Political Philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre

This article focuses on Alasdair MacIntyre's contribution to political
philosophy since 1981, although MacIntyre has also written influential
works on theology, Marxism, rationality, metaphysics, ethics, and the
history of philosophy. He has made a personal intellectual journey
from Marxism to Catholicism and from Aristotle to Aquinas, and he is
now one of the preeminent Thomist political philosophers. The most
consistent and most distinctive feature of MacIntyre's work is his
antipathy to the modern liberal capitalist world. He believes that
modern philosophy and modern life are characterized by the absence of
any coherent moral code, and that the vast majority of individuals
living in this world lack a meaningful sense of purpose in their lives
and also lack any genuine community. He draws on the ideal of the
Greek polis and Aristotle's philosophy to propose a different way of
life in which people work together in genuinely political communities
to acquire the virtues and fulfill their innately human purpose. This
way of life is to be sustained in small communities which are to
resist as best they can the destructive forces of liberal capitalism.

1. Introduction

Alasdair MacIntyre was born in 1929, in Glasgow, Scotland. He holds MA
degrees from the University of Manchester and University College at
Oxford, and taught at several institutions in the United Kingdom
before moving to the United States in 1970. He has taught at several
institutions in the United States, and he currently holds a position
at Notre Dame University.

His first publication, "Analogy in Metaphysics," appeared in 1950 when
he was 21 years old. His first book, Marxism: An Interpretation,
followed in 1953. Since then, he has written or edited nearly twenty
books and hundreds of articles and book reviews on a wide range of
subjects, including theology, Marxism, the nature of rationality,
metaphysics, and the history of philosophy and ethics. For references
that deal with his contributions to fields other than political
philosophy, and for more detailed biographical information, see the
References and Further Reading.

This essay concentrates on MacIntyre's contributions to political
philosophy and is primarily concerned with his best known work, After
Virtue, which was originally published in 1981. A second edition of
After Virtue was published in 1984; it included a postscript in which
MacIntyre responded to a number of criticisms of the original edition.
It is this second edition that will be cited below. The three main
works which followed After Virtue expand on, clarify, or revise the
arguments found there. These are Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
(1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), and Dependent
Rational Animals (1999). The last is of particular importance for
understanding the practical consequences of MacIntyre's political
philosophy. It is also likely to be the easiest of the three for the
beginning student of MacIntyre's work to read and understand. A useful
source for MacIntyre's thought is The MacIntyre Reader (1998), edited
by Kelvin Knight, which brings together a number of MacIntyre's
shorter works going back to the 1950s, a pair of interviews with
MacIntyre, excerpts from After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which
Rationality?, and two thoughtful essays by Knight.

In the first of those essays, Knight claims that "MacIntyre's politics
may now, to an extent, be described in terms of resistance" (The
MacIntyre Reader 23; see also Breen 2002 and McMylor 1994). Knight is
certainly right about this. MacIntyre is trying to resist and
transform essentially the entire modern world. His definition of
"modern" stretches back roughly 350 years to the Enlightenment,
although he considers the Enlightenment to have been a mistake; (After
Virtue 118 and Chapters 4-6; see also Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? Chapter 1), but in this article the term "modern" will
mean the contemporary twentieth and twenty-first century world.

MacIntyre wants to overthrow the liberal capitalist ideology that
currently dominates the world both in the realm of ideas and in its
manifestations in political and social institutions and actions. He
seeks to achieve this not through the use of force but by changing how
people think about, understand, and act in the world. To show that the
changes he wants are possible and desirable, he returns to an older
conception of morality, derived from the teachings of St. Thomas
Aquinas and ultimately, through Aquinas, the philosophy of Aristotle
and the way of life of the Athenian polis. He portrays this older
conception of morality as both superior to and fundamentally hostile
to the modern order, and his philosophical arguments are meant to help
restore it to the world. On the other hand, he understands that
liberal capitalism has tremendous power and appeal both in the world
of ideas and in the power it has over people in the social, political,
and economic spheres. Ultimately his recommendation is that the
particular conditions of the modern world require that those who agree
with his arguments should, to the greatest possible degree, withdraw
from the world into communities where the old morality can be kept
alive until the time is right for it to re-emerge.

This article begins by describing the modern world as MacIntyre sees
it, and then moves on to MacIntyre's depiction of what he believes to
be the very different world of the ancient Greeks, and specifically
the ancient Athenians. Next, it contrasts the two and shows why
MacIntyre believes the ancient world to be superior. The conclusion
examines MacIntyre's suggested alternative to the modern world, which
draws on the ancient world without simply proposing a return to it.

It is important to keep in mind that MacIntyre is not suggesting that
we should merely tinker around the edges of liberal capitalist
society; his goal is to fundamentally transform it. He does not
believe that this will happen quickly or easily, and indeed it may not
happen at all, but he believes that it will be a disaster for humanity
if it does not happen. After Virtue famously closes with a warning
about "the new dark ages which are already upon us" (After Virtue
263). It is also important to keep in mind that even if, after careful
consideration, you do not agree with MacIntyre's proposed solution, or
you do not believe that it has any chance of actually coming about, it
may still be that MacIntyre's critique of the modern world is at least
partially correct. MacIntyre is well aware that most of us who have
been brought up in the liberal capitalist world see our world's ideas
and institutions as natural and desirable – not perfect, but
fundamentally sound – and so we will not easily be persuaded that it
is in fact inherently deeply flawed and profoundly unhealthy. But an
openness to that possibility is essential to understanding MacIntyre.
2. Philosophy and Society

As we work through MacIntyre's argument, we will be talking about both
the world of ideas – that is, philosophy – and the world of
institutions and actions – that is, politics and society. Although at
times we will consider these two worlds separately, one of MacIntyre's
most strongly held convictions is that they are closely connected.
MacIntyre has not always been clear or consistent about the strength
or direction of that connection, but the importance of the connection
for MacIntyre's argument has been consistent ever since After Virtue.
Contemporary philosophers, he says, tend to interpret and argue about
the works of past philosophers without paying attention to the
intellectual and especially the social context in which those works
were created. They act as though all past philosophers are
contributing to the same argument, seeking timeless and eternal moral
truths. But this is wrong, because philosophies are in large part
derived from sociologies and are specific to particular societies:
"Morality which is no particular society's morality is to be found
nowhere" (After Virtue 265-266; see also The MacIntyre Reader 258).
Although philosophers can and should learn from the work of earlier
philosophers, this is not their main source of ideas when they are
doing their job properly. What philosophers primarily do is study the
actual world in which they live – its politics, traditions, social
organization, families and so on – and try to find the ideas and
values that must underlie those institutions and practices, even if
the members of the society cannot articulate them, or cannot
articulate them fully. When the philosophers have done their work
correctly, the philosophy they articulate will reflect their society;
and because philosophers are uniquely suited to see the society as a
whole they will be in a unique position to point out inconsistencies,
propose new ideas consistent with the old ones that are nevertheless
improvements on those ideas, and show why things that seem trivial are
actually crucial to the society, and vice versa. They are also in a
position to examine not only what it is that the people in their
society do but why they do it, even when those people cannot explain
it for themselves. These are the things that MacIntyre himself wants
to do: show the inconsistencies and incoherencies at the center of
modern conceptions of morality and society and transform them so that
the modern expression of morality, structure of society, and practices
of politics can be transformed as well. But philosophers do not and
cannot stand outside of all societies to offer objective truths or
objective moralities, since these must always be connected to
particular societies.

So, the political, social, and economic life of a society constrains
the kinds of ideas and morality it can have (at times MacIntyre seems
to agree with Marx that these things do not merely constrain ideas and
morals but actually determine them), and those ideas and that
morality, especially as articulated by philosophers, in turn influence
economics and politics (again, in different writings MacIntyre seems
to have different views about how much influence they have). Let us
see what MacIntyre has to say about modern ideas and institutions in
After Virtue.
3. The Current Moral Disorder and Its Consequences

MacIntyre begins After Virtue by asking the reader to engage in a
thought experiment: "Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer
the effects of a catastrophe…. A series of environmental disasters
[which] are blamed by the general public on the scientists" leads to
rioting, scientists being lynched by angry mobs, the destruction of
laboratories and equipment, the burning of books, and ultimately the
decision by the government to end science instruction in schools and
universities and to imprison and execute the remaining scientists.
Eventually, enlightened people decide to restore science, but what do
they have to work with? Only fragments: bits and pieces of theories,
chapters of books, torn and charred pages of articles, hazy memories
and damaged equipment with functions that are unclear, if not entirely
forgotten. These people, he argues, would combine these fragments as
best they could, inventing theories to connect them as necessary.
People would talk and act as though they were doing "science," but
they would actually be doing something very different from what we
currently call science. From our point of view, in a world where the
sciences are intact, their "science" would be full of errors and
inconsistencies, "truths" which no one could actually prove, and
competing theories which were incompatible with one another. Further,
the supporters of these theories would be unable to agree on any way
to resolve their differences.

