the kind in which those contributors believed. The ghosts of the Ninth Edition haunt the contemporary academy. They need to be exorcized.

Thirdly, and more particularly, one key encyclopaedic belief still informs general academic practice, even if in a modified and weakened version. I refer to the belief that every rationally defensible standpoint can engage with every other, the belief that, whatever may be thought about incommensurability in theory, in academic practice it can safely be neglected. So in the construction and implementation of the curriculum in so-called advanced societies the universal translatability of texts from any and every culture into the language of teacher and student is taken for granted. And so is the universality of a capacity to make what was framed in the light of the canons of one culture intelligible to those who inhabit some other quite alien culture, provided only that the latter is our own, or one very like it.

There are of course some contemporary philosophers who are prepared to defend this belief on the basis of arguments derived from Donald Davidson’s work. These are important arguments which deserve to be taken with great seriousness even, or perhaps most of all, by those such as myself who reject their conclusions (I have explained my reasons for so doing in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, 1988, chapter XIX; and this rejection was of course presupposed by part of my argument in Lecture V). But the dominant beliefs in our contemporary academic culture concerning the translatability of alien languages and the intelligibility of alien cultures are not a result of the influence of Davidson’s or any other arguments. They are rather a residue, an inherited set of presuppositions which are all the more powerful for being so seldom spelled out, a legacy from successive eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenments and not least from the culture of the Ninth Edition.

Yet of course, although contemporary academic practice preserves this continuity with its predecessors, it is also marked by a crucial difference. For whereas it was a tenet of Enlightenment cultures that every point of view, whatever its source, could be brought into rational debate with every other, this tenet had as its counterpart a belief that such rational debate could always, if adequately conducted, have a conclusive outcome. The point and purpose of rational debate was to establish truths and only those methods were acceptable which led to the conclusive refutation of error and vindication of truth. The contrast with contemporary academic practice could not be sharper. For with rare exceptions the outcomes of rational debate on fundamental issues are systematically inconclusive, as I noted earlier when discussing recent philosophy. The accepted standards of rationality, insofar as they are generally shared, provide contemporary academic practice with only a weakly conceived rationality, one compatible with the coexistence of widely divergent points of view, each unable, at least by those generally accepted standards, to provide conclusive refutations of its rivals.

We can thus contrast the various Enlightenments’ strong conceptions of rationality with this contemporary weak conception. The rationale for this weak conception is clear and is clearly bound up with that which made the standpoint of the Ninth Edition and of its predecessor Enlightenments unacceptable to later academic generations. What would be required, on this contemporary view, for a conclusive termination of rational debate would be appeal to a standard or set of standards such that no adequately rational person could fail to acknowledge its authority. But such a standard or standards, since it would have to provide criteria for the rational acceptability or otherwise of any theoretical or conceptual scheme, would itself have to be formulable and defensible independently of any such scheme. But–and it is here that contemporary academic practice breaks radically with its Enlightenment predecessors–there can be no such standard; any standard adequate to discharge such functions will itself be embedded in, supported by, and articulated in terms of some set of theoretical and conceptual structures. Thus since, so far as large-scale theoretical and conceptual structures are concerned, each rival theoretical standpoint provides from within itself and in its own terms the standards by which, so its adherents claim, it should be evaluated, rivalry between such contending standpoints includes rivalry over standards. There is no theoretically neutral, pretheoretical ground from which the adjudication of competing claims can proceed.

It is all too easy to conclude further that therefore, when one large-scale theoretical and conceptual standpoint is systematically at odds with another, there can be no rational way of settling the differences between them. And Nietzsche’s genealogical heirs do so conclude, for this as well as for other reasons. But the Thomist has only to remind him or herself that it would have been quite as plausible in the thirteenth century to have concluded that, since Augustinianism and the Aristotelianism of the Islamic commentators were systematically at odds in just this way, each having internal to itself its own standards of rational evaluation, no rational way could be found to settle the differences between them. And since Aquinas decisively showed this conclusion to be false, those able to learn from him have every reason to resist it in the present instance. How then ought a Thomist to proceed?

The questions and problems which Aquinas posed about Augustinianism to Augustinians and about Aristotelianism to Aristotelians are each initially framed in terms internal to the system of thought and enquiry which was being put in question. Aquinas’s strategy, if I have understood it correctly, was to enable Augustinians to understand how, by their own standards, they confronted problems for the adequate treatment of which, so long as they remained within the confines of their own system, they lacked the necessary resources; and in a parallel way to provide the same kind of understanding for Averroistic Aristotelians. So we also need to proceed by raising critical questions for encyclopaedists and genealogists, not in our terms, but in theirs. Just such a problem is posed for the genealogist, so I shall suggest in the ninth lecture, by his or her conception of personal identity. And in the encyclopaedist’s idiom no expression invites such questions more obviously and more insistently than ‘morality’ itself.

