After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.
University of Notre Dame, 1981.

Chapter I. A Disquieting Suggestion
p. 2 "The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess... are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived." Says that philosophy will not be able to help us. We must understand the history - but it is not academic history to which he refers (i.e. in its value-neutral standpoint moral disorder "must remain largely invisible" -- "... the real world and its fate has remained unrecognized by the academic curriculum"). The language of morality is in a state so disastrous that we cannot even afford the cultural luxury of pessimism.
Chapter 2. The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism
Interminable character of modern moral disagreements. "There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture." (p.6) There seems to be no way of deciding between rival claims and premises. p. 11: "We simultaneously and inconsistently treat moral arguments as an exercise of our rational powers and as mere expressive assertion..."
emotivism- all moral judgments are nothing but expression of preferences. It makes the claim that every attempt, past or present, to provide rational justification for objective morality has failed. "What emotivism however did fail to reckon with is the difference it would make to morality if emotivism were not only true but also widely believed to be true." (p. 19) Contends that emotivism has become embodied in our culture and that what was once morality has in large degree disappeared, and this marks a degeneration, a grave cultural loss.
Chapter 3. Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context
"A moral philosophy - and emotivism is no exception - characteristically presupposes a sociology. For every moral philosophy offers explicitly or implicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of the relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions, and actions, and in so doing generally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or at least can be in the real social world." (p.23)
~key to emotivism: obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. Kant's distinction between treating people as means or ends has no meaning in this type of philosophy.
~self presented in emotivism may pass judgment on anything and everything, there are no limits set to it. "It is in this capacity of the self to evade any necessary identification with any particular contingent state of affairs... To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity. Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency is to be located." (p. 31-2)
Chapter 4. The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality
Scottish Enlightenment. Kierkegaard - "The choice between the ethical and the esthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil." (40) And: "Just as Hume seeks to found morality on the passions because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on reason, so Kant founds it on reason because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on the passions, and Kierkegaard on criterionless fundamental choice because of what he takes to be the compelling nature of the considerations which exclude both reason and the passions.
"Thus the vindication of each position was made to rest in crucial part upon the failure of the other two, and the sum total of the effective criticism of each position by the others turned out to be the failure of all. The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture -- and subsequently of our own -- lacked any public shared rationale or justification... the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject." (49-50)
Chapter 5. Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail
~the rejection of any teleological view of human nature -that is, of any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end: this is the key to the failure. "Since the whole point of ethics - both as theoretical and a practical discipline - is to enable man to pass from his present state to his true end, the elimination of any notion of essential human nature and with it the abandonment of any notions of a telos leaves behind a moral scheme composed of two remaining elements whose relationship becomes quite unclear." (55) Rift exposed the fact vs. value dichotomy: on one hand a content for morality, a set of injunctions deprived of teleological context. On the other, a view of untutored human nature-as-it-is - and no bridge from the one to the other. "It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept." (59)
Chapter 6. Some Consequences of the Failure of the Enlightenment Project
~utilitarianism; the Kantian project of showing that any rational agent is logically committed to the rules of morality in virtue of his or her rationality (66) The price paid for liberation from what appeared to be traditional authority was the loss of any authoritative content. "Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone listen..." (68)
Chapter 7: 'Fact,' Explanation and Expertise
p. 81: "The Enlightenment is... the period par excellence in which most intellectuals lack self-knowledge."
~Aristotelian understanding of nature repudiated in 17-18th cents. along with Ais. acct of action. "'Man' ceases, except within theology - and not always there - to be what I called earlier a functional concept. The explanation of action is increasingly held to be a matter of laying bare the physiological and physical mechanisms which underlie action; and, when Kant recognizes that there is deep incompatibility between any account of action which recognizes the role of moral imperatives in governing action and any such mechanical type of explanation, he is compelled to the conclusion that actions obeying and embodying moral imperatives must be from the standpoint of science inexplicable and unintelligible. After Kant the question of the relationship between such notions as those of intention, purpose, reason for action... and the concepts which specify the notion of mechanical explanation... becomes part of the permanent repertoire of philosophy. The former notions are... treated as detached from notions of good or virtue..." (82)
p. 86: "Twentieth century social life turns out in key part to be the concrete and dramatic re-enactment of 18th century philosophy." Managerial expertise: claims of value neutrality and manipulative power.
Chapter 8. The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power
Chapter 9. Nietzsche or Aristotle?
p. 110: "It was indeed Nietzsche's perception of this vulgarized facility of modern moral utterance which partly informed his disgust with it."
