Anglophone philosophy is a strange beast. Some of its strangeness is shared with other disciplines, such as its over-specialization, development of hermetic jargon, and indifference to work in other languages (for instance, the profound moral and political thought of Chantal Delsol, Pierre Manent, Rémi Brague, and Nicolas Grimaldi remains largely unread by anglophone philosophers). What seems peculiar to philosophy is that some of its most interesting, innovative, and erudite practitioners are read more by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, and others than by philosophers themselves. To some degree this is true of Charles Taylor, despite his many awards and the polite yet limited attention he receives among political philosophers. But it is far truer of Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work is cited usually only to illustrate a radical and misguided form of communitarianism, or as a key catalyst of modern virtue ethics.
To some extent this is unsurprising. MacIntyre has consistently swum against the current in moral and political philosophy. His first book, Marxism and Christianity (1953), gave systematic attention to two movements which most contemporary anglophone philosophers – with their entrenched liberalism and anti-theism – found embarrassing and disreputable. Since then, moreover, MacIntyre has not given an inch to the status quo. Not only did he deepen and widen his critique of moral and political liberalism – most famously in After Virtue (1981) – he also elaborated a Thomistic Aristotelianism in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), which managed to alienate the anglophone consensus still further. His philosophical project, in both its negative and positive aspects, has drawn many admirers. But that it set him at odds with the majority of his colleagues was hardly unexpected.
What, then, do we have in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity? First of all, we have a remarkable consolidation of work that spans over six decades (MacIntyre will be ninety in 2019). After 1953, MacIntyre confined most of his work on Marxism to non-academic magazines and pamphlets, but in this magnum opus Marxist claims and insights make a resounding return, and arguably form its centrepiece. We also have the substantial return of narrative, a theme central to MacIntyre's seminal paper ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science’ (1977), but which (until now) was marginal to his subsequent work. There are, in addition, highly ambitious, synoptic critiques of both ‘Morality’ and expressivism – building on his earlier critiques of normative ethical theory and emotivism respectively – along with a renewed, fortified elaboration of Thomistic Aristotelianism.
The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 explores two conflicting accounts of desire and the ‘good’, viz. those proposed by expressivists on the one hand, and Neo-Aristotelians (including Thomists) on the other. The basic contrast here is as follows: Neo-Aristotelians understand desire as constitutively aimed at various goods, or at least perceived goods, which are assessable by rational standards independent of desire itself; expressivists understand desire as for various objects that vary according to subjective preference – such preferences being mutually consistent or inconsistent, but which lack any constitutive, normative aim, and are not assessable for rational adequacy according to independent normative standards. In a subtle discussion (§1.1) MacIntyre affirms the Thomistic view that all desire thus proceeds sub specie boni, with the vital qualification that mere impulses or momentary whims, together with ‘neurotic desires’ (10), do not so proceed (or do not count as desires proper). It follows that desires in the paradigmatic sense are essentially intelligible, and intelligible in virtue of the good(s) toward which they are directed.
But how are we to analyse the notion of ‘good’ itself? Here MacIntyre follows Peter Geach in arguing for an ‘attributive’ account of ‘good’ (§1.2): that is, the criteria governing its use depend on the nouns to which it is applied. A good amp, for instance, is good qua amp, and even if there is disagreement about what makes for goodness in amps, objective criteria are there to be found. In this way, MacIntyre rejects the expressivist view that ‘good’ merely expresses commendation or approval: we speak of good seducers, but do not thereby approve of seduction. One key upshot of this account is that when a Neo-Aristotelian speaks of desires as subject to normative assessment, this is not yet ethical assessment: the latter depends on considering, more widely, whether the goods one seeks are good for one, or as MacIntyre often puts it, are conducive to one's ‘flourishing’ (§1.4). A second key upshot is that the reduction of normative claims to expressions of commendation, approval, etc., effectively precludes objective evaluative judgements, thereby also precluding valid inferences between them (§1.3). This logical problem, one highlighted again by Geach, poses a significant threat to expressivism.
At this juncture, it might be thought that MacIntyre would dig down into his Geachian account of goodness and attempt to fend off its critics, of which Simon Blackburn and Alan Gibbard are perhaps the best known (19f.). Intriguingly, however, he does not. Instead, he notes the seemingly endless disagreements between expressivists and their opponents, and infers that a more fruitful way ahead is to put the debate on a new dialectical footing. The latter will attend primarily to ‘practice’ (63), rather than to current philosophical theory, and at the core of this new method will be both Marxist and narrative resources: only these, MacIntyre suggests, can secure the Neo-Aristotelian case against expressivism.