Why does MacIntyre ask us to imagine such a world? "The hypothesis 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"
(After Virtue 2, After Virtue 256). People in the modern liberal
capitalist world talk as though we are engaged in moral reasoning, and
act as though our actions are chosen as the result of such reasoning,
but in fact neither of these things is true. Just as with the people
working with "science" in the imaginary world that MacIntyre
describes, philosophers and ordinary people are working today with
bits and pieces of philosophies which are detached from their original
pre-Enlightenment settings in which they were comprehensible and
useful. Current moral and political philosophies are fragmented,
incoherent, and conflicting, with no standards that can be appealed to
in order to evaluate their truth or adjudicate the conflicts between
them – or at least no standards that all those involved in the
disputes will be willing to accept, since any standard will presuppose
the truth of one of the contending positions. To use an analogy that
MacIntyre does not use, one might say that it is as if we tore
handfuls of pages from books by Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Danielle
Steele, Mark Twain, and J.K. Rowling, threw half of them away,
shuffled the rest, stapled them together, and then tried to read the
"story" that resulted. It would be incoherent, and any attempt to
describe the characters, plot, or meaning would be doomed to failure.
On the other hand, because certain characters, settings, and bits of
narrative would reappear throughout, it would seem as though the story
could cohere, and much effort – ultimately futile – might be expended
in trying to make it do so. This, according to MacIntyre, is the moral
world in which we currently live.

One consequence of this situation is that we have endless and
interminable debates within philosophy and, where philosophy
influences politics, within politics as well (After Virtue 6-8, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry 7 and Chapter 1). MacIntyre
demonstrates this with regard to philosophers by a comparison of the
positions of John Rawls and Robert Nozick on what justice is,
positions which are mutually exclusive, but internally coherent. Each
conclusion follows reasonably from its premises (After Virtue Chapter
17). Each position has many adherents who can point out the flaws in
the other but cannot successfully defend their own position against
attack. In the political world, one of the examples MacIntyre uses is
the abortion issue in the United States. One side of the debate,
drawing largely on a particular interpretation of Christian ethics,
asserts that abortion is murder and hence is both morally unacceptable
and deserving of legal punishment; the other side, usually drawing
either on a conception of privacy or of rights or both, asserts that
women should have the right to make a private decision about
terminating a pregnancy, and therefore abortion, while possibly
morally problematic, deserves the protection of the law. In either
case, the conclusion follows logically, that is, reasonably, from the
premises. But the starting premises are incompatible, and there is no
way to gain everyone's agreement to either set of premises, nor is
there even any agreement on what kind of argument might be able to
gain a consensus. (And a look at public opinion polls about abortion
taken in the United States shows that the percentage of people for or
against legal abortion in particular circumstances has basically
remained unchanged since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973).

It is also the case, according to MacIntyre, that those involved in
these philosophical and political debates claim to be using premises
that are objective, based on reason, and universally applicable. Many
of them even believe these claims, misunderstanding the nature of
their particular inadequate modern philosophy, just as the people in
MacIntyre's post-disaster world misunderstand what it means to be
doing real science. But what they are really doing, whether they
recognize it or not, is using the language of morality to try to gain
their own preferences. They are not trying to persuade others by
reasoned argument, because a reasoned argument about morality would
require a shared agreement on the good for human beings in the same
way that reasoned arguments in the sciences rely on shared agreement
about what counts as a scientific definition and a scientific
practice. This agreement about the good for human beings does not
exist in the modern world (in fact, the modern world is in many ways
defined by its absence) and so any attempt at reasoned argument about
morality or moral issues is doomed to fail. Other parties to the
argument are fully aware that they are simply trying to gain the
outcome they prefer using whatever methods happen to be the most
effective. (Below there will be more discussion of these people; they
are the ones who tend to be most successful as the modern world
measures success.) Because we cannot agree on the premises of morality
or what morality should aim at, we cannot agree about what counts as a
reasoned argument, and since reasoned argument is impossible, all that
remains for any individual is to attempt to manipulate other people's
emotions and attitudes to get them to comply with one's own wishes.

MacIntyre claims that protest and indignation are hallmarks of public
"debate" in the modern world. Since no one can ever win an argument –
because there's no agreement about how someone could "win" – anyone
can resort to protesting; since no one can ever lose an argument – how
can they, if no one can win? – anyone can become indignant if they
don't get their way. If no one can persuade anyone else to do what
they want, then only coercion, whether open or hidden (for example, in
the form of deception) remains. This is why, MacIntyre says, political
arguments are not just interminable but extremely loud and angry, and
why modern politics is simply a form of civil war.
4. The Absence of Meaningful Moral Choices

But there is another problem. Just as no one can win an argument with
anyone else by persuading them with reasons, no one can win such an
argument with himself or herself in trying to determine what their own
moral commitments should be. In other words, no one can have real
reasons for choosing the moral positions and values that they do, and
no one can have any real reasons for choosing any way of life over any
other as the best possible life. So any choice about the kind of life
one will lead (and of course these choices have to be made, either
consciously or unconsciously) must be arbitrary; any individual could
always just as easily have chosen some other life which would have a
very different set of moral positions and values (After Virtue Chapter
4). And if I can choose to be anything, but have no way of discovering
reasons that might persuade me that some choice is the best, then it
is impossible for me to make any kind of meaningful commitment to any
of my choices, and it will be extremely easy to revise my morals in
the name of expediency. The temptation will therefore be strong to
choose moral principles on the grounds of effectiveness. I will choose
my values at any given time because they happen to be useful as a way
of attaining something else I value, rather than rationally choosing
the best possible life and then letting that choice of the best life
determine what I should value and what I should do. Perhaps I will
choose values that enable me to be more popular in my community, or
values that are useful for justifying my desire for money, or values
that I believe will make me more successful at my job. What most
people cannot do and are not even aware that they should do is tie
their moral positions to a coherent and defensible version of the good
life for human beings. The modern philosophies that have received the
most attention and support – theories of utility such as those put
forward by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and theories of rights
such as those advanced by John Locke and John Rawls – cannot provide
such a description of the good life for human beings, and MacIntyre
regards them as having failed in their ambitions to do so and
therefore to have failed in their project of creating new moral
systems even on their own terms (After Virtue Chapter 6).

Many would disagree with MacIntyre at this point. They would say that
these moral debates are interminable not because of anything specific
to modernity but because by their nature they do not and cannot have
any resolution. In their view, the situation MacIntyre has described
is not a sign of philosophical or political failure in modern times,
it is simply a recognition that there are many diverse definitions of
what the best life for human beings is and therefore what is just, or
good, or virtuous, and that while many of them are legitimate, none is
or can be absolutely true. It follows that each of us is entitled to
our own viewpoint on these matters and to choose the version of the
best life and the best moral code that we individually prefer,
provided of course we do not harm others. In After Virtue, MacIntyre
calls this point of view emotivism, "the doctrine that all evaluative
judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but
expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar
as they are moral or evaluative in character" (After Virtue 11-12,
emphasis in original). In a world where people subscribe to emotivism,
moral judgments, since they cannot be used for reasoned persuasion,
are used for two reasons: to express our own preferences, and to try
to change the emotions and attitudes of those with whom we disagree in
order to make them agree with us and share our preferences. MacIntyre
believes that emotivism is a false doctrine, because we can in fact
rationally determine the best possible life for human beings and
therefore can have moral judgments that are more than mere
preferences, but it is nevertheless a doctrine that many people today
subscribe to, and they act as though it is true. Because so many
people act as if it is true, it takes on a degree of power in the
world. This is one example of the linkage between how people think and
how they live: "A moral philosophy – and emotivism is no exception –
characteristically presupposes a sociology" (After Virtue 23; see also
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry 80). Although few people would,
if asked, say that they subscribed to the doctrine of emotivism
(indeed, few people would even be able to explain what it is), it is
only possible to make sense of their actions and lives if we say that
they are acting according to emotivist principles – they act as though
morality is nothing but an arbitrary choice that is an expression of
their will, and so this is the doctrine to which we can say they
subscribe.

