After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

Moreover the concept of a practice with goods internal to itself, understood as I have tried to understand it, is similarly removed to the margins of our lives.

Thus the historical process by and through which the aesthete, the bureaucratic manager—the essential instrument for organizing modern work—and their social kindred become the central characters of modern society (a process which I described even if too briefly in Chapter 3) and the historical process by which the narrative understanding of the unity of human life and the concept of a practice were expelled to the margins of modern culture turn out to be one and the same.

There was indeed one distinctively new way open to understand the virtues once they had been severed from their traditional context in thought and practice, and that is as dispositions related in either of two alternative ways to the psychology of that newly invented social institution, the individual. Either the virtues—or some of them—could be understood as expressions of the natural passions of the individual or they—or some of them—could be understood as dispositions necessary to curb and to limit the destructive effect of some of those same natural passions.

It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that morality came generally to be understood as offering a solution to the problems posed by human egoism and that the content of morality came to be largely equated with altruism. For it was in that same period that men came to be thought of as in some dangerous measure egoistic by nature; and it is only once we think of mankind as by nature dangerously egoistic that altruism becomes at once socially necessary and yet apparently impossible and, if and when it occurs, inexplicable.

There is no way of my pursuing my good which is necessarily antagonistic to you pursuing yours because the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours peculiarly—goods are not private property. Hence Aristotle’s definition of friendship, the fundamental form of human relationship, is in terms of shared goods. The egoist is thus, in the ancient and medieval world, always someone who has made a fundamental mistake about where his own good lies and someone who has thus and to that extent excluded himself from human relationships.

But why should we find agreeable certain qualities in others which are not useful to us—Hume is sure that we do—and why should we obey rules on occasions when it is not to our interest to do so? Hume’s answers to these questions reveal the underlying weakness of his account. For he tries to conclude in the Treatise that it is to our long-term advantage to be just, when all that his premises warrant is the younger Rameau’s conclusion that it is often to our long-term advantage that people in general should be just.

The importance of recalling in the form of objections to Hume’s thesis those self-doubts which Diderot put into Rameau’s mouth is not only however a matter of Hume’s inability to transcend the eighteenth century’s egoistic presuppositions. What they point to is a more fundamental weakness which becomes explicit when we consider Hume’s attitude to rival tables of the virtues. One the one hand, Hume sometimes writes as if the knowledge of what is virtuous and what is vicious is a matter of simple reflection open to everyone: ‘The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces character and actions, amiable or odious, praiseworthy or blamable; that which stamps on them the mark of honor or infamy, approbation or censure; that which renders morality as active principle and constitutes virtue or happiness and vice or misery—it is possible, I say, that the final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species’ (Inquiry I).

But while the falsity of certain metaphysical views is necessary, if Hume’s own position on the virtues is to be vindicated, that falsity is not sufficient. And Hume’s problem about how ‘ought’ may be derived from ‘is’ denies him any overt appeal to his own understanding of the nature of things to supply that insufficiency. Hence, although Hume may find in what he takes to be the falsity of the Christian religion a ground for condemning the adherents of the monkish virtues—Hume condemns humility as useless, for example—his final court of appeal can be no more than the appeal to the passions of men of good sense, to a concurrence of feelings among the worldly.

But before doing so it is important to notice three features of Hume’s treatment of the virtues which recur in other eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century moral philosophies. The first of these concerns the characterization of particular virtues. In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community’s good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good.

Honor becomes nothing more than a badge of aristocratic status, and status itself, tied as it is now so securely to property, has very little to do with desert. Distributive justice cannot any longer be defined in terms of desert either, and so the alternatives become those of defining justice in terms of some sort of equality (a project which Hume himself rejects) or in terms of legal entitlements. And justice is not the only virtue that has to be redefined.

A second feature of Hume’s treatment of the virtues which recurs in later thought and practice is a quite new conception of the relationship of virtues to rules.

Virtues are indeed now conceived of not, as in the Aristotelian scheme, as possessing a role and function distinct from and to be contrasted with, that of rules or laws, but rather as being just those dispositions necessary to produce obedience to the rules of morality.

The virtues are now not to be practiced for the sake of some good other, or more, than the practice of the virtues itself. Virtue is, indeed has to be, its own end, its own reward and its own motive. It is central to this Stoic tendency to believe that there is a single standard of virtue and that moral achievement lies simply in total compliance with it.