But this is to look ahead. The remainder of chapter 1 is devoted centrally to showing how human flourishing is historically and culturally mediated, and thus more complex than Aristotle (or even Aquinas) realized (§1.4). Part of this complexity is filled out by D. W. Winnicott, the child paediatrician and psychoanalyst, who helps us understand how children's desires must be transformed if they are to achieve genuine goods, and thus have a proper chance of flourishing (§1.6). It is also filled out by attending to Aristotle's conception of life as a teleologically ordered whole, one whose final end we can rarely (if ever) approximate without continual dialogue with others (§1.8). Other sections (§§1.5, 7, 9) contain fascinating excursions into relatively hostile territory – populated by Humeans, Nietzscheans, Freudians, and Frankfurtians – whose salvos, though they may protect the expressivist, threaten the Neo-Aristotelian's objectivist and teleological account of desire and the good.
At the end of chapter 1, MacIntyre admits that his argumentative progress has been modest: he has not refuted expressivism, let alone vindicated Neo-Aristotelianism. At most he has clarified the main issues between them, centring on their competing understandings of desire and the good. Furthermore, he acknowledges a glaring lacuna, namely his lack of engagement with normative ethical theories such as Kantianism, utilitarianism, and contractarianism. (Following Bernard Williams, he labels these theories forms of ‘Morality’ (65).) Such Moral theories – unlike expressivism, yet like Neo-Aristotelianism – presuppose an objective good, but give rival and incompatible accounts of it. Indeed, according to MacIntyre (§1.10), like the dispute between Neo-Aristotelians and expressivists, that between rival Moral theorists is seemingly interminable, and not subject to rational resolution. On the one hand, this actually bolsters expressivism: the latter offers an explanation for such irresolvable disagreement – viz. that the contending parties, contra their own self-conception, are in fact merely ‘giving expression to the[ir] different and incompatible prerational commitments’ (67). On the other hand, this stand-off within the Morality camp amounts to a strong reason to press ahead with MacIntyre's method of practice. For that method holds out the prospect of resolving not only the debate between expressivism and Neo-Aristotelianism, but also that between Neo-Aristotelianism and the various partisans of Morality. These two tasks set the agenda, in effect, for the next three chapters.
Chapter 2, entitled ‘Theory, practice, and their social contexts’, broaches these tasks by supplementing Neo-Aristotelianism with elements of Marxism. MacIntyre begins (§2.1) by pinpointing a deformation consequent upon academic specialization, professionalization, and compartmentalization: taken together, these radically occlude the ‘standpoint of practical agency’ (76), which – in and through practical deliberation – integrates complex sets of considerations, and never confines itself to (e.g.) maximizing utility simpliciter, or respecting individuals’ human rights tout court. These master notions within Morality are, according to MacIntyre, ‘philosophical fictions’ (77), which stand in need of actual social and deliberative embodiment. Lest this assertion of the academic ‘mystification’ of practice (to use a Marxist term) be too hard to swallow, MacIntyre provides a helpful example (§2.2): Hume's claim that avarice is a ‘natural’ and ‘universal’ passion. Echoing chapters XV–XVI of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre contends that Hume's view is (to use another Marxist term) an artefact of ‘ideology’: Hume is merely endorsing ‘the values of the eighteenth-century British social and economic order’ (83). In a similar way, many contemporary philosophers – representatives of Morality – accept an increasing number of ‘rights’ to liberty and equality, presenting these as natural and universal. Yet like Hume, they are in fact retailing particular, local values, typical of their class. In this way, MacIntyre adjures, historical enquiry can show how ‘political and moral philosophy is informed by the deformations of [its] own social and cultural order’ (85).
To his credit, MacIntyre grants that even Aristotle is subject to such ideological deformation (§2.3). Aristotle's position as a patrician Greek male led him to cast women, slaves, productive workers, and non-Greeks as rationally defective, and thus as incapable of realizing what he presents (incoherently) as the universal human telos (86). But Aquinas largely rescues Aristotle from these deformations (88) – rendering Thomism the paradigm form of Neo-Aristotelianism for MacIntyre. In illustration of this, he cites Aquinas’ proleptic critique of Hume, in which Aquinas forcefully condemns the desire for riches as such, and denies we have reason to esteem the rich as such (91). These claims were subsequently lent subtlety and depth by Marx (§2.4), with his theory of exploitation and surplus value. It remains the case, however, that Marx's core positions in political economy were elaborations of positions already present in Thomistic Aristotelianism, with its advocacy of the common good under the natural law, and concomitant deprecation of pleonexia (viz. the desire for inordinate gain).
