After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact, which I alluded to in my discussion of Gewirth’s argument, that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century.

The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know that there are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.

In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertions whatsoever is followed with great rigor.

A central characteristic of moral fictions which comes clearly into view when we juxtapose the concept of utility to that of rights is now identifiable: they purport to provide us with an objective and impersonal criterion, but they do not.

Hence when claims invoking rights are matched against claims appealing to utility or when either or both are matched against claims based on some traditional concept of justice, it is not surprising that there is no rational way of deciding which type of claim is to be given priority or how one is to be weighed against the other.

This provides us with an insight important for understanding the politics of modern societies. For what I described earlier as the culture of bureaucratic individualism results in their characteristic overt political debates being between an individualism which makes its claims in terms of rights and forms of bureaucratic organization which make their claims in terms of utility. But if the concept of rights and that of utility are a matching pair of incommensurable fictions, it will be the case that the moral idiom employed can at best provide a semblance of rationality for the modern political process, but not its reality. The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution.

‘To protest’ and its Latin predecessors and French cognates are originally as often or more often positive as negative; to protest was once to bear witness to something and only as a consequence of that allegiance to bear witness against something else. But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.

It is scarcely surprising that empiricists had to press old words into new forms of service—‘idea’, ‘impression’ and even ‘experience’ itself. 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, as when we speak of ‘five years experience as a carpenter’. The empiricist concept of experience was unknown for most of human history. It is understandable then that empiricism’s linguistic history is one of continuous innovation and invention, culminating in the barbarous neologism ‘sense-datum’.

There are of course other crucial divergences. 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. But the observations of the natural scientist are never in this sense basic. We do indeed bring hypotheses to the test of observation; but our observations in turn can always be put to the question. The belief that Jupiter has seven moons is put to the test of observation through a telescope; but the observation itself has to be vindicated by the theories of geometrical optics. Theory is required to support observation, just as much as observation theory.

From the seventeenth century onwards it was a commonplace that whereas the scholastics had allowed themselves to be deceived about the character of the facts of the natural and social world by interposing an Aristotelian interpretation between themselves and experienced reality, we moderns—that is, we seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century moderns—had stripped away interpretation and theory and confronted fact and experience just as they are. It was precisely in virtue of this that those moderns proclaimed and named themselves the Enlightenment, and understood the medieval past by contrast as the Dark Ages. What Aristotle obscured, they see. This conceit of course was, as such conceits always are, the sign of an unacknowledged and unrecognized transition from one stance of theoretical interpretation to another. The Enlightenment is consequently the period par excellence in which most intellectuals lack self-knowledge.

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. What is it about intentions, purposes and reasons that makes them thus unmentionable? It is the fact that all these expressions refer to or presuppose reference to the beliefs of the agents in question.

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’.

but in the chemical changes which the chemist or the technologist of human behavior brings about the chemist or the technologist must see exemplified not only the laws which govern such changes but the imprinting of his own will on nature or society. And that imprinting he will treat, as Marx saw, as the expression of his own rational autonomy and not the mere outcome of antecedent conditions.

Civil servants and managers alike justify themselves and their claims to authority, power and money by invoking their own competence as scientific managers of social change. Thus there emerges an ideology which finds its classical form of expression in a pre-existing sociological theory, Weber’s theory of bureaucracy. Weber’s account of bureaucracy notoriously has many flaws. But in his insistence that the rationality of adjusting means to ends in the most economical and efficient way is the central task of the bureaucrat and that therefore the appropriate mode of justification of his activity by the bureaucrat lies in the appeal to his (or later her) ability to deploy a body of scientific and above all social scientific knowledge, organized in terms of and understood as comprising a set of universal law-like generalizations, Weber provided the key to much of the modern age.

So we can now see in bare skeletal outline a progress first from the Enlightenment’s ideal for a social science to the aspirations of social reformers, next from the aspirations of social reformers to the ideals of practice and justification of civil servants and managers, then from the practices of management to the theoretical codification of these practices and of the norms governing them by sociologists and organization theorists and finally from the employment of the textbooks written by those theorists in schools of management and business schools to the theoretically informed managerial practice of the contemporary technocratic expert.

Just as unpredictability does not entail inexplicability, so predictability does not entail explicability.

It is necessary, if life is to be meaningful, for us to be able to engage in long-term projects, and this requires predictability; it is necessary, if life is to be meaningful, for us to be in possession of ourselves and not merely to be the creations of other people’s projects, intentions and desires, and this requires unpredictability. We are thus involved in a world in which we are simultaneously trying to render the rest of society predictable and ourselves unpredictable, to devise generalizations which will capture the behavior of others and to cast our own behavior into forms which will elude the generalizations which others frame.

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. Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. 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. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is.

All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely.

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.

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. Hence the defensibility of the Nietzschean position turns in the end on the answer to the question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle? 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.