5. Emotivism and Manipulative Social Relations

If we are to fully understand emotivism as a philosophical doctrine,
MacIntyre says, we must understand what it would look like if it were
socially embodied. That is, if we stipulate that nearly all the people
in a given society subscribe to emotivism, what can we expect their
society look like? How will they behave? It turns out, MacIntyre says,
that such a society would look much like ours, and that (as has been
said) we act as though we believe emotivism to be true. MacIntyre says
that "the key to the social content of emotivism….is the fact that
emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between
manipulative and non-manipulative social relations" (After Virtue 23).
Each of us regards the other members of our society as means to ends
of our own. Because I cannot persuade people, and because we cannot
have any common good that is not purely temporary and based on our
separate individual desires, there is no kind of social relationship
left except for each of us trying to use the others to achieve our own
selfish goals. Even for someone who did not want to live this way, the
fact that others would be trying to gain power over them in order to
manipulate them would mean that they would still need to seek as much
power as they could simply to avoid being manipulated. It would also
mean that each of them would need to manipulate others in ways that
would make it more difficult or impossible for them to be manipulated
in return. This is similar to the argument that animates a good deal
of Hobbes' Leviathan, where the constant battle for power over one
another in a state of nature leads to a life that is solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short, and eventually to the recognition of the
need for a sovereign with absolute power – although this, of course,
is not the solution MacIntyre advocates.
6. The Concept of a Practice and the Origin of the Virtues

In After Virtue, MacIntyre tries to explain another element of what is
missing in modern life through his use of the concept of a practice.
He illustrates this with the example of a person wishing to teach a
disinterested child how to play chess.

The teaching process may begin with the teacher offering the child
candy to play and enough additional candy if the child wins to
motivate the child to play. It might be assumed that this is
sufficient to motivate the child to learn to play chess well, but as
MacIntyre notes, it is sufficient only to motivate the child to learn
to win – which may mean cheating if the opportunity arises. However,
over time, the child may come to appreciate the unique combination of
skills and abilities that chess calls on, and may learn to enjoy
exercising and developing those skills and abilities. At this point,
the child will be interested in learning to play chess well for its
own sake. Cheating to win will, from this point on, be a form of
losing, not winning, because the child will be denying themselves the
true rewards of chess playing, which are internal to the game. The
child will also, it should be noted, enjoy playing chess; there is
pleasure associated with developing one's skills and abilities that
cannot come if one cheats in order to win.

MacIntyre concludes that there are two kinds of goods attached to the
practice of chess-playing and to practices in general. One kind,
external goods, are goods attached to the practice "by the accidents
of social circumstance" – in his example, the candy given to the
child, but in the real world typically money, power, and fame (After
Virtue 188). These can be achieved in any number of ways. Internal
goods are the goods that can only be achieved by participating in the
practice itself. If you want the benefits to be gained by playing
chess, you will have to play chess. And in pursuing them while playing
chess, you gain other goods as well – you will get an education in the
virtues. The two kinds of goods differ as well in that external goods
end up as someone's property, and the more one person has of any of
them the less there is for anyone else (money, power, and fame are
often of this nature). Internal goods are competed for as well, "but
it is characteristic of them that their achievement is a good for the
whole community who participate in the practice" (After Virtue
190-191). A well played chess game benefits both the winner and loser,
and the community as a whole can learn from the play of the game and
develop their own skills and talents by learning from it.

MacIntyre believes that politics should be a practice with internal
goods, but as it is now it only leads to external goods. Some win,
others lose; there is no good achieved that is good for the whole
community; cheating and exploitation are frequent, and this damages
the community as a whole. (MacIntyre has changed his terminology since
After Virtue. He now calls internal goods "goods of excellence," and
external goods are now called "goods of effectiveness." See The
MacIntyre Reader 55).

One important way to understand the community surrounding a genuine
practice is as a community of teachers and learners, with each
individual community member filling each of these roles at different
times. "It belongs to the concept of a practice as I have outlined
it…that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves
within the practice in our relationship to other practitioners "
(After Virtue 191). Throughout my time as a participant in a practice,
but especially at the beginning, I must put myself under the authority
of others. To continue MacIntyre's example of chess playing beyond
where he develops it, notice that I, the player, rely on other chess
players to teach me rules and strategies, to evaluate my play and
suggest improvements, answer questions, encourage and guide me, and
provide opponents. In competing with one another, we develop one
another's skills, and each of us is able to recognize and value those
skills in the other and hence values the other person for exhibiting
those skills.

MacIntyre notes that when individuals first start to engage in a
practice, they have no choice but to agree to accept external
standards for the evaluation of their performance and to agree to
follow the rules set out for the practice: "A practice involves
standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the
achievement of goods" (After Virtue 190). As a newcomer, I lack the
knowledge and experience that would let me evaluate myself and my
efforts, so I must rely on others to judge me according to the
standards of the practice. And I cannot simply subordinate the
standards to my will; I cannot simply decide that I am a grand master
at chess because I want to be one. The standards that determine who is
and who is not a grand master are already established, and I must
accept them. Unilaterally declaring myself a grand master will not
place me at the top of the chess hierarchy; it will place me outside
it altogether. As I gain in talent, experience, and knowledge, I can
begin to have input into the standards themselves, but I will never
gain the ability to move outside them if I want to continue to
participate in the practice. Nor will I ever gain the ability to move
outside the rules if I want to be part of the practice, although in
some cases the community can agree to change the rules if they believe
it is beneficial to the practice. So, for example, the rules of chess
have changed since the game's origin, and MacIntyre would likely say
that this has happened in order to more fully develop the principles
of the game.

MacIntyre also emphasizes that chess, like other practices, has a
history and is part of a tradition. So he might point out that an
important part of becoming a grand master at chess is studying the
records of games that have been played by previous grand masters,
reading commentaries on those games, examining their philosophies,
practice regimens, and the psychological tactics they employed on
their opponents, and so on. The rules and standards have developed in
the past and are binding on the present, and although they can
sometimes be changed by the community as a whole those changes should
be consistent with the principles of the game as it has developed in
the past. This would seem to be a very conservative doctrine, as it is
in the hands of someone like Edmund Burke (cf. Reflections on the
Revolution in France), but MacIntyre is explicit that traditions that
are in good order require ongoing internal debates about the meaning
of the tradition and how it is to be improved and developed for the
future. He is not advocating blind loyalty to the past, nor is he
saying that all change is bad. He is only acknowledging that the
present rests on the past and must take that past into account in its
self-understanding as well as in its planning for the future. We have
already mentioned changes in the rules of chess, but other
transformations can occur without changing the rules. Today, for
example, chess players may decide that they must revise what they know
about the game and how it is played in order to compete against
computer opponents which use very different methods of playing than
human opponents do. This requires new approaches and tactics which
will become part of the tradition that is available to players in the
future. But developing new methods does not require starting from
scratch – the past provides materials for use in the present and
should not be dismissed as irrelevant.

Although MacIntyre does not emphasize this, he likely would agree with
Burke that the idea that one is part of a tradition can serve to
strengthen the community, as it encourages the present practitioners
to think of themselves as tied to the past and with an obligation to
the future, so that they will work to surpass the standards of the
past and leave a tradition that is in good order to those who will
practice it in the future.

Practices are also important because it is only within the context of
a practice that human beings can practice the virtues. Goods that are
external to practices, such as money and power, can be achieved in a
variety of ways, some good and some bad. But achieving the goods that
are internal to a practice, according to MacIntyre, requires the
presence of the virtues, and in After Virtue he defines the virtues in
terms of practices: "A virtue is an acquired human quality the
possession and the 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….we have to
accept as necessary components of any practice with internal goods and
standards of excellence the virtues of justice, courage, and honesty"
(After Virtue 191). The necessity of these virtues follows logically
from the definition of a practice, as we shall see, but it is
important to understand that as far as MacIntyre is concerned, virtues
and therefore morality can only make sense in the context of a
practice: they require a shared end, shared rules, and shared
standards of evaluation. The virtues also define the relationships
among those who share a practice: "….the virtues are those goods by
reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our
relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of
purposes and standards which inform practices" (After Virtue 191). We
must have the virtues if we are to have healthy practices and healthy
communities. Let us consider the three virtues of honesty, courage,
and justice and see how they arise from practices.

