After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

By ‘experience’ was originally meant the act of putting something to the test or trial—a meaning that was later reserved to ‘experiment’ and later still involvement in some form of activity,

The meaning of ‘experiment’ and the meaning of ‘experience’ diverge more sharply than they had done for the seventeenth century.

The empiricist concept was intended to discriminate the basic elements from which our knowledge is constructed and on which it is founded; beliefs and theories are to be vindicated or not, depending on the verdict of the basic elements of experience.

Theory is required to support observation, just as much as observation theory.

Indeed within the Aristotelian framework the one task cannot be discharged without discharging the other. The modern contrast between the sphere of morality on the one hand and the sphere of the human sciences on the other is quite alien to Aristotelianism because, as we have already seen, the modern fact-value distinction is also alien to it.

After Kant the question of the relationship between such notions as those of intention, purpose, reason for action and the like on the one hand and the concepts which specify the notion of mechanical explanation on the other becomes part of the permanent repertoire of philosophy. The former notions are however now treated as detached from notions of good or virtue; those concepts have been handed over to the separate subdiscipline of ethics.

If we know the truth of a statement expressing a genuine law, that is, we also know the truth of a set of well-defined counterfactual conditionals.

Quine argued that if there is to be a science of human behavior whose key expressions characterize that behavior in terms precise enough to provide us with genuine laws, those expressions must be formulated in a vocabulary which omits all reference to intentions, purposes, and reasons for action. Just as physics, to become a genuine mechanical science, had to purify its descriptive vocabulary, so must the human sciences.

Secondly, the concept of a state or belief or enjoyment or fear involves too many contestable and doubtful cases to furnish the kind of evidence we need to confirm or disconfirm claims to have discovered a law.

Quine’s conclusion is that therefore any genuine science of human behavior must eliminate such intentional expressions; but it is perhaps necessary to do to Quine what Marx did to Hegel, that is, to stand his argument on its head. For it follows from Quine’s position that if it proved impossible to eliminate references to such items as beliefs and enjoyments and fears from our understanding of human behavior, that understanding could not take the form which Quine considers the form of human science, namely embodiment in law-like generalizations.

The notion of ‘fact’ with respect to human beings is thus transformed in the transition from the Aristotelian to the mechanist view. On the former view human action, because it is to be explained teleologically, not only can, but must be, characterized with reference to the hierarchy of goods which provide the ends of human action. On the latter view human action not only can, but must be, characterized without any reference to such goods. On the former view the facts about human action include the facts about what is valuable to human beings (and not just the facts about what they think to be valuable); on the latter view there are no facts about what is valuable. ‘Fact’ becomes value-free, ‘is’ becomes a stranger to ‘ought’ and explanation, as well as evaluation, changes its character as a result of this divorce between ‘is’ and ‘ought’.

As an observer, if I know the relevant laws governing the behavior of others, I can whenever I observe that the antecedent conditions have been fulfilled predict the outcome. As an agent, if I know these laws, I can whenever I can contrive the fulfilment of the same antecedent conditions produce the outcome. What Marx understood was that such an agent is forced to regard his own actions quite differently from the behavior of those whom he is manipulating.

But as the functions of modern states become more and more the same, their civil services come to be more and more the same too; and while their various political masters come and go, civil servants maintain the administrative continuity of government and thus confer on the government much of its character.

What I am suggesting is that the true achievements of the social sciences are being concealed from us—and from many social scientists themselves—by systematic misinterpretation.

The first is James C. Davies’s famous thesis (1962) which generalizes—to revolutions as a class—Tocqueville’s observation that the French revolution occurred when a period of rising and to some degree gratified expectations was followed by a period of set-back when expectations continued to rise and were sharply disappointed.

The second is Oscar Newman’s generalization that the crime rate rises in high-rise buildings with the height of the building up to a height of thirteen floors, but at more than thirteen floors levels off (Newman 1973, p. 25).

The third is Egon Bittner’s discovery of the differences between the understanding of the import of law embodied in police work and the understanding of that same import embodied in the...

The fourth is the contention advanced by Rosalind and Ivo Feierabend (1966) that the most and least modernized societies are the most stable and least violent, whereas those at midpoint in the approach to moderni...

All four of these generalizations rest on distinguished research; all are buttressed by an impressive...

First of all, they all coexist in their disciplines with recognized counter-examples, and the recognition of these counter-examples—if not by the authors of the generalizations themselves, at least by colleagues at work in the same areas—does not seem to affect the standing of the generalizations in anything like the w...

