After Virtue Macintyre

Philosophical Review

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyreReview by: Samuel SchefflerThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Jul., 1983), pp. 443-447Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2184489 .Accessed: 31/10/2014 14:27

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BOOK REVIEWS

The Philosophical Review, XCII, No. 3 (July 1983)

AFTER VIRTUE: A STUDY IN MORAL THEORY. By ALASDAIR MACIN- lYRE. Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Pp. ix, 252.

Contemporary moral thought, according to Alasdair MacIntyre, is in disarray. Debates and disagreements, he says in After Virtue, are the charac- teristic modes of' contemporary moral discourse, and since the participants in contemporary moral debates typically put forth arguments which pro- ceed from rival and incommensurable premises, these debates go on inter- minably and are in principle irresolvable. Moreover, the variety and het- erogeneity of the concepts employed in such debates, which some might like to interpret as signs of' a healthy pluralism, are signs instead that our moral categories amount to "an unharmonious melange of' ill-assorted fragments" (p. 10). What we possess, MacIntyre believes, are simply bits and pieces of a number of' quite disparate moral conceptions, each of' which once flourished in some set of' cultural and historical circumstances more or less remote from our own, and none of which is generally ac- cepted or even generally remembered in its entirety today. Thus, according to MacIntyre, contemporary moral thought is simply not coherent. And far from addressing themselves to this situation, most philosophers- in particular most analytic moral philosophers-have failed even to recog- nize it fully. Indeed, he suggests, most analytic moral philosophers could not possibly have succeeded in fully recognizing it, since the situation in question is the result of a complex series of historical developments, and since most such philosophers persist in thinking that the problems of moral philosophy can be treated ahistorically, with the language and concepts of contemporary morality taken simply as given.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre attempts to accomplish three major goals. The first is to provide a historical account of those social and intellectual developments which he takes to explain the supposed disorder of modern moral thought. The second is to present a philosophical defense of' a broadly Aristotelian conception of morality. And the third is to present us with an example of the kind of historically and sociologically informed philoso- phizing about morality which MacIntyre regards as preferable to typical analytic treatments.

The heart of' MacIntyre's argument is as follows. During the European Middle Ages, the dominant moral conceptions were Aristotelian. Within the Aristotelian tradition, a moral scheme has three main elements: a conception of man as he happens to be, a conception of man as he could be if' he realized his telos, and a set of ethical precepts which instruct man

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about the virtues he must cultivate and the vices he must shun if' he is to move from the first state to the second. This tradition recognizes no fact- value distinction, for the right act in a given situation is taken to be the one that a good man would choose, a good man is taken to be one who realizes his telos, and the judgment that a particular man has or has not realized his telos is regarded as purely factual. Thus from the standpoint of this tradition, the notion of moral truth is unproblematic. It becomes problematic, however, if' one rejects a teleological conception of' human nature. Thus it was, according to MacIntyre, that the historical rejection of' Aristotelian teleology gave rise to what he calls "the Enlightenment project ofjustifying morality," a project which consisted in attempting to identify some rational basis for morality once the rejection of' Aristotelian metaphysics had un- dermined the tradition of moral functionalism. On MacIntyre's view, the three major contributors to this project were Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard. But, he argues, none of' them was able to carry out the project successfully. Moreover, he maintains, the project had to fail, given certain assumptions shared by all of the contributors to it about the form that a justification of morality would have to take. They all agreed that the "key premises" of' such a justification "would characterize some feature or features of' human nature; and the rules of' morality would then be ex- plained and justified as being those rules which a being possessing just such a human nature could be expected to accept" (p. 50). But the moral precepts they sought to justify in this way were quite traditional, and those precepts had originally been seen as indicating how untutored human nature could be transformed, altered, enabled to realize its telos. Thus it was hardly likely that those precepts could be shown to be ones that untutored human nature by itself would accept, or that they could be justified by appealing to features of untutored human nature alone.