Nature for many writers becomes what God had been for Christianity. Nature is conceived of as an actively benevolent agent; nature is a legislator for our good. Diderot, who often thinks of nature in this way, is thereby forced to pose the problem of how nature, being so benevolent and powerful, can permit the occurrence of evils, in a way that precisely parallels the problem raised for Christian theologians by the occurrence of evils in a universe created and ruled by an omnipotent and benevolent deity. And in so doing Diderot reveals more plainly than do others the way in which nature itself has become a new deity. Nature harmonizes, nature orders, nature provides us with a rule of life. Thus even some Christians are apt to see what is crucial to their ethics as being the maxim to understand and to live in accordance with their nature. From this arises a peculiar blend of Stoicism and Christianity, most strikingly exemplified by Dr. Johnson.

In Johnson’s writings the influence of Juvenal and Epictetus is modified by Johnson’s judgment that the Stoics took too high a view of human nature, and yet in the sixth Rambler he nonetheless concludes that he, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing everything, but his own disposition, will waste his life in further efforts, and multiply the griefs which he proposes to remove’.

The cultivation of the virtues cannot issue in any further happiness. Consequently, when Johnson praises patience, the distance between his conception of patience and that of the medieval tradition is as great as the distance between Hume’s concept of justice and Aristotle’s. For the medievals the virtue of patience, as I pointed out earlier, is intimately related to the virtue of hope; to be patient is to be prepared to wait until the promise of life is fulfilled. For Johnson—at least so fa...

For Smith the virtues fall into two classes. There are on the one hand those three virtues which, if they are perfectly possessed, enable a man to exhibit perfectly virtuous behavior. ‘The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence, may be said to be perfectly virtuous’ (Theory of Moral Sentiments VI. iii. 1). Notice of course that once again to be virtuous had been equated with rule-following. When Smith comes to deal with justice, he makes it a charge against ‘ancient moralists’ that we do not find ‘any attempt towards a particular enumeration of the rules of justice’. But on Smith’s view knowledge of what the rules are, whether the rules of justice or of prudence or of benevolence, is not sufficient to enable us to follow them; to do so we need another virtue of a very different kind, the Stoic virtue of self-command which enables us to control our passions when they distract us from what virtue requires.

What is abundantly clear is that in everyday life as in moral philosophy the replacement of Aristotelian or Christian teleology by a definition of the virtues in terms of the passions is not so much or at all the replacement of one set of criteria by another, but rather a movement towards and into a situation where there are no longer any clear criteria.

Virtue in the individual is nothing more or less than allowing the public good to provide the standard for individual behavior.

This is why the republican conception of justice was defined basically in terms of equality, but secondarily in terms of public desert, public merit, a notion for which once again a place has to be found.

I thus take eighteenth-century republicanism to be a more serious claimant for moral allegiance than such writers suggest.

Liberty, fraternity and equality were not the only Jacobin virtues. Patriotism and love of family were both important: the persistent bachelor was regarded as an enemy of virtue. So was the man who failed to do useful productive work or who failed to do good work.

Cobbett—‘the last man of the old England and the first man of the new’, said Marx—crusaded to change the society as a whole; Jane Austen tried to discover enclaves for the life of the virtues within it. Cobbett looked backward to the England of his childhood, beyond that to England before the oligarchical settlement of 1688 and yet further to England before the Reformation, seeing each stage as one in a decline towards his own day.

Jane Austen, by contrast, identifies that social sphere within which the practice of the virtues is able to continue. It is not of course that she is blind to the economic realities against which Cobbett railed. We learn somewhere in all her novels about where the money of the main characters comes from; we see a great deal of the economic self-seeking, of the pleonexia which is central to Cobbett’s vision. So much so indeed that David Daiches once described her as a ‘Marxist before Marx’. Her heroines must, if they are to survive, seek for economic security. But this is not just because of the threat of the outside economic world; it is because the telos of her heroines is a life within both a particular kind of marriage and a particular kind of household of which that marriage will be the focal point.

