1 After Virtue, 3rd edition: Outline and Commentary Chapters 1-9: The Critique An Introductory Scenario Chapter 1, A Disquieting Suggestion A. MacIntyre’s opening scenario is taken from Walter M. Miller. Jr.’s science-fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). MacIntyre argues that contemporary philosophies, especially ethical philosophies, are equally blind to how they are using language and for similar reasons. B. What is needed, then, is a narrative history of what happened, and a history that accounts for the changes in social practices and their accompanying ethical vocabularies. Emotivism: How We Got Here Chapter 2, The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism A. MacIntyre begins with three examples of moral debates that suffer from incommensurable positions. Such debates have three basic problems: 1. Their rival premises make it difficult to come to any shared understanding that might change someone’s mind. 2. Because they are presented in impersonal terms, the other positions accuse them of bad faith, of manipulation and hiding their true motives. 3. The diversity of moral vocabularies are products of history, and the meanings of terms have changed, so it is impossible to come to an understanding of the conflict without a sense of history. B. Emotivism claims that all moral oughts (“This should be”) are really just strongly held feelings or intuitions (“I approve of this.”). This suffers from circular reasoning: 1. It is impossible to identify feelings of approval if they also have to explain the kind of approval in question. 2. There are differences between the way we use reason-giving utterances and the way we use utterances of simple preference. 3. The ways such utterances are used has to be accounted for, and emotivism would suggest that the meaning of moral utterances and their actual uses don’t synch up well. C. A history of emotivism shows why it was taken seriously at the turn of the twentieth-century, e.g. G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1902). 1. Moore’s approach had three aspects not essential to each other: a. The non-natural properties of moral intuitions: they cannot be proven. b. Every action is evaluated by its consequences: a utilitarian calculus. c. The greatest goods are aesthetic experience and friendship. 2. Moore’s milieu at Cambridge was rejecting a weak version of Christian social ethics. 3. The nature of their rejection and their moral approach made emotivism seem true. D. The social conditions surrounding emotivism were a historic social decline: 1. An attempt to give genuine rational justification for ethical actions and judgments. 2. A breakdown in this attempt to provide impersonal standards. 3. An acceptance of the emotivist claim that such standards are really just feelings. 2 4. The analytical response is no more successful because it, too, is built on unjustifiable foundations. 5. The responses of Nietzsche and the existentialists suffer a similar fate. 6. They all concede the bad faith in Enlightenment attempts at ethical justification. 7. So, emotivism is true about a certain historical ethical incoherency. Chapter 3, Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context A. A moral philosophy is based upon a social context, and the social context of emotivism is one in which all social relations are manipulative. From an emotivist perspective, the social world cannot appeal to impersonal criteria—there are none. The social world can only be a meeting place of individual wills and competing desires. B. The managerial world and its commitment to effectiveness is an example of this kind of social world. Max Weber’s analysis of decisions is emblematic of this kind of reasoning, and he is unable to truly distinguish reasoning from power since all decisions are subjective and finally arbitrary. C. MacIntyre appeals to socio-ethical characters to help explain how certain ideals shape our social content. 1. Definition #1 (27): “They are a very special type of social role which places a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who inhabit them in a way many other social roles do not.” 2. Definition #2 (28): “Characters are masks worn by moral philosophies. characters merge what is usually thought to belong to the individual man or woman and what is usually thought to belong to social roles.” 3. Definition #3 (29): “A character is an object of regard by the members of the culture generally or by some significant segment of them. He furnishes them with a cultural and moral ideal. Social type and psychological type are required to coincide. The character morally legitimates a mode of social existence.” D. Along with the Rich Aesthete, MacIntyre argues that the Manager and the Therapist represent two modern socio-ethical characters, though they need not garner universal consent to nonetheless be reflective of modern ideals. E. The emotivist modern self, on the other hand, is a democratized self without set social context, deeply fluid and contingent, and without a narrative of moral commitments. This is because the emotivist self has lost the telos or end purpose that came with pre-modern social roles and obligations. F. Taken together, the public character (i.e. the manager or therapist) and the personal emotivist self are a basic division in which individualism and collectivism are at continual odds. And MacIntyre thinks this has happened because of a particular history. Discussion Questions Why does MacIntyre begin with a science-fiction story? Why does he hold that the history of ethics and social roles is a key to the problem? 3 Do you find his analysis of emotivism convincing? Is it still a contemporary problem? Why does MacIntyre consider it a failure as a moral theory? Can you think of other socio-ethical characters that exemplify MacIntyre’s point? The Failure of Enlightenment Arguments Chapter 4, The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality A. Some might object that the views of ethical philosophy can have little influence on the culture at large. MacIntyre argues that in the Enlightenment, a Northern Protestant culture involving England, Scotland, Southern Germany, and the Netherlands did have such influence, which also shaped the philosophes of France, as well as Naples. B. Its secularization is symbolized by the changing understanding of moralis (morality), which began roughly as character, then practice, and finally, only as sexual continence. C. To trace the history of the breakdown of the Enlightenment project, MacIntyre examines in particular four thinkers, all who support in the main traditional (i.e. Christian) ethical practices, yet who tried to appeal to one aspect of human agency—the will, reason, or desires: 1. Kierkegaard—Kierkegaard’s Either-Or explores the meaning of a radical, ultimate choice that is neither aesthetic nor ethical in and of itself. It is a choice beyond reason because the authority behind the ethical itself is treated as transcending rationality. 2. Kant—Rational ethics must be the same for all persons, and all must have the will to carry them out. They must be categorical imperatives that are judged by duty, not happiness, and they must possess internal consistency among themselves. Yet these tests for universal maxims do not always succeed. Trivial and immoral maxims can be formulated according to his criteria. 3. Diderot—He tries to build an ethic based on human desires, even as he recognizes the need to adjudicate between rival desires. 4. Hume—Hume’s project is more detailed and sophisticated than Diderot’s, yet he, too, wants to make human desires (sympathy) the basis of ethics, and he fails in this. D. MacIntyre concludes that each system was built upon the failure of the other two faculties. Their failure to find a foundation in the human person is set against the background of loss of religion and the failure to share a public rationality open to all. Chapter 5, Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail A. Each Enlightenment moralist failed because, though he sought to base his ethics on human nature, he did not account for the totality of the human person. While they each have recognized the unformed state of humans and of rules, they have each overlooked what humans can become, the teleological aspect of human becoming. B. The reason, will, and desires are all necessary within a specific practice, for reason employs the rules and precepts to instruct and shape the will and desires towards a specific end. This Aristotelian understanding is expanded in theistic cultures, including a greater respect for the divine law, the telos being located in the afterlife, and so on. And such has a high view of human reason and its ability to comprehend the virtues and that necessary for ethical rationality. 4 C. This synthesis began to unravel with the Reformation critique of human reason and the judgment that reason is not capable of guiding the passions. A judgment as to telos was lost and with this, the remaining two components of unrealized human nature and ethical rules were strained in their attempts to go forward. Kant realized the potential problem and attempts to reintroduce a kind of teleological argument. D. Trying to adopt an objective principle based on ‘facts’ alone lead to failure. A key historical change in the moral language of the 17th and 18th centuries meant that no longer could one offer valid inferences from is to ought. 1. Certain terms (including roles) have built in assumptions about their good practice. 2. Assuming ethical oughts without contexts leads to incoherence. 3. The loss of a telos and of social roles within an ethical practice reduces ethical matters to that of individuals. 4. Survivals from classical theism were hypothetical yet treated as categorical, and yet they ignored the contexts necessary to make them meaningful.