Critical Notice

SIMON BLACKBURN, Pembroke College, Oxford.

Afasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Duck- worth, 252 pp., L24.

The main themes of Professor MacIntyres large and sweeping book are as follows. Our contemporary moral world is ridden with dis- putes. We disagree about what ought to be done, and about how to start deciding what ought to be done. We do not even know which moral concepts best repay attention in making such decisions. These difficulties are due to our inheritance of a moral vocabulary which needed a certain setting to make sense; lacking that setting, our terms now lack their original meanings. We can be compared to the survivors of some catastrophe which has destroyed all genuine expertise in science: were such survivors to continue to use scientific terms, without the context of theory, knowledge, and practice, which give them their real meaning, then they could not understand them as we do. The setting which gave our moral vocabulary its original sense was that of classical theism: in that context moral judgments were at once hypothetical and categorical in form. They were hypothetical in so far as they expressed a judgment as to what conduct would be teleologically appropriate for a human being . . . They were categorical in so far as they reported the contents of the universal law commanded by God. (p. 57) Since we have lost any profound sense of a telos for man, and of a law-giving God, our expressions cannot retain this sense. They become, instead, mere vehicles for the expression of desire and attitude: the banners of the modern emotivist self - a rootless, role-playing thing without essen- tial identity. Worse, the emotivist self is essentially manipulative in its relations with others, having no notion of treating other people as ends in themselves. I t social embodiment is the managerial society, whose admired figures consume or use other people in the pursuit of given, arbitrarily chosen ends. MacIntyre sees the emergence of this kind of society as a consequence of the failure of the enlightenment

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project of justifying morality on a secular footing, and that project was bound to fail, because of the loss of the original context - the classical theism which gave moral concepts their real theoretical un- derpinning.

However, there is a more positive side to things. MacIntyre be- lieves that by modifying Aristotle he can begin to develop a concept of virtue which shows us some way forward. His main notion is that of a practice - something like chess or medicine or painting, which require something of their practitioners. I t is not quite that they require traditional virtues, like patience, or truth-telling, or cour- age, because MacIntyre is realistic enough to know that mean- spirited and vicious people can be very good at chess or music or whatever (p. 180). But in some sense the practices can only flourish when these virtues do so too. Furthermore, the practices bring inter- nal rewards with them - the reward of painting well, for instance, is something which can be achieved in no other way. These internal rewards need contrasting with the consumer rewards which modern society alone concentrates upon. Our mentors should be Tolstoy and St. Benedict.

Undoubtedly there is much to admire in the nostalgic vision of small communities of wholesome people playing chess and painting and potting, but it does not by itself constitute a morality. Mac- Intyre realises that there may be tensions, for instance between the claims of family life and the claims of art. Pursuing a practice makes many demands on other things besides virtue: on other people, on political arrangements, on allocations of resources. The practitioner himself will face choices about how much to demand of himself and others, and how to rank the pursuit of his activity.

To tackle this kind of problem MacIntyre introduces the notion of the telos of a whole human life. Rightly pointing out that actions are made sense of in terms of a context of performance, he argues that we should see ourselves in the light of parts of narratives. Ac- tions must be intelligible as parts of a narrative of a whole life: the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest (p. 203). It might seem from this that a successful narrative, and therefore a successful life, would be that of someone who singlemind- edly pursues, say, a better way to pot, or a new variation of the Queens Indian, and finds it. But in a rather puzzling transition (p. 206) it rapidly turns out that the really worthwhile quest is for a philosophical conception of the good for man, and that the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to under- stand what more and what else the good life for man is.

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Professor MacIntyres rhetorical gifts do not always make it easy to see quite why he holds the views he does. The whole introduction of success in life as somehow derivative from the success of the nar- rative of a life is exceedingly implausible, even if we waive the difi- culties in seeing why the narrative should be one of any kind of quest at all. All kinds of things other than quests make good narrations. And becoming good copy for would-be narrators of my life seems eminently possible not only without much questing, but also with- out much exercise of virtue: can anyone really believe that a good story of a life equals a story of a good life? Inconstancies, failure, onsets of weakness, vice and madness all make for interesting histor- ies. If we are to derive the nature of the virtuous life from consider- ing what makes for success in narration, it seems we would need an aesthetic canon of a rather peculiar nature. A unified, intelligible, compelling, altogether satisfactory narrative can be made out of most kinds of life - indeed, virtuous philosophically questing lives conducted in the shelter of communities and traditions of good behav- iour seem less promising than many other subjects. If I need your pawn to complete my collage, would-be raconteurs of my life will have more to relate if I go against our Benedictine traditions, and pinch it.