When Jane Austen speaks of ‘happiness’, she does so as an Aristotelian. Gilbert Ryle believed that her Aristotelianism—which he saw as the clue to the moral temper of her novels—may have derived from a reading of Shaftesbury. C.S. Lewis with equal justice saw in her an essentially Christian writer. It is her uniting of Christian and Aristotelian themes in a determinate social context that makes Jane Austen the last great effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues which I have tried to identify.

She praises practical intelligence in an Aristotelian way and humility in a Christian way. But she does not ever merely reproduce the tradition; she continuously extends it and in extending it she has three central preoccupations.

Morality in Jane Austen is never the mere inhibition and regulation of the passions; although that is how it may appear to those such as Marianne Dashwood who have romantically identified themselves with a ruling passion and who make in a very unHumean way reason the servant of the passions. Morality is rather meant to educate the passions; but the outward appearance of morality may always disguise uneducated passions.

Self-knowledge is for Jane Austen both an intellectual and a moral virtue, and it is closely allied to another virtue which Jane Austen makes central and which is relatively new to the catalogue of the virtues.

By the time Jane Austen writes that unity can no longer be treated as a mere presupposition or context for a virtuous life. It has itself to be continually reaffirmed and its reaffirmation in deed rather than in word is the virtue which Jane Austen calls constancy. Constancy is crucial in at least two novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, in each of which it is a central virtue of the heroine. Constancy, so Jane Austen makes Anne Elliot argue cogently in the latter novel, is a virtue which women are more apt to practise than are men. And without constancy all the other virtues to some degree lose their point. Constancy is reinforced by and reinforces the Christian virtue of patience, but it is not the same as patience, just as patience which is reinforced by and reinforces the Aristotelian virtue of courage, is not the same as courage.

constancy requires a recognition of a particular kind of threat to the integrity of the personality in the peculiarly modern social world, a recognition which patience does not necessarily require.

For charm is the characteristically modern quality which those who lack or simulate the virtues use to get by in the situations of characteristically modern social life. Camus once defined charm as that quality which procures the answer ‘Yes’ before any question has been asked.

The virtues and the harms and evils which the virtues alone will overcome provide the structure both of a life in which the telos can be achieved and of a narrative in which the story of such a life can be unfolded. Once again it turns out that any specific account of the virtues presupposes an equally specific account of the narrative structure and unity of a human life and vice versa.

Rawls argues that any rational agent so situated will define a just distribution of goods in any social order in terms of two principles and a rule for allocating priorities when the two principles conflict.

The first principle is: ‘Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.’ The second principle is: ‘Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the joint savings principle [the joint savings principle provides for fair investment in the interests of future generations], and (b) attached to offices and parties open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity’ (p. 302).

Nozick claims that ‘if the world were wholly just’ (p. 151) the only people entitled to hold anything, that is to appropriate it for use as they and they alone wished, would be those who had justly acquired what they held by some just act of original acquisition and those who had justly acquired what they held by some just act of transfer from someone else who had either acquired it by some just act of original acquisition or by some just transfer… and so on.

What I want to argue is threefold: first, that the incompatibility of Rawls’s and Nozick’s accounts does up to a point genuinely mirror the incompatibility of A’s position with B’s, and that to this extent at least Rawls and Nozick successfully articulate at the level of moral philosophy the disagreement between such ordinary non-philosophical citizens as A and B; but that Rawls and Nozick also reproduce the very same type of incompatibility and incommensurability at the level of philosophical argument that made A’s and B’s debate unsettlable at the level of social conflict; and secondly, that there is nonetheless an element in the position of both A and B which neither Rawls’s account nor Nozick’s captures, an element which survives from that older classical tradition in which the virtues were central. When we reflect on both these points, a third emerges: namely, that in their conjunction we have an important clue to the social presuppositions which Rawls and Nozick to some degree share.

For Nozick only evidence about what has been legitimately acquired in the past is relevant; present patterns of distribution in themselves must be irrelevant to justice (although not perhaps to kindness or generosity). To say even this much makes it clear how close Rawls is to B and how close Nozick is to A. For A appealed against distributive canons to a justice of entitlement, and B appealed against canons of entitlement to a justice which regards needs. Yet it is also at once clear not only that Rawls’s priorities are incompatible with Nozick’s in a way parallel to that in which B’s position is incompatible with A’s, but also that Rawls’s position is incommensurable with Nozick’s in a way similarly parallel to that in which B’s is incommensurable with A’s.