Members of a practice must be honest with each other when they
instruct others in the principles of the practice, when they explain
the rules to them, and when they evaluate their performance. And we
have already seen that the practitioners must not lie or cheat when
they engage in the practice, or they will not really be engaging in it
and will not gain the benefits of doing so. Courage, MacIntyre says,
is a virtue "because the care and concern for individuals, communities
and causes which is so crucial to so much in practices requires the
existence of such a virtue" (After Virtue 192). Practitioners of a
shared practice come to genuinely care about each other, and genuinely
caring about others means a willingness to risk harm or danger on
their behalf, and that is what courage is. Finally, "Justice requires
that we treat others in respect of merit or desert according to
uniform and impersonal standards," and we have seen that these are the
standards that are a part of a practice (After Virtue 192). So virtues
such as honesty, courage, and justice have meaning in the context of a
practice, raising the possibility that there is a way out of the moral
chaos that surrounds us today.

MacIntyre is vague about what things do and do not constitute
practices; he gives some examples of each, stating that playing chess
is a practice but playing tic-tac-toe isn't; farming is, but planting
turnips isn't. More important to him than narrowly defining the
boundaries of a practice is arguing that particular kinds of
activities certainly are practices. Why does MacIntyre care so much
about practices? It is because he believes that there are a number of
things that have been practices in the past, currently are not, but
could (and should) be again, and chief among these is politics. It is
possible to think of politics as a practice within a community that
has a shared aim, and where the members of that community have the
same standards of excellence, the same rules, and the same traditions.
Indeed, in MacIntyre's view, politics is a sort of meta-practice,
because it is the practice of determining the best life for human
beings, a life which will include engaging in other practices. Here
MacIntyre parallels Aristotle's language about politics as the science
ordering the other sciences (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.2). The
benefits of a practice would then flow to those who participated in
politics – in fact, certain important benefits could only be achieved
by political participation – and politics would make people more
virtuous rather than less virtuous as it now does. To see why politics
currently makes people worse instead of better, and how this
inevitably follows from our current moral anarchy, we need to take a
closer look at contemporary politics.
7. Politics in a World without Morality

MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of
individuals who have no conception of the human good, no way to come
together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another about
what that common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the
common good does not and cannot exist. What kind of politics can such
a society have? "Politically the societies of advanced Western
modernity are oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies. The large
majority of those who inhabit them are excluded from membership in the
elites that determine the range of alternatives between which voters
are permitted to choose. And the most fundamental issues are excluded
from that range of alternatives." (The MacIntyre Reader 237; see also
The MacIntyre Reader 248, 272). What MacIntyre means by "the most
fundamental issues" are the issues of what the best way of life is for
individual human beings and for human communities as a whole, and how
each can be ordered so as to enable the other to flourish. Modern
politics has no space for such issues. Prior to the 2004 election in
the United States he published a short essay on the Internet arguing
that in light of this lack of meaningful alternatives about the most
fundamental issues the proper thing to do was refrain from voting.
There are no meaningful alternatives on these issues because almost
all citizens subscribe, consciously or not, to the modern idea that
issues about the best way of life are not capable of political
resolution or consensus and that they must be left to each individual
to decide. MacIntyre and other critics of liberalism, which they see
as the political manifestation of emotivism, argue that liberalism
claims to be neutral about the best way of life and moves debates
about it out of the public sphere and into the private, claiming that
the state should take no position about what the good life or the good
state is. This however has the effect of privileging a certain kind of
life and a certain kind of state in the name of neutrality; it is
another of the deceptions of the modern world. Because liberalism
asserts that each individual has a right to pursue happiness in his or
her own way, and because the versions of happiness individuals pursue
are inevitably mutually incompatible (I wish to have prayer in
schools, you do not; I wish to outlaw abortion, which you support; I
wish to raise taxes on the wealthy to feed the poor, which you
reject), and because we cannot persuade one another or agree on a
common good, politics is, as MacIntyre says, "civil war carried on by
other means" (After Virtue 253).

MacIntyre's famous comment, quoted earlier, about the new dark ages we
are living in is followed by the observation that in contrast to the
earlier dark ages, the barbarians are not at the gates but in fact
have been governing us for some time (After Virtue 263). This
conclusion is what we would expect if MacIntyre's view of the world is
right. We would be ruled by people who are ruthlessly aggressive,
ignorant of or actually hostile to the virtues required for civilized
life, and destructive of social life. Since politics today is about
using ideas and arguments not to search for truth but to manipulate
others in the quest for power, we would expect the people with the
most power to be the ones who are best at manipulating others for
their own purposes and who have the greatest desire for power. The
reasons they would give to justify their power would be false, but
widely accepted, and they would use that power for their own selfish
ends. Furthermore, they would pursue that power through whatever means
they felt would be most effective, in the absence of any of the
standards of right and wrong or success and failure that a practice
would provide. In such a world, MacIntyre says, things that would
appear to be vices would in fact be virtues. For example, keeping
one's word, which as we have already seen MacIntyre considers to be
one of the most important virtues (it is part of honesty), would
frequently have negative consequences for those who practiced it,
since it might end up being an obstacle to achieving some goal most
effectively. So instead of condemning people for not keeping their
word, we praise them for the virtue of "adaptability" and the ability
to change as the situation demands it. If politics were a practice
with the possibility of internal goods and virtues, this would not be
the case; but since it is currently not a practice, and therefore has
only external goods to offer, it is. Anyone who has read The Prince
cannot read MacIntyre on this point without recalling Machiavelli's
advice to the prince about the need to be adaptable and the only
relevant standards being those of success or failure; MacIntyre would
certainly agree that the modern world is characterized by its
Machiavellian politics.

It would also be in the interest of the ruling elite that would arise
that no one raises any of the fundamental questions about the best
life for human beings and the community considered earlier, because
any answer to those questions, and indeed any attempt to find answers,
could only undermine the legitimacy of their rule which is based on
the belief that there are no such answers. MacIntyre says in After
Virtue that claims to rule are based on the claim to possess
bureaucratic competence as described by Max Weber: people claim that
they should have power because they are the ones that can use it most
effectively, although the goals that they are pursuing in such an
effective fashion are never questioned or discussed. MacIntyre further
believes that these claims of managerial competence are and must be
false; they are another of the deceptions of the modern age (After
Virtue Chapter 6-8). But even if these claims were valid, valuing the
effective use of power without considering the ends for which it is
being used is a mistake. Trying to answer questions about the proper
ends of human life not only reveals the nature of our current problems
and the responsibility of those in power for creating and perpetuating
them but it also leads to the realization that the world needs radical
change before it can even be possible to discover the answers.

MacIntyre argues that modern politics has no place for patriotism,
because there is no patria, or fatherland. Although there can be
nationalism, jingoism, and propaganda, there can be no genuine,
healthy affection for the nation or for our fellow citizens because we
lack a shared project that would connect us to the nation or to our
fellow citizens. It would be bizarre for people to have a feeling of
attachment to the modern state, since it is bound to thwart many of
their projects, allows them no effective voice, and gives them no
unifying vision of the good life or any kind of shared community. And
if the state is purely instrumental, to be used to advance one's own
projects, why would anyone be willing to die for it, since death means
the end of all such projects? Yet the state requires such a patriotic
attachment, because it needs people willing to serve as soldiers,
police officers, and in other similar life- and safety-threatening
jobs. In trying to create such an attachment, the state reveals its
own nature and its absurdity: "The modern state…behaves part of the
time towards those subjected to it as if it were no more than a giant,
monopolistic utility company and part of the time as if it were the
sacred guardian of all that is most to be valued. In the one capacity
it requires us to fill in the appropriate forms in triplicate. In the
other, it periodically demands that we die for it" (The MacIntyre
Reader 227; see also The MacIntyre Reader 236).

