Summary of After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

The Enlightenment project for morality has failed. The limited expertise of our governing elites cannot justify the vast power they claim. And navigating a way out of our current societal malaise requires us to resurrect an older form of morality.

That is a crude albeit faithful summary of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, first published in 1981. In making such claims the book has proved to be prescient: the faltering hegemony of liberalism and recurrent surges of anti-elite sentiment across the West testify to that. But can the solution to our malaise really lie in the resurrection of a form of ethics first outlined by Aristotle and later integrated into Christianity by Thomas Aquinas?

For MacIntyre, the answer is yes. His book aims to chart a way out of our moral dark age by reintroducing the idea of a telos into morality: the idea that things have a given end or purpose, and something is “good” if it helps the object or entity attain that end.

To understand why he sees this as an attractive idea, we must first engage with his critique of modern morality — which he sees as a kind of cargo cult where people are using moral terms despite moral discourse long having entered a state of incoherence.

To convince us of this view, he surveys the main moral philosophies of the past couple of centuries.

Critique of Modern Morality

Among his targets are those who sought to show that rationality could supply morality with foundations, such as Rawls. The reason he gives is “if those who claim to be able to formulate principles on which rational moral agents ought to agree cannot secure agreement on the formulation of those principles from their colleagues who share their basic philosophical purpose and method, there is once again prima facie evidence that their project has failed.”

Søren Kierkegaard

A different critique is applied to Kierkegaard, who posited that one has to choose between the ethical way of the life and the aesthetic way of life. This is not a choice between good and evil, but rather “whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.” Choosing the aesthetic mode is to attempt to lose oneself in present experience, much as the lover loses himself in passion. In contrast, the ethical mode is likened to marriage, where the present is bound by commitment and obligation to both the past and the future. For MacIntyre, there is a contradiction here: how can something one chooses come to have authority over us?

He then moves on to Kant. Central to Kant’s moral philosophy is the idea “if the rules of philosophy are rational, they must be the same for all rational beings”. By what process does Kant derive such rules? One possibility is to infer whether obedience to the rule would lead to the happiness of the rational being who obeys it. But Kant rejects this criterion, as he believed that our conception of happiness changes too frequently to provide a consistent guide.

Immanuel Kant

Kant also rejected the view according to which a rule is valid if it is commanded by God. Even if we could establish that God has mandated a maxim, how could we know that we ought to do what God commands? We would need to possess a moral standard independent of God in order to know whether he was worthy of obedience — but such a standard would render God and his commandments superfluous.

Ultimately, Kant settled on a test whereby a rational morality will lay down rules which can be held by all people, in all situations, at all times. This leads to maxims such as ‘Always tell the truth’, ‘Always keep promises’, ‘Be benevolent to those in need’ and ‘Do not commit suicide’.

But MacIntyre notes that absurd maxims such as ‘Always eat mussels on Mondays in March’, and ‘persecute all those who hold false religious beliefs’ would also pass Kant’s test. One can avoid such trivial maxims by invoking Kant’s assertion that people should always be treated as ends in themselves, and not as means. But for MacIntyre, Kant provides no good reasons for this assertion. ‘Let everyone except me be treated as a means’ could thus also be a maxim consistent with Kant’s schema.

Jeremy Bentham

There were many other attempts to establish a rational basis for morality. Take Bentham’s utilitarianism, where maximising pleasure and minimising pain becomes society’s objective. This view would later be qualified somewhat by Mill, who drew a distinction between higher and lower pleasures, and linked the growth of human creativity to increases in human happiness.

MacIntyre rejects utilitarianism because he considers many different types of pleasure and happiness to be incommensurable. For example, the life of the monk and the soldier both entail a different kind of happiness. By what criteria can one choose one type of happiness over the other?

The rights-based approach of Gewirth in Reason and Morality (1978) is also examined. For MacIntyre, the key claim of Gewirth’s book is as follows: to exercise rational agency, one needs freedom and well-being. As these are necessary to be rational, the rational agent is committed to asserting that he has a right to these.[1]

MacIntyre objects to this on the grounds that rights always have a specific local character, and have not even existed universally in human societies. He notes that “there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century.” (p. 69)

If we concede that rational agents existed before 1400, it is no longer tenable to assert that a right belongs to the “minimal characterisation of an agent”.