Neither Rawls’s account nor Nozick’s allows this central place, or indeed any kind of place, for desert in claims about justice and injustice. Rawls (p. 310) allows that common sense views of justice connect it with desert, but argues first that we do not know what anyone deserves until we have already formulated the rules of justice (and hence we cannot base our understanding of justice upon desert), and secondly that when we have formulated the rules of justice it turns out that it is not desert that is in question anyway, but only legitimate expectations. He also argues that to attempt to apply notions of desert would be impracticable—the ghost of Hume walks in his pages at this point.

Nozick is less explicit, but his scheme of justice being based exclusively on entitlements can allow no place for desert.

It is in any case clear that for both Nozick and Rawls a society is composed of individuals, each with his or her own interest, who then have to come together and formulate common rules of life. In Nozick’s case there is the additional negative constraint of a set of basic rights. In Rawls’s case the only constraints are those that a prudent rationality would impose. Individuals are thus in both accounts primary and society secondary, and the identification of individual interests is prior to, and independent of, the construction of any moral or social bonds between them.

Only those goods in which everyone, whatever their view of the good life, takes an interest are to be admitted to consideration. In Nozick’s argument too, the concept of community required for the notion of desert to have application is simply absent. To understand this is to clarify two further points. The first concerns the shared social presuppositions of Rawls and Nozick. It is, from both standpoints, as though we had been shipwrecked on an uninhabited island with a group of other individuals, each of whom is a stranger to me and to all the others.

Nozick’s premise concerning rights introduces a strong set of constraints; we do know that certain types of interference with each other are absolutely prohibited.

Thus Rawls and Nozick articulate with great power a shared view which envisages entry into social life as—at least ideally—the voluntary act of at least potentially rational individuals with prior interests who have to ask the the question ‘What kind of social contract with others is it reasonable for me to enter into?’ Not surprisingly it is a consequence of this that their views exclude any account of human community in which the notion of desert in relation to contributions to the common tasks of that community in pursing shared goods could provide the basis for judgments about virtue and injustice.

What makes this important is that Nozick’s account serves the interest of a particular mythology about the past precisely by what it excludes from view. For central to Nozick’s account is the thesis that all legitimate entitlements can be traced to legitimate acts of original acquisition. But, if that is so, there are in fact very few, and in some large areas of the world no, legitimate entitlements.

Consequently the allegiance of such marginal communities to the tradition is constantly in danger of being eroded, and this in search of what, if my argument is correct, is a chimaera. For what analysis of A’s and B’s position reveals once again is that we have all too many disparate and rival moral concepts, in this case rival and disparate concepts of justice, and that the moral resources of the culture allow us no way of settling the issue between them rationally. Moral philosophy, as it is dominantly understood, reflects the debates and disagreements of the culture so faithfully that its controversies turn out to be unsettlable in just the way that the political and moral debates themselves are.

It is not just that we live too much by a variety and multiplicity of fragmented concepts; it is that these are used at one and the same time to express rival and incompatible social ideals and policies and to furnish us with a pluralist political rhetoric whose function is to conceal the depth of our conflicts.

The nature of any society therefore is not to be deciphered from its laws alone, but from those understood as an index of its conflicts. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed. Yet if this is so, another virtue too has been displaced. Patriotism cannot be what it was because we lack in the fullest sense a patria. The point that I am making must not be confused with the commonplace liberal rejection of patriotism. Liberals have often—not always—taken a negative or even hostile attitude towards patriotism, partly because their allegiance is to values which they take to be universal and not local and particular, and partly because of a well-justified suspicion that in the modern world patriotism is often a façade behind which chauvinism and imperialism are fostered. But my present point is not that patriotism is good or bad as a sentiment, but that the practice of patriotism as a virtue is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way that it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political and moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community; but it is characteristica...

It must have been clear from earlier parts of my argument that the tradition of the virtues is at variance with central features of the modern economic order and more especially its individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values of the market to a central social place.

It now becomes clear that it also involves a rejection of the modern political order. This does not mean that there are not many tasks only to be performed in and through government which still require performing: the rule of law, so far as it is possible in a modern state, has to be vindicated, injustice and unwarranted suffering have to be dealt with, generosity has to be exercised, and liberty has to be defended, in ways that are sometimes only possible through the use of governmental institutions.

Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being accumulated.