Insights from MacIntyre

I've been listening to a lot of Alasdair MacIntyre lectures lately, and figured I would share some of my favorite insights to entice others to do the same. MacIntyre does an excellent job of unsettling the left/right dichotomies that tend to frame debates in our society, so he is well worth listening to no matter where you fit on that spectrum. I will keep adding to this as I make my way through them.

Free to Audible Subscribers

It was recently brought to my attention that among the library of audiobooks available for free to all Audible subscribers is MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. It is an excellent production read by Derek Perkins, and I very much enjoyed the experience of listening to this now classic text.

www.audible.co.uk/pd/After-Virtue-Third-Edition-Audiobook/B07B79S9LQ

“Human Dignity: A Puzzling and Possibly Dangerous Idea?” (2021)

MacIntyre considers the concept of human dignity and the work it is (unsuccessfully) forced to do in contemporary society as a stand-in for justice. (On the loss of our concept of justice in modernity, see chapter 17 of After Virtue). I wonder about certain elements of his interpretation of Thomas, which he speaks more to in the Q&A, but I find it an insightful corrective to the dominant framework of our times.

“Absences from Aquinas, Silences in Ireland” (2018)

In this lecture, he discusses how issues such as abortion are transformed when considered in terms of justice, in light of common goods and final ends, rather than in terms of 'rights'.

"Any group that has developed a shared and detailed conception of their common good will have at some point to ask and answer the question, 'What do we owe to the children of our particular society?', giving expression to a continuing concern for their flourishing, translating into actions that secure that flourishing—physical, emotional, and intellectual, through family, school, work, and leisure, so that those children become capable in turn for caring for their society’s common good. As part of this, adults owe them protection while still unborn, while infants, and into their adolescence. But if adults were to take care to keep children alive, yet at the same time did not act to ensure that they are well-fed, have medical care, and are provided with the discipline of excellent schooling, those adults would both be, and be seen to be, morally questionable characters."

“What We Owe the Dead” (2020)

In this lecture, MacIntyre argues that only by understanding what we owe the dead can we understand what we owe each other, and that first and foremost we owe the dead truthfulness.

However, it is not only what we owe to them, but what we owe them for: It is from those who came before us that we receive the depth or poverty of our language and thus, to some degree, our conversational habits, and it is through the right kinds of conversations that we learn the relationship between the various goods to which we order our lives and become educated in the virtues.

“To be virtuous, our relationships with others must find expression in a language that has an imaginative vocabulary and a set of idioms adequate to the moral life. . .

. . . We have to learn how to make occasion and time for extended conversations with a variety of not-always-agreeable others and we have to learn first how to listen and only then come to participate. Our principle aim in so doing is to discover what it is about which we ourselves have been mistaken or confused or [why we are] unable to identify key problems. And this self-education we will only achieve if we and the other participants in our conversations agree in appealing to standards that enable us to determine together in particular cases what is indeed true and what is false. Good conversation is therefore incompatible with some standard conceptions of freedom of speech. Those who deny that the holocaust occurred or that carbon emissions produce the effects that they characteristically produce, for example, have lost their grasp of those standards to which all of us need to appeal if we are to distinguish the true from the false, and so have excluded themselves from participation in worthwhile conversation, except perhaps for those conversations explicitly designed to demonstrate their errors to them, and to secure an admission of error.

Conversations would not have the import that they have if they did not also issue in choices and actions, and not only in judgments. They provide a means for resolving quandaries about common goods and how they are to be achieved in ways that take into account other goods, individual and common. Reasoning together with others, we learn just what it is that in this or that situation is required by justice or courage or temperateness, and incur the censure of those others if we don’t proceed to act. So, over time habits are instilled, or if they are not, we lose our place in the exchanges of conversational friendship. So it is that conversation becomes an education into the virtues.”

“Common Goods, Frequent Evils” (2017)

The term ‘common good’ gets thrown around a lot in contemporary political discourse on both the right and left. However, it is almost invariably used to refer to public goods, or else some aggregate of individual goods. In this lecture, MacIntyre distinguishes these different kinds of goods and the role they play (or should play) in our social and political life.

