About 'AfterVirtue' by A. MacIntyre

Disclaimer: The following is merely a stringing together of a group of posts from my weblog, and there is no pretension to stylistic quality. I post it merely as a convenience to those who may wish to read what has come before without clicking through the calendar. Also, I have not included comments or references to them, and this probably decreases the quality of the content herein. I will try to edit on some future, more disciplined, day.  This story includes posts from August 30, 2003 through September 11. 2003.

MacIntyre and the History of Ethical Failure.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been reading After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre, this week. MacIntyre, in this work, is also tracing the history of our inability to justify our ethical claims in this day and age, but he traces the problem back to the failure of the enlightenment project to find a rational basis for morality (think of Descartes, Mill, Hume, Kant, et al.), instead of tracing it to the onset of atheism as I have done in these blog entries. Anyone who already knows something of the history of ethics from Descartes through the present day can probably already see what he means by the failure of the enlightenment project. If not, you can get a better summary from his book than I could ever hope to write.

I believe that my project here is similar to MacIntyre’s in After Virtue, because I believe that the enlightenment project was related to the rise of atheism, even though none of the enlightenment philosophers were atheists. The enlightenment project follows on the scientific revolution, and both of these required a turning away from the Scholastic, Aristotelian understanding of causality which was espoused by the Medieval Catholic Church. And this turning from the Catholic Church was an early step in the process which led to the increase in atheism in the west. MacIntyre’s interpretation of the history is probably better than mine, as he is a much better scholar than I, but, basically, I think that it all boils down to the same thing: the scientific revolution, the enlightenment project in ethics, the rise of democracy and humanism in the west and the corresponding decline of religion are all, I would say, descendants of the Protestant Reformation. We owe it all to Martin Luther (and his followers), in other words, who had the nerve to stand up to the authority of the Medieval Catholic Church and call it corrupt. This assault on authority in western culture has continued from the above movements through the abolition of slavery, the granting of suffrage to women, the discovery of relativity and the uncertainty principle in physics, and on up to the deconstruction of all metaphysical language in the canon and the struggle for rights for homosexuals, which we follow in the news today. (Is that too big a leap? That’s probably too big a leap. Okay, I’ll flesh it out a little, then.)

Here’s why it all starts with Luther. So long as the Catholic Church and the European monarchies held the power in Europe, they also controlled education and access to spirituality, because the common people couldn’t read or understand the Latin which was used in the Bible and the church, so they were utterly dependent on their priests to tell them what they had to do to get to heaven. The Protestant Reformation spread the belief that common people could go directly to the scriptures and interpret them themselves– they didn’t need the priests to mediate between them and God. The Bible was translated into the vernacular languages, and people had a reason to want to learn to read. This leads to the gaining of knowledge (about something other than agriculture) by people who were not under the control of Catholic dogma, and the whole future rolls out from there. Get it? Okay.

It is primarily a negative movement, however– we know what we don’t want; we don’t want someone else to tell us what to do– so it fails to establish any positive grounds for ethical decision-making to which everyone can agree. So, being free to choose our own actions, we have a hard time deciding which actions are best and which are no good. Or, if we think we know which are best, we can’t convince anyone who disagrees that what we think is right: ethical debate becomes something like what you see in the comments at Emphasis Added. Everyone announces their opinion, and when they differ, everyone just has to agree to disagree. The belief with the most votes wins, not the belief that is best grounded rationally. (And, incidentally, this leads to all of the irrational marketing that we see in the political arena– Bush in a flight suit– just before an election.) We might feel vindicated when our side scores a victory by predicting disaster if the other side gets what they think is best, as the opponents to the war in Iraq are gaining in the polls due to the complications which have developed over there. But this is an empty victory, isn’t it, if we have to wait for more disasters as proofs of our position. In the end one side may be vindicated by the destruction of all life on the planet by the other side, and no one would be left to say, "I told you so!".

This specter of the end of the world is what finally makes Nietzsche’s recommendations untenable, I believe. We have tried out the life of untrammeled greed, uninhibited sexuality and gluttony, and the pursuit of pleasure through every available means, and it has all led to destruction. We look around at the environmental damage, the wars and terrorism, the obesity, STD’s, and addiction, and we see that living the dreams of the will-to-power aren’t working out so well. And lying has been tolerated for so long, that we can no longer tell who is lying and who is earnest, amongst our leaders. This place is a mess, and time is running out. So here I am, the philosopher to the rescue!, right? Well, for today, I just want to re-emphasize the urgency of the problem, and point out that I’m not the only one writing about it, that MacIntyre has addressed it in a much read book as well.