Finally, in addition to these political problems, the modern age is
also characterized by global capitalism, which in MacIntyre's view has
its own deeply pernicious consequences. First, it reinforces emotivism
by making the pursuit of one's preferences the highest good. By doing
so, it is like emotivism in that it promotes a false view of human
happiness. We will see shortly what MacIntyre sees as the truly happy
human life, or at least the potentially happy life, which is lived
according to the objective standards of virtue found within a
tradition. But we can say here that that life does not involve simply
accumulating money or the things that money can buy. Money has a role
to play in the virtuous life; there are certain virtues, such as
generosity, which are impossible or at least very difficult to carry
out without money – here MacIntyre agrees with Aristotle. But a life
spent pursuing money is a wasted life, as far as MacIntyre is
concerned.

Second, capitalism as an ideology also promotes the instrumental
manipulation of people we have already discussed. The capitalist
manager manipulates their employees in the production of goods, and
the marketing department manipulates customers in order to get them to
consume those goods. Free market economies "in fact ruthlessly impose
market conditions that forcibly deprive many workers of productive
work, that condemn parts of the labor force in metropolitan countries
and whole societies in less developed areas to irremediable economic
deprivation, that enlarge inequalities and divisions of wealth and
income, so organizing societies into competing and antagonistic
interests" (The MacIntyre Reader 249). And it is money that dominates
the modern politics that is constructed by this capitalist competition
and antagonism (Dependent Rational Animals 131). Money and the harm it
does to the political process will not be removed from politics until
people choose to pursue goods of excellence rather than goods of
effectiveness. Capitalism is therefore not only harmful in and of
itself but also for its effects on politics.
8. The Greek Way of Life

Given his abiding interest in and admiration for the polis, it would
not be surprising if MacIntyre has another meaning for "barbarians"
when he describes the people who rule us today: for the ancient
Greeks, anyone who did not live in a polis and participate in polis
life was a barbarian, and when we see what MacIntyre thinks the polis
was and what kind of life pursued there, we will see that the people
who are on top in the world today are very far from living that kind
of life – as, of course, we all are. So he is probably using the word
as it was originally used, in addition to using it for its modern
meaning. Overcoming the modern barbarians would mean creating and
defending a modern version of the polis – and to do this, we must
understand the ancient version of the polis.

It is time, then, to turn to the ancient world which was destroyed by
the modern world we have been describing (MacIntyre offers a history
of how the new world came to replace the old one in After Virtue,
Chapter 16). Most of our attention will be focused, as MacIntyre's is,
on the Athenian polis, or city-state, in the time of Aristotle, and on
Aristotle's thought, which MacIntyre believes is an expression of the
way of life of the Athenian upper class. As with his description of
modernity, his descriptions of the ancient world and Aristotle's
thought are contentious, and there are many points on which other
scholars disagree with his arguments and his conclusions. We will be
focusing on the contrast between the ancient world and the modern
world and the reasons MacIntyre believes the former to be in many ways
superior. Keep in mind that ultimately he wants us to learn from the
institutions and ideas of the past and modify them to fit the
conditions of the modern world; the final part of this essay will
describe how his new world would differ from the world in which we now
live.

MacIntyre does not want to try to recreate the polis, nor does he
believe it would be possible even if it were desirable. MacIntyre also
does not simply offer uncritical praise of the polis. He is strongly
opposed to many of the institutions that made day-to-day polis life
possible: slavery, the treatment of women, the elitism of its politics
and political philosophy, and its exclusion of outsiders. One can
summarize these positions by saying that MacIntyre rejects those
elements of the polis and of Aristotle's thought that are hierarchical
in a way that subordinates some people (actually most people) for the
good of others. So MacIntyre realizes that there is much in the polis
that we do not and should not wish to restore. He believes that it is
possible to separate the positive features of the polis from its
negative features, keeping the former while rejecting the latter;
whether he is correct in this is an open question.
9. Heroic Society and Homer

For MacIntyre, understanding the polis means understanding its
predecessor: heroic society as described by Homer in the Iliad and
Odyssey (After Virtue Chapter 10; Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
Chapter 2). In heroic society, MacIntyre says, people did not see
themselves as we moderns do, as individuals bearing rights and seeking
autonomy from external control through the manipulation of others.
They also did not see themselves as constructing their own identities,
choosing what they wanted to be and who they were. Instead, their
identities came from their place within their society: "The self
becomes what it is in heroic societies only through its role; it is a
social creation, not an individual one" (After Virtue 129). Each
individual had a fixed role resulting from their location in the
social network, primarily through their particular ties to their
family and kin, and each individual had the specific obligations and
privileges attached to that location.

Many of these obligations were not chosen by the person bearing them,
and that person was not free to choose other obligations instead. Nor
would trying to evade one's obligations be praised as an example of
adaptability; it would be condemned as a violation of the social
order, which was the framework on which morality was built. People in
this society did not try to determine morality in terms of abstract
objective rules which applied to all equally – to try to place oneself
outside of society was to cease to exist, because each person's
identity made sense only in the context of that society. As MacIntyre
puts it, each individual in such a society "has a given role and
status within a well-defined and highly determinate system of roles
and statuses….In such a society a man [sic] knows who he is by knowing
his role in these structures; and in knowing this he knows also what
he owes and what is owed to him by the occupant of every other role
and status" (After Virtue 122). So in any particular situation, an
individual would be able to understand what they should do in a
straightforward way: the thing for them to do is the thing that it is
appropriate for a person in their position to do by showing the proper
regard for someone, meeting the particular obligations they have,
doing what their duty requires them to do, and so forth. And it is
also clear what actions must be performed in order to do these things.
All they must do is ask what a person in their position is supposed to
do in this situation and then do it.

In MacIntyre's view, this kind of society, unlike modern societies,
can have a genuine moral code, since failing to do what a person in a
particular position is supposed to do is a moral failure, and that
person can and will be judged accordingly by the other members of the
society, who know what that person's duties, obligations, and
privileges are and have legitimate claims on that person for them.
This moral code is based on what is agreed to be the shared end of the
society and the best way to achieve it, which gives each member their
proper role in the society and their proper tasks. Heroic society is
not by any means democratic, and so it would appear that democracy is
not necessary to have this kind of society, but MacIntyre does believe
that societies which include practices and virtues nowadays will prove
to be democratic – much more democratic than they are now, in fact.

Recall our earlier discussion of the practices and the virtues. Taken
as a whole, this kind of society can be understood as a kind of
practice. Each individual agrees about what the virtues are – those
traits that make it possible for them to carry out their obligations
as they ought to in order to bring about the best possible life for
the society as a whole – and they follow the virtues in living out
their lives. There is also a determinate pattern to the life of each
individual in the society, as each meets their obligations and
fulfills their role like characters in a story. Remember the earlier
suggestion that making sense out of morality today is like trying to
tell a coherent story by mixing up parts of five or six very different
novels. In this society, each individual is like a character in a
story that is told by the society as a whole. The story is about what
the good life is, and it provides a shared narrative for everyone.
What is good for the individual and what is good for society are
mutually reinforcing. If each individual does what they are supposed
to do, the society will function as it should, and at the same time
the society provides the context for the happy life spent in pursuit
of the virtues that give meaning to the lives of its members.
10. The Athenian Polis and Aristotle

MacIntyre asserts that the virtues of heroic society and the heroic
ideal carry forward into classical Athens, but since Athenian society
is organized very differently than heroic society, this leads to
difficulties. The virtues that are expressed in a society organized
primarily around family and kinship networks have to be expressed
differently in a society organized around the principle of the
equality of citizens and the activity of politics. In MacIntyre's
view, much of Athenian philosophy and art is engaged in redefining the
heroic virtues to make them fit the new context of the polis; again we
see how philosophy and society are interrelated, with changes in
society leading to changes in philosophy. MacIntyre's definition of
the polis is somewhat idiosyncratic: "The application of [the virtues
as a way to measure an individual's goodness] in a community whose
shared aim is the realization of the human good presupposes of course
a wide range of agreement in that community on goods and virtues, and
it is this agreement which makes possible the kind of bond between
citizens which, on Aristotle's view, constitutes a polis" (After
Virtue 155; see also Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 33-34).
Restoring this agreement is the sense in which MacIntyre wants to
return to the polis.

