Those who take this study of Alasdair MacIntyre's thought in hand will likely be tempted to turn immediately to the book's third and final part where it is asked, ‘where exactly, after all the intellectual and social history, the comparative vistas and the wealth of historical detail, does MacIntyre stand on the normative question in ethics’ (385)? Yet a patient study of the preceding chapters will dispel any illusion that the question lends itself to a simple, straightforward answer. For regardless of how one judges his work, MacIntyre has been singularly successful in drawing attention to the enormous complexity of moral questions. While launching a vigorous campaign against the overly abstract formality of theoretical ethics, he has continually rebuffed accusations of moral relativism and subjectivism. While underlining the importance of historical contingency and cultural context for ethics, he has refused to relinquish his hold on legitimate claims to moral objectivity. MacIntyre has never shied away from pointing to the serious maladies that cripple modern society's ability to think clearly through moral questions, but he does not hesitate to do so before having fully developed an antidote.
D'Andrea takes us on an exhaustive tour through the half century spanning from The Significance of Moral Judgements (1951) to Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913–1922 (2005). His aim is to represent ‘MacIntyre's thought from the inside - an internal perspective on his work through which the system-under-construction that brings his thought together and the internal logic of that quasi-system can be brought into clearer view’ (xiii). Given that D'Andrea proceeds through MacIntyre's oeuvre in chronological fashion, often stopping to dissect MacIntyre's arguments as if under a microscope, the book does indeed reflect the ‘system-under-construction’, though it devotes less time to synthesizing the system's various components. Such synthesis is by no means absent, but only the most ambitious and/or patient reader will be able to digest the rich fare of minutiae in the interim.
The book is appropriately divided into three sections corresponding to the ante, in, and post phases of the After Virtue project. The breadth of D'Andrea's familiarity with MacIntyre's corpus enables him to draw connections between the latter's ethical theory and his underlying metaphysics, psychology, and philosophy of religion. In fact, one of the most significant merits of this book is that it highlights MacIntyre's constant endeavor to embed ethics in the web of social and communal realities unique to human existence. The industrial revolution, MacIntyre has argued, ushered in a radically new way of relating to both neighbor and stranger, and ethical philosophy has never adequately taken stock of the implications this transformation has had for moral discourse. Ethical theory has made the fatal mistake of jettisoning other fields of knowledge, making it practically impossible to construct a robust framework for understanding why human beings constantly strive to adhere to shared moral standards.
Even while writing his MA thesis, The Significance of Moral Judgements (1951), MacIntyre believed that moral judgements lack the level of certainty characteristic of other judgements. But he was equally convinced that within a given set of circumstances, evaluative judgements are perfectly warranted. Justifying evaluative discourse may not be easy, but we must not be afraid to employ a unique form of logic that draws inferences from ‘patterns’ of action and judgement (17). From the start, therefore, MacIntyre set the parameters which would shape his thinking even when it seemed he had entirely changed directions. He perceived the need to accept the contingency and historicity of ethical phenomena while simultaneously placing evaluative judgements and moral criteria within the horizon of rational certainty.
One of D'Andrea's goals is to identify the factors that have inhibited MacIntyre from asserting full objectivism at different points over his career. According to D'Andrea, at the time of The Significance of Moral Judgements and A Short History of Ethics (1966), MacIntyre was unable to distinguish between the Aristotelian notions of accidental form and essential human nature. Though this may be true, it would have been helpful if the author had woven this critical observation into the fabric of the preceding narrative so that the reader would have a way of situating MacIntyre within the wider history of philosophy.
The second factor that held MacIntyre back from unmitigated objectivism was, in D'Andrea's estimation, his adherence to Marx's notion of the class-dependency of practical reasoning. Indeed, the influence of Marxism on MacIntyre is a focal point of D'Andrea's analysis. According to MacIntyre, Marxism held the most potential for conveying Christian ideas once their original metaphysical basis had eroded; Marxism was an inevitable reaction to the idea, most prominent in Hegel and Feuerbach, that Christianity can be reduced to a this-worldly promise of redemption realizable simply through ‘hard thinking’. MacIntyre found such a vacuous notion of praxis completely unconvincing. He was sympathetic to Marx's attempt to articulate a thoughtful response. However, D'Andrea believes that any accusation of a full and uncritical embrace of Marxism on the part of MacIntyre is utterly unfounded. Historical data alone had convinced MacIntyre of the falsifiability of Marx's critique of capitalism, inasmuch as the latter's prophecies never materialized.