It is yet another of Nietzsche’s merits that he joins to his critique of Enlightenment moralities a sense of their failure to address adequately, let alone to answer the question: what sort of person am I to become? This is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life. But for characteristically modern moralities it is a question to be approached only by indirection. The primary question from their standpoint has concerned rules: what rules ought we to follow? And why ought we to obey them? And that this has been the primary question is unsurprising when we recall the consequences of the expulsion of Aristotelian teleology from the moral world. Ronald Dworkin has recently argued that the central doctrine of modern liberalism is the thesis that questions about the good life for man or the ends of human life are to be regarded from the public standpoint as systematically unsettlable. On these individuals are free to agree or to disagree. 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.

A man in heroic society is what he does. Hermann Fränkel wrote of Homeric man that ‘a man and his actions become identical, and he makes himself completely and adequately comprehended in them; he has no hidden depths.… In [the epics] factual report of what men do and say, everything that men are, is expressed, because they are no more than what they do and say and suffer’ (Fränkel 1975, p. 79).

To be courageous is to be someone on whom reliance can be placed. Hence courage is an important ingredient in friendship. The bonds of friendship in heroic societies are modelled on those of kinship. Sometimes friendship is formally vowed, so that by the vow the duties of brothers are mutually incurred. Who my friends are and who my enemies, is as clearly defined as who my kinsmen are. The other ingredient of friendship is fidelity. My friend’s courage assures me of his power to aid me and my household; my friend’s fidelity assures me of his will. My household’s fidelity is the basic guarantee of its unity. So in women, who constitute the crucial relationships within the household, fidelity is the key virtue. Andromache and Hector, Penelope and Odysseus are friends (philos) as much as are Achilles and Patroclus.

What I hope this account makes clear already is the way in which any adequate account of the virtues in heroic society would be impossible which divorced them from their context in its social structure, just as no adequate account of the social structure of heroic society would be possible which did not include an account of the heroic virtues. But to put it in this way is to understate the crucial point: morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society.

Without such a place in the social order, a man would not only be incapable of receiving recognition and response from others; not only would others not know, but he would not himself know who he was.

If the heroic virtues require for their exercise the presence of a kind of social structure which is now irrevocably lost—as they do—what relevance can they possess for us? Nobody now can be a Hector or a Gisli. The answer is that perhaps what we have to learn from heroic societies is twofold: first that all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from a series of predecessors in which series heroic societies hold first place.

What the poet of the Iliad sees and his characters do not is that winning too may be a form of losing.

The casual modern reader might easily suppose at first that Plato is contrasting Socrates’ rigor with the carelessness of the ordinary Athenian; but as the pattern recurs again and again, another interpretation suggests itself, namely that Plato is pointing to a general state of incoherence in the use of evaluative language in Athenian culture.

The intervention of a god in Greek tragedy—or at the very least an appeal to a god to intervene—often signals the disclosure of an incoherence in moral standards and vocabulary.

‘Scratch Thrasymachus and you find Agamemnon.’ Agamemnon is the prototype of the Homeric hero who has never learnt the truth that the Iliad was written to teach; he wants only to win and to have the fruits of victory for himself. Everyone else is to be used or overcome: Iphigeneia, Briseis, Achilles. So the sophist of whom Plato’s Thrasymachus is the type makes success the only goal of action and makes the acquisition of power to do and to get whatever one wants the entire content of success. A virtue is then naturally enough defined as a quality which will ensure success. But success for the sophists, as for other Greeks, must be success in some particular city. Hence the ethics of success comes to be combined with a certain kind of relativism. To be successful is to be successful in a particular city; but in different cities there may be different conceptions of the virtues. What is taken to be just in democratic Athens may be different from what is taken to be just in aristocratic Thebes or in military Sparta. The sophistic conclusion is that in each particular city the virtues are what they are taken to be in that city. There is no such thing as justice-as-such, but only justice-as-understood-in-Athens and justice-as-understood-at-Thebes and justice-as-understood-at-Sparta. This relativism, when combined with the view that a virtue is a quality which leads to individual success, involves its adherents in a number of related difficulties.

Part of the original impulse behind the sophistic view seems to have been the wish to provide a consistent and coherent redefinition of the central evaluative expressions in fifth-century Greek as a basis for educating the young, particularly the aristocratic young, for political success. But the achievement of a certain degree of consistency by elevating competitive conceptions and definitions of the virtues above the cooperative ones turns out to have generated inconsistency at other points. By accepting the evaluative vocabulary of his own particular city the sophist will sometimes find himself using expressions which themselves embody a non-relativistic standpoint inconsistent with the relativism which led him to use that vocabulary. And the sophist who has redefined expressions such as ‘just’, ‘virtue’ and ‘good’ so that they refer to qualities which are conducive to individual success, but who also wishes to employ the conventional vocabulary in order to achieve that success, may well find himself in one situation praising justice, because by ‘justice’ nothing more is to be meant that ‘what is to the interest of the stronger’ and in another praising injustice over justice because it is the practice of injustice (as conventionally understood) which is in fact to the interest of the stronger.