But the main target of his critique is emotivism, a philosophical movement that formed at around the start of the 20th century which held that moral judgements are simply statements of preference. For C.L. Stevenson, one of emotivism’s principal proponents, the sentence ‘This is good’ was essentially equivalent to ‘I approve of this; do so as well.’

MacIntyre dismisses emotivism as circular. If moral statements represent approval, then what kind of approval? An emotivist either has no answer to this question, or must answer moral approval — in which case the justification becomes “vacuously circular”. In contrast, MacIntyre maintains that there is a distinction between normal approval and moral approval — normal approval represents personal preference whereas moral approval is an evaluative expression independent of the context of utterance and the individuals involved. This key difference is something emotivism cannot account for and indeed rejects.

Alasdair MacIntyre.
Source: Sean O’Connor

So the course of history has left us with all these different moral schema, but no universal standard with which to decide between them. This is the moral disaster which MacIntyre opens the book by describing. But his criticism of modernity is not exclusively philosophical, and rights and utility are not the only things he sees as fictions. One chapter consists of a lengthy broadside against what he sees as the defining characters of modernity — the Rich Aesthete, the Therapist, and the Manager. Let us concentrate on his critique of the manager, who he sees as claiming authority at a level far beyond what their expertise warrants.

The managerial and bureaucratic claim to authority is based two claims. First, value neutrality which requires “the existence of a domain of morally neutral fact about which the manager is to be expert”. Second, systematic effectiveness which requires “a collection of law-like generalisations with strong predictive power.”

But can one really disentangle facts and values? Probably not: the values and theories one has acquired heavily influence how one sees the world, and thus how “facts” are perceived. MacIntyre provides two examples:

The twentieth-century observer looks into the night sky and sees stars and planets; some earlier observers saw instead chinks in a sphere through which the light beyond could be observed. What each observer takes himself or herself to perceive is identified and has to be identified by theory-laden concepts. (p. 79)

The belief that Jupiter has seven moons is put to the test of observation through a telescope; but the observation itself has to be vindicated by the theories of geometrical optics. Theory is required to support observation, just as much as observation theory. (p. 81)

The idea of a realm of fact independent of theories thus dismissed, how does he dismiss the idea of a realm of facts and laws independent of values? For this, he draws on Quine who argued that for a science of human behaviour to exist – and thus a set of laws to be established – all references to human beliefs, intentions and purposes would need to be eliminated for two reasons:

Sentences of the form ‘X believes that p’ (or for that matter, ‘X enjoys its being the case that p’ or ‘X fears that p’) have an internal complexity which is not truth-functional, which is to say that they cannot be mapped on to the predicate calculus; and in this they differ in a crucial respect from the sentences used to express the laws of physics. Secondly, the concept of a state or belief or enjoyment or fear involves too many contestable and doubtful cases to furnish the kind of evidence we need to confirm or disconfirm claims to have discovered a law. (p. 83)

Without a realm of fact independent of theories and values, the claim to systematic effectiveness is also cast into doubt as laws of general behaviour can no longer be firmly established.

Here, MacIntyre makes two claims, partly building on the above. First, in the social sciences the paucity of laws results in a poor record of predictive success. Consider economists:

No economist predicted ‘stagflation’ before it occurred, the writings of monetary theorists have signally failed to predict the rates of inflation correctly (Levy 1975) and D.J.C. Smyth and J.C.K. Ash have shown that the forecasts produced on the basis of the most sophisticated economic theory for OECD since 1967 have produced less successful predictions than would have been arrived at by using the commonsense, or as they say, naive methods of forecasting rates of growth by taking the average rate of growth for the last ten years as a guide or rates of inflation by assuming that the next six months will resemble the last six months (Smyth and Ash 1975).