In the early 1970s, MacIntyre shifted his attention to the modern social condition and its pressing relevance for moral argument. At this point, he deemed Aristotle too elitist and Aquinas too inaccessible to the contemporary imagination to have any significant impact. Figures such as Vico, Hegel, and Herder continued to hold sway for MacIntyre due to their acute historical sensibility. Yet as the decade progressed, MacIntyre was drawn more and more to the unshakeable role of ‘rules of practice’ in ethics. Such rules, he argued, demonstrate that ‘truth’ is both constituted by tradition and constitutive of tradition. D'Andrea sees here MacIntyre's preliminary answer to the normative question in ethics: normativity derives from ‘the history and internal objective teleology, as it were, of practices’ (69). According to MacIntyre, the great tragedy of post-Kantian ethics is that the individual has been abstracted from the community and its underlying moral tradition. In his groundbreaking essay of 1978, ‘How to Identify Ethical Principles’, MacIntyre argued that the notion of virtue, despite the wide variety of its formulations, has the power to ground the kind of impersonal authority which we desperately need to guide our ethical lives. He even identifies three basic virtues - truthfulness, fairness, and courage - from which further principles of action can be deduced.
MacIntyre's preoccupation with the distinctive purposefulness of human action and the type of rationality it entails, his conviction of the inextricable link between ethics and history, and his deep dissatisfaction with the analytic tradition, impelled him to embark on the After Virtue project. D'Andrea describes this centerpiece as ‘a kind of manifesto for those who share MacIntyre's belief that our present moral predicament can and should be understood in a historical light’ (225). At the same time, he emphasizes that rather than solving the problem, MacIntyre's primary intent was to show why it went undetected for so long. Lacking an acute historical sensitivity, analytic philosophy was ill-equipped to deal with the problem, as were emotivism and consequentialism. MacIntyre begins an argument which he would take up seven years later in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Namely, if we set aside the artificial notion that morality is absolutely autonomous and grant that there are manifest ends and purposes in the realm of human action, then we must allow for an intrinsic connection between human action and human well-being. The argument thus turns upon the visibility of ends and purposes, as these are what distinguish ethical reasoning from mathematics, logic, and other sciences.
Anyone who wishes to take MacIntyre seriously must confront the formidable question of how virtue-based ethics relates to religion, particularly Christianity. D'Andrea accepts the challenge. Laying the groundwork of MacIntyre's philosophy of religion before moving to explore its explicit connection to ethics, D'Andrea expresses admiration for MacIntyre's justification for analogical language in religious discourse. He is all the more impressed by the fact that MacIntyre seems to have accomplished this without any direct assistance from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in which the doctrine of analogy is most refined. On the other hand, D'Andrea points to notable lacunae in MacIntyre's critique of the cosmological and teleological arguments for God's existence. He also regrets that MacIntyre was ambiguous as to whether the notion of ‘religious attitude’ pertains primarily to Christianity or to religion in general. Conversely, D'Andrea finds considerable merit in MacIntyre's critique of Christian philosophical and theological ethics, which MacIntyre judged wholly ineffectual for addressing contemporary social questions. In a series of 1966 lectures entitled ‘The Debate about God: Victorian Relevance and Contemporary Irrelevance’, MacIntyre argued that Christianity was left with three choices. It could retreat into isolationism, engage modern culture with an eye fixed on Christianity's glorious past, or zero in on the core beliefs of Christianity and re-present them in a way that accords with the prevailing secular epistemological standards.
By the late 1970s, MacIntyre began to flesh out an argument for this type of re-presentation. The theist, he claimed, needs to show that the standard of justice which we reasonably attribute to God is precisely that which is discoverable to human reason. The theist needs to argue that ‘for God to be just and reasonable in His actions, according to the best human standards for these, is simply for Him to be Himself’ (162). D'Andrea glosses over the apparent circularity of MacIntyre's reasoning, but he does draw attention to a crucial turning point in the latter's thought concerning not only the reasonableness of theistic moral discourse, but even its possible superiority for interrelating the concepts of ‘law’, ‘virtue’, and ‘moral authority’. In regard to the relationship between reason and faith, D'Andrea summarizes MacIntyre's journey as one moving from a Thomist viewpoint that allows some Christian tenets (and not others) to be rationally justifiable, to a Barthian position in which Christianity exists as a self-enclosed form of life, and finally to a version of Thomism in which natural knowledge inclines one towards Christian revelation and informs its theological formulations.
D'Andrea covers a vast amount of MacIntyre's scholarly output without neglecting important secondary literature. He can hardly be criticized for a lack of thoroughness. Yet one has to wonder whether this is the type of book that will ultimately assist readers in assimilating MacIntyre's complex thought. One can easily overlook the forest while inspecting the individual trees. Granted, few thinkers are as innovative and eclectic as MacIntyre, and it is not easy to synthesize the many twists and turns of his curriculum. D'Andrea himself describes MacIntyre as one who has ‘consistently been a pathbreaker, initiating topics of philosophical investigation and conversation and then moving on to new areas’ (xv). D'Andrea deserves credit for skillfully tracing some tortuous lines stretching over half a century, but those in search of a more compressed synthesis of MacIntyre's thought would best look elsewhere.