MacIntyre on virtue.

What MacIntyre accomplishes, on the positive side, is to set up a structure describing the virtues as they are reflected within a human life, conceived as a unity, and lived within a tradition– this description is meant to give a rational structure to our understanding of morality today, and perhaps provide a framework for deciding which sorts of actions are valuable...although he never spells this part out very concretely. It appears that his aim, in this book, is simply to demonstrate that he can show us a way to make morality make sense. Filling in the details he leaves to the reader or perhaps to a later work. I have put the later works on my wish list at Amazon, if anyone wants to get them for me. Or maybe I’ll check the library for them.

Anyway, the virtues he understands in the classical sense as habits, or dispositions to act in a particular way, which contribute to excellence in a particular activity. The preferred activities are those which are productive of ‘goods’– this is a strange usage of the word in contemporary English, and will require some elaboration. He’s not talking about the goods that we buy at the grocery, or even about good things that we can get as a consequence of actions, like payment, or reputation or fame, the way an athlete might get these things for being good at basketball. What he means, particularly, are the pleasures of being involved in an activity which requires some training and practice in order to gain expertise, and which has standards for excellence which are generally recognized by people who practice the activity ( he calls these ‘practices’.). So the pleasure that an athlete might experience in playing ball and improving his skill is a good, in this sense; the pleasure that he might feel under the hands of the groupies who follow him to the hotel after the game is not. The virtues are the habits necessary in order to become a good basketball player, or to participate in similar ‘practices’ which produce a kind of pleasure in the process of the learning and practice thereof (arts, sciences, athletics, homemaking?– something about managing a household, in any case– oh, and, of course, philosophy...) He puts a special emphasis on the virtues which are required to be an attentive student of these activities, and to trust, accept, and learn from the criticism offered by ‘masters’ in the course of learning. The relationships between master and student and the relationships within the community of practitioners of the practices also require virtues (such as honesty!) in order to function correctly. The activities will be components of the ‘good life’, and the virtues as necessary to the latter as to the former. In his words:

This isn’t all, though. The practices also have to be understood as embedded within a tradition, which provides the starting point for any single good life’s quest and against which the individual must argue in order to improve the tradition and transmit it as something living on to future generations. The tradition dies when its practitioners cease to reflect upon and improve it.

Morality is likewise always seen as something embedded within a particular historical period– there is no morality which will always receive the affirmation of all rational creatures at all historical moments, MacIntyre believes. It may be that his reluctance to provide his own catalogue of virtues derives from his desire to escape this historicity just a little.

More on MacIntyre and virtues.

Yesterday I said:

Today I want to look at this a little more closely. Putting aside any questions about the notion of ‘practices’ until later (and I do have questions), we can at least grant that practices are something that must be learned, and they must be taught by someone with more expertise than the student, at least at the outset of learning. A student may surpass his master, but first he has to submit to the master’s judgement. And he may, probably will, in fact, be learning from more than one practitioner of the skill. These relationships can only function in the intended way if certain virtues are exhibited by the teachers and students.

Within the relationships, here, honesty on the part of the teachers is necessary if the student is to be able to identify his shortcomings and correct them. Honesty on the part of the student is necessary if he wishes to get useable feedback (plagiarizing a paper may get the student a better grade, but he will get no assessment of his skill in writing and therefore no opportunity to become a better writer, unless he submits real samples of his own writing). There is another kind of honesty (the opposite of psychological denial) involved in admitting one's mistakes, too.

The masters have to be fair in their assessment of the student; a kind of justice is required, a giving of praise only where it is due, and criticism or correction where they are necessary.

And finally, the student must have the courage to face these assessments and internalize them without turning away from the community and the practice, if the student is to advance in skill. MacIntyre of course believes that the only way to get the ‘good’ internal to the practice is to develop skill in it and to attempt to achieve some excellence in its products.

These virtues are not necessary to use the practice for the achievement of external goods (money, prestige, or power), but, MacIntyre insists, someone must be practicing the skill honestly in order for someone else to cheat at it– the cheater still depends upon the teaching and standards which are established by the real artists or scientists, yet the cheater doesn’t get the real prize, the internal goods which enrich one’s life.

