After Virtue Part III — Seeing the End

Part I

Part II

Sorry I have been a lit­tle slack on fol­low­ing through with my dis­cus­sion of Alas­dair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.  I men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous post that M. uses three main char­ac­ters to describe con­tem­po­rary dis­course on ethics, which he calls emo­tivist (based on sub­jec­tive feel­ing or will).

There is the Rich Aes­thete who is sup­plied with ample means but no par­tic­u­lar end to direct them and so lives with a sense of exper­i­men­ta­tion and explo­ration. There is the Bureau­cratic Man­ager who views all of life includ­ing human­ity as means to be ordered in the most effec­tive man­ner towards the pre­de­ter­mined ends of pro­duc­tion. Then there is the Ther­a­pist who can­not speak of larger human ends but only of human indi­vid­u­als as ends unto them­selves. These char­ac­ters reflect the mod­ern West’s detach­ment to the larger moral frame­work of under­stand­ing humanity’s telos or goal. Mac­In­tyre iden­ti­fies this con­cept of telos as cru­cial in recov­er­ing a coher­ent moral framework.

Mac­In­tyre offers a clearly neg­a­tive eval­u­a­tion of the Enlight­en­ment that pro­duced these char­ac­ters. The Enlight­en­ment is char­ac­ter­ized as an attempt to lib­er­ate soci­ety from the restric­tions of divine moral law imposed by the church. Hav­ing declared the church unfit to reg­u­late moral dis­course philoso­phers began the task of estab­lish­ing a ratio­nal basis for moral­ity. What fol­lowed is described by Mac­In­tyre as almost a com­edy of errors in the devel­op­ments from David Hume to Imman­ual Kant to Soren Kierkegaard. This pro­gres­sion is sum­ma­rized clearly in the following,

Just as Hume seeks to found moral­ity on the pas­sions because his argu­ments have excluded the pos­si­bil­ity of found­ing it on rea­son, so Kant founds it on rea­son because his argu­ments have excluded the pos­si­bil­ity of found­ing it on the pas­sions, and Kierkegaard on cri­te­ri­on­less fun­da­men­tal choice because of what he takes to be the com­pelling nature of the con­sid­er­a­tions which exclude both rea­son and pas­sions.… Thus the vin­di­ca­tion of each posi­tion was made to rest in cru­cial part upon the fail­ure of the other two, and the sum total of the effec­tive crit­i­cism of each posi­tion by the oth­ers turned out to be the fail­ure of all (pg. 49–50).

What is miss­ing from all these mod­els and what is nec­es­sary for moral­ity accord­ing to Mac­In­tyre is an under­stand­ing of human­ity as it could be, or humanity’s telos. With­out this any moral con­tent loses its rela­tion­ship to those who prac­tice it. The con­se­quences of this failed project is a soci­ety run pri­mar­ily by Bureau­cratic Man­agers who order things accord­ing to effec­tive­ness and pro­duc­tion and not the moral ends of humanity.

Mac­In­tyre argues that nearly all con­tem­po­rary expres­sions of ethics are best exem­pli­fied in the work of Niet­zsche. It was Niet­zsche who argued most clearly that what passes for moral objec­tiv­ity is in fact the expres­sion of sub­jec­tive will. This leads Mac­In­tyre to the piv­otal chap­ter Niet­zsche or Aris­to­tle?. It is these two fig­ures who are viewed as offer­ing the only true alter­na­tives in moral dis­course. Aris­to­tle was the frame­work of pre­mod­ern ethics and Niet­zsche is viewed as the cul­mi­na­tion of mod­ern ethics. Mac­In­tyre then poses his crit­i­cal ques­tion, “was it right in the first place to reject Aris­to­tle?” (pg. 117). It is in the fol­low­ing chap­ters that Mac­In­tyre then begins to artic­u­late a con­cept of virtues as it was expressed not only by Aris­to­tle but also in early heroic lit­er­a­ture, in Athens, in the medieval period, as well as cer­tain mod­ern expressions.