|
 Philosopher
of the Month
October
2002 - Alasdair MacIntyre
Matthew
Ray
Alasdair
MacIntyre is one of the most innovative philosophers writing in
untechnical English today. A prolific author, his writings include
influential articles on modern philosophy and on philosophical theology
as well as monographs on Marcuse and on the concept of the unconscious
in the writings of Freud, together with a now standard text on moral
thinking, A Short History of Ethics. But it is for 1980's
After Virtue and the texts that followed in its wake - Whose
Justice, Which Rationality?, Three Versions of Moral Enquiry
and more recently Dependent Rational Animals - that MacIntyre
is probably most celebrated. I shall therefore spend the rest of
this article situating MacIntyre by outlining the position argued
for in the text that inaugurated that specific trajectory of thought.
The
main goal of After Virtue, and it is a goal motivated by
Nietzsche's persuasive attack on morality (but pursued by MacIntyre
with an Aristotelian detachment), is to provide us with a good reason
for acting morally today. He does so by introducing his notion of
a 'practice'. Practices, MacIntyre tells us, are found in some form
or other across all human cultures and in a sense constitute goals
for human desire. But what are practices? His technical definition
of a practice runs as follows:
'By
a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially
established co-operative human activity through which goods internal
to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to
achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to,
and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result
that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of
the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended'.( After
Virtue, p. 187).
Yet
this is a compact definition and so it might be worth explaining
in a little more detail here at least what 'goods internal to a
practice' actually are. Such goods, we might say, are those goods
which can only be achieved through participation in that specific
practice and such goods must, moreover, have historically evolved
standards of excellence internal to them. On this account, social
activities like playing chess would count as practices because the
good of playing chess well can only be achieved through engaging
in that practice, a practice with a developed standard of excellence.
Virtue then becomes the name for those human capabilities that allow
us to pursue practices and therefore aim for the goods internal
to those practices. Resilience, for instance, allows us to pursue
the good internal to the practice of sailing a ship. Similarly,
diligence allows us to pursue the different good internal to the
practice of playing in a string quartet and honesty allows us to
pursue the good internal to, say, playing chess (we could
of course cheat but only external goods could be achieved that way:
a rather restricted and short-lived form of social prestige, perhaps).
And all these practices, because they have historically developed
standards of excellence, call for the virtue of accepting the judgement
of a legitimate authority on our part: as novices or beginners,
we have to accept the judgement of a past master as to what the
good of chess, or of a particular kind of musicianship, consists
in. Thus practices, which we all engage in, require virtues, from
which it follows that they are rational to foster. Such, then, is
what is to my mind the central line of argument in After Virtue,
an argument that provides us with a rational reason for acting ethically,
a rationale much needed in the post-Nietzschean world (MacIntyre
is one of a small set of major Anglophone philosophers who take
Nietzsche very seriously indeed).
It
remains to be mentioned here that Whose Justice, Which Rationality?
argues that certain social traditions - such as the Christian religious
tradition - embody conceptions of rational enquiry within them,
so that what makes for a rational reason to act, for example, can
only be answered by accepting the philosophical commitments of a
given tradition in the first place. On this view, what justifies
a theory is 'the rational superiority of that particular structure
to all previous attempts within that particular tradition to formulate
such theories and principles', Whose Justice, Which Rationality?
There is thus no conception of rationality to be found over and
above any tradition, no possibility of an objective rationality
outside - and therefore able to adjudicate between - all traditions.
In
conclusion, we might say that MacIntyre maintains that it is hardly
arbitrary to either act virtuously or to accept the philosophical
commitments of a given tradition; a position illuminated and supplemented
in all his later writings.
Suggested
reading
After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre (Duckworth)
Whose Justice, Which Rationality?, Alasdair MacIntyre (Duckworth)
The MacIntyre Reader, Ed. K Knight (Polity)
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured early-November 2002
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