MacIntyre has many other fine points to draw, but I think this gives us enough to move on. My quick response to this is that he’s right, but that his definition is too narrow– the virtues are in fact necessary in these contexts, but these contexts subsume only a small minority of the human actions which make up any particular day’s work. And I doubt that MacIntyre means that all human beings should be involved in these sorts of practices– there are already too many poets in the world. But does this mean that the rest of the people have no need of the virtues?

Stepping back for a moment....

MacIntyre has me a little confused, partly because he has gone off on a tangent from the original direction of my thought, I suppose, because I had conceived of the issue as a problem related to the death of God, and MacIntyre insists on framing it differently, as a problem in the best efforts of Hume and Kant to frame an ethics consistent with the kind of reasoning used in modern science.

But one thing that we need to do in order to clarify is to look at the way that God did provide unity to ethical thinking. MacIntyre implies that what is lost after the death of God is a telos for human life, a unifying goal which helps us to understand what counts as a good life, overall. And this may be so, but when it come to most attempts at ethical reasoning, what we lose with God, and what the deconstructionists do so much work to dislocate in their critiques of the metaphysical theories of history, is an arché, origin, or first principle for reasoning.

The idea that the human brain was created by a benevolent God carries a lot of explanatory power. If this were so, then we could assume things such as: (1) God would want our brain to be appropriately fitted to understanding the world, so we wouldn’t be easily misled by the appearances of things (Both Descartes and Berkeley believed something like this), and (2) God could fix certain values or modes of ethical reasoning or whatever-you-like into all human brains, and those people who act as if they didn’t know, for example, that adultery is wrong, are obviously prevaricating and can be considered wrong. Any philosopher who holds that values are innately universal among human beings has probably got a God in the background doing some of the explanatory work for him or her. Otherwise it is very difficult to explain how ethical beliefs, which vary so much from culture to culture, can all be explained within one system. (Adopting the strategy of proclaiming the inhabitants of the next continent to be less than human can eliminate a lot of controversy, at the same time that it clears the way for a lot of beastly behavior towards them, but we’ve supposedly gotten beyond that by this century.)

Immanuel Kant, who believed in God, but also believed in Newton, tried to find a way to explain science and ethics without relying on the intervention of God. And sometimes I think that once his theories are translated from mental into linguistic terminology, they still almost work, although they explain less than he thought they did. MacIntyre thinks they didn’t work, and so does Nietzsche. So while MacIntyre thinks our choices are between Aristotle and Nietzsche, I would say MacIntyre, Nietzsche, or an updated version of Kant. The latter I find in Wittgenstein’s earlier works, although anytime I say something like this near Wittgenstein scholars they tend to get angry, so I’m probably wrong (but stubborn, so I’ll get to all of that later).

We might have to look into some American philosophy, too. I’m thinking that even MacIntyre is headed in a sort of pragmatic direction. Isn’t he saying, after all, that because there are no given ethical absolutes, we just have to choose a rational scheme within which to do our ethical thinking? And the scheme advanced by Aristotle, once understood, is one which assigns all of the ethical concepts their due place within a framework which allows for rational debate and decision-making? I think that might be what he’s saying. And I think that, if that’s correct, that it is a strategy which is characteristically American: forget the ‘Truth’– let’s just find a way that works.

MacIntyre on Nietzsche.

MacIntyre’s criticism of Nietzsche is simple and elegant. If the evolved human being rises above other people to arrive at a place where he can ‘create’ values, he removes himself from the human relationships within which values emerge, and therefore can know nothing about value. MacIntyre quotes Nietzsche, from The Will To Power:

MacIntyre goes on to say that because "great man" removes himself from the relationships involved in learning and engaging in the practices, he is condemned to "moral solipsism". We can easily see that any severe isolation from society leads to pathology, and the "practices" need have nothing to do with it. We have psychiatric diagnoses for this standpoint: schizoid personality disorder and delusional disorder, grandiose type, and a moment’s reflection is enough to reveal that a life this solitary would be one of misery. In fact, we can see now that this is the source of Raskolnikov’s misery: by committing murder, he cuts himself off from the possibility of any further relatedness to his friends and family. The murder is the final plank in a wall which he had begun building in his isolation with his theories. And it literally takes years before he is able to let Sonya communicate with him again.