MacIntyre argues that “Except in rare cases, a contemporary political society structured by an Aristotelian understanding of its common good will not take the form of a modern state, if only because almost all modern states are too large and heterogeneous, are oligarchies ruled by agenda-setting elites, and are bureucratically structured so that the relationship between those who are governed to the governed it too often that of patron to client, rather than that of citizen to citizen. This, however, does not preclude the emergence of local societies who, deliberating together as to their common good and sharing an understanding of their needs and resources bring in to being recognizably Aristotelian forms of political community in neighbourhoods, in townships, even in some cities, even perhaps in some small nation states.” We need to be educated into and participate in a politics of a common good if we are to develop our full human potentialities, but the dominant forms of our contemporary political life provide no such education. Therefore, it is necessary to develop local forms of political community of a particular kind.

A core element of the common good and of virtue is the reality of justice, and hence of the natural law. However, MacIntyre notes that “It's important that this kind of education into the virtues involves the transformation of the agent’s desires. Those who address some call for the obedience to precepts of the natural law or to any other set of precepts, to those whose desires have not yet been adequately transformed become the voices of an ineffective, abstract moralism. A moralism all to familiar in recent American politics.”

MacIntyre also discusses how,“in Aquinas's commentary on the politics, he endorsed Aristotle's account of the political common good. Yet that political common good, turns out to be a subordinate good, since 'the highest good, which is God, is the common good, since the good of all things depends on him, and the good whereby each thing is good is the particular good of it and other things which depend on it. Everything therefore is ordered to one good, which is God, as to an end.' As part of the political community, I find a less than ultimate good in my political community. As part of the universe, I find my ultimate good in the good of the universe: God. For I am part of the order of things, and the goods to the achievement of which I direct myself are rightly ordered only when they are ordered to God.”

“Modern states themselves can't be adequately deliberative communities, and not only because of their size and heterogeneity... It's also the case...that they are ruled by agenda-setting elites, political elites, financial elites, economic elites, media elites, academic elites, who make public debates a matter of choice between severely limited and unimaginative alternatives, so excluding many voices that go unheard. But this isn't all. Economic inequalities in modern societies are such that appeals to interests are bound for a large majority to be more persuasive than appeals to the common good, even when those appeals to interests are masked by a rhetoric that appeals to the common good. The everyday anxieties of the unemployed and of most working-class people dictate a politics of interests, while about the rich we need always to remember Aristotle's remark that they do not know how to be ruled. Moreover, the different ways in which different social groups are educated or miseducated make it impossible for them to engage in the kind of shared deliberative conversations from which a common mind concerning the common good can emerge. Some are scarcely educated at all. Some are unable to recognize the extend to which they can become victims of misinformation communicated by social media. Some trust expertise unduly and some mistrust it unduly. So there are insufficiently common standards in the light of which truth is judged and arguments evaluated. And without these, it must seem, no common mind as to the common good is possible. However, this is mistaken.” MacIntyre proceeds to discuss why this is so.

“The Justification of Coercion and Constraint” (2016)

In this lecture, MacIntyre asks under what circumstances coercion and constraint are goods, and from this inquiry he draws three conclusions about freedom:

(1) “The first is that a great deal turns on how the relationship between freedoms on the one hand and human goods, common and individual, on the other is conceived. If freedom, as I’ve contended, is valuable only if and insofar as it contributes to the achievement of those goods, then it’s not in itself a good to be valued for its own sake. Of every particular freedom, we must ask whether and how it needs to be limited in particular situations and particular types of situations if certain goods are to be achieved."

(2) "The second conclusion concerns that great evil: powerlessness. Freedoms are goods only to those who have been able to learn how to exercise their free choice with some measure of effectiveness so they can move towards the achievement of their individual goods and the common goods they share with others . . . For those who have been deprived of the opportunity to learn how to exercise their freedom of choice because of the inadequacies of their family life or schooling, so that they have never learned how to deliberate with others about their common goods, freedoms may not be goods. So those who justly aspire, as we all ought to aspire, to rescue the powerless from their powerlessness, their status as victims, have not completed our task by merely conferring legal or political freedoms unaccompanied by educational and economic opportunities of a substantial kind. Opportunities that enable those who are able to make use of them become the makers of good choices.”

(3) Finally, when freedom is misconceived, so that it is taken to be itself a good no matter how it’s exercised, then the consequences will be a multiplication of bad choices and a multiplication of bad citizens. Every year a number of institutions in the United States publish rankings of political societies according to how free they are . . . But freedom as they understand it, so I’ve contended, is freedom misconceived. It is therefore a further and final conclusion of this paper that this is a misleading and indeed corrupting way to evaluate political societies."

If you enjoyed After Virtue, these three books build on and expand his thesis, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity summaries his overall view of ethics and politics in a more accessible form. Read my review of Dependent Rational Animals here.