After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

any adequate generally Aristotelian account must supply a teleological account which can replace Aristotle’s metaphysical biology.

The great Australian philosopher John Anderson urged us ‘not to ask of a social institution: “What end or purpose does it serve?” but rather, “Of what conflicts is it the scene?”’

That problem was how to educate and civilize human nature in a culture in which human life was in danger of being torn apart by the conflict of too many ideals, too many ways of life.

On this medieval view, as on the ancient, there is no room for the modern liberal distinction between law and morality, and there is no room for this because of what the medieval kingdom shares with the polis, as Aristotle conceived it. Both are conceived as communities in which men in company pursue the human good and not merely as—what the modern liberal state takes itself to be—providing the arena in which each individual seeks his or her own private good.

Every particular view of the virtues is linked to some particular notion of the narrative structure or structures of human life.

cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, courage)

where our knowledge is genuinely empirical we have to be careful not to confuse what we have learnt empirically with what is inferred from theory, even from true theory.

By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

In the realm of practices the authority of both goods and standards operates in such a way as to rule out all subjectivist and emotivist analyses of judgment. De gustibus est disputandum.

A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.

truthfulness, justice and courage

the relationship of practices to institutions—

Indeed the power of the liberal individualist standpoint partly derives from the evident fact that the modern state is indeed totally unfitted to act as moral educator of any community.

Aristotelian in that it links evaluation and explanation in a characteristically Aristotelian way.

When someone complains—as do some of those who attempt or commit suicide—that his or her life is meaningless, he or she is often and perhaps characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement towards a climax or a telos. Hence the point of doing any one thing rather than another at crucial junctures in their lives seems to such person to have been lost.

It does follow of course that all attempts to elucidate the notion of personal identity independently of and in isolation from the notions of narrative, intelligibility and accountability are bound to fail. As all such attempts have.

The author stated that narratives are ived before they are told while the narrative is the story told prior to and guiding living/action - his novel interpretation of telos. This is incoherent/uninttelligable.

The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest. A quest for what?

modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.

to think of a human life as a narrative unity is to think in a way alien to the dominant individualist and bureaucratic modes of modern culture.

Arts, sciences and games are taken to be work only for a minority of specialists: the rest of us may receive incidental benefits in our leisure time only as spectators or consumers. Where the notion of engagement in a practice was once socially central, the notion of aesthetic consumption now is, at least for the majority.

the content of morality came to be largely equated with altruism.

what education in the virtues teaches me is that my good as a man is one and the same as the good of those others with whom I am bound up in human community.

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.

Thus the appeal to a universal verdict by mankind turns out

Benevolence in the eighteenth century is assigned very much the scope which the Christian scheme of the virtues assigned to charity. But, unlike charity, benevolence as a virtue became a licence for almost any kind of manipulative intervention in the affairs of others.

remarked earlier upon the degree to which the concept of a rule acquired a new centrality in modern individualist morality. 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.

Within the Aristotelian scheme ‘moral virtue’ was not a tautological expression; but by the end of the eighteenth century ‘moral’ and ‘Virtuous’ have come to be used as synonyms. Later still ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’ came to be treated as largely interchangeable, and so did ‘dutiful’ and ‘virtuous’. Where once the common language of morality, even in everyday speech, had embodied a set of precise distinctions which presupposed a complex moral scheme, there comes into being a kind of linguistic mélange which enables very little to be said.

the Victorian marriage—that last refuge of those who, outside the domestic sphere, were quite prepared to be scoundrels—

the moral vocabulary had become detached from any precise central context of understanding and made available to different competing moral groups for their special and differing purposes.

Adam Smith did in fact allow for one moral area in which rules will not supply us with what we need: there are always borderline cases in which we do not know how to apply the relevant rule and in which niceness of feeling must therefore guide us. Smith attacks the whole notion of casuistry as a wrongheaded attempt to provide for the application of rules even in such cases. In Kant’s moral writings by contrast we have reached a point at which the notion that morality is anything other than obedience to rules has almost, if not quite, disappeared from sight.

so Smith, writ

the connection between Smith’s preoccupation with virtue and his republicanism was not something peculiar to his own thought. Republicanism in the eighteenth century is the project of restoring a community of virtue; but it envisages that project in an idiom inherited from Roman rather than Greek sources and transmitted through the Italian republics of the middle ages. Machiavelli with his exaltation of civic virtue over both the Christian and the pagan virtues articulates one aspect of the republican tradition, but only one. What is central to that tradition is the notion of a public good which is prior to and characterizable independently of the summing of individual desires and interests.

Republicanism

‘Cui servire est regnare’ says the prayer about God, or as the English version has it, ‘whom to serve is perfect freedom’, and what the Christian said about God the republican says of the republic.

in fact most modern totalitarianism and terror has nothing to do with any commitment to virtue.

The true lesson of the Jacobin Clubs and their downfall is that you cannot hope to reinvent morality on the scale of a whole nation when the very idiom of the morality which you seek to re-invent is alien in one way to the vast mass of ordinary people and in another to the intellectual elite. The attempt to impose morality by terror—the solution of St. Just—is the desperate expedient of those who already glimpse this fact but will not admit it. (It is this and not the ideal of public virtue which, so I would argue, breeds totalitarianism.) To understand this is to be given the essential clue to the predicament of all those adherents of the older tradition of the virtues—some of whom cannot even recognize any more that that is what they are—who seek to re-establish the virtues.

The ‘something at work in the community’ which counteracts the tendency to produce a virtuous and happy community is the all-pervasive influence of pleonexia (although that is not Cobbett’s word) in the form of the usury (that is Cobbett’s word) inflicted on society by an individualistic economy and market in which land, labor and money itself have all been transformed into commodities. It is precisely because Cobbett looks back across that great division in human history towards the past before individualism and the power of markets, before what Karl Polanyi called ‘the great transformation’, that Marx saw Cobbett as possessing his peculiar significance for English history.

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.

I think the emphasis on narrative struc

legitimate

crucial term as it refers to the written word

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.

Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. 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.

a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints. We still of course, even in modern society, find it difficult to think of families, colleges and other genuine communities in this way; but even our thinking about those is now invaded to an increasing degree by individualist conceptions, especially in the law courts.

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.

it would be wrong to conclude from the stress that I have laid on the medieval background that Protestantism did not in some areas become the bearer of this very same moral tradition; in Scotland for example, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics were the secular moral texts in the universities, coexisting happily with a Calvinist theology which was often elsewhere hostile to them, until 1690 and after. And there are today both black and white Protestant communities in the United States, especially perhaps those in or from the South, who will recognize in the tradition of the virtues a key part of their own cultural inheritance.

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.

Adam Ferguson: ‘We are not to expect that the laws of any country are to be framed as so many lessons of morality.… Laws, whether civil or political, are expedients of policy to adjust the pretensions of parties, and to secure the peace of society. The expedient is accommodated to special circumstances… ’ (Principles of Moral and Political Science ii. 144). 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.

I woul

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.

Nothing in my argument suggests, let alone implies, any good grounds for rejecting certain forms of government as necessary and legitimate; what the argument does entail is that the modern state is not such a form of government.

Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.

The bureaucratic manager, the consuming aesthete, the therapist, the protester and their numerous kindred occupy almost all the available culturally recognizable roles; the notions of the expertise of the few and of the moral agency of everyone are the presuppositions of the dramas which those characters enact.