Study Notes on Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue (Third Edition)

A Disquieting Suggestion: The State of Modern Morality

• The Science Fiction Hypothesis: MacIntyre opens with a hypothetical scenario in which a series of environmental disasters are blamed on scientists.
  • Riots ensue, laboratories are destroyed, and a "Know-Nothing" political movement abolishes science.
  • Generations later, attempts are made to revive science based on fragments: partial theories, illegible texts, and instruments used without context.
  • People argue about relativity or phlogiston using scientific terminology (neutrinos, mass), but they lack the theoretical background that gave these terms meaning.
  • Everything conforms to canons of consistency, but the essential context is lost; people are unintentionally practicing "simulacra" of science.
• The Moral Application: MacIntyre contends that in our actual world, the language of morality is in this same state of grave disorder.
  • We possess only fragments of a conceptual scheme, lacking the historical and social contexts from which they derived their significance.
  • We use key moral expressions (good, right, duty) but have lost our theoretical and practical comprehension of morality.
• The Invisibility of the Catastrophe:
  • Analytical philosophy and phenomenology are powerless to detect this disorder because they are descriptive of the language of the present; they elucidate conceptual structures as they currently appear.
  • This catastrophe is not a single event but a long, complex historical process—likely occurring before the founding of academic history/sociology, which are themselves symptoms of the disaster.
  • Modern radicals, liberals, and conservatives are all betrayed by the language they use, yet they are confident in their moral rhetoric.

The Nature of Moral Disagreement and Emotivism

• Interminable Debates: Contemporary moral arguments are characterized by their inability to find a terminus.
  • Example: Debates on war (pacifism vs. deterrence vs. liberation), abortion (rights over one's body vs. universalizability vs. the sanctity of life), and justice (equal opportunity/health care vs. freedom to contract).
• Three Key Characteristics of Disagreement:
  • Conceptual Incommensurability: Rival premises invoke different types of normative concepts (e.g., rights vs. utility vs. justice). There is no established rational way to weigh them against each other. Invocation becomes a matter of pure assertion, leading to a "shrill" tone.
  • Masquerade of Impersonality: While disagreements seem based on arbitrary will, the language used purports to be rational and objective. Moral utterances are presented in a mode that implies impersonal criteria, yet lack the context to ground such criteria.
  • Historical Heterogeneity: Premises are inherited from various sources (Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, Locke, Kant, etc.). These concepts were once part of larger totalities of theory and practice but have been deprived of their original functions.
• The Challenge of Emotivism:
  • Definition: Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative and moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference/attitude. They are neither true nor false.
  • C.L. Stevenson's Version: "This is good" means "I approve of this; do so as well." This seeks to capture both the expressive and influential functions of moral judgment.
  • MacIntyre's Critique: Emotivism fails as a theory of meaning because:
    1. It is circular: identifying moral approval as the attitude expressed by a moral judgment.
    2. It fails to distinguish between personal preference and evaluative utterances (the latter sever the link between context of utterance and force of reason-giving).
    3. Expression of feeling is a function of use, not meaning (e.g., an angry teacher shouting an arithmetical truth).
• Emotivism as a Theory of Use: While false as a theory of meaning, emotivism is a powerful description of how moral language is used in modern culture. Use has become radically discrepant with meaning, allowing agents to manipulate others while being assured they are appealing to objective criteria.

Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context

• Sociological Supposition: Every moral philosophy presupposes a sociology.
• The Obliteration of Distinction: Emotivism entails the collapse of the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.
  • For Kant, treating someone as an end means offering them reasons to evaluate.
  • For an emotivist, there are no impersonal criteria; others are always means, never ends. Success consists in aligning others' attitudes with your own.
• The Characters of Modernity: In modern society, certain social roles function as "masks" for moral philosophies. These "characters" fuse role and personality, providing a moral ideal for the culture.
  • The Rich Aesthete: Driven by the pursuit of enjoyment and the avoidance of boredom; views the world as a series of opportunities for their own gratification.
  • The (Bureaucratic) Manager: Driven by effectiveness and efficiency. Treats ends as given and focuses on technique to match means to ends. Managerial authority is essentially successful power, as Max Weber described.
  • The Therapist: Also treats ends as given (e.g., well-adjustment). Focuses on technique to transform symptoms into energy. Truth is displaced by psychological effectiveness (Philip Rieff).
• The Emotivist Self: The modern self is "democratized"—it has no necessary social identity or content.
  • It is criterionless; it can stand back from any situation and pass judgment from an abstract point of view (Sartre vs. Goffman).
  • The self is separated from its social embodiments and lacks a rational history in its moral transitions.