That the polis was the setting for the good life was, MacIntyre says,
taken for granted by everyone participating in the debate about what
the virtues could mean in their new setting, and in After Virtue he
examines four of the voices in this debate: Plato, the sophists,
playwrights such as Sophocles, and Aristotle. It is Aristotle who
comes to be MacIntyre's focus, because it is Aristotle "whose account
of the virtues decisively constitutes the classical tradition as a
tradition of moral thought" (After Virtue 147). MacIntyre believes
that Aristotle is essentially expressing the Athenian way of life in
the form of a philosophy. Some scholars would disagree with this
argument, but let us consider Aristotle more closely in order to see
MacIntyre's argument.

Aristotle's philosophy has at its heart the idea of a telos, or final
purpose. Think about a knife for a moment. If you were asked to
describe a knife, what would you say about it? You would probably
describe its size and shape, what it is made out of, the fact that it
has a handle and a blade, and you would probably also say that its
purpose is to cut things. That purpose is its telos, and your
description of the knife would be incomplete in an important way if
you did not include it. It is fairly easy to see that something made
by human beings has a telos, since humans generally create things for
specific purposes. But Aristotle believes that things in the natural
world also have a telos. The acorn has as its telos growing into a
big, tall, strong oak tree, full of healthy acorns. The baby
thoroughbred horse has as its telos being a swift runner; the wolf cub
will grow up to hunt well; and so on. Human beings also have a telos,
and according to Aristotle it is to be happy by living a life in
accordance with the virtues. This is the inherent purpose of human
life, and each of us is intended by nature to live a virtuous life in
the same way the acorn is meant to be an oak tree and the colt is
meant to be a swift racehorse. We do not get to choose what our telos
is, any more than a knife or an acorn or a horse does. We do get to
choose whether or not we are going to try to achieve it, and we can be
held responsible if we do not (The MacIntyre Reader, "Plain Persons
and Moral Philosophy").

The idea of a telos can be used to provide standards for normatively
evaluating things. For example, if I have a knife that will not hold
an edge, or has a handle that falls off, I have a knife that will not
be able to fulfill its telos. It cannot do what it is supposed to do
and what it was made to do. I can therefore say that it is a bad
knife. Similarly, a wolf that is fat and lazy, or unable to scent
animals, or runs slowly, is not the ideal wolf. It has not become what
it was supposed to be. And human beings, if they do not pursue the
life of happiness through virtuous behavior that is their telos, are
bad human beings. They are guilty of moral failure, and everyone who
agrees about what the human telos is will have to agree to that, in
the same way they will have to agree that a knife that falls apart
whenever someone tries to use it is a bad knife. Thus, for people who
share a telos and whose community expresses that shared telos,
morality has context and meaning.

It should be pointed out here that contemporary philosophies such as
emotivism deny that there is a human telos (with ruinous consequences
as far as MacIntyre is concerned). The idea that there is a human
telos carries with it its own problems. Most obviously, it has at
least so far proven impossible to unite all people behind a particular
idea of what that telos is, or to demonstrate how we can be sure that
a telos even exists. Often, the idea that nature or the gods want
people to pursue certain goals and behave in certain ways has been
used as a pretext for human tyranny. Many would point to the Taliban
in Afghanistan, or the Catholic Inquisition, as an example of this.
Also, there have been historical eras in which people in different
societies strongly believed that there was a telos, but disagreed
about what it was (in fact, the era of the polis in Greece was one
such era). This has often led to war. The liberal idea of religious
toleration, based on the idea that the proper work of government is
the protection of people's bodies and property rather than their soul
(see Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration), was in part the result of
the religious wars, which were in part about the best life for human
beings, that ravaged Europe for centuries (and ravage other parts of
the world today). MacIntyre points out, however, that just because we
haven't reached agreement on this subject doesn't mean that we can't,
and he argues that the belief that we can't is a historically specific
belief, rather than an objective and permanent truth about how the
world works. If we reason correctly, and examine competing
philosophical traditions of moral enquiry, we can choose the most
accurate one. (This is the task of Three Rival Versions of Moral
Enquiry).

You may want to think about physical health as an analogy. If I want
to be healthy, I am much more likely to succeed if I am willing to
exercise, eat sensibly, avoid tobacco and other drugs, and do what my
doctor tells me, even when that means undergoing painful surgery,
paying for expensive treatments, or swallowing foul-tasting medicines.
I am certainly free not to do any of these things. I can smoke,
overeat, lie on the couch all day, and never go near a doctor's
office. But in that case I won't be healthy, and I don't get to
redefine "health" to cover my condition. If I said I was living such a
lifestyle because I was trying to live a healthy life, anyone who knew
anything about health would laugh at me. Since health is preferable to
sickness, I should be willing to reject unhealthy behaviors that are
temporarily pleasant to achieve what is really good for me in the long
run. Yet often I do not. In the same way, I should give up things that
do not bring me closer to my telos by contributing to a virtuous life.
But, again, often I do not. And if we accept that certain things are
inherently good or harmful for our bodies because of our nature as
particular kinds of animals, why shouldn't we accept the same
principle regarding our souls?

As human beings, we are not always inclined to live a virtuous life
devoted to the pursuit of the virtues, but that is the life that we
should lead. MacIntyre calls this the distinction between "human
nature as it is" and "human nature as it could be if it realized its
telos" (After Virtue 52). The role of ethical theory is to take us
from the former condition to the latter, teaching us how to overcome
the weaknesses of our human nature and become what we are capable of
becoming, as well as why this ought to be our good. It is like a road
map, showing us where we are and where we need to get to and
identifying the hazards along the way. Recall that MacIntyre said that
in the modern world people believe that they do not have any fixed
telos or purpose; there is nothing that we are meant to become, no
innate goal that we move towards. (MacIntyre points to Hobbes and
Leviathan as an example of this philosophical belief and its
consequences). Absent any conception of what human beings are supposed
to become if they realized their telos, there can be no ethical
theory, because it simply has no purpose. For people with no
destination, a road map has no value.

We have seen MacIntyre's description of modernity and its problems,
and we have seen his description of the life of the polis and the
philosophy of Aristotle. This brings us to the choice MacIntyre says
confronts us. In After Virtue he says that we can either choose the
modern world, with its emotivism, liberalism and capitalism – a world
which, if we are honest, is actually a Nietzschean world – or we can
choose to return to a morality and a conception of the virtues based
on the philosophy of Aristotle (After Virtue Chapter 18). MacIntyre
wants us to reject Nietzsche and choose Aristotle – not on the basis
of the kind of arbitrary decision made under emotivism, but on the
grounds that the kind of rational morality proposed by Aristotle does
not fall prey to the criticisms of Nietzsche. It remains to describe
what the future would hold if MacIntyre were successful in his
project. How would a world based on the experience of the polis and
the philosophy of Aristotle that world differ from the world we live
in today? After Virtue ends without providing much guidance –
MacIntyre says that we are waiting for a new Saint Benedict (who was
the founder of monasticism in the Catholic tradition) to lead us out
of the new dark ages (After Virtue 263) – but in his later writings he
has offered more detail about what a better world would look like.
11. Our Human Nature: Dependent Rational Animals and Human Virtues

Much of what MacIntyre has to say on this topic is found in Dependent
Rational Animals, and that book will be the focus of this section of
the essay. MacIntyre intends the book to answer two questions: "Why is
it important for us to attend to and to understand what human beings
have in common with members of other intelligent animal species?" and
"What makes attention to human vulnerability and disability important
for moral philosophers?" (Dependent Rational Animals ix). The book
reflects MacIntyre's change of position regarding whether "an ethics
independent of biology" is possible (Dependent Rational Animals x). In
After Virtue he had rejected Aristotle's biological teleology – which
is the idea that human beings have a telos because of the particular
kind of creature that we are. Aristotle says that only human beings
have the ability to speak and reason and therefore our telos is to
develop that reason. In Dependent Rational Animals MacIntyre now
accepts the idea of a biological teleology, but much of his argument
for this is based on the idea that it is not human beings alone that
have the ability to speak and reason; dolphins and gorillas can also
do these things, and we can learn something about humans from how
these other animals pursue their individual and collective goods. What
we learn is that for human beings the key to flourishing is to be an
independent practical reasoner (Dependent Rational Animals 77). What
are the consequences of this?