Contemporary moral debate is notoriously inconclusive in its outcomes, perhaps in part because of the extent to which it makes use of the concepts of the encyclopaedists but has abstracted those concepts from the framework within which and in terms of which they were understood by the moralists of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenments. What then did those moralists mean by ‘morality’?

No conviction, so I suggested in the first of these lectures, is more central to the encyclopaedist’s mind than that ‘morality’ names a distinct subject matter, to be studied and understood in its own terms as well as in its relationships to other areas of human experience, such as law and religion. This conviction had already informed the first great modern encyclopaedia, L’Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, more than a century before it exerted its influence on the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And in the earlier, just as in the later enterprise, it guided the overall plan of the encyclopaedia as well as the writing of individual articles. So while there are few and only incidental references to morality in D’Alembert’s ‘Discours Preliminaire,’ the article ‘Encyclopédie’ by Diderot in volume IV summarized the aim of the editors as to “inspire a taste for science, a horror of falsehood and vice, and a love of virtue; because everything which does not aim ultimately at happiness and virtue is nothing.”

These two aims were thought to harmonize. The cultivation of virtue both produces individual happiness–at least generally and in the longer run–and undergirds the social order. In this Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, author of the articles on ‘Morale’ and ‘Moralité’ in volume X agreed with Diderot. De Jaucourt was an internationally famous physician, educated at Geneva and Cambridge before he studied medicine at Leyden with Boerhaave, author of a life of Leibniz prefaced to an edition of the Theodicy, as well as of medical treatises. Recruited originally to contribute medical articles to the Encyclopédie de Jaucourt represents the shared beliefs of educated adherents of the Enlightenment rather than the theorizing of its outstanding leaders. In the articles ‘Moralité’ and ‘Morale’ four theses are particularly noteworthy. A good or just action is one which “conforms to a law imposing an obligation.” Morality is thus primarily a matter of rules, and to be a good or just person, to be virtuous in character, is to be disposed to do what the rules require. Secondly, on the content of what morality requires ordinary human beings in all times and places agree, sharing “general ideas of certain duties without which society could not sustain itself.” Difficulties and disagreements arise not over these general ideas, but only over their application in particular circumstances.

Thirdly, morality is treated as a distinct phenomenon throughout de Jaucourt’s contributions, but its independence is made explicit in his emphasis upon its independence of religious faith. Morality is not only independent of faith, but faith, while at its best in the gospels upholding true morality, adds nothing to morality. Moreover the truths of morality are more certain than those of faith. And, finally, plain persons do not need the moral theorist to tell them what the requirements of morality are, except insofar as religious or political interests have obfuscated and distorted true morality, sometimes with the aid of false moral theory, which has often enough been the case. The implication is that the central function of enlightened moral theory is to combat the influence of bad moral theory.

It is striking how far other thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment agree with de Jaucourt. Plain persons are also thought to be well aware of what their duties and obligations require of them by Kant in Germany and not only by Reid and Stewart in Scotland but also earlier, on the basis of a very different theory, by Hume. In England, Butler and Price, themselves theoretically at variance, concurred. The plain person, so conceived, apprehends what morality requires in a way that is compatible with those apprehensions being elicited in the course of his or her psychological development. But what is thus apprehended is independent of social circumstance, is a set of premises rather than a conclusion, and does not require, for example, in order to be adequately understood, the type of moral education or moral self-education so crucial to the theories of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. For them, of course, every moral agent no matter how plain a person is at least an incipient theorist, and the practical knowledge of the mature good person has a crucial theoretical component; it is for this reason that both Aristotle and Aquinas agree that we study philosophical ethics, not only for the sake of theoretical goals, but so as ourselves to become good.

By contrast, for the thinkers of the Enlightenment generally the only role left open for theory is the vindication and clarification of the philosophically uninfected plain person’s moral judgments, so as to protect them against false theory. For Reid the single most dangerous false theorist was Hume. But many Enlightenment thinkers gave that place to the tradition stemming from Aristotle. So Kant explicitly condemned central Aristotelian doctrines. And for de Jaucourt Scholastic theory was a mélange drawn from various sources “without rule or principle.”

When such eighteenth-century writers proclaimed the universality of moral agreement upon fundamentals, they were not unaware of some of the crucial differences between the cultures of modern Europe and those of other times and places. Sometimes indeed, as with Diderot, they perceived, or half-ironically claimed to perceive, in cultures untouched by Western civilization morality as it really is, uncontaminated by either superstition or philosophy. Sometimes, as with Dugald Stewart, they saw cultural differences in morality as stemming from the application of one and the same set of moral rules to very different circumstances, just as de Jaucourt had done. But for the majority of Enlightenment theorists, at least as regards moral fundamentals, just because morality secures the same agreement to the same rules and conceptions of duty and obligation in all societies, it has no history. It is incapable of development.

