‘After Virtue’ Describes an Unfolding Moral Crisis
‘After Virtue’, by Alasdair MacIntyre, reviewed.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is famous — or perhaps infamous — for its cryptic conclusion, in which the author writes that we are waiting ‘not for Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.’ MacIntyre’s claim is that virtue can be understood only by reference to the contexts out of which they arise. We must therefore understand where we are from. He is not saying that the Benedict for whom we are waiting will lead a withdrawal from the world. Rather, he is saying, as he made plain during the Q&A that followed his talk on ‘Common Goods, Frequent Evils’ in March 2017, that this Benedict will engage with the world in a whole new way. This is central to understanding After Virtue. Forty years after its release, it is still misunderstood, accidentally and on purpose.
For MacIntyre, modern moral arguments are irreconcilable because the premises on which they are based are incommensurable. There is no objective standard by which to judge the merit of these premises. He cites the abortion debate, for example: one party thinks the individual has inviolable rights over her body. The other, that an embryo is a person and its destruction is murder. He draws a parallel with Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which fragments of scientific knowledge — though not its basis — remain after global catastrophe. We use moral language and make moral arguments in a similarly clumsy, fragmentary way, says MacIntyre. We do not consider the historical and cultural conditions out of which they arose. For MacIntyre, it is only by reference to these conditions that they make sense.
Modern moral arguments are irreconcilable because the premises on which they are based are incommensurable.
Modern moral arguments, then, are, at bottom, expressions of preference. The validity of an argument is judged by the success of the contending party in persuading her opponent to her point of view. An ostensibly sound argument is in fact an arbitrary construction, formed post–hoc to defend an irrational choice. Thus our culture is emotivist: our moral arguments are a clash of wills. Though MacIntyre dismisses Nietzsche’s notion of the übermensch — one answer to this moral question — as silly and dangerous, he salutes its creator for diagnosing the problem. Nietzsche attacked the moral norms of his time because he saw they were arbitrary and incoherent.
MacIntyre dismisses Nietzsche’s idea of the übermensch as silly and dangerous.
This raises the question how we got here. For MacIntyre, it begins with the Enlightenment rejection of Aristotelianism and the notion of the telos: the goal or function. Without reference to a telos, we cannot say what it means to be virtuous. We cannot say a knife is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ unless we know what the purpose of a knife is, which is to cut. Thus, when we say a knife is ‘good’, we mean it cuts well. Aristotle thought human life also had a proper end, and that achieving that end demanded action. He drew a line between ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’ and ‘man-as-he-ought-to-be’. This view prevailed throughout the ancient and medieval periods. A person’s social role — soldier, priest, lawyer — came with duties, privileges and virtues. To be ‘virtuous’ was to play your role well. But when Renaissance and Enlightenment scientists rejected Aristotelian physics, they also ditched his teleology, emptying ethics of its content. For this reason, all attempts since to develop a coherent philosophy — by Kant, Hume, Kierkegaard and others — have failed, and were doomed to fail. Like the inhabitants of the world of A Canticle for Liebowitz, these philosophers had only conceptual fragments with which to piece together their world-views.
MacIntyre offers a solution, but is not not definitive. Nietzsche’s mistake, MacIntyre says, was failing to recognise the role that society plays in the development of morality. Morality cannot be divorced from the context in which it develops, MacIntyre writes, and — as Aristotle knew — from ‘social practices’. Morals and virtues demand a communitarian framework to be intelligible. This is as far as MacIntyre will go in articulating a modern ethics, which may strike the reader as unsatisfying. But if it is a failing on MacIntyre’s part, it is a necessary one; and one which springs from his refusal to say what he does not know for the sake of our sense of closure. (MacIntyre did, in fact, go on to define what a modern ethics might look like in Dependent Rational Animals and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?) As it is, forty years after its first publication, After Virtue is rigorous, lucidly written and thought-provoking.
