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As Alasdair MacIntyre sees the matter, moral discourse in the sense in which it once existed has broken down. This may be illustrated by numerous issues debated in contemporary society, none of which is in the nature of the case capable of being settled. Once there was a generally-accepted theistic world-view in which human beings had in general terms a definite direction or aim in life; against that background there were clear criteria for settling moral disputes. Since the Enlightenment this has no longer been so. It is true that ‘in everyday discourse the habit of speaking of moral judgments as true or false persists; but the question of what it is in virtue of which a particular moral judgment is true or false has come to lack any clear answer’. This is because ‘moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices’. Many efforts have been made, by Utilitarians, Kantians and others, to plug the gap; but they have all failed.
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- Copyright © 2001 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Prese, 1984), 2Google Scholar.
2 MacIntyre, Virtue, 6‐7.
3 MacIntyre, Virtue, 60.
4 MacIntyre, Virtue, 62.
5 MacIntyre, Virtue, 63.
6 MacIntyre, Virtue, 63‐4.
7 My italics.
8 MacIntyre, Virtue, 64.
9 MacIntyre, Virtue, 64‐5.
10 MacIntyre, Virtue, 6‐8.
11 That was the year in which G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica was first published.
12 MacIntyre, Virtue, 11‐12, 14‐17.
13 Neglect of the fact that ‘good’ might be largely a mutter of other qualities and effects, without being precisely definable in terms of them, seems to be what is wrong with Moore's famous argument in Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). Moore inferred that it was a simple intuitable property; the emotivists, that it was not a property at ail, and that to call something good was fundamentally a matter of evincing a positive emotion towards it. MacIntyre rightly exclaims at the badness of Moore's arguments on this subject; I think the fact that they were so influential for so long is something of a scandal in twentieth‐century moral philosophy.
14 A very useful scheme of character‐traits, along with suggestions about their bearings on a person's profession, has been developed, on the basis of Jungian psychology, by Isabel Myers and Katheryn Briggs. See David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, Please Understand Me. Character and Temperament Types (Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis, 1984). A former student of mine had felt discontented and alienated in his family business for some years, took the Myers' Briggs test, and came to understand exactly why. Such tests, put to such uses as this (always assuming, of course, that they are based on sound research), are evidently conducive to human happiness.
15 In Johnny Town‐Mouse, Beatrix Potter makes the sensible point that some people are better suited by life in a town, others by life in the country. What is relevant from the pint of view of an enlightened utilitarianism is not to try to weigh up which way of life is absolutely better, but to ensure that so far as possible persons of each kind are enabled to live in an environment which suits them.
16 MacIntyre, Virtue, 6.
17 As might well happen, for instance, to somone who read Robert Wright's The Moral Animal. The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Random House, 1994)Google Scholar.
18 Dr. Janet Ajzenstadt has remarked, in conversation, that there is no abortion debate. That is to say, it is not characteristic of persons on either side to take note of, let alone seriously respond to, the points made on the other side.
19 MacIntyre, Virtue, 8.
20 Cf. the conclusion of the posthumously published manuscript notes by Sidgwick, included by F. F. Constance Jones in her ‘Preface’ to the sixth edition of Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981), xxii. ‘There was indeed a fundamental opposition between the individual's interest and either morality (i.e., intuitionism and utilitarianism), which I could not solve by any method I had vet found trustworthy, without the assumption of the moral government of the world’ (my italics).
21 Sometimes he seems to imply that we ought to believe in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul because these doctrines are morally desirable; sometimes rather that we should bear them in mind as ideal possibilities.
22 See Matthew 5: 5‐10; 25: 31‐46.
23 MacIntyre, Virtue, 11.
24 It is the principal matter at issue in MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN. University of Notre Dame Press. 1988)Google Scholar.
25 ‘Intuitionism’ in ethics is certainly very liable to this sort of abuse; one is made to feel stupid if one does not share the ‘intuitions’ about what is good or bad of the members of one's society or group who have the greatest prestige. But I think aspects of intuitionism can be rescued. If a person were to doubt, for example, whether in general good action tended to increase happiness, bad action to impugn it, it could reasonably be said that to that extent the person was ignorant of the meanings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
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