By JUDE DOUGHERTY
With the publication of After Virtue in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre set the parameters for a philosophical debate that was to last for decades. As if his point had not been well made, he followed that book with two others, Whose Justice, Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. With the first of these volumes (now in its third edition), McIntyre succeeded in bringing moral discourse back to earth from the abstract, idealized realm inhabited by philosophers in the English-speaking world who limited themselves to analysis of language and formal arguments, or invented imaginary situations that presumably gave direction to affairs in the real world.
In After Virtue, MacIntyre observes and documents that philosophers trained in diverse intellectual traditions rarely succeeded in talking to one another. The academy, he points out, has no common set of principles on which judgments may be based. In the absence of a set of shared first principles, rival conceptions of rationality prevail at both theoretical and practical levels. Put simply, there is no single universe of discourse. What an investigator takes to be relevant data and how they are characterized and classified depends upon his theoretical and moral standpoint.
“It is my contention” writes MacIntyre, “that far from being a barrier to rational enquiry, a commitment to some theoretical or doctrinal tradition is a prerequisite for advancement.”
In Whose Justice, Which Rationality?, MacIntyre makes it clear that in adopting a moral code, one can be an Aristotelian or a disciple of David Hume but one cannot be both. Furthermore once cannot be either without an appropriate polis. The conditions for the administration of Aristotelian justice are different from the conditions of Humean justice.
Although these issues are rarely a matter of public discussion, within the United States the forum in which they are sometimes aired is that which takes place at level of congressional approval for presidential nominations to the Supreme Court.
No one denies the importance of such nominations, given that judge-made law has become a powerful force in shaping the nation’s culture, perhaps more so than enactments of legislative assemblies at the national and state levels. So-called interest groups take it for granted that they are more likely to have their aims implemented through the process of judicial review than through lobbying legislative assemblies. Litigation is instigated with deliberation; forum shopping is standard practice as progressives and others seek judges that are like minded.
The judicial bench itself tends to reflect the intellectual trends of the academy, the same academy that inspires the interest groups to action. Consider, for example, policies with respect to global warming, climate change, immigration, and intervention in the Middle East typically advanced by the progressive left.
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry may be the most fascinating of the books under consideration. MacIntyre utilizes three late nineteenth-century intellectual outlooks to illustrate incompatible standards of rationality. His choice of the late nineteenth century was governed by the occasion for which he prepared the volume, namely the Gifford lectures of 1988, a series of lectures founded as a result of a bequest by Adam Gifford, one hundred years earlier.
The first outlook examined is one Adam Gifford presumably held himself, the common outlook of the editors of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The second outlook is that provided by Nietzsche in his Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), drafted as an epitaph, MacIntyre suggests, for the central assumptions of the Ninth Edition.
The third outlook is represented by Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which promoted the philosophical tradition represented by Aquinas. For Leo the past is neither prologue nor something to struggle against. Rather it is that from which we have to learn. Theoretical enquiry when honestly conducted leads one to engage the best minds of the past on issues that have to do with the ends of human life.
In MacIntyre’s judgment, the authors of the Britannica assumed that all educated persons subscribed to a single conception of rationality, confidently holding that the unity of enquiry mirrors the unity of the cosmos. He uses Henry Sedgwick’s Britannica article on ethics to illustrate that although Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Kant were offering rival accounts, they nevertheless were addressing the same timeless subject.
Nietzsche is cited for a second outlook insofar as he provides a challenge to Sedgwick’s unity of philosophical experience. Whereas the Encyclopaedists may have aspired to displace the Bible as a canonical book, Nietzsche discredited the notion of a “canon.” He denied that things possess constitutions in themselves apart from interpretation and subjectivity. There is no truth as such, there are no rules of rationality; there are only strategies of insight and strategies of subversion. For Nietzsche the type of rationality professed in the Ninth Edition is still too hospitable to Christianity.
“I fear,” wrote Nietzsche, “we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.”
That is, explains MacIntyre, that we still believe that language represents the order of things by means of conceptual schemes and a logic of identity and difference.
As Western civilization disintegrates before our eyes, one can suppose that MacIntyre, if asked, would have signed The Paris Document: A Europe We Can Believe In (February 2018). The document rests securely on the rationality recognize by Adam Gifford, if not on the Thomism endorsed by McIntyre himself.
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