The Enlightenment Project and Its Failure

• The Project Defined: From roughly 1630 to 1850, Northern European culture sought an independent rational justification for morality.
  • Contributors (Hume, Smith, Kant, Diderot, Kierkegaard) generally agreed on the content of morality (marriage, family, honesty) but differed on its basis.
• Threefold Aristotelian Scheme: Traditional morality (Aristotelian, Christian, Islamic) had three elements:
  1. Untutored Human Nature: Man-as-he-happens-to-be.
  2. Man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos: Essential nature/purpose.
  3. Moral Precepts: The means of transition from state 1 to state 2.
• The Breakdown: The Enlightenment rejected the second element (the telos / essential nature).
  • This left two incompatible fragments: a specific set of moral injunctions and a view of untutored human nature.
  • Because the injunctions were designed to correct human nature, they could not be deduced from human nature as it is.
  • Hume/Diderot/Smith: Tried to base morality on the passions/desires. Failed because passions are conflicting and need a separate criterion to be ordered.
  • Kant: Tried to base morality on reason (the categorical imperative). Failed because universalizability is a formal test; it can validate trivial or immoral maxims (e.g., "Persecute all who hold false beliefs").
  • Kierkegaard: Realizing reason and desire had failed, he invoked "radical choice." This is incoherent because if a principle is chosen for no reason, it lacks authority.
• The "No Ought from Is" Problem: This principle is not a timeless logical truth but a symptom of the rejection of functional concepts.
  • In Aristotelian thought, "man" is a functional concept (like "watch" or "farmer"). One cannot define a watch independently of a "good watch."
  • Once man is no longer seen as having a purpose, the move from factual premises to evaluative conclusions appears impossible.

Consequences of Failure: Utilitarianism and Rights

• Utilitarianism: An attempt to find a new telos in "happiness" or "pleasure."
  • Bentham: Defined happiness as a unitary sensation (pleasure vs. pain). Failed because the pursuit of one's own happiness does not necessarily coincide with the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
  • J.S. Mill: Tried to distinguish "higher" and "lower" pleasures. Failed because human happiness is polymorphous and incommensurable (e.g., the pleasure of drinking vs. the pleasure of swimming).
  • Sidgwick: Finally admitted that moral beliefs are irreducibly heterogeneous and accepted "intuitionism" as the terminus.
• The Fiction of Natural Rights: Another attempt to ground morality.
  • MacIntyre asserts there are no such rights; belief in them is like belief in witches or unicorns.
  • Every attempt to give a good reason for them has failed.
  • They are fictions that purport to provide impersonal criteria but do not.
• Modern Political Life: A struggle between the fiction of "rights" and the fiction of "utility."
  • Individualism makes claims in terms of rights; bureaucracies make claims in terms of utility. Both are incommensurable.
  • Politics becomes "civil war carried on by other means." Protest and indignation become dominant because rational victory is impossible.

