Wandering the Ethical Wilderness with Alasdair MacIntyre

I came across the name Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre as I am sure many oth­ers have in the work of Stan­ley Hauer­was.  And as you read more Hauer­was you encounter again and again Mac­In­tyre.  I am cur­rently tak­ing a course in pro­fes­sional ethics in coun­selling and was given the oppor­tu­nity to choose a text to read and review.  I imme­di­ately took the oppor­tu­nity to finally crack open MacIntyre’s After Virtue.  I am, so far, quite intrigued and hope to share a bit of my jour­ney into the text with you.

Mac­In­tyre begins his work by ask­ing the reader to imag­ine.  Imag­ine that there were a dis­as­ter in the field of nat­ural sci­ence.  “Wide­spread riots occur, lab­o­ra­to­ries are burnt down, physi­cists are lynched, books and instru­ments are destroyed.”  And finally a polit­i­cal power comes into place and bans sci­ence from being taught or prac­ticed.  In time though there is a move­ment to revive this ancient prac­tice and a new gen­er­a­tion learns piece­meal from the scraps that remain.  A new expres­sion of sci­ence emerges but it remains arbi­trary based on par­tial and ran­dom bits of knowl­edge that have sur­vived.  No one real­izes the inac­cu­racy of what they are doing because they have no mem­ory or recorded his­tory of sci­ence as it was in its total­ity.  Mac­In­tyre sug­gests that this imag­ined state of affairs for the nat­ural sci­ences is anal­o­gous to the cur­rent state ethics.  Their remains scraps and frag­ments of eth­i­cal lan­guage and rea­son­ing but they no longer fit into the coher­ent whole from which these con­cepts and prac­tices emerged.

This was an unex­pected but help­ful frame­work by Mac­In­tyre to intro­duce his explo­ration and retrieval of par­tic­u­lar moral tra­di­tions.  I think the image by and large holds.  We con­tinue to pre­serve a par­tic­u­lar vocab­u­lary around ethics.  We speak of jus­tice, hon­esty, com­mit­ment, integrity, inten­tion, respect, val­ues, etc. and yet these terms tend to be stretched and shifted with an elas­tic­ity that makes us won­der where and how they can gain pos­i­tive and eth­i­cal trac­tion in our age.  Mac­In­tyre seems to sug­gest that there is indeed a way for­ward in ethics that is, well, eth­i­cal.  Let’s see where it goes.