The sweep and scope of MacIntyres book have led to a great deal of praise. Its significance has been hailed in many journals of more than purely professional range. But this scope and sweep is, I fear, largely achieved by a pretty persistent failure to acknowledge ordinary standards of discussion. I propose to illustrate this harsh judgment by considering just two crucial and typical passages. The first shows MacIntyre arguing for his main claim about emotivism, namely, that it is incapable of drawing a distinction between treat- ing people as means and treating them as ends. Emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations (p. 22). The passage reads:

To treat someone else as an end is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons. It is to be unwilling to influence another except by reasons which that other he or she judges to be good. It is to appeal to impersonal criteria of the validity of which each rational agent must be his or her own judge. By contrast, to treat some- one else as a means is to seek to make him or her an instrument of my purposes by adducing whatever influences or considerations will in fact be effective in this or that occasion. The generalisations of the sociology and psychology of persuasion are what I shall need to guide me, not the standards of a normative rationality.

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If emotivism is true, this distinction is illusory. For evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others. I cannot genuinely appeal to impersonal criteria, for there are no impersonal criteria. I may think that I so appeal and others may think that I so appeal, but these thoughts will always be mistakes. The sole reality of distinctively moral discourse is the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and choices of another with its own. Others are always means, never ends (pp. 22-23).

I believe that if as a profession we let this kind of writing impose on us, then we have indeed lost our virtue. Consider the first three sentences. Each of them gives a quite different characterization of what it is to treat someone as an end. The first demands that I give what I take to be good reasons for acting one way rather than an- other. The second does not, demanding only that I offer reasons which the other will judge to be good. The third introduces the entirely new notion of impersonal criteria which may or may not be valid. Well, suppose I want my son not to eat an ice-cream and point out truly that if he does we will miss the bus and fail to see Star Wars , which he wants to see even more than he wants to eat an ice-cream. Do I treat him as an end? I dont offer him anything which I take to be a good reason for acting one way or another - I would not regard it as a reason for a course of action that it enables me to see Star Wars . So the first definition is not met. But the second apparently is. The third is not, insofar as I can make sense of it: I see no impersonal criteria whose validity ensures that missing Star Wars is a reason against a course of action. Perhaps then I am not treating him as an end after all, but only as a means - manipu- lating and managing him.

At least I dont hit him, remove him bodily from the ice-cream vendor, hurl his ice-cream into a field. I only point out other wants he has, with the satisfaction of which eating an ice-cream conflicts. Can an emotivist not make sense of this distinction? Well, emoti- vism is not a doctrine in the philosophy of belief and desire. As far as I know, it does not address the question of the distinction between bringing someone to realise something on the one hand, and altering the situation so that something they want is attended with some penal& on the other, or for that matter between telling someone the truth and deceiving them, or, ultimately, addresszng their point of view and ignoring it. Perhaps the charge is that an emotivist cannot consistently approve of one course of action - pointing out the difficulty about Star W a r s - more than the other - removing him bodily, say. But of course it

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can. Emotivism is the doctrine that the use of moral language is explicable in terms of a primary function of expression of attitude. And as far as that thesis goes, you can hold any attitude. Indeed, I am an emotivist, and I strongly approve of treating the child one way, and strongly disapprove of treating him the other.

Perhaps it is impersonal criteria of normative rationality whose disappearance troubles MacIntyre. But what does this mean? I be- lieve that it is wrong to gratuitously kick dogs, because it causes them pain. Is not this an impersonal criterion of wrongness? I cer- tainly dont believe that persons matter to the wrongness - it is not as though what makes it wrong to kick dogs is that we disapprove of it, or that their owners dislike it. I t wouldnt matter what we thought of it, it would still be wrong. In saying this I endorse only one kind of moral disposition - one which, given an input of know- ledge that an animal has been gratuitously caused pain, gives disap- proval as output. I would regard a moral disposition which used a different input - knowledge about persons - before it could yield that output as markedly inferior. Perhaps it is the loss of rationality which worries MacIntyre. But how does the argument about treat- ing people as means not ends then look: that if we see no prospect of rational proof of moral or other evaluative positions, we should fail to distinguish courses of action which pay no attention to the wants of others from those which do? That is just silly. And so, finally, is the apparent implication of the last two sentences I quoted: that to attempt to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and choices of another with ones own is to treat them as a means. Aligning is a symmetrical relation. I can align my wifes attitude to TV comedy with my own by coming to admire and share her discriminations, or by seeking to put my own humorous dispositions in what she will or should regard as a favourable light. She can do the same. I t is extra- ordinary to see this essentially civilized activity as an exercise in manipulation or management. The underlying thought, presumably, is that an emotivist should admire a manipulative way of conducting the conversation - e.g. by bullying or lying - as much as any other. But once again there is absolutely no reason to demand that. Align- ing attitudes is often a good. But it is not the only good, and there is no reason for a projective second-order theory to be associated with the repugnant first-order view that i t is.

I believe that we should not write or admire philosophy which so rapidly degenerates into this kind of superficial rhetoric. I t betrays lack of patience with the real issues, and a lack of care about the tools used to work upon them. Another passage illustrating the same defects occurs when MacIntyre treats one of his historical themes.

