After Virtue

9/15/2012

2 Comments

 
Hey all,

I am, finally, reading Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue".  I can now join Tavs in the "Alasdair MacIntyre Fan Club."  The book is fantastic. 

At the outset, MacIntyre argues, "Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.  Riots occur, labs are burned down, books and instruments are destroyed.  Much later, enlightened people try to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was.  All they possess are fragments; parts of theories; half-chapters from books; instruments whose use is forgotten.

They lump together these fragments and continue to use the old names of physics, chemistry and biology.  They learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid.  But what they are doing is not science at all.  For everything they do and say only makes sense within certain canons of consistency and coherence- which have been lost, perhaps irretrievably."

This is exactly what has occurred, argues MacIntyre, to our language of morality.  I was quite skeptical at first, but his argument grows more and more compelling.  He also includes a Who's Who of references to many of our PLS authors (Kant, Mill, Aquinas) -- and makes fun of almost all of them.  In many ways, "After Virtue" is re-shaping a lot of my basic assumptions.

A later section decries the way that Philosophy and History have been divorced (Adam, this made me think of you, with your interest in the intersection of those disciplines):
"There ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. 

As a result of the separation between Philosophy and History, ideas are now endowed with a falsely independent life of their own on the one hand.  Political and social action is presented as peculiarly mindless on the other."

I suggest that you read "After Virtue".  If you have already read it, what do you think?  I would like to discuss it once I finish.  Perhaps over a beer.  Come visit me in Philadelphia.  All of you.

-LC
2 Comments
Adam
9/15/2012 04:26:54 am

I'm glad you're enjoying After Virtue. I read it last summer after graduation; it's definitely one of my favorite books, and no doubt one of the most important and controversial works in 20th century moral philosophy.

My only two problems with the books are his scathing critiques of Kierkegaard and capitalism. A lot could be said here.

Regarding Kierkegaard, I’m not going to argue that Kierkegaard espouses anything like the virtue ethics of MacIntyre, but I do think that MacIntyre’s reading of Kierkegaard as a moral relativist overlooks the key point of Either/Or: that morality comes from God, not from man. I think that many of Kierkegaard’s points about moral character and the importance of tradition are applicable to virtue ethics.

Regarding capitalism, I think it comes down to whether or not one values material progress. It seems like MacIntyre does so long as it is distributed ‘fairly’ (I don’t know what criteria one would use to determine this). However, the burden is on the communitarians and socialists to prove that their views can more adequately meet the challenges of a highly advanced economy. The profit motive seems to me to be a tolerable evil if we are to have a modern economy. At least in capitalism individuals are free to act virtuously with their capital, benefiting the communities to which they owe their livelihood. Why would we expect the government to act more virtuously than individuals?

What I like most about MacIntyre is his synthesis of philosophy and history. Can philosophy demonstrate certain conclusions transcendentally and a priori or are all philosophical views merely reflections of the historical period in which they exist? MacIntyre seems to solve this perennial question brilliantly, espoused most clearly in his Postscript to the Second Edition. I’m not going to go through the entire argument, but basically he says that philosophy can make progress, but only within a shared historical tradition and under the assumption that it has never reached absolute knowledge: “So we ought to aspire to provide the best theory so far as to what type of theory the best theory so far must be: no more, but no less.”

I think ultimately MacIntyre is right in his conclusion that virtue ethics are incompatible with our current moral and political schemes and that we must “construct 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.” In today’s political environment, there is no talk about virtue, but much talk about ‘progress’ and moving ‘forward’. But where are we moving towards? And how will we know once we get there? I think that people fail to realize that any ‘progress’ that has been made in modernity has taken place within a broad yet definable shared tradition, namely, European Christian civilization. Indeed, the criteria of ‘progress’ is only intelligible when viewed from within the framework of such a tradition. If we destroy the cultural, intellectual, and religious tradition in which our views of ‘progress’ are imbedded, then we will no doubt also loose any conception of ‘progress’. The end result will be an extreme form of unintelligibility that MacIntyre describes at the beginning of his book.

I’m glad we’re keeping up with our intellectual development. Coincidently, I just started reading Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age”. Taylor is a friend of MacIntyre and presents a Hegelian philosophical-historical view of the emergence of modernity, ultimately arguing that we have made some ‘progress’ (which MacIntyre believes too, I think). For a more deeply conservative view of modernity, see Michael Gillespie’s “The Theological Origins of Modernity”. He argues that modernity has its roots in non-Trinitarian theological views. Interesting stuff!

A.P.F.

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Lillian
9/17/2012 10:24:23 am

Adam,

Thanks for your thoughts. Obviously I shall have to hasten through the book before I can properly respond (only about 1/3 there right now). Your comments have made me even more excited to continue.

"In today’s political environment, there is no talk about virtue, but much talk about ‘progress’ and moving ‘forward’. But where are we moving towards? And how will we know once we get there?" -- very well said. It is profoundly true that an individual and a society need a "telos" in order to have true achievement. Our aimless society seems to descend into anarchy.

As Whittaker Chambers said, "It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth."

-LC

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