Every activity, every enquiry, every practice aims at some good; for by ‘the good’ or ‘a good’ we mean that at which human beings characteristically aim. It is important that Aristotle’s initial arguments in the Ethics pre-suppose that what G.E. Moore was to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ is not a fallacy at all and that statements about what is good—and what is just or courageous or excellent in other ways—just are a kind of factual statement. Human beings, like the members of all other species, have a specific nature; and that nature is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that they move by nature towards a specific telos. The good is defined in terms of their specific characteristics. Hence Aristotle’s ethics, expounded as he expounds it, presupposes his metaphysical biology. Aristotle thus sets himself the task of giving an account of the good which is at once local and particular—located in and partially defined by the characteristics of the polis—and yet also cosmic and universal. The tension between these poles is felt throughout the argument of the Ethics.

The virtues are precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos.

Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. Moral education is an ‘éducation sentimentale’.

We are to think then of friendship as being the sharing of all in the common project of creating and sustaining the life of the city, a sharing incorporated in the immediacy of an individual’s particular friendships. This notion of the political community as a common project is alien to the modern liberal individualist world. This is how we sometimes at least think of schools, hospitals or philanthropic organizations; but we have no conception of such a form of community concerned, as Aristotle says the polis is concerned, with the whole of life, not with this or that good, but with man’s good as such. It is no wonder that friendship has been relegated to private life and thereby weakened in comparison to what it once was.

telos, but

It has been argued that all we need to provide in order to justify an account of the virtues and vices is some very general account of what human flourishing and well-being consists in. The virtues can then be adequately characterized as those qualities necessary to promote such flourishing and well-being, because, whatever our disagreements in detail on that subject, we ought to be able to agree rationally on what is a virtue and what a vice. This view ignores the place in our cultural history of deep conflicts over what human flourishing and well-being do consist in and the way in which rival and incompatible beliefs on that topic beget rival and incompatible tables of the virtues. Aristotle and Nietzsche, Hume and the New Testament are names which represent polar oppositions on these matters. Hence any adequate teleological account must provide us with some clear and defensible account of the telos; and 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?”’ (Passmore 1962, p. xxii). If Aristotle had asked this question both of the polis and of the individual agent, he would have had an additional resource for understanding the teleological character of both the virtues and the social forms which provide them with a context. For it was Anderson’s insight—a Sophoclean insight—that it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are.

Of all the mythological ways of thinking which have disguised the middle ages for us none is more misleading than that which portrays a unified and monolithic Christian culture and this not just because the medieval achievement was also Jewish and Islamic. Medieval culture, insofar as it was a unity at all, was a fragile and complex balance of a variety of disparate and conflicting elements.

Stoicism thus invites us to stand against the world of physical and political circumstance at the very same time that it requires us to act in conformity with nature. There are symptoms of paradox here and they are not misleading.

Indeed whenever the virtues begin to lose their central place, Stoic patterns of thought and action at once reappear. Stoicism remains one of the permanent moral possibilities within the cultures of the West.

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.

There is thus a crucial difference between this quarrel and that later quarrel between Henry VIII and Thomas More in which what is in dispute is precisely how events are to be interpreted. Henry II and Thomas Becket inhabit a single narrative structure; Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell on the one hand and Thomas More and Reginald Pole on the other inhabit rival conceptual worlds and tell, as they act and after they act, different and incompatible stories about what they do. In the medieval quarrel agreement in narrative understanding is manifested also in agreement about the virtues and vices; in the Tudor quarrel that framework of medieval agreement has already been lost. And it was that framework which the medieval Aristotelians tried to articulate.

The practice of forgiveness presupposes the practices of justice, but there is this crucial difference. Justice is characteristically administered by a judge, an impersonal authority representing the whole community; but forgiveness can only be extended by the offended party.

Yet although I have dwelt upon the prima facie case for holding that the differences and incompatibilities between different accounts at least suggest that there is no single, central, core conception of the virtues which might make a claim for universal allegiance, I ought also to point out that each of the five moral accounts which I have sketched so summarily does embody just such a claim. It is indeed just this feature of those accounts that makes them of more than sociological or antiquarian interest. Every one of these accounts claims not only theoretical, but also an institutional hegemony.

Every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices.

Justice requires that we treat others in respect of merit or desert according to uniform and impersonal standards; to depart from the standards of justice in some particular instance defines our relationship with the relevant person as in some way special or distinctive.

If someone says that he cares for some individual, community or cause, but is unwilling to risk harm or danger on his, her or its own behalf, he puts in question the genuineness of his care and concern. Courage, the capacity to risk harm or danger to oneself, has its role in human life because of this connection with care and concern.

To enter into a practice is to enter into a relationship not only with its contemporary practitioners, but also with those who have preceded us in the practice, particularly those whose achievements extended the reach of the practice to its present point. It is thus the achievement, and a fortiori the authority, of a tradition which I then confront and from which I have to learn.