The tragedy is that this Thomist-cum-Marxist platform – which for MacIntyre represents the antithesis of ideology and the apogee of practical clear-sightedness – came to face severe opposition in the twentieth century (opposition far more influential than Hume's). For the new discipline of economics (§2.5) adopted a conception of practical rationality as the maximization of preference satisfaction, thereby sidelining the Thomist-cum-Marxist subordination of the individual good to the common good (102). This modern hallowing of pleonexia has since developed into an ideology of immense institutional power, which Marxists and Thomist distributivists (§2.6) have challenged, but been unable to overturn.
Chapter 2 ends (§2.7) on a monitory note: the theoretical triumph of pleonexia, despite its manifold practical failures (financial crises, vast inequalities, decreased human flourishing), should alert us to the power of ideology, and the need for what MacIntyre terms ‘sociological self-knowledge’ (112). The latter requires a kind of asceticism, or intellectual and affective discipline, whereby we humbly acknowledge the bearing of our social roles on practice. Academics, for example, can all too easily further, or at least condone, social deprivation and marginalization. We must all be ruthlessly honest about this, MacIntyre contends, and call one another to account for such professional deformation.
Chapter 3 applies this ‘enlarged conception of rational justification’ (113) to Morality. At a theoretical level, the latter is a mélange of normative ethical theories (§3.1), proposing absolute prohibitions here, and the maximization of pleasure there, but all the while offering no governing principles with which to solve the dilemmas it creates. At a practical level (§3.2), Morality is at home in a capitalist environment, which stimulates desires inordinately, and discourages reflection on their justification. This MacIntyre summarizes as the ‘ethics of the market’, which is accompanied by the ‘ethics of the state’ (§3.3), a bureaucratic, impersonal, law- and contract-bound set of norms, the nominal egalitarianism of which is undermined by the pervasive influence of wealth (127). In this way, the practical matches the theoretical incoherence of Morality (§§3.4, 5, 6): agents are buffeted by the changing exigencies of state and market, but owing to the procedural ‘neutralism’ of the former, and pleonectic imperative of the latter, they find any objective and stable ordering of goods in their lives difficult if not impossible to achieve. It is this situation of ethical bewilderment and impasse that leads MacIntyre back to expressivism (§3.7). For only the latter, he argues, can capture the parlous condition of Morality, which is a mere parody of a genuinely objective ethics (128). Indeed, it is understood best as a multi-layered pretence, laying claim to objectively ordered values, but in fact collapsing into the expression of fluid, ungrounded subjective preference.
This harsh verdict on Morality does not, however, spell the final demise of non-Neo-Aristotelian objective ethics. The rest of chapter 3 is devoted to three authors who, although unwilling to embrace any form of Neo-Aristotelian, teleological ethics, take objective, non-expressivist ethics seriously enough to wish to salvage it. The three authors MacIntyre chooses (with striking adventurousness) are Oscar Wilde (§3.8), D. H. Lawrence (§3.9), and Bernard Williams (§§3.10, 11), each of whom – from his own professional standpoint – propounds an anti-Moral, artistically inflected ethics. Wilde lauds aesthetic education, while Lawrence lauds emotional education, yet both present the deliverances of these as sufficiently well-founded and objective that they can override the stale injunctions of Morality (in their case, a Puritan Christian morality of prohibition and command). Williams builds on both artists, affirming Wilde's idea that aesthetic achievement can trump Moral duty (see his discussion of Paul Gauguin in ‘Moral Luck’), and showing great sympathy for Lawrence's ethics of authenticity and self-expression (150). But despite his respect for Williams, MacIntyre concludes that his ethical alternative to Morality cannot avoid ‘inarticulateness and . . . significant error’ (156). This is because Williams insulates first-personal authenticity from third-personal (and hence wider, social) critique, and moreover provides no objective ranking of goods in light of which such critique can proceed. This yields inevitable inarticulacy, which is compounded by the error of rejecting (throughout his career) all forms of Aristotelian teleology. Showing this is indeed an error is MacIntyre's principal task in his fourth chapter.