Even worse than economists, most sociologists and political scientists keep no systematic records of their predictions:

In the notorious article by Karl Deutsch, John Platt and Dieter Senghors (Science, March 1971) where sixty-two alleged major social science achievements are listed it is impressive that in not a single case is the predictive power of the theories listed assessed in statistical terms—a wise precaution, given the authors’ point of view. (p. 89)

If elite competence is a fiction, then so must be their idea of success. This definition is best illustrated by Goffman’s sociology, which MacIntryre summarises and evaluates as follows:

Because success is whatever passes for success, it is in the regard of others that I prosper or fail to prosper; hence the importance of presentation as a—perhaps the central—theme. Goffman’s social world is one of which a thesis that Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics considers only to reject is true: the good for man, consists in the possession of honor, honor being precisely whatever embodies and expresses the regard of others. Aristotle’s reason for rejecting this thesis is to the point. We honor others, he says, in virtue of something that they are or have done to merit the honor; honor cannot therefore be at best more than secondary good.

But the predictive failure and declining status of modern elites has not yet resulted in society questioning the fictional morality and definition of success propagated by those elites.

This recalls the claims made by Nietzsche. But MacIntyre has some harsh words for Nietzsche’s ideas, which he summarised as follows: 

If there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates. There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. I myself must now bring into existence ‘new tables of what is good’… The rational and rationally justified autonomous moral subject of the eighteenth century is a fiction, an illusion; so, Nietzsche resolves, let will replace reason and let us make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will, an act of the will that by its quality may remind us of that archaic aristocratic self-assertiveness which preceded what Nietzsche took to be the disaster of slave-morality and which by its effectiveness may be the prophetic precursor of a new era. (pp. 113-114)

For MacIntyre, Nietzsche has “illegitimately generalized from the condition of moral judgment in his own day to the nature of morality as such (p. 113).” Nietzsche thus “conceded the substance of that for which emotivism contended” and the idea of the Übermensch belongs “in the pages of a philosophical bestiary rather than in serious discussion.”

The Aristotelian Framework

If Nietzsche’s solution is untenable, then what is the way forward for MacIntyre? He turns to an older form or morality, most notably outlined by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics:

It was because a moral tradition of which Aristotle’s thought was the intellectual core was repudiated during the transitions of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that the Enlightenment project of discovering new rational secular foundations for morality had to be undertaken. And it was because that project failed, because the views advanced by its most intellectually powerful protagonists, and more especially by Kant, could not be sustained in the face of rational criticism that Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors were able to mount their apparently successful critique of all previous morality. Hence the defensibility of the Nietzschean position turns in the end on the answer to the question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle? (p. 117)

Aristotle

The idea of a telos and virtue are central to the Aristotelian framework. Telos can be understood as purpose or end: the ideal point or climax towards which one’s life is moving — and it is also possible for an entire society to have a telos.

In a teleological framework, ethics can then be understood as that which helps man move from where he is to this desired end.  Without a telos, there can be no ethics, and moral statements become nothing but garble. The Enlightenment-era attack and destruction of teleological morality thus rendered morality incoherent.

But what was the telos for Aristotle? The answer is eudaimonia which can be understood as a “state of being well and doing well in being well, of a man’s being well-favored himself and in relation to the divine.”  Aristotle rejected identifying this with money, honour, or pleasure.  But for Aristotle, eudaimonia was not universally accessible – one can be excluded from it by adversity, ugliness, low birth and childlessness.

Furthermore, to attain eudaimonia, one needs to develop the virtues – and not just one or some of them, but all of them. A full discussion of the virtues and vices in the Nicomachean Ethics – which includes two vices for every virtue – is outside the scope of this summary. But there are some worth mentioning, such as phronêsis, which is knowing how to exercise judgment in particular cases. Without this virtue, none of the other virtues can really be exercised as the “very same action which would in one situation be liberality could in another be prodigality and in a third meanness.” In other words, a virtue in one circumstance can be a vice in another, and vice versa.

Another is sôphrosunê. Originally an aristocratic virtue, it refers to the restraint of one who could but doesn’t abuse his power — which implies the ability to control one’s passions.

