After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

But now the doctrine of Enten-Eller is plainly to the effect that the principles which depict the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lies beyond reasons, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason. Yet the ethical is to have authority over us. But how can that which we adopt for one reason have any authority over us? The contradiction in Kierkegaard’s doctrine is plain. To this someone might reply that we characteristically appeal to authority when we have no reasons; we may appeal to the authority of the custodians of the Christian revelation, for example, at the very point where reason breaks down. So that the notion of authority and the notion of reason are not, as my argument suggests, intimately connected, but are in fact mutually exclusive. Yet this concept of authority as excluding reason is, as I have already noticed, itself a peculiarly, even if not exclusively, modern concept, fashioned in a culture to which the notion of authority is alien and repugnant, so that appeals to authority appear irrational. But the traditional authority of the ethical, in the culture which Kierkegaard inherited, was not of this arbitrary kind. And it is this traditional concept of authority which must be embodied in the ethical if it is to be as Kierkegaard describes it.