MacIntyre now believes that any successful ethical theory must
comprehend three aspects of human existence: we are dependent, we are
rational, and we are animals. The first and third of these, he says,
are seldom taken into account by philosophers, and the second is
frequently overemphasized. Aristotle comes in for particular criticism
for denying the merit of the experiences of dependent human beings and
making a virtue out of self-sufficient superiority (Dependent Rational
Animals 6-7, 127). These are flaws which can be seen to contribute to
MacIntyre's turning away from Aristotle and towards Aquinas, whose
account of the human telos and virtues includes resources that allow
us to include everyone in the community rather than a small elite as
Aristotle's philosophy does. Much of the book is concerned with
placing human beings in relationship to other animals, especially with
regard to intelligence and rationality. MacIntyre argues that human
beings retain their animal natures in important ways (Dependent
Rational Animals 49) and that we are like gorillas and dolphins in
that members of each species "pursue their respective goods in company
with and in cooperation with each other" (Dependent Rational Animals
61).

Because we are animals, we are vulnerable to a wide range of
inadequacies, deficiencies, and illnesses and are in need of the help
of others if we are to survive and even more help if we are to thrive.
Each of us has had the experience of dependency in infancy and
childhood and most of us will face physical dependency again as we
age. The kind of dependency that MacIntyre focuses on is our
dependency on others to learn how to be rational and how to be
ethical. This need is strongest in children, who at first simply
follow whatever desires they happen to have at the moment. One of the
things that parents must do (MacIntyre focuses on the mother
throughout his discussion of parenting, without giving any reasons for
this) is to teach their children that what they desire is not
necessarily what is best for them at that time or what is best for
them in the context of their life as a whole. Even when we pass beyond
childhood, we still need others to watch and comment on our motives
and actions, to insure that those aim at what is good for us and not
merely at satisfying our temporary and potentially harmful desires.
These are our friends, who provide us with insight and
self-understanding, not least because they call us to account for our
actions when those seem immoral, short sighted, or out of character.
To provide such an account I must first reflect on my motivations and
goals, and then explain them in such a way that my friend can make
sense of them.

This is one of the ways in which I need other people, receive things
from them, and am dependent on them. Throughout my life, other people
assist me in developing the use of my reason, and I am dependent on
others for this; I cannot become rational on my own. I can only grow
if I can reason with and learn from others, and this requires certain
traits from me: the virtues (honesty, courage, and justice, for
example). Each of us also finds that others are dependent on us at
different times and in different ways, and we are obligated to assist
them in developing the same qualities and virtues others are helping
us to develop; and this assistance is itself a virtue. We therefore
find ourselves as part of a community of giving and receiving which is
a network of duties and obligations. Potentially, of course, these
same networks are dangerous; MacIntyre acknowledges that these
structures of giving and receiving are also structures of unequal
power distribution and potentially of domination and deprivation
(Dependent Rational Animals 102). We must take care to see that they
are not used in this way. But this network of obligations in the
service of a shared good – the development of human capacities to
reason and behave virtuously – means that this kind of society
resembles the polis as MacIntyre understands it.

So acknowledging our nature as a particular kind of animal forces us
to acknowledge our dependence on others to develop our rationality and
become independent and our need to use our rationality to help
dependent others (hence the title: Dependent Rational Animals).
MacIntyre says that each of these is a different kind of virtue: the
virtues of dependence differ from the virtues of independence but are
nonetheless virtues (Dependent Rational Animals Chapter 10). This in
turn requires us to acknowledge the networks of relationships of which
we are a part, and once we have done this we can and must deliberate
about the social and political institutions we wish to create in order
to promote and protect these networks. Collectively promoting the
social structures we need in order to flourish as individuals enables
us to escape from false dichotomies between self-interest and the
common interest and between selfishness and altruism. In supporting
the networks that are necessary if we are to flourish, I am promoting
both my interest and everyone else's, and I am looking out for the
common good as well as my own individual good. Practices, then, are
both consequences of our nature as the kind of animals we are, when we
properly understand the kind of animals we are, and forms of social
order that are in keeping with our nature, as opposed to contemporary
forms of social order (liberalism and capitalism) which are not.
12. A New Politics

MacIntyre has shown that his ideal society would be different from our
own in two particular areas, politics and economics, and now it is
time to consider what he believes we should do in order to bring this
ideal society into being. As was stated at the very beginning of this
essay, MacIntyre is writing in order to resist the modern world,
including modern politics. "Modern systematic politics, whether
liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be
rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the
tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its
institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition" (After
Virtue 255). When we have made the changes MacIntyre wants to see,
politics will no longer be civil war by other means: "the politics of
such communities…is not a politics of competing interests in the way
in which the politics of the modern state is" (Dependent Rational
Animals 144). It is instead a shared project, and one that is shared
by all adults, rather than being limited to a few elites who have
gained power through manipulation and use that power to gain the goods
of effectiveness for themselves. Politics will not be about people
selfishly fighting over power and money; instead there will be "a
conception of political activity as one aspect of the everyday
activity of every adult capable of engaging in it" (Dependent Rational
Animals 141). Human beings, as the kind of creatures we are, need the
internal goods/goods of excellence that can only be acquired through
participation in politics if we are to flourish. Therefore, everyone
must be allowed to have access to the political decision-making
process. The matters to be discussed and decided on will not be
limited as they are now; they will extend to questions about what the
good life is for the community and those who make it up. Politics will
be especially concerned with the virtues of justice and generosity,
ensuring that citizens get what they deserve and what they need. And
it is an important requirement of this new politics that, everyone
must "have a voice in communal deliberation about what these norms of
justice require" (Dependent Rational Animals 129-130). This kind of
deliberation requires small communities; although not every kind of
small community is healthy, a healthy politics can only take place in
a small community. Although their size cannot be precisely specified,
they will be intermediate in scale between the family and the modern
state (Dependent Rational Animals 131).

Politics will be understood and lived as a practice, and it will be
about the pursuit of internal goods/goods of excellence rather than
external goods/goods of effectiveness. "It is only because and when a
certain range of moral commitments is shared, as it must be within a
community structured by networks of giving and receiving, that not
only shared deliberation, but shared critical enquiry concerning that
deliberation and the way of life of which it is a part, becomes
possible" (Dependent Rational Animals 161). When the community
deliberates collectively about its best way of life it is choosing a
telos, or final end. And that final end will be one which reflects the
needs of all the citizens, including the need to have and use the
virtues, which are part of our nature as dependent rational animals.

MacIntyre's communities will also have traditions and histories, and
they will have people who are authorities to whom the rest of us will
submit ourselves while we learn about those traditions and histories.
Think back to the discussion of chess. Authority in chess is derived
from a mastery of the virtues internal to the game (or goods of
excellence) rather than external virtues (or goods of effectiveness).
Chess players with authority do not have authority because they
dominate others, or because they have wealth or political power.
Players recognize who has mastered the virtues internal to the game,
and try to learn from them. Rather than hating or resenting or fearing
those with authority, they welcome and value them; the powerful seek
to share their knowledge and skills for the good of the game, rather
than for purposes of domination or exploitation. All the players
recognize the rules of the game that make it possible for the game to
educate us in its virtues, and they follow those rules because they
recognize them as necessary and desirable. They are loyal to the game,
they enjoy it, and they genuinely care about those with whom they
share it. There is competition, to be sure, but it is in the service
of pursuing a common good. The political community, for MacIntyre,
must be this kind of community.
13. A New Economics

Capitalism must be replaced or transformed, or at least ways must be
found to shield individual small communities from its effects. "The
tradition of the virtues is at variance with central features of the
modern economic order and more especially its individualism, its
acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values of the market to a
central social place" (After Virtue 254). The ideas that the purpose
of life is to get rich and that the well-being of a society can be
measured by its economic production will both be rejected, for these
both reflect a focus on the goods of effectiveness rather than the
goods of excellence. In addition, capitalism undermines communities of
all kinds, including the family; we must have a way of life that puts
the common good first. "Market relationships can only be sustained by
being embedded in certain types of local nonmarket relationship,
relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to
contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they so often in
fact do, undermine and corrupt communal ties" (Dependent Rational
Animals 117). There are many possibilities for how we might construct
new economic systems. "The institutional forms through which such a
way of life is realized, although economically various, have this in
common: they do not promote economic growth and they require some
significant degree of insulation from and protection from the forces
generated by outside markets" (Dependent Rational Animals 145; The
MacIntyre Reader 249). The society MacIntyre prefers will have only
small inequalities of income and wealth, to prevent people from being
excluded from the community by their poverty or placing themselves
above it on account of their great wealth, both of which phenomena we
certainly see today (and which Aristotle recognized in his day). If
MacIntyre is correct that growing up as human beings is about learning
to overcome our immediate desires and learning to see our long term
good, then advertising and marketing, which teach us to give in to our
immediate desires, are going to become much less effective. Markets
must be subordinated to the development of the virtues in individuals
and the community, rather than the other way around, which is what
happens in the world in which we now live.
14. Conclusion