Chapter 4 is dense and rich, constituting the book's philosophical dénouement. In it MacIntyre adumbrates his ‘politics of local community and conflict’ (§4.2, 3), recapitulates the centrality of human practice as conveyed through narrative or ‘story’ (§§4.9, 10, 12, 13), and (of immediate interest to mainstream anglophone philosophers) engages in a lengthy rebuttal of Williams's critique of Aristotelian ethics (§4.11). The rest of the chapter tackles various outstanding disputes between Neo-Aristotelians and their rivals: the practical rationality of seeking common goods versus rational choice theory (§4.4, 5), eudaimonia versus subjective well-being (§4.6, 7), and integrated versus compartmentalized (or ‘fractured’) roles and norms (§4.1, 8). I shall focus on MacIntyre's engagement with Williams.
MacIntyre's first main target is Williams's claim, echoed by Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, that ‘Aristotle is mistaken in thinking that there is any such thing as the good life for human agents’ (222). To this MacIntyre responds that there are at least eight categories of good which ‘it would be difficult to deny’ contribute to the good life (here one is reminded of John Finnis's natural law ethics, which specifies seven such categories). These are: health, material goods that free one from destitution, good family relationships, a decent education, rewarding work, good friends, fruitful leisure, and the ability to order one's life. The more of these goods a life contains, the better it is – and on this, MacIntyre avers, ‘there is in fact a surprising amount of agreement’ (223). It follows that what makes a life go badly, or fail to reach its proper telos, will also elicit substantial agreement: namely, circumstances or actions that deprive one of one or more of the above goods. From these base-level agreements, MacIntyre contends, the Neo-Aristotelian can infer a set of virtues and vices, which promote human goods and evils respectively (223). He or she can also infer that it is vicious to seek pleasure, power, or money per se, since none of these is an intrinsic good: pleasure is bad when it is has evil objects, and both power and money are purely instrumental goods.
Of course beyond these core agreements, there will be many disagreements. So how to deal with these? Here MacIntyre reinvokes what he takes to be a systematic weakness in Williams's ethical vision: ‘Williams's insistence on the first person character, a first person that is an “I”, not a “we”, of all practical deliberation that is an authentic expression of the agent’ (224). This emphasis on authenticity sidelines, and even precludes, shared deliberation with precisely those others who are relevant to deciding how to order various individual and common goods. (MacIntyre's engaging narratives of such shared deliberation – e.g. within a Danish fishing community, or a Brazilian favela (§4.3) – provide examples of what he has in mind.) Williams also errs in failing to appreciate the Aristotelian axiom that rationality or logos is the distinctive mark of humans: ‘Quite as distinctive, so he argues, is their capacity for falling helplessly in love’ (225). But although Williams is right that human affective life is distinct from that of other animals, it is so largely because it is infused with rationality: only humans can ask, for instance, ‘Is it a good thing or a bad thing to fall helplessly in love?’, and transform their desires accordingly (226). More widely, then, although humans share much with other species, what marks them out is the capacity to reflect on their ends, and order them so that, as a whole, their lives end up more flourishing than failing. And this requires, in turn, avoiding (e.g.) compartmentalized and hedonistic living, which cannot but hamper one's final telos (228–229). If Williams had reflected more on such general teleological truths, MacIntyre implies, he too would have found some form of Aristotelianism irresistible.
Chapter 5, with its extended narratives of four twentieth-century lives, rounds off this magisterial volume, underlining its thesis that only in and through narrative can Aristotle's claims about teleology, flourishing, and common goods be properly grasped and appreciated. Interestingly, three of these narratives (those of Vasily Grossman, C. L. R. James, and Monsignor Denis Faul) portray lives heavily involved with Marxism. And this underscores the degree to which MacIntyre has, towards the end of his impressively long career, managed to overcome a compartmentalization that afflicted most of it. For as I mentioned above, his work on Marxism has until now been aimed at mainly non-academic audiences.