For the moment all I want to note is that social scientists themselves characteristically and for the most part do in fact adopt just such a tolerant attitude to counter-examples, an attitude very different from that of either natural scientists themselves or of Popperian philosophers of science and to leave open the question of whether their attitude might not after all be justified.

A second characteristic, closely linked to the first, of all four generalizations is that they lack not only universal quantifiers but also scope modifiers. That is, they are not only not genuinely of the form ‘For all x and some y if x has property ϕ, then y has property ψ’, but we cannot say of them in any precise way under what conditions they hold.

Thirdly, these generalizations do not entail any well-defined set of counterfactual conditionals in the way that the law-like generalizations of physics and chemistry do. We do not know how to apply them systematically beyond the limits of observation to unobserved or hypothetical instances. Thus they are not laws, whatever else they may be.

The probabilistic generalizations of natural science—those, say, of statistical mechanics—are indeed more than this precisely because they are as law-like as any non-probabilistic generalizations. They possess universal quantifiers—quantification is over sets, not over individuals—they entail well-defined sets of counter-factual conditionals and they are refuted by counter-examples in precisely the same way and to the same degree that other law-like generalizations are.

I want to argue that there are four sources of systematic unpredictability in human affairs. The first derives from the nature of radical conceptual innovation.

For a necessary part of predicting an invention is to say what a wheel is; and to say what a wheel is just is to invent it. It is easy to see how this example can be generalized. Any invention, any discovery, which consists essentially in the elaboration of a radically new concept cannot be predicted, for a necessary part of the prediction is the present elaboration of the very concept whose discovery or invention was to take place only in the future.

But my present thesis is concerned not with mere foretelling but with rationally grounded prediction, and it is the systematic limitations on such prediction with which I am concerned. What is important about the systematic unpredictability of radical conceptual innovation is of course the consequent unpredictability of the future of science.

A third source of systematic unpredictability arises from the game-theoretic character of social life.

I turn now to the fourth such source: pure contingency.

We have then four independent but often related sources of systematic unpredictability in human life. It is important to emphasize that not only does unpredictability not entail inexplicability, but that its presence is compatible with the truth of determinism in a strong version.

It may be suggested that there is an internal incoherence in my contentions. For on the one hand I have asserted that we cannot predict radical conceptual innovation, while on the other I have asserted that there are systematic and permanently unpredictable elements in human life.

On my own terms, it may be argued, it must remain unpredictable by me whether the future will not turn out to be fully predictable after all. Or the point may be put in another way: it may be asked, have you shown that certain matters are necessarily and in principle unpredictable or merely that as a matter of contingent fact they are unpredictable?

In philosophy there are in fact very few and perhaps no valid logical impossibility or reductio ad absurdum proofs. The reason for this is that to produce such a proof we need to be able to map the relevant parts of our discourse on to a formal calculus in such a way as to enable us to move from given formula ‘q’ to a consequence of the form ‘p.~p’ and thence as a further consequence to ‘~q’.

Just as unpredictability does not entail inexplicability, so predictability does not entail explicability. Knowledge of statistical regularities plays as important a part in our elaboration and carrying out of plans and projects as does knowledge of scheduling and coordinated expectations. Lacking either we would not be able to make rational choices between alternative plans in terms of their chances of success and failure.

A life lived from moment to moment, from episode to episode, unconnected by threads of large-scale intention, would lack the basis for many characteristically human institutions: marriage, war, the remembrance of the lives of the dead, the carrying on of families, cities and services through generations and so on. But the pervasive unpredictability in human life also renders all our plans and projects permanently vulnerable and fragile.

Since organizational success and organizational predictability exclude one another, the project of creating a wholly or largely predictable organization committed to creating a wholly or largely predictable society is doomed and doomed by the facts about social life.

What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat.

For it follows from my whole argument that the realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively-grounded claims function in fact as expressions of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference.

A key part of my thesis has been that modern moral utterance and practice can only be understood as a series of fragmented survivals from an older past and that the insoluble problems which they have generated for modern moral theorists will remain insoluble until this is well understood. If the deontological character of moral judgments is the ghost of conceptions of divine law which are quite alien to the metaphysics of modernity and if the teleological character is similarly the ghost of conceptions of human nature and activity which are equally not at home in the modern world, we should expect the problems of understanding and of assigning an intelligible status to moral judgments both continually to arise and as continually to prove inhospitable to philosophical solutions. What we need here is not only philosophical acuteness but also the kind of vision which anthropologists at their best bring to the observation of other cultures, enabling them to identify survivals and unintelligibilities unperceived by those who inhabit those cultures.

