by Alasdair MacIntyre (CUP, £15.99 each)
For more than 50 years, Alasdair MacIntyre has been telling us that the world is out of joint. Drawing on the combined resources of Marxism and Christianity, he argues that modernity has been crippled by a catastrophic rift between morality and reality—in other words, between our choices about how to live our lives and the conditions that make rational deliberation possible. And the fact that no one seems particularly bothered is, in his opinion, just another symptom of comprehensive calamity.
MacIntyre has made his case in a hugely impressive series of books and articles and, despite his extraordinary persistence, has never got stuck in a rut. Almost alone among contemporary philosophers, he seems incapable of being a bore. But his combination of pessimism, paradox and dialectical élan has not endeared him to the general public; and the breadth and vehemence of his intellectual commitments have made him persona non grata to the philosophical establishment. For most of his career, he has remained a voice crying in the wilderness.
The only person not celebrating the triumph of virtue ethics is Alasdair MacIntyre himself (pictured, right). If you want to know why, you might go back to the book that started it all—After Virtue, now acknowledged as a kind of classic, though it met with a churlish critical reception when it came out in 1981. MacIntyre did indeed hark back to pre-modern Europe as a happier world, where the vocabulary of virtue and character could be used with an unembarrassed conviction of rationality and truth. But he also argued that this healthy ethical culture depended on forms of communal life that had been shattered by the listless, deracinated atomism of capitalist private property and the modern state, and he did not pretend to know how the damage could be repaired. So morality was left looking like an irretrievable project—a brain-dead zombie, a form without a content, a forlorn relic from a lost world. The idea of refloating virtue ethics as an instrument of social policy would strike the author of After Virtue as a quixotic absurdity, if not blasphemy.
In these two new volumes of selected essays and lectures—as crisp and coruscating as everything else he writes—MacIntyre provides further justifications for his radical pessimism. In a brilliant meditation on "moral philosophy and contemporary social practice" he argues that traditional conceptions of virtue were epistemological as well as ethical. They involved an aspiration towards stable, publicly justifiable practical knowledge, nurtured by social institutions where moral differences could be subjected to intelligent and constructive collaborative discussion. And they issued eventually in new agreements over ultimate ends, both individual and collective, and perhaps in ethical revolutions or the invention of new forms of social life. Once these institutions withered away, we found ourselves in a state of moral solitary confinement: we might approve of other people's moral preferences, or we might find them intolerable, but we could no longer engage with them intellectually. Virtues became hollow social skills rather than vibrant forms of human rationality—no more than useful means towards the attainment of so-called "values" that were not themselves a suitable matter for deliberation. The moral teacher was thus reduced to the status of a lifestyle coach, and moral philosophy was swallowed up by instrumental social policy.
MacIntyre's gloomy diagnosis of what he calls "the politics of ethics" is supported by some incisive discussions of scientific rationality. His main theme is that science is essentially a set of developing social institutions embodying canons of rational appraisal that are themselves subject to constant rational review. It follows that the task of the scientist is not so much to seek out new facts as to sustain and develop a tradition of inquiry, and to do so by offering new accounts of the successes and failures of past theories. Science, in other words, is about fashioning persuasive narratives: far from being an antagonist to historical reason, it is in fact a form of it.
The rationality of morality, such as it is, depends on exactly the same conditions: both science and morality require participation in collaborative traditions of inquiry, and they cannot survive unless they can tell convincing stories about how their current perspectives have grown from an intelligent appraisal of their past. The only difference is that in the case of morality, the thread of intelligible tradition has been damaged beyond repair.
One may well wonder how far MacIntyre's own intellectual career embodies the kind of narrative unity that he regards as the basis of rational progress. He offers a partial answer in an enigmatic but revealing essay that looks back to his first book, Marxism: An Interpretation, published in 1953. MacIntyre wrote this from the perspective of a protestant Christian appealing to his co-religionists to enter into dialogue with the communist world. Marxists were more like a heretical Christian sect than a band of total unbelievers, he argued, and they would make indispensable allies in the Christian struggle against the complacency of modern liberalism. MacIntyre no longer believes in the possibility of reconciliation between Marxism and Christianity—he now identifies himself as a "Thomistic Aristotelian"—but his old hopes seem to have survived, if only in the form of cherished disappointments.
For some reason MacIntyre does not invoke another of his early works—an article written for the New Reasoner in 1958, in which he deplored the political choice that then seemed to be on offer to believers in progress: either to be a grimly realistic Stalinist, for whom moral deliberation must lie down before the juggernaut of history; or to be the kind of self-righteous "moral critic of Stalinism" who cuddles his conscience and refuses to take history seriously. It was one of the founding documents of the old New Left and one of the great political essays of the 20th century, and its title looks like a prophecy of where MacIntyre and many others would still be 50 years later: "Notes from the moral wilderness."
