REFLECTIONS ON A GIANT
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died recently at age 96, was known for being pugnacious in argument and blunt — even fierce — in his criticism of people and ideas of which he disapproved. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when visiting the University of Notre Dame for the first time some 30 years ago, to be invited to lunch and given a tour by him of the campus. I was a young, not very well known academic, but one who had written a review of one of his books that, though appreciative, was not uncritical. Professor MacIntyre — already a towering figure in moral and political philosophy — had read the review but could not have been more gracious to its author.
MacIntyre’s thought was central to a revival of Aristotelian moral philosophy in which virtues are linked to a comprehensive account of human flourishing — what Aristotle himself termed eudaimonia. Prior to the Aristotelian revival — associated not only with MacIntyre, but also with Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Peter Geach, John McDowell, David Wiggins, John Finnis, and others — the principal options in moral philosophy were typically presented as some form of Kantian deontology, on the one side, and Benthamite utilitarianism, on the other. MacIntyre (like the other philosophers I mentioned) found these alternatives deeply unsatisfactory.
MacIntyrean “virtue ethics” levels a decisive challenge to the utilitarian thesis that all human goods can be weighed and measured — that morally upright decision-making can be reduced to an aggregative underlying principle, such as providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number. But in adopting a sort of via media, virtue ethics also contrasts with deontology’s formalism, which fails to recognize that the more-than-merely-instrumental goods — those intrinsically desirable ends and purposes that people rightly pursue for their own sakes, such as friendship, marriage and family, knowledge, beauty, integrity, and friendship with God — constitute the starting points of moral reflection and comprise the integral components of human well-being and fulfillment.
MacIntyre’s approach to moral and political philosophy — best exemplified by his magisterial books After Virtue (1981) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) — was further defined by his articulation of the significant sense in which human beings’ moral reflection is “tradition-dependent.” In a major contribution to reflection on moral experience, he usefully described how it is that people are not permanently imprisoned in the particular tradition or culture into which they were born (or into which they previously moved or converted), because he showed how traditions themselves provide the resources for their own internal critique. He advanced — and indeed, his own life modeled — the thesis that traditions (which may be secular or religious) enter into moments of fundamental epistemological crises for their adherents when the traditions generate important questions that they themselves do not have adequate resources to answer.
In such cases, the sincere truth-seeker will be forced to look outside his tradition in search of a superior tradition — that is, a superior set of resources — which can provide the tools to answer the questions still in need of resolution. MacIntyre lived this dynamic in his own philosophical conversion from Marxism — he was cognizant of Marxism’s tenuous moral foundations, even if he remained sympathetic to some of its conclusions — to Aristotelian-Thomism. He later became a religious convert to Catholicism.
While MacIntyre rightly acknowledged that there are significant senses in which moral reflection is tradition-dependent, it is also necessary to identify the significant ways in which it is not — for example, by articulating the universal precepts and truth-claims that always ground sound moral reflection. It is in this realm that I believe MacIntyre fell a bit short. In my view, he did not manage to construct sufficient guardrails to ensure his tradition-dependent account of moral reflection was protected from collapsing into a form of relativism.
In his searing attack on contemporary liberalism and what he described as the Enlightenment conception of practical reason in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre, in my judgment, somewhat obscured the potential force of his critique by eschewing discussion and analysis of the universal principles of practical reason that can, and should, ground universal truth-claims about concepts of, say, justice, the common good, human dignity (an idea about which MacIntyre was skeptical), human rights (about which he was even more skeptical), and moral duties.
MacIntyre famously voiced something approaching contempt for concepts of human (or “natural”) rights and human dignity — ideas commonly associated with certain strains of Enlightenment-era liberalism, to be sure, but which also occupy prominent and indispensable roles in profoundly non-liberal traditions making universal claims, such as contemporary articulations of natural law theory.
I made this point — although in my youthful hubris I stated it too harshly — in a 1989 review of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. In my review, I noted that MacIntyre’s decision to wield his tradition-dependent “moral particularism” as a
weapon against liberal moral and political thought . . . stops him from drawing upon the best resources of the tradition he himself views as the best alternative to liberalism. It mires him in an ultimately relativistic position that can be described as ‘Thomism’ only by the grace of inverted commas.
Here, it seems to me that the via media would have been to point out that liberalism, like Marxism, was unable to answer the first-order questions that inevitably arise from its answers to concrete controversies of the modern era — first-order questions such as, “Why should we believe that people have rights?” or, “Where do rights come from?” But natural law theory — insofar as it provides the more philosophically cogent, non-liberal grounding for the rights that liberalism sometimes, if inadequately, identifies — is able to provide the answers.
Alasdair MacIntyre, a giant of 20th- and 21st-century philosophy, requiescat in pace.