After Virtue Part II — Endless Debates

Wan­der­ing the Eth­i­cal Wilder­ness with Alas­dair Mac­In­tytre
Part I

After sketch­ing a land­scape in which our moral frame­work has been greatly dis­fig­ured and frag­mented over time Mac­In­tyre pro­ceeds with the obser­va­tion that most moral or eth­i­cal debates have no real end.  War is wrong, war can estab­lish peace, war can be just.  Abor­tion is unjust, abor­tion can be a nec­es­sary evil, women deserve to have rights over their bod­ies.  These debates con­tinue on through the years over kitchen tables, news­pa­per edi­to­ri­als, aca­d­e­mic peri­od­i­cals and gov­ern­ment debates.  Eth­i­cal debates get reduced to issues which pro­duce oppos­ing par­ties (and there­fore bat­tles of will) which in turn accept no com­mon cri­te­ria for deci­sion mak­ing even though we may evoke larger par­a­digms such as jus­tice or duty or dig­nity.  M. asserts that we have all but lost con­nec­tion to the orig­i­nal for­ma­tion of these larger moral cat­e­gories and so there can be no deci­sion mak­ing when it comes to ethics because the only thing in play is “expres­sions of pref­er­ence, expres­sions of atti­tude or feel­ing,” which he labels as emo­tivism.  With emo­tivism there can be no appeal to some­thing shared and agreed upon unless it so hap­pens that a culture’s pref­er­ences hap­pen to align.  What emerged then as moral stan­dards came from those with the great­est influ­ence and abil­i­ties of persuasion.

How­ever we might agree or dis­agree with this the­o­ret­i­cal under­stand­ing of moral think­ing M. asserts that west­ern moral­ity has sim­ply embod­ied this approach as true.

This chap­ter resounded so clearly in my mind as I raced through the end­less debates and con­ver­sa­tions I have car­ried on with friends, fam­ily and strangers only to come out either exhausted or frus­trated or most likely both.  We have lost a com­mon tra­di­tion of moral think­ing and replaced it with com­pet­ing wills to power (M. sees Nietzsche’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion as essen­tially cor­rect).  So what do the moral char­ac­ters of M.‘s mod­ern emo­tivist moral­ity look like?  He turns to this in sub­se­quent chap­ters as he explores the Rich Aes­thete, the Bureau­cratic Man­ager and the Therapist.