After Virtue - part 1 (of 6)

1. Where Are We Now, and Why?
2. “Enlightened” Europe
3. Turning point: Nietzsche or Aristotle?
4. Pagan vs. Christian Virtues
5. After Virtue
6. MacIntyre’s Answer


1. Where Are We Now, and Why?

On the very last page of my Master’s thesis on Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body, I quote the emeritus professor of philosophy Alasdair MacIntyre’s (b. 1929) modern classic, After Virtue. At the end of this post series I shall return to this particular reference. What lies between here and there is an attempt to give a relatively brief but nonetheless informative six-part account of the structure and main arguments of After Virtue. I personally look at it as one (if not the only) milestone in modern philosophical ethics.

After Virtue – a study in moral theory (1st ed. 1981) traces the evolution of moral theories up to the modern era. In this sense it is a history of philosophical ethics. But this is only the means to – what I take is – its fundamental task: to make a judgement on this history. The driving motive for writing the book is, according to MacIntyre’s own words, his dissatisfaction in his earlier philosophical work and in “moral philosophy” generally as a (supposedly) independent subject.

In the first chapter, “A Disquieting Suggestion”, the author states his hypothesis: we have nearly entirely lost comprehension of both practical and theoretical morality. The genealogy of morality, if you will, is from order to disorder.

He gives an account of the nature of moral disagreement today and the claims of emotivism. Moral theory is in trouble. We have no rational way for moral agreement in our culture, the author says, and presents, for instance, just war and autonomy of body (abortion) as examples. All sides are logically valid, appeal to objectivity, and all are supported by a historical continuum. Emotivism – the belief that judgments are nothing but preference and feeling – is rampant.

MacIntyre rejects emotivism (as did the analytical philosophers: it is a theory of use and fails as a theory of meaning) but understands its appeal. Most likely the dissatisfaction with “intuitionism” (G. E. Moore 1873-1958 and the “common sense” movement) caused it. Moore’s will had won ground but the “facts” or arguments were unimpressive.

As said, emotivism has won ground. Truth has been displaced as value and replaced as psychological effectiveness. It has “infiltrated both education and religion”, MacIntyre says. Emotivism’s key characteristic is the lack of ultimate criteria.

What, then, had happened?

The answer to this is one of the cornerstones – which the author would like to see resurrected – of his project. What happened is that human telos was abandoned. “Progress” to modernity rejected teleology as superstition. Human life had no instrinsic purpose.

MacIntyre retraces the birth of emotivism to the failure of the Enlightenment Project of justifying morality. He explains what it was, why it had to fail, and what some of its consequences are.

Today’s academic philosophy is marginalized. MacIntyre’s hypothesis is that the roots of the problems of both academic philosophy and everyday social and practical lives are the same: the predecessor culture’s failure to solve its problems. The Enlightenment era sought to found morality on purely rational grounds.

According to MacIntyre, Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was the first to notice the impossibility of the project – he first discovered the concept of radical choice, not rational premises that must lie at the bedrock of morality. We choose our first principles, he argued.

But before Kierkegaard earlier philosophers, too, were reacting to the failure of his predecessors. The genealogy looks something like this: Diderot (1713-1784) said the bedrock or morality desire; Hume (1711-1776) said not desire but passions; Kant (1724-1804) said not passions but reason; and finally Kierkegaard concluded, neither reason nor passion, but choice. Each theory was vindicated by the failure of the previous.

Ultimately, the failure of philosophy (and religion before that) to justify morality is one major cause of the loss of its (morality’s) central cultural role and of it becoming marginal, narrowly academic.