A key vice is pleonexia, interpreted by J.S. Mill as wanting more than one’s share. But according to MacIntyre, it actually means “acquisitiveness as such, a quality that modern individualism both in its economic activity and in the character of the consuming aesthete does not perceive to be a vice at all.”

Some parts of Aristotle’s world-view contrast starkly with modern sensibilities. For one, he has a very different concept of friendship. Whereas modern friendship is mostly based on affection, for Aristotle friendship and any associated affection arose from “a relationship defined in terms of a common allegiance to and a common pursuit of goods.” While he stated in the Lysis that friendship could derive from mutual utility and mutual pleasure, these seem to be considered as less genuine forms of friendship.

Moreover, despite the fact that the end or telos occupies a key role in Aristotelian ethics, the framework should not be seen as consequentialist. The virtues are not a means to an end, but very much part of that end itself:

Aristotle takes that part of morality which is obedience to rules to be obedience to laws enacted by the city-state—if and when the city-state enacts as it ought. Such law prescribes and prohibits certain types of action absolutely and such actions are among those which a virtuous man would do or refrain from doing. Hence it is a crucial part of Aristotle’s view that certain types of action are absolutely prohibited or enjoined irrespective of circumstances or consequences. Aristotle’s view is teleological, but it is not consequentialist. (p. 150)

But there are good reasons for rejecting classical Aristotelianism.

First, explicit in the above quote is also the central role of the city-state is Aristotle’s scheme, leading to some strange conclusions. One is the idea that those outside it, such as slaves and barbarians, had no moral worth, because they could not develop the virtues, which could only be done in a polis.

Second, Aristotle is relatively blind to the conflict that exists across moral orders, such as the incommensurable moral demands in the tragedies of Sophocles. Tragedy for Aristotle always arose from an individual flaw arising from the lack of some virtue.

Third, and perhaps the main reason for the rejection of Aristotelianism was its strict biologicism: the idea that living beings move by nature to their telos.[2]

MacIntyre’s Proposal

Conceding these flaws, what kind of modified Aristotelianism does MacIntyre propose?

First, the provisional telos he outlines is that “the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.” The virtues are those qualities that help us “achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”

This distinction between external and internal goods is important, as there is sometimes conflict between the two. The distinction is illustrated through the example of chess. If one is exceptionally good at chess, one may attain prestige, status or money. These are external goods of playing chess, which can be attained by other types of activities as well.

But a good internal to chess can only be attained by playing chess, such as skill or an appreciation of certain strategems. Generally, internal goods can only be identified and judged by those with experience of the practice in question.

This distinction provides another ground for criticising utilitarianism, as it cannot compare internal and external goods. In fact, the distinction is not made by any of the classical utilitarians.

But more critically, it is another ground to reproach the institutional structure of the West. While institutions are necessary to carry on practices, institutions are also highly preoccupied by external goods such as power and money, which means that “the ideals and the creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution, in which the cooperative care for common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution. In this context the essential function of the virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions.”

An over-emphasis on external goods can thus lead to a kind of corruption. This dynamic also plays out at the individual level, as “notoriously the cultivation of truthfulness, justice and courage will often, the world being what it contingently is, bar us from being rich or famous or powerful.”

The question then, what kind of virtue can ward off corruption such as this? One candidate is the virtue of constancy, which could provide a narrative structure to the life of an individual.

Constancy can be defined as having a singleness of purpose — in Kierkegaard’s words, it implies the purity of heart whereby one wills one thing. It is a principal virtue of the heroines in Jane Austen’s novels. Practicing this virtue — and reaffirming one’s purpose in daily life — gives a narrative unity to the life of the possessor:

When Kierkegaard contrasted the ethical and the aesthetic ways of life in Enten-Eller, he argued that the aesthetic life is one in which a human life is dissolved into a series of separate present moments, in which the unity of a human life disappears from view. By contrast in the ethical life the commitments and responsibilities to the future springing from past episodes in which obligations were conceived and debts assumed unite the present to past and to future in such a way as to make of a human life a unity. The unity to which Kierkegaard refers is that narrative unity whose central place in the life of the virtues I identified in the preceding chapter.

