A Book Review… A Commonsense Antidote
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xiii + 322 pp.
Alasdair MacIntyre opens with the observation that philosophy in our culture has become an almost exclusively academic discipline whose practitioners for the most part address each other rather than the educated layman. He offers the present volume as a kind of commonsense antidote to certain modern conceptions of what contributes to human flourishing.
He writes from a Thomistic, Aristotelian perspective, convinced that it is only from that natural law perspective that we are able adequately to approach some key issues confronting today’s social order. Modernity, for MacIntyre, begins with British empiricism and the repudiation of classical learning. Readers will remember his Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1998), in which he makes the distinction between ancients and moderns.
MacIntyre claims that the Thomistic, Aristotelian philosophical outlook, when informed by certain features of Marx’s Capital, is alone able to critique modernity from within modernity. Why appeal to Marx? Because the early Marx, he says, has something to teach us about “surplus value, something only hinted at in Aristotle, and not addressed by St. Thomas.”
The book consists of five essays. In his essay on desire, MacIntyre makes a distinction between expressivism (also called emotivism) and the natural law perspective which recognizes a divinely given order in nature. The two outlooks come with differing notions of the good. Both have consequences in the economic and social order.
In the pursuit of the good, for example, lives can go wrong in a variety of ways, certainly on account of misdirected or frustrated desires. Someone who has his mind set on a particular athletic achievement or on a certain professional appointment may fail to realize his objective and may consequently find himself unhappy. Upon reflection he may even conclude that he has squandered his life. Whether a life goes ill or well obviously depends upon what is desired. Belief, however acquired, plays a crucial part in the formation of desire. We may easily be mistaken about the true object of our desire.
As rational agents we have the ability and, one may say, the duty to ascertain what we really desire as well as to learn whether we have good reason to desire it. “We have to make our desires intelligible,” proclaims MacIntyre. To speak of something as worthy of desire, as good or bad, is to evaluate it from a point of view.
Here, MacIntyre finds it necessary to make another set of distinctions which he formulates in a set of sentences, namely, between 1) sentences that state purported facts that are either true or false, and 2) sentences that are evaluative attitudes toward those facts. For nonhuman animals the environment is given and to flourish is successfully to adapt to that environment. Human beings have little difficulty in agreeing what it is for wolves, dolphins, or polar bears to flourish, but not what contributes to human flourishing.
Are there standards against which desire can be measured? Indeed, from an Aristotelian point of view, there are. Obviously the human condition is complicated, given that desires are not limited to animal appetites. Desire and fulfillment have a lot to do with education and the philosophical outlook one has embraced, consciously or not.
From a Thomistic point of view there is truth about human fulfillment waiting to be discovered; truth about what is good and best. On the “expressive” side there is no such truth; there are only preferences. On expressive premises, an agent needs to ask how far and in what ways he needs to order his attitudes and commitments to flourish.
Suppose a person desires something, but on reflection finds there is no good reason to desire it. He may have excellent reasons for desiring something else. The question then becomes what standard enables him to choose one good over the other. Philosophy may help, but perhaps not.
The problem with modern philosophical training, MacIntyre believes, is its narrowness. Those engaged in philosophical pursuits, like members of other professions, are limited in their life experiences. They will have rarely been soldiers or trade organizers, worked on farms, in fishing crews, or on construction sites.
The compartmentalization of contemporary social life ensures that those who do not have these important life experiences are isolated from common political and social practice. Philosophy can easily become disengaged and irrelevant as a guide to behavior. The ivory tower metaphor is not without foundation.
The earlier reference to Karl Marx deserves some expansion. MacIntyre notes that Marx himself made a close study of Aristotle’s Politics and was well acquainted with the Nicomachean Ethics. Marx takes Aristotle to have accurately described the forms of economic exchange in the ancient Greek world.
That world no longer exists. Any theory of economic exchange today, MacIntyre holds, must take into account Marx’s theory of surplus value and his account of how individuals are regarded from the employer’s point of view. Important in Marx’s analysis is the concept of “surplus value” and the workers as a “commodity.”
Those who own the means of production, even though they may pay a just wage, a wage sufficient to meet the needs of the labor force, nevertheless pay out less than the value that those workers contributed. That surplus value is appropriated by the employer for his own economic purpose. The surplus goes unnoticed because it is disguised in legal form as a contractual relation freely entered into by employee and employer. The reinvestment of the surplus contributes to economic advancement. Moral judgments follow the nature of the contract and its circumstances.
At one point, MacIntyre seems embarrassed by Aristotle’s doctrine of the “natural slave,” that is, one who can act in accordance with reason only as an instrument of another.
He then reminds his reader, “It was the 16th century Dominicans who had a Thomistic education who argued against those who used the Aristotelian notion of the natural slave to justify the enslavement of indigenous peoples in America. The Valladolid debates between Bartolome de las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda that took place in 1550-1551 under the patronage of Charles V are worth revisiting. It was the Dominican de las Casas who defended the native’s rights and ability of self-governance.”
MacIntyre’s attempt to reach the educated layman succeeds without doubt, as insight after insight tumbles over each other as one turns the pages of this volume.
+ + +
(Jude Dougherty is dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.)