It is interesting to note that lying is a key component of the behavior which establishes this isolation. In lying, the ubermensch dons a mask; his true self is concealed, and he therefore steps out of true relatedness, which requires revealing oneself to others. So here is a thing that happens when you tell a lie: you isolate yourself.

Finishing with MacIntyre.

I would like to finish up with MacIntyre today, or at least to put him to the side for a while, so I’ll try to make some concluding comments. I am not really willing to attempt a full-scale critique, because I am too out of practice and still too undecided on certain matters to assume and defend a position. I can point in the direction that such a critique would take, however.

MacIntyre’s system of virtues is based upon and requires something of a return to a more traditional notion of community and the role of the individual than that to which we are accustomed. I see some positive trends implicit in this approach: I believe a community’s responsibility to provide for the needs of children would be easier to prove from this standpoint, for example, and the inter-dependence of human beings is a fact of life which can get side-lined in more individualistic ethical schemes. Traditional notions also have some well-established shortcomings, however.

In a feudally organized community, movement between economic strata is difficult or impossible, which prevents the talents of people in the lower classes from being fully exploited for the benefit of the community, and which keeps in power people who have lesser talents. And this leads to a lot of unhappiness all around. I am not sure that MacIntyre necessarily brings this characteristic of traditional society into his vision of the virtues, but something about the ‘practices’ which he describes leads me to think that they might be restricted to those who have the money and leisure to acquire the kind of education which enables people to become engaged in such activities. In simpler terms, they are elitist activities, with the possible exception of the games/ athletics and the ‘practices necessary for managing a household’. But don’t these sound suspiciously like roles which might be reserved for males of color and females of any shade? Thereby allowing everyone to have a part in the virtues (and accountability), whether they have a part in the decision-making of society or an opportunity to study art and philosophy or not? Then those males of color and females who have no skills or interest in the areas of athletics or homemaking would be treated as bad (or simply amoral) people, just because they are not allowed access to the activities in which they might excel. Think for a minute of my young African-American man on the witness stand: if you told him that he might understand the value of truth-telling better if he took up painting or physics, he would not only be unconvinced– he might just think that you were agreeing with him. To avoid these pitfalls, the theory would have to be expanded to include other kinds of activities which require community effort– perhaps some of the ordinary labor tasks which occupy a great part of the workday of the world outside of the colleges.

There is the chance, however, that these tasks really do fit easily into MacIntyre’s scheme, and it is just his lack of familiarity with them which obscures this from his view. He says the practices are "ongoing modes of human activity within which ends have to be discovered and rediscovered, and means designed to pursue them". He then says that "architecture is included, but not bricklaying", as if bricklaying were a task in which the best systems and procedures have been laid down for all time in the past somewhere. Yet even in the so-called areas of "unskilled" labor, people can do better or worse at their tasks, new tools and methods can be developed, and a learning curve from apprentice to master can be observed. There are therefore ways in which these might be included among the ‘practices’.

What this means, however, is that the corresponding notion of relationship can also be expanded, and perhaps other kinds of relationship besides those involving work or play could even be considered– say the relationship between parent and child, or that between management and labor. Perhaps any human relationship constitutes an arena within which goods and the activities with which goods are correlated and the virtuous habits necessary for the engagement in the activities can all be discovered. This would universalize the theory and it would permit fewer distinctions between people which lead to possible discrimination and prejudice. But I seriously have no idea if this works or if it is even needed as an improvement to MacIntyre’s theory. (One thing I love about blogging as opposed to doing this writing in a college setting is that sentences like that last one are permitted. Colleges always expect you to act as if you know the final answers and are willing to defend your position to the death.)

I have a bad habit of jumping over steps in my arguments to save time and space. I can see that I’ve made some big leaps in the above, which I wrote last night. I’m not going to flesh them out, however, unless someone specifically requests it, because there’s a couple of random things to put in about MacIntyre before we leave him, and I want to do that now.

First of all, I think that the concluding words of After Virtue are terribly interesting given the state of the world today (remembering that he wrote this in 1981):

I suppose that as long as the electricity holds out, we can be one of those communities.

And, second, if you still want more MacIntyre (Alasdair) his books are available at Amazon.com, or, if you’re near Notre Dame, you can go see him speak on Saturday, November 15, before the football game with BYU. Appropriately enough, the topic is "Truth Telling and Lying".

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