“Dependent Rational Animals”
Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Open Court, 1999 (ISBN 0-8126-9397-3), xiii + 172pp.
In the present study based on three Carus lectures given in 1997, the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre responds to two key questions: why is it important to consider and appreciate what humans have in common with other intelligent animals? and why is human vulnerability and disability important for moral philosophy? He describes his account as that of a Thomistic Aristotelian and is seeking in part to correct what he sees as shortcomings of his earlier works, particularly regarding the role of biology and development in relation to the virtues. His central thesis is that we require virtues in order to develop from our initial animal condition into one of independent rational agency and to respond to the vulnerability and disability of ourselves and others. These are the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals, “whose dependence, rationality, and animality have to be understood in relationship to each other” (5). He advances this thesis by way of three interrelated contentions.
The first contention is that, although our differences are significant, we must recognize that both in our infancy and to some degree thereafter we comport ourselves towards the world much the same way as other intelligent animals. “Human identity is primarily, even if not only, bodily and therefore animal identity and it is by reference to that identity that the continuities of our relationships to others are partly defined” (8). It is widely recognized that a dolphin is able to “perceive, recognize, categorize, and remember the multitude of sounds and sights it receives through its auditory or visual senses,” which implies for MacIntyre that we may be justified to ascribe the possession of thoughts, beliefs, and even concepts to dolphins (26). It has often been argued that we can attribute neither thoughts nor beliefs to non-linguistic animals, but MacIntyre points out that for both human and non-human animals there exists a pre-linguistic distinction between truth and falsity and that this is a form of belief. What is more accurately to be ruled out is the kind of determinate beliefs that language brings about.
Nonetheless, indeterminate beliefs can still be modified on the basis of sense data and can be seen at work in human infants much the same as in animals. Even when we acquire the use of language and become reflective, we do not stop relying on the same pre-conceptual recognitions, discriminations, and exercises of perceptual attention that we did before. What changes is that, through the instruction of others, we restructure this ‘animal comportment’ so as to elaborate or correct our beliefs and redirect our activities. MacIntyre maintains that in certain instances animals have reasons for doing what they do, and this shows that language does not provide us with the ability to have reasons for action. Rather, the use of language gives us the capacity to reflect upon those reasons.
The second contention is that “the virtues of independent rational agency need for their adequate exercise to be accompanied by what I shall call the virtues of acknowledged dependence” (8). Unlike dolphins, humans go through a stage in which they separate themselves from their desires in order to recognize goods other than their immediately felt urges. Language allows a child to evaluate its reasons for acting and to discover that it may have a reason to act contrary to its most urgently felt wants. This evaluation involves an idea of the ‘good’ and, although it requires that we learn from others, we must also come to make our own judgments if we are to become independent reasoners. Maturation also involves an expansion of our awareness away from just the present and toward an imagined future, the possibilities for which can be enlarged or diminished in our lives by others.
MacIntyre discusses the roles played by the virtues of acknowledged dependence in our development as independent rational agents. For example, he maintains that self-knowledge depends heavily on what we learn about ourselves from others, and upon a confirmation by others of our own self-judgements. Here he highlights the insight stemming from Wittgenstein that we are only able to have the concept of human identity that we do when our own “criterionless ungrounded self-ascriptions of identity coincide in the overwhelming majority of cases with the criterion-grounded ascriptions of identity by others” (95). The virtue that is connected with this process and that allows us to reach the necessary degree of self-knowledge is honesty. Through a number of similar discussions, MacIntyre shows that the virtues serve a threefold function: they enable us (1) to attain and then continue in the exercise of practical reasoning, (2) to care for and educate others so that they can also attain and continue with practical reasoning, and (3) to protect ourselves and others against neglect, defective sympathies, stupidity, acquisitiveness, and malice.
MacIntyre highlights our inevitable embeddedness in networks of giving and receiving and thereby distances his approach from a number of key ethical positions. He disagrees with Hume’s view that virtues are what are generally useful or agreeable because vice is often useful or agreeable to certain people (e.g., greed is useful to purveyors of luxury cars). Against Kant, he rejects the adequacy of moral absolutes because virtues take us beyond the demands of natural law. Contra many political theorists, MacIntyre opposes ethics based on rational choice because they only apply to those capable of negotiating on equal terms. Sympathy and empathy are necessary in order to include infants, the elderly, and the handicapped in these negotiations. Thus, reasoning and sympathy/empathy must be supplemented by virtues based on giving and receiving.
The final contention is that neither the modern nation-state nor the modern family can supply the requisite political and social association. He states that
what I am trying to envisage then is a form of political society in which it is taken for granted that disability and dependence on others are something that all of us experience at certain times in our lives . . . and that consequently our interest in how the needs of the disabled are adequately voiced . . . is integral to [our] conception of [the] common good (130).
The nation-state, while providing important public goods, is too vast and wrongly structured to provide for the ‘common good’ as defined by MacIntyre. Any rhetoric to the contrary is “a purveyor of dangerous fictions” (133). Further, the goods of family life are generally achieved within the goods of the local community and are therefore reliant upon its flourishing. It must, then, be some form of a local community that provides the necessary association. This leads to a discussion of salient aspects of said community, including the kinds friendship and truthfulness required for the authentic representation of those who cannot represent themselves.