The disorder of contemporary moral thought, according to Maclntyre, is the result of the breakdown of the Enlightenment project. The failure of' that project left the modern world with a conception of the person as an autonomous moral agent, no longer defined in terms of his role in any natural or social order; but it also left the status of moral precepts com- pletely unclear. And although subsequent attempts have been made, by utilitarians and by contemporary neo-Kantians for example, to provide some rational basis for morality, all such attempts have failed, according to MacIntyre. And so in our culture we hear talk of rights, of utility, and of virtue, and much of this talk purports to be objective; but with the moral concepts in use so heterogeneous, and in the absence of' any consensus about the justification of moral claims, such claims have come increasingly to seem like mere assertions of individual will, and radically deflationary accounts of morality as a whole have come to seem increasingly compel-

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ling. Indeed, MacIntyre argues, given the failure of the Enlightenment project, the only alternative to accepting a Nietzschean diagnosis of morality is to try to show that the repudiation of the Aristotelian moral tradition was a mistake in the first place. In the end, of course, MacIntyre believes that that can be shown; he argues at some length that the tradition of the virtues remains defensible even if we reject Aristotle's own metaphysical biology, and that it represents mankind's best hope for the future.

This summary, obviously, provides only the barest sketch of MacIntyre's central argument. In After Virtue, the presentation of that argument in all its complexity and detail constitutes the core of a lively and learned discussion which cuts across conventional disciplinary boundaries and addresses a wide range of topics not standardly included nowadays under the head- ing of "moral philosophy." While the quality of the discussion of these topics seems to me uneven, and although I have serious reservations about the book's central argument, there is no doubt in my mind that After Virtue is a significant and provocative book which deserves to be read and con- templated with care and attention. Its account of the condition of contemporary moral thought is disturbing but hard to dismiss; its account of the virtues is intriguing and highly suggestive; and the case it makes for the relevance of historical considerations to arguments in moral philosophy should serve as an antidote to the methodological complacency of some excessively ahistorical analytic philosophers. In the space that remains, I will indicate briefly the major reservations I do nevertheless have about MacIntyre's central line of discussion.

First, MacIntyre's actual arguments against the views defended by the contributors to "the Enlightenment project" and their successors tend to be hasty and on occasion somewhat hackneyed. Kant's moral philosophy, for example, is dismissed in a page and a third (pp. 44-45) on the basis of a few stock arguments. The contemporary moral philosophers most indebt- ed to Kant are all dismissed on the strength of a criticism of one sentence from Alan Gewirth's book, Reason and Morality. And some still more sweep- ing verdicts are delivered with even less direct backing, as for example in the remark that "to the present day Kierkegaard, Kant and Hume do not lack ingenious, academic disciples in the debate between whom the con- tinuing power only of the negative arguments of each tradition against the other is the most significant feature" (p. 48). I don't see that readers should be any more impressed by this sort of thing than MacIntyre himself would be by a page and a third of stock criticisms of Aristotle or a dismissal of all contemporary accounts of virtues, including his own, which was based on a criticism of one sentence from the writing of, say, Peter Geach.

Second, MacIntyre's account of the virtues, although very interesting indeed, seems to me not fully satisfactory as it stands. That account pro-

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ceeds in stages; the virtues are provisionally characterized with reference to the notion of a practice, and this provisional account is then modified and supplemented at later stages. I have reservations about both the provisional and the supplemented accounts. According to the provisional account, virtues are said to be those human qualities necessary to achieve the goods internal to practices, where 'practice' is understood in a somewhat special sense, and a good is internal to a given practice just in case it is a good that can only be achieved by engaging in that practice or one of the same specific kind. Although MacIntyre denies that it follows from this account that great chess players cannot be vicious, I am not entirely con- vinced that he is entitled to deny it, and in any case he does seem happy to say something that strikes me as hardly more plausible, namely that a great chess player who is vicious cannot achieve any of the internal goods of' chess. And when, in order to supplement this provisional account of the virtues, MacIntyre introduces his conception of' the human telos, a "telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of' a whole human life" (p. 189), new difficulties emerge. For what MacIntyre says is that "the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man" (p. 204), and this formulation raises more questions than it answers. What is to count as seeking? Is there anything for a person who is seeking the good life to find, apart from the activity of seeking itself? If so, then why doesn't the good life consist in attaining that thing, rather than in seeking it? If not, then why exactly is seeking such a thing so good? And so on. I do not mean to claim that these questions cannot be answered, or that MacIntyre's account of the virtues cannot possibly be on the right track. What I do want to suggest, however, is that considerable further develop- ment and clarification would be required at certain crucial points before that account could carry conviction.