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He describes why the enlightenment project of justifying morality has to fail: Hence the eighteenth century moral philosophers en- gaged in what was an inevitably unsuccessful project; for they did indeed attempt to find a rational basis for their moral beliefs in a particular understanding of human nature while inheriting a set of moral injunctions on the one hand and a conception of human nature on the other which had been expressly designed to be dis- crepant with one another (p. 53). The discrepancy arises because the old context contrasted man-as-he-ought-to-be with man as he is. Hume is of course prominent among the enlightenments inevit- able failures. But did Hume attempt to find a rational basis for moral beliefs? He attempted to form a natural explanation of how we come to have the moral sentiments we do, but as every student knows, he denied reason any part whatsoever in justifying those sen- timents. Perhaps it was just careless formulation which led so dis- tinguished an historian of moral thought as Professor MacIntyre to suggest otherwise. But if we consider Humes actual project, the Newtonian attempt to understand our nature as moral agents, how is it vitiated by the contrast between man-as-he-ought-to-be, and man as he is? There is no paradox in ones moral views being, in Humes sense, the outcome of a particular sentimental disposition, but also being quite capable of seeing flaws and failures in that very disposition, and being capable of admiring presentations of people whose dispositions are superior to the general run, or even superior to any actual persons. Similarly our knowledge of the world may be obtained through the senses, but we can imagine people whose senses are better developed than our own: who see and hear more, for example. But this cavalier treatment of the real concerns of the Enlightenment pales into nothing compared to MacIntyres view of Book I11 of the Treatise: For he tries to conclude in the Treatise that it is to our long-term advantage to be just, when all that the premises warrant is the younger Rameaus conclusion that it is often to our long-term advantage that people in general should be just (This in the context of Humes inability to transcend the eighteenth centurys egoistic presuppositions (p. 2 13)). Hume tried to prove that it is always in an individuals self interest to be just? The Hume who wrote that . . . a single act ofjustice, considered in itself, may often be contrary to the public good; and it is only the concurrence of mankind, in a general scheme or system of action, which is ad- vantageous? It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Book 111 of the Treatise has as its main theme the way in which the sentiment of approbation becomes attached to exercises of justice in spite of their frequent opposition to individual or collective interest. No wonder

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MacIntyre can say that enlightenment projects had to fail, if the rule of the game is that he can describe those projects how he wishes.

I have taken these passages to illustrate the philosophical and historical defects of Professor Maclntyres work. They seem to me damning, but others may forgive them for the sake of the scope and sweep: the excitement at the parade of figures and idea which Mac- Intyre conjures up, or the exciting idea of ourselves as the misun- derstanding inheritors of a vocabulary which once functioned, but now does not.

Yet one would have thought that the claim of our disinheritance carried with it an obligation to produce the antecedent body of thought, when classical theism provided a teleology and a theology which enabled our moral vocabulary to work properly - in other words, when there was a superior understanding of moral concepts. The parallel with the catastrophe which might remove our under- standing of physics demands that there should have been such a time. But, curiously, there is very little to suggest when it was. The Greeks? But as MacIntyre notes, the Greeks very much shared our sense of the fractured, fragmentary nature of moral requirements. Indeed, MacIntyre thinks that they had a moral outlook which is a good deal more incoherent than we find it easy to recognize (p. 126). Perhaps Homeric society? But there may never have been such a thing: Homer was a poet, not a sociologist, and his depiction of men at war may tell us no more about the morality of an actual society than, say, the MagniJicent Seven tells us about frontier ethics, or even twentieth-century ethics. And even were we to rely on an interpretation of Homers moral scheme, is it at all likely to stand to ours as real physics does to the post-catastrophic imitation : dont his characters have only their characteristically limited sense of moral- ity? Christian society? Well, medieval culture is again described as a fragile and complex balance of a variety of disparate and conflict- ing elements. There is no hint of the sunny superior grasp of moral- ity which classical theism was supposed to provide. I found i t strange that MacIntyre did not work around to at least some kind of hint of which culture and which body of teleology and theology was to form the essential contrast with us. It needs to be a time when moral dispute was not interminable, when values were not incommensurable, when proofs were habitually offered and accep- ted, and where these things were not so just because of some limited authoritarian conception of ethics. I dont believe it, and if all thai can be done is to point to a fairly persistent Aristotelian under- current. which enabled men to see morality in some teleological and

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satisfying way in all periods, then I dont believe that we are disin- herited from it. We can still understand the attractions of that vision.

Professor MacIntyre has considerable fluency, and apparently a quite Steineresque acquaintance with a multitude of authors and literatures (he doesnt even need to translate Danish titles into En- glish). And there is something worth discussing in the idea of a de- generation in our understanding of our own concepts. But the book contains historical and philosophical blunders which eventually make it seem just silly. Why then is it likely to be successful and important? Presumably because it offers a promise - that issues in history and philosophy can in effect be by-passed. The fact that Hume or Kant has a complex moral view, or that emotivism de- mands considerable subtlety with complicated issues in the philos- ophy of mind and language, is an obstacle to a common desire: the desire for a large diagnosis, an overview, an instant attitude. This desire is not wholly ignoble, for it can lead to better things. But to pander to it as it stands isjournalism, not philosophy.