MacIntyre's ideal world would be very different from today's world,
and it is one that would undoubtedly take decades, and probably
centuries, to arrive, just as the replacement of Aristotelian morality
by liberal capitalism took a very long time. What are we to do in the
meantime? MacIntyre says that we can begin to work on the kinds of
small communities that are capable of preserving the practices and
virtues even in the face of liberal capitalism (Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? 99). We need to focus our energies on building and
maintaining the kinds of small communities where practices and the
virtues have a place and protecting them as much as possible from the
depredations of the modern state and modern capitalism. At the end of
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, he proposes ways to modify
universities and their curricula to bring them closer to the kind of
communities he wants to encourage. As far back as 1968's Marxism and
Christianity, MacIntyre was advocating "a politics of self-defence for
all those local societies that aspire to achieve some relatively
self-sufficient and independent form of participatory practice-based
community" (Marxism and Christianity xxvi, cited in The MacIntyre
Reader 23; see The MacIntyre Reader 248 and Breen 187). Small
communities will also make it possible for people to evaluate
political candidates in a variety of settings and judge them on the
basis of integrity rather than adaptability (The MacIntyre Reader
249). We can evaluate our leaders on their actual characters rather
than seeing them through the distortions of advertising and the
manipulation of propaganda.

MacIntyre's objections to liberal capitalism show the influences of
both the Marxism to which he subscribed early in his career and the
Catholic Church of which he is now a member. Both Marxism and
Catholicism, for different reasons, critique the unbridled pursuit of
wealth under capitalism. But there are many reasons to doubt that the
kind of society MacIntyre promotes will turn out as he wishes. Many
authors, from Adam Smith to Hayek to von Mises, have argued that
attempts to control or limit markets inevitably have as a consequence
attempts to control and limit human beings in ways that lead to the
gulag rather than to the virtues. They would also argue that
MacIntyre's proposals, by limiting or discouraging economic growth,
would condemn the poor to continued poverty and prevent improvements
in living standards in general, and would punish people who are able
to successfully provide people with what they want while profiting
from this success. This would kill initiative and innovation and lead
to stagnation. Whether people agree or disagree, MacIntyre would
probably take some satisfaction in the fact that at least there is an
argument going on – a serious discussion about the ultimate values and
way of life the community should pursue – which is typically avoided
or stifled on those rare occasions when it does arise. The next step
would be to make this kind of argument a part of mainstream political
discussions.

If his ideas become widespread and are widely adopted, MacIntyre's
small communities, like St. Benedict's monasteries, will preserve the
practices, the virtues, and morality until such a time as they can
re-emerge into the world. In the meantime they will be the best way of
life for those who are fortunate and hard-working enough to be a part
of them today. And of course those who, like MacIntyre, practice
philosophy must continue to strengthen and develop the arguments found
in the Aristotelian tradition as it has developed through Aquinas, and
continue to draw attention to the flaws and weaknesses of liberal
philosophy in the hope of persuading others to change their
allegiances.
15. References and Further Reading
a. Primary Sources

This bibliography includes only the most significant books from the
period beginning with After Virtue and is in chronological order.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Second Edition. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1984 (1981).
The foundation of his later work and the most important of his books
to read. Includes his arguments about the failures of modern
philosophy and politics and how those failures might be overcome, or
at least diminished, with the help of the philosophy of Aristotle and
the political way of life of the Greek city-state.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.
MacIntyre addresses "both what makes it rational to act in one way
rather than another and what makes it rational to advance and defend
one conception of practical rationality rather than another" (p. ix).
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
MacIntyre discusses three rival versions of moral enquiry:
encyclopedia, tradition, and geneaology. He describes how they
conflict with one another and the possibility that one of these
traditions can "emerge as indisputably rationally superior" (p. 5). It
is the Thomist tradition, he argues, that proves to be rationally
superior to the others.
Knight, Kelvin. The MacIntyre Reader. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1998.
This is a collection of articles by MacIntyre, extracts from After
Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and a pair of interviews
of MacIntyre, along with an introductory essay on MacIntyre by Knight.
The book is an excellent source for anyone looking for an overview of
MacIntyre's career, and Knight's essay is an outstanding analysis of
MacIntyre's project. There is also a very thorough Guide to Further
Reading, in essay form, in which Knight again reveals a sympathetic
and extensive knowledge of MacIntyre's work. Highly recommended.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need
the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court, 1999.
MacIntyre begins this book with the claim that any moral philosophy
must begin by acknowledging that human beings are a particular kind of
animal with particular needs and goods that are determined by our
animal nature. He then establishes what that nature is, and argues
that it requires us to develop our rationality while acknowledging our
dependence on others, thus providing us with a telos. He provides a
sketch of what kind of social organization would be necessary to
enable each of us to fulfill our telos, and how that kind of
organization differs from the organization of the modern world.
b. Secondary Sources
Ballard, Bruce W. Understanding MacIntyre. Lanham: University Press of
America, Inc., 2000.
This short (90 page) book has two parts: the first part explains the
fundamentals of MacIntyre's thought for beginning students, and the
second part brings MacIntyre into contact with thinkers such as Marx,
Kierkegaard, and Graybosch. Unfortunately these chapters are too brief
to be really useful on their own; Chapter 10, for example, entitled
"MacIntyre and His Critics," is a mere five pages long.
Breen, Keith. "Alasdair MacIntyre and the Hope for a Politics of
Virtuous Acknowledged Dependence." Contemporary Political Theory
(2002) 1, 181-201.
A political analysis of Dependent Rational Animals. The author
concludes that MacIntyre must moderate his claims if he is to avoid
self-contradiction and "a despairing purism."
Fuller, Michael. Making Sense of MacIntyre. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998.
This 144 page book has a title that might lead one to expect an
introductory volume, but while there is a summary of MacIntyre's
themes, the author also uses other philosophers, such as Donald
Davidson and especially Richard Rorty, to make sense of MacIntyre's
thought, and the reader who is not already familiar with Davidson and
Rorty may find this material difficult to understand.
Horton, John, and Susan Mendus, eds. After MacIntyre: Critical
Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Notre Dame: Notre Dame
University Press, 1994.
This collection of essays is wide-ranging, including essays on
MacIntyre's conception of justice, his characterization of liberalism,
his interpretation of Aquinas and his critique of the Enlightenment.
The last chapter is written by MacIntyre himself; entitled "A Partial
Response To My Critics," it offers MacIntyre's responses to some of
the criticisms offered by the other authors. (MacIntyre's willingness
to engage with his critics is both rare and admirable).
McMylor, Peter. Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity. London:
Routledge, 1994.
The author is a sociologist who treats MacIntyre's work as social
criticism. Part one is entitled "MacIntyre – Christianity and/or
Marxism?" and part two is "Markets, Managers, and the Virtues."
Murphy, Mark C., ed. Alasdair MacIntyre. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
A collection of eight essays by various scholars, with an introduction
by Murphy, that address different aspects of MacIntyre's thought.
Chapters 6 and 7, "MacIntyre's Political Philosophy," by Murphy, and
"MacIntyre's Critique of Modernity," by Terry Pinkard, were especially
helpful in working on this essay. The book concludes with an excellent
bibliography of works by and about MacIntyre.
Weinstein, Jack Russell. On MacIntyre. No location: Thomson Wadsworth, 2003.
Intended for the beginning philosophy student and the general reader.
Chapter 2 is a brief biography of MacIntyre's life with an emphasis on
his intellectual influences; Chapter 3 focuses on MacIntyre's
theological work, particularly MacIntyre's early comparisons of
Christianity and Marxism.