Finally, it is an important claim of' MacIntyre's book that any moral philosophy "characteristically presupposes a sociology" (p. 22); he defends the claim by arguing that "every moral philosophy offers explicitly or implicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of' the relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions and actions, and in so doing generally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or at least can be in the real social world" (p. 22). And he emphasizes repeatedly that changes in moral thought go hand in hand with changing conceptions of the self and changing forms of social and political organization. Thus one would expect that MacIntyre, in urging a return to the tradition of the virtues, would not limit himself to presenting arguments intended to dem- onstrate the appeal of that tradition on an abstract level, but would also provide some kind of' detailed social theory which would make the embodi- ment of that tradition in the real contemporary world seem socially and

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politically feasible. For if, as Maclntyre says, the modern self is not the Aristotelian self but is rather the "emotivist self" (p. 30), and if "modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection" (p. 237) of the tradition of the virtues, then surely something more than a few good philosophical arguments would be needed to effect a transition to the kind of' world in which that tradition might once again flourish. Yet, sur- prisingly, here of all places Maclntyre has little to offer: "What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if' the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope" (p. 245). But if we have learned the lessons that Maclntyre himself has tried to teach us, we can hardly share in a spirit of' hope which is grounded in circumstances so far removed from the specific social and political realities of' our own time. And if we take those lessons at all seriously, we cannot help but wonder about the adequacy of the sociology presupposed by Maclntyre's own moral philosophy.

SAMUEL SCHEFFLER University of California, Berkeley

The Philosophical Review, XCII, No. 3 (July 1983)

INTERESTS AND RIGHTS: THE CASE AGAINST ANIMALS. By R. G. FREY. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980. Pp. xi, 176.

In recent years a small but influential group of philosophers has defended the view that the logic of at least some of our most plausible moral theories requires the inclusion of at least some nonhuman animals within the moral domain, and that this inclusion in turn requires reform of' at least some of our most common practices regarding animals (such as eat- ing their flesh). The moral theories invoked in their arguments have typically been some form of rights theory or some version of utilitarianism. In either case a crucial premise in these arguments has been that at least some animals (those that are conscious or sentient) have interests. In virtue of' their having interests the practices in question (depending on how the argument is continued) either violate their rights or show a disregard for their welfare. In either case they are morally indefensible.

As its subtitle advertises, Raymond Frey's book is a self-conscious reac- tion against this zoophile trend. While Frey thinks that animals can be wronged, and also that some of our current practices wrong them, he

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Article Contentsp. 443p. 444p. 445p. 446p. 447

Issue Table of ContentsThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Jul., 1983), pp. 327-496Front Matter [pp. 327-328]Kant's Intentions in the Refutation of Idealism [pp. 329-383]"How One Becomes What One Is" [pp. 385-417]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 419-422]Review: untitled [pp. 422-426]Review: untitled [pp. 426-431]Review: untitled [pp. 431-433]Review: untitled [pp. 434-436]Review: untitled [pp. 436-438]Review: untitled [pp. 438-442]Review: untitled [pp. 443-447]Review: untitled [pp. 447-450]Review: untitled [pp. 450-452]Review: untitled [pp. 452-454]Review: untitled [pp. 455-460]Review: untitled [pp. 460-462]Review: untitled [pp. 462-465]Review: untitled [pp. 466-468]Review: untitled [pp. 468-471]Review: untitled [pp. 471-474]Review: untitled [pp. 474-480]Review: untitled [pp. 480-481]Review: untitled [pp. 481-486]

Books Received [pp. 487-496]Back Matter

After Virtue Macintyre

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