Narrative unity has some advantages. First it helps to make a character’s action intelligible as short-term intentions and actions become aligned with long-term intentions and action. MacIntyre also sees the practice of this virtue as a way to stave off existential angst:

When someone complains — as do some of those who attempt or commit suicide — that his or her life is meaningless, he or she is often and perhaps characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement towards a climax or a telos.

But he also warns it would not be a panacea, as a quest can fail or be frustrated, or simply end up forgotten amidst distractions. Ultimately, the virtues should help us develop the ability to overcome failures and avoid temptations, “increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good” in the process.

Thus we have seen a broad overview of McIntyre’s solution. He finishes the book by saying that the West needs a new but very different kind of St. Benedict, someone who could lay the ground for small self-sustaining communities in which the virtues could be practiced.

Implications for Metasophism

Some reviewers criticised the book for being vague in how to go forward. At this stage, summary ends and commentary begins, and I want to illustrate how Metasophism already integrates some of the positive features of Aristotelianism outlined by MacIntyre.

Let us take the first point, which is the telos. In Metasophism, this is the Imperative: that the goal for humanity should be to discover the meaning of life, and to survive and to acquire knowledge until such a point is reached. What is the argument for adopting such a telos?

Either there exists an objective concept of good, or not. If not, then we are in a world of moral nihilism. Nothing can be criticised on moral grounds, for there are none.

But if there is an objective good, then the next logical step is to try to figure out what that is. I don’t know if it that is possible, but it could be.

So the idea that there might be an objective good, and that it might be discoverable, is the motivating logic of the Imperative. We are not deriving an ought from an “is”, but an ought from a “might”. This telos seems to be resistant to, even builds upon, the Enlightenment scepticism which MacIntyre broadly sees as mistaken. But there are three other reasons for favour it.

First, it is more abstract in who it applies to. MacIntyre specifies that his telos applies to man. But it may not be the fate of man alone to inquire about the existence of good — the same question may be posed by another intelligent species, distant in time or space. In this sense, the Imperative may provide a sort of common mission, facilitating productive co-operation where otherwise there may only be destructive competition.

Second, it is slightly more specific in what is to be done. It explicitly requires the discovery of knowledge. A common reaction to this point is that most people are not motivated or cannot partake in such a quest. But knowledge is just a means to an end — reaching this end requires the long-term survival of humanity, and there is a role in that for everyone who wants it. For example, long-term survival requires a high degree of societal cohesion. That is helped when we have tidy streets, well-kept parks, and beautiful buildings — all of these can create a sense of pride in the community, and perhaps also a willingness to bear the occasional sacrifice when necessary.

None of the people involved in creating beautiful surroundings need to acquire knowledge as such (other than that needed to do their job). But they would have an individual role in greater narrative — and it could be explicitly recognised. So everyone can contribute to this telos in some way or another, and this could be a very good way of promoting the virtue of constancy elaborated by MacIntyre.

Importantly however, people should be supported in defining their own individual way of contributing to the mission. Different generations and factions are going to want to do things differently. That should actually be facilitated, and we could do so as follows: give the young support to form their own projects, and give them the chance to define their own story for how they would contribute to the common mission. This non-hierarchical dimension might be able to co-opt those who want to change things, before they really turn against the system.

The Metasophist telos thus allows us to build the quest-narrative structure which MacIntyre sees as essential to reintroducing meaning and legibility into society. But it does so without reintroducing the inflexible social order which preceded the Enlightenment. Such a reversion is the true failure to be avoided.

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Notes

[1] The full quote is: “Since the agent regards as necessary goods the freedom and well-being that constitute the generic features of his successful action, he logically must also hold that he has rights to these generic features and he implicitly makes a corresponding rights-claim.”

[2] Achtenberg, D. (1992), On the Metaphysical Presuppositions of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in: The Journal of Value Inquiry 26, 317–340