The pointlessness of this imaginary debate arises from a shared presupposition of the contending parties, namely that the set of rules whose status and justification they are investigating provides an adequately demarcated subject matter for investigation, provides the material for an autonomous field of study.

But Nietzsche then goes on to confront the problem that this act of destruction has created. The underlying structure of his argument is as follows: if there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates. There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. I myself must now bring into existence ‘new tables of what is good’. ‘We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (p. 266). The rational and rationally justified autonomous moral subject of the eighteenth century is a fiction, an illusion; so, Nietzsche resolves, let will replace reason and let us make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will, an act of the will that by its quality may remind us of that archaic aristocratic self-assertiveness which preceded what Nietzsche took to be the disaster of slave-morality and which by its effectiveness may be the prophetic precursor of a new era.

The central contrast embodied in Goffman’s sociology is precisely the same as that embodied in emotivism. It is the contrast between the purported meaning and point of our utterances and the use to which they are actually being put, between the surface presentations of behavior and the strategies used to achieve those presentations.

For Goffman’s world is empty of objective standards of achievement; it is so defined that there is no cultural or social space from which appeal to such standards could be made. Standards are established though and in interaction itself; and moral standards seem to have the function only of sustaining types of interaction that may always be menaced by over-expansive individuals.

Goffman’s social world is one of which a thesis that Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics considers only to reject is true: the good for man, consists in the possession of honor, honor being precisely whatever embodies and expresses the regard of others. Aristotle’s reason for rejecting this thesis is to the point. We honor others, he says, in virtue of something that they are or have done to merit the honor; honor cannot therefore be at best more than secondary good. That in virtue of which honor is assigned must be more important. But in Goffman’s social world imputations of merit are themselves part of the contrived social reality whose function is to aid or to contain some striving, role-playing will. Goffman’s is a sociology which by intention deflates the pretensions of appearance to be anything more than appearance. It is a sociology which it would be tempting to call cynical—in the modern, not the ancient sense—but for the fact that, if Goffman’s portrait of human life is a true likeness, there can be no such thing as a cynical disregard for objective merit, since there is no such thing as objective merit for the cynic to disregard.

So Goffman’s sociology, since it claims to show us not just what human nature can become under certain highly specific conditions, but what human nature must be and therefore always has been, clearly makes the implicit claim that Aristotle’s moral philosophy is false.

Yet it is not of course just that Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is false if Aristotle’s is true and vice versa. In a much stronger sense Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is matched specifically against Aristotle’s by virtue of the historical role which each plays. For, as I argued earlier, it was because a moral tradition of which Aristotle’s thought was the intellectual core was repudiated during the transitions of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that the Enlightenment project of discovering new rational secular foundations for morality had to be undertaken. And it was because that project failed, because the views advanced by its most intellectually powerful protagonists, and more especially by Kant, could not be sustained in the face of rational criticism that Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors were able to mount their apparently successful critique of all previous morality.

For if Aristotle’s position in ethics and politics—or something very like it—could be sustained, the whole Nietzschean enterprise would be pointless. This is because the power of Nietzsche’s position depends upon the truth of one central thesis: that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail and that therefore belief in the tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set of rationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will.

My own argument obliges me to agree with Nietzsche that the philosophers of the Enlightenment never succeeded in providing grounds for doubting his central thesis; his epigrams are even deadlier than his extended arguments. But, if my earlier argument is correct, that failure itself was nothing other than an historical sequel to the rejection of the Aristotelian tradition. And thus the key question does indeed become: can Aristotle’s ethics, or something very like it, after all be vindicated?

The rules of morality and law hence are not to be derived from or justified in terms of some more fundamental conception of the good for man. In arguing thus Dworkin has, I believe, identified a stance characteristic not just of liberalism, but of modernity. Rules become the primary concept of the moral life. Qualities of character then generally come to be prized only because they will lead us to follow the right set of rules.

In this conceptual mélange there are to be found, jostling with such modern concepts as those of utility and rights, a variety of virtue concepts, functioning in a variety of different ways. What is lacking however is any clear consensus, either as to the place of virtue concepts relative to other moral concepts, or as to which dispositions are to be included within the catalogue of the virtues or the requirements imposed by particular virtues.