Managerial Expertise as a Moral Fiction

• The Claim: Managers claim authority based on "expertise"—their possession of law-like generalizations that allow for social control/manipulation.
• The Reality: The social sciences have failed to discover any law-like generalizations with strong predictive power.
  • Social science generalizations typically lack universal quantifiers, lack scope modifiers, and do not entail counterfactual conditionals (e.g., Davis's thesis on revolutions or Newman's on crime in high-rises).
• Four Sources of Systematic Unpredictability:
  1. Radical Conceptual Innovation: One cannot predict the invention of a new concept (like the wheel or quantum mechanics) because to do so is to invent it.
  2. Unpredictability of One's Own Future Actions: As long as decisions are unmade, the agent cannot predict them, which impacts others' ability to predict.
  3. Game-Theoretic Character of Life: Social life involves infinite reflexivity, imperfect knowledge, and multiple games being played simultaneously (e.g., the battle of Gettysburg was indeterminate while it was fought).
  4. Pure Contingency: Trivial events (the length of Cleopatra's nose, a molehill) can alter the course of history.
• The Conclusion: Managerial expertise is a masquerade. The social world is out of anyone's control. Bureaucratic skills are a fetishism; effectiveness is a histrionic success—the best bureaucrat is simply the best actor.

The Aristotelian Tradition: Heroic Societies to Athens

• Heroic Societies (Homer, Sagas):
  • Identity is entirely social; it is tied to roles within kinship/household. A man is what he does (Frankel).
  • Virtues (aretai) are those qualities that enable a person to perform their social role (e.g., courage for the warrior, fidelity for the wife).
  • Morality and social structure are identical.
  • Narrative form: Life is understood as an enacted story with a beginning, middle, and end (fate and death).
• Classical Athens:
  • The polis becomes the primary moral community. Conceptions of virtue become detached from specific roles but are still tied to the city.
  • Conflict arises: Cooperative vs. competitive virtues. Disagreement over dikaiosune (justice) and sophrosune (restraint).
  • Sophocles: Recognizes tragic conflict between rival goods (e.g., Antigone vs. Creon). Acknowledges an objective moral order that we perceive imperfectly.
  • Aristotle: Synthesizes the tradition into a rational scheme.
    • Eudaimonia is the human telos (human flourishing).
    • Virtues are dispositions to act and feel correctly. They are internal means to the end.
    • Phronesis (practical wisdom) is required to apply virtues in particular cases (kata ton orthon logon).
    • Unity of the virtues: One cannot possess one virtue fully without the others.
    • Friendship is the bond of the polis—a shared pursuit of the good.

Medieval Transitions and the Quest

• Medieval Transformation: Synthesized Aristotelianism with biblical religion (Jewish, Christian, Islamic).
  • New Virtues: Charity (caritas), humility, and patience are added. Charity is a love even for sinners, which Aristotle could not conceive.
  • The Quest: Human life is seen as a journey or quest (in via).
    • Success/failure is judged by the whole life.
    • The telos is not just a state but a redemption of the past.
• Thomas Aquinas: Represented a high point of synthesis, but MacIntyre notes he was sometimes overly systematic, ignoring the empirical "untidiness" of the virtues and the reality of tragic conflict.

The Core Concept of Virtue

• MacIntyre proposes a three-stage definition of the core concept of virtue:
  1. Practices: Any complex form of cooperative activity with internal goods (e.g., chess, physics, farming, architecture). Virtues are those qualities needed to achieve internal goods and resist the corruption of institutions (which pursue external goods like money and power).
  2. Narrative Unity of a Human Life: Virtues are qualities that sustain us in a quest for the good, giving our lives a narrative unity from birth to death.
  3. Tradition: Virtues sustain the social and historical traditions which provide practices and individual lives with their context. A tradition is an "historically extended, socially embodied argument."

Conclusion: Nietzsche or Aristotle?

• The Ultimate Choice: We are left with two alternatives:
  • Nietzsche: Morality is just a mask for the will to power. His Ubermensch is the final outcome of individualist autonomy—solitary, self-legislating, and ultimately a pseudo-concept.
  • Aristotle: Morality is grounded in a tradition of the virtues and a shared conception of the human good.
• The Modern Condition: Modern politics is civil war. We have no shared moral first principles.
• The Solution: MacIntyre argues for a return to Aristotle, not by shoring up the modern state, but by constructing local forms of community where the virtues can survive the "new dark ages."
• St. Benedict: As in the original Dark Ages, we are waiting for a new (and different) St. Benedict to create institutions where civility and moral life can flourish.