For the editors and writers of the Ninth Edition this is the point at which their partial rejection of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is most systematic. Biology and anthropology had combined to supply them with a developmental framework within which to organize what both history and anthropology had discovered about alien cultures. In the perspective thus afforded the distinctness of morality appeared not as a timeless, but as an emerging, phenomenon. It was through a process in the course of which moral rules were disengaged from a variety of nonrational, superstitious entanglements both with rules concerning pollution and contagion and with rules prescribing ritual observances that moral progress was taken to have occurred, a progress towards just such an apprehension of moral truths as the eighteenth century had envisaged but one exhibited in full clarity only by the civilized rather than the primitive or savage mind.

Moreover, as one would expect with such a progress, development had been uneven and moral agreement, even among the civilized, was not quite as complete, even over fundamentals, as the overoptimistic eighteenth century had supposed. Moral theory has therefore not merely the task of recording and protecting the judgments of plain persons. Looking back on their eighteenth-century predecessors the late nineteenth-century encyclopaedists could observe some significant measure of disagreement among the protectors and interpreters of the morality of plain persons as to what indeed plain persons did believe and assert, even when secured against the dangers of superstition and bad philosophy. And plain persons themselves, protected and unprotected, continued to disagree. To the moral philosopher therefore there falls a constructive task, that of organizing and harmonizing the moral beliefs of plain persons in the manner best calculated to secure rational assent from the largest possible number of such persons, independently of their conflicting views upon other matters.

The moral philosopher’s aim then is or ought to be that of articulating a rational consensus out of the pretheoretical beliefs and judgments of plain persons. But not all such beliefs and judgments are equally to be taken into account. It depends in part on where they are to be placed in the developmental scheme. So Henry Sidgwick, whose Outlines of the History of Ethics (London, 1886) was developed–for the benefit, in the first instance, of the Church of Scotland’s theological students–out of the article on ‘Ethics’ which he contributed to the Ninth Edition, was to write that “the current civilised morality of the present age” is “a stage in a long process of development” in which “We do not find merely change … we see progress” (Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, H. Spencer and J. Martineau, London, 1902, pp. 351–52). It is out of the beliefs and judgments only of the civilized that rational consensus is to be constructed.

Sidgwick understood his own findings about morality as the outcome of a long history of enquiry in which, just as in morality itself, progress had been made. Not only had morality become and been perceived as a distinct phenomenon but moral philosophy had similarly made itself independent of external ties when after the Reformation “reflective persons” were “led to seek for an ethical method that–relying solely on the common reason and common moral experience of mankind–might claim universal acceptance from all sects” (Outlines, p. 157). Sidgwick’s own version of that method he was happy to call “ethical science,” aiming to exhibit in its pursuit “the same disinterested curiosity to which we chiefly owe the great discoveries of physics” (The Methods of Ethics, Preface to the first edition). The resemblance of Sidgwick’s aims to those of Adam Gifford is unmistakable. What, then, according to Sidgwick, did that method disclose?

It disclosed first of all the distinctive moral ‘ought,’ the ‘ought’ of duty and obligation, not reducible to, nor paraphrasable in terms of, any nonmoral concept, an “elementary notion” (‘The Establishment of Ethical First Principles,’ Mind IV, no. 13 [1879], p. 107), and so also from the outset the distinctness of morality. The progress of moral philosophy and of morality itself thus coincide. Moreover there can be rational consensus in large areas, those in which the civilized agree as to what constitutes justice, prudence, and benevolence on the basis of principles not to be denied by any rational person, principles which make explicit the requirements of the moral ‘ought.’ What is not supplied is any reason whatsoever for giving to this distinctive ‘ought’ a central place in our practical lives. That it ought to be accorded such a place is something which Sidgwick, like the vast majority of his educated contemporaries, took for granted. It was presupposed as a surd fact of their social existence. But the propositions in and through which this surd fact was presented were represented as the theses of any adequately rational and reflective mind, so contrasting those propositions with the practices and beliefs of the allegedly primitive and the allegedly savage, as characterized by Frazer in the article on ‘Taboo’ in the Ninth Edition. The Seventh and Eighth Editions had dealt with taboo in two sentences; the editors of the Ninth allowed three and a half pages to the first extended treatment of the subject ever to be published. And central to the encyclopaedist’s point of view, and more especially to that of the contributors to the Ninth Edition, was the claim that the late nineteenth century’s conceptions of duties and obligations are both morally and rationally superior to the conceptions of taboo which inform alien ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ cultures.

Franz Steiner remarked that although Frazer began by defining ‘taboo’ as ‘a system of religi...