But this raises the question of whether he has replaced one form of ‘double life’ (166, 248, 293) – philosopher/Marxist – with another: philosopher/Catholic Christian. For it is noticeable how, although religious commitment is evident in this text, it is carefully sequestered from the main line of argument. MacIntyre argues not for a variety of Thomism, but rather for an awkward hybrid, ‘Thomistic Aristotelianism’, or ‘NeoAristotelianism developed in contemporary Thomistic terms’ (166). Granted, there are several passages concerning God as our final end, but these are highly tentative. MacIntyre speaks, for instance, of the ‘directedness of . . . life, if not toward God, at least beyond finitude’ (56), and finishes the book by referring to ‘a good toward which desire tends insofar as it remains unsatisfied by even the most desirable of finite goods, as in good lives it does’ (315). But there are no biblical narratives, or lives of modern saints; and only brief mentions of the Jesuits in New Spain (99), and Cardinal Manning (107), who seem to earn a mention in virtue of their proto- or quasi-Communist credentials.
To this it may be objected that philosophy is one thing, theology another – and indeed MacIntyre's final two sentences suggest this. ‘But here the enquiries of politics and ethics end’, he declares – ‘Here natural theology begins’ (315). But is this not precisely the kind of compartmentalization and specialization which he decries in the rest of the book? Arguably, there is no such neat distinction to be made. And if not, we should ask ourselves where a more theologically informed approach might lead. It might lead, I suggest, to a more circumspect embrace of narrative as a substantive source of philosophical reflection. For what biblical narratives show beyond doubt is a set of strong metaphysical commitments, which require detailed philosophical investigation (and perhaps also revision or repudiation). Narrative per se, however, cannot determine the outcome of such investigation. A more theologically informed approach might also generate a less critical account of modern capitalist economy. This is certainly true of the work of Samuel Gregg, which deploys Catholic natural law and social teaching, along with an explicit range of biblical references, to argue for economic conclusions far less localist – and far more liberal – than MacIntyre would countenance. I am not qualified to anticipate the outcome of such a contretemps, but I think it needs to take place. As things stand, MacIntyre's localism seems to occlude the structural priority of the global economy, and his characterization of the latter largely in terms of pleonexia seems insufficiently nuanced to do the analytic and critical work required of it.
Turning to the philosophical core of this astonishingly wide-ranging work, I want to raise a few questions about its advocacy of Neo-Aristotelianism, and its critique of both expressivism and ‘Morality’. Adherents of Kantianism, utilitarianism, and contractarianism will find MacIntyre's treatment of these unsatisfying, since he refuses on principle to engage with them as philosophical theories (§1.10), and treats them rather as a confused amalgam which subtends everyday practice and debate. Since I agree that these Moral theories are weak on either construal, I shall address Neo-Aristotelianism and expressivism instead. MacIntyre acknowledges that expressivists usefully raise the problem of how normative judgements motivate, even though (on his view) they wrongly deny the motivating power of matters of fact, at least when these concern what agents ‘have learned to understand as their goods and good’ (140). He acknowledges, further, that expressivists give the best account of the interminable disputes between adherents of Morality: ‘each contending party's Moral judgements give expression to underlying prerational commitments, to attitudes and sentiments that find expression in the unargued premises of their arguments’ (141). But even if one is sympathetic to these conclusions, it remains a real question, I think, whether MacIntyre has done enough to show that Neo-Aristotelianism is not itself merely another member of that hapless theoretical-cum-practical family, ‘Morality’ – a family espousing ethical objectivism, but which collapses ultimately into an expressivist heap. On what grounds do I say this?
My main ground is that it is uncertain whether MacIntyre has made good on his claim that only Neo-Aristotelianism ‘captures certain truths about human beings, truths that we acknowledge in our everyday practices even when they are inconsistent with the way in which we represent ourselves to ourselves [as Moralists or expressivists]’ (201–202). His central reason for holding this is that in practice we cannot help affirming that our life is a teleologically ordered whole, whose final end is flourishing, and that we move towards flourishing when we pursue objective goods, and move towards failure when we pursue objective evils. But is it not possible that MacIntyre's posited final end, together with the specific ‘goods’ which he claims constitute it, are simply an expression of his own, personal – perhaps class-, culture-, and family-informed – desires? After all, it is hardly unaccountable, psychologically and sociologically, that someone born in depression-era Scotland would wish for a revolutionary transformation of society, and be attracted to a religion promising the redemption of suffering. But that such desires, wishes, and attractions also establish – and serve to identify – the final and objective good of humanity seems quite another matter. Perhaps an accurate narrative of MacIntyre's life would reveal that idea as little more than wishful (if also highly original and intelligent) thinking. Many, myself included, hope not.