and: "a key part of my thesis has been that modern moral utterance and practice can only be understood as a series of fragmented survivals from an older past and that the insoluble problems which they have generated for modern moral theorists will remain insoluble until this is well understood. If the deontological character of moral judgments is the ghost of conceptions of divine law which are quite alien to the metaphysics of modernity and if the teleological character is similarly the ghost of conceptions of human nature and activity which are equally not at home in the modern world, we should expect the problems of understanding and of assigning an intelligible status to moral judgments both continually to arise and as continually to prove inhospitable to philosophical solutions." (110-111)
~Nietzsche's achievement was to understand that "what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will" (113)
Rules rather than virtues: key concept. We need to attend to virtues in order to understand the function and authority of rules. (119)
Chapter 10. The Virtues in Heroic Societies
~morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society. Evaluative questions are questions of social fact. We learn from this that "morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit ..." (126-7)
~Nietzsche's mythologized this distant past: "What [he] portrays as aristocratic self-assertion: what Homer and the sagas show are forms of assertion proper to and required by a certain role. The self becomes what it is in heroic societies only through its role; it is a social creation, not an individual one. Hence when Nietzsche projects back on to the archaic past his own 19th-century individualism, he reveals that what looked like an historical inquiry was actually an inventive literary construction." (129)
Chapter 11. The Virtues at Athens
~ belief in the virtues... and belief in human life exhibiting a certain narrative order are internally connected (144). Important to recall that what is at stake in the "Sophoclean dramatic encounter" is not simply the fate of the individual... "in some important sense the community too is a dramatic character which enacts the narrative of its history." (145)
Chapter 12. Aristotle's Account of the Virtues
~ every activity, every inquiry, every practice aims at some good
~human beings have a specific nature; they have certain aims and goals; and they move by nature toward a specific telos
~what is the good for man? Not money, honor, pleasure. He calls it eudaimonia: blessedness, happiness, prosperity. The state of doing/being well through possession and practice of the virtues. "To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues." (149)
~friendship embodies shared recognition and pursuit of a good, a sharing which forms the essential primary element of any form of community
~both Plato and Aristotle "treat conflict as an evil" (157); the good life is unitary; civil war is the worst of evils. "It follows that conflict is simply the result either of flaws of character in individuals or of unintelligent political arrangements. This has consequences not only for Aristotle's politics, but also for his poetics and even his theory of knowledge. In all three the agon has been displaced from its Homeric centrality..."(157)
~certain tension between Aristotle's view of man as essentially political and his view of man As essentially metaphysical (158)
~virtues unavailable to slaves or barbarians: "Freedom is the presupposition of the exercise of the virtues and the achievement of the good." (159)
~virtues cannot be defined as merely the pleasant or useful. "The standard of utility or pleasure is set by man qua animal, man prior to and without any particular culture. But man without culture is a myth. Our biological nature certain places constraints on all cultural possibility; but man who has nothing but a biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing. It is only man with practical intelligence - and that, as we have seen, is intelligence informed by virtues - whom we actively meet in history."(161)
~practical reasoning according to A. has 4 essential elements: (1) wants and goals of the agent, presupposed by but not expressed in his reasoning; (2) major premise, assertion that to do or seek for something is good; (3) minor premise, wherein agent asserts that said incident is an instance or occasion of requisite nature; (4) conclusion = action. A.MacI says A's account of practical reasoning is "notably elliptical and in need of paraphrase and interpretation," (162) but enough is said to warrant saying that in Aristotelian terms, reason cannot be the servant of the passions. "For the education of the passions into conformity with pursuit of what theoretical reasoning identifies as the telos and practical reasoning as the right action to do in each particular time and place is what ethics is about." (162)
Chapter 13. Medieval Aspects and Occasions
~medieval vision is historical in a way that Aristotle's could never be... the virtues are those which enable men to survive evils on their historical journey. (176) A.MacI. does not say, but it occurs to me to ask, whether what was the zoon politicon, the polis, for Aristotle, was transmuted in the medieval period as the supernatural - that is, only a supernatural tension could maintain so many diverse, even opposing, virtues. cf. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: "[The] heroic and monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural religion."
Chapter 14. The Nature of the Virtues
~ Benjamin Franklin and Jane Austen
~virtue defined: "A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods." (191) This seems a bit labored, but could you find a better? But good, later (194) - "It... turns out ... that every practice has its own history and a history which is more and other than that of the improvement of the relevant technical skills. This historical dimension is crucial in relation to the virtues."
~ p. 200: are there evil practices?
Chapter 15. The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition
~"liquidation of the self into a set of demarcated areas of role-playing allows no scope for the exercise [of]... virtues in any sense remotely Aristotelian" (205)
~"The concepts of narrative, intelligibility and accountability presuppose the applicability of the concept of personal identity... [but] all attempts to elucidate the notion of personal identity independently of and in isolation from the notions of narrative, intelligibility and accountability are bound to fail." (218)
~"The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide." (221)
~"A living tradition is... an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition." (222)
Chapter 16. From the Virtues to Virtue and after Virtue
~a "pluralism which threatens to submerge us all" (226)
~ traditional account of the virtues presupposed the concept of narrative unity and the concept of a practice
~segregation of narrative from life (postmodernism?)
p. 227: "The contrast, indeed the opposition, between art and life, which is often in fact the premise rather than the conclusion of such theorists, provides a way of exempting art - including narrative - from its moral tasks. And the relegation of art by modernity to the status of an essentially minority activity and interest further helps to protect us from any narrative understanding of ourselves." And: "... to think of a human life as a narrative unity is to think in a way alien to the dominant individualist and bureaucratic modes of modern culture."
~egotism and altruism ( 229) Altruism both "socially necessary" and "inexplicable." And: "On the traditional Aristotelian view such problems do not arise. For what education in the virtues teaches me is that my good as a man is one and the same as the good of others with whom I am bound up in human community. There is no way of my pursuing my good which is necessarily antagonistic to you pursuing yours because the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours peculiarly - goods are not private property. Hence Aristotle's definition of friendship, the fundamental form of human relationship... The egotist is thus, in the ancient and medieval world, always someone who has made a fundamental mistake about where his own good lies and [who]... has to that extent excluded himself from human relationships."
~review of Kant, Hume, Stoicism; French Revolution, and Jane Austen - "the last great effective imagination voice" of thought about the virtues (240)
Chapter 17. Justice as a Virtue: Changing Conceptions
Rawls and Nozick. Modern moral incoherence.
Chapter 18. After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle; Trotsky and St. Benedict
p. 259: "It is therefore after all the case that the crucial moral opposition is between liberal individualism in some version or another and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other." His conclusion is that despite three centuries of moral philosophy, "...[we] lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualistic point of view; and that, on the other hand, the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments."
Postscript to the Second Edition.
p. 268: "The philosophy of physical science is dependent on the history of physical science. But the case is no different with morality."