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MacIntyreand Aristotle’s Ethics
Jiyuan Yu
In After Virtue (hereafter, AV), Alasdair MacIntyre develops a theory of virtue based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter, NE) which has been quite influential. This paper examines the way in which MacIntyre’s own ethics is related to his interpretation of Aristotle. The focus of the discussion is more on how MacIntyre creatively uses the NE than on the evaluation of the content of his interpretation.
1. Interpretation and Revival
Let me begin by examining how MacIntyre relates his project to Aristotle. In the contemporary revival of virtue ethics, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has been hailed as the most important classic in Western ethics. However, it has not always been the case that it has received such a warm reception.In the first half of the 20th century, moral philosophers showed little philosophical interest in it. H. A. Prichard, for example, in his influential paper “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?”, states:
The fact, if it be a fact, that virtue is no basis for morality will explain what otherwise it is difficult to account for, viz. the extreme sense of dissatisfaction produced by a close reading of Aristotle’s Ethics. Why is the Ethics so disappointing?... It is, rather, because Aristotle does not do what we as Moral Philosophers want him to do, viz. to convince us that we really ought to do what in our non-reflective consciousness we have hitherto believed we ought to do, or if not, to tell us what, if any, are the other things which we really ought to do, and to prove to us that he is right.[1]
Prichard is convinced that an appropriate moral philosophy should address the issue of what one ought to do. Since Aristotle’s ethics is concerned with virtue and characteran approach which does not fit with Prichard’s notion of moral philosophy, Prichard concludes that there is not much to learn in Aristotle’s Ethics.[2]
The evaluation of Aristotle’s Ethics changes after Elizabeth Anscombe published her 1958 article, “Modern Moral Philosophy.”[3] Like Prichard, Anscombe is impressed with the sharp contrast between Aristotle and modern moral philosophers, but unlike Prichard, Anscombe dismissed the concepts of “moral obligation” or “moral duty” which are at the core of modern moral philosophy. To do ethics appropriately, in her judgment, we must turn to the notion of virtue, and we must first of all provide a sound psychology of virtue. Anscombe’s paper inaugurated the contemporary revival of virtue ethics. It is in the shift from what one ought to do to what kind of person one should be that Aristotle’s Ethics becomes a model for most moral philosophers. Clearly, in Prichard and Anscombe we see that different philosophical sensibilities lead to radically different evaluations of the same classic.
In line with Anscombe, MacIntyre claims that Aristotle is “the protagonist against whom I have matched the voices of liberal modernity.” (AV, 146)[4] However, different from many virtue theorists who, although using Aristotle to criticize modern moral philosophy, do not see him as a viable paradigm to develop a positive theory, MacIntyre proceeds to develop, following Aristotle’s thinking, an alternative theory of virtue to replace modern morality.[5] Indeed, it is his positive and substantial Aristotelian reconstruction that makes him a worthy subject of discussion for this volume.
MacIntyre argues that our current language of morality is full of disagreements and is “in a state of grave disorder.” (AV. 2) Different moral positions are derived from incompatible and incommensurable premises which have different historical origins. There is no rational way of securing moral agreement and terminating these disagreements. Such a situation, according to him, is the result of the failure of what he calls “the Enlightenment project,” that is, the project of discovering and providing a rational justification of morality (AV, 39). This project fails because moral thinkers “cannot agree among themselves either on what the character of moral rationality is or on the substance of the morality which is to be founded on that rationality.”(AV, 21) Furthermore, MacIntyre claims that the Enlightenment project itself results from the wrongful rejection of the Aristotelian tradition:
It was because a moral tradition of which Aristotle’s thought was the core was repudiated during the transitions of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that the Enlightenment project of discovering new rational secular foundations for morality had to be undertaken. (AV. 117)
Accordingly, it was wrong in the first place to reject Aristotle, and the Enlightenment project should never have been started. Such a diagnosis leads MacIntyre to return to Aristotle, to “make a new start to the enquiry in order to put Aristotelianism to the question all over again.” (AV. 119) Macintyre’s enquiry contains two aspects. The first is as follows:
It will be necessary to consider Aristotle’s own moral philosophy not merely as it is expressed in key texts in his own writings, but as an attempt to inherit and to sum up a good deal that had gone before and in turn as a source of stimulus to much later thought. (AV. 119)
Two tasks are involved in this first aspect: to comment on Aristotle’s own texts and to provide an exposition of the tradition in which Aristotle’s thinking was developed and of which Aristotle serves as the source and representative. Clearly, the former task is the interpretation usually conducted by Aristotelian commentators who seek to transmit and explain the original meaning of Aristotle’s texts, and the latter task is a job usually carried out by scholars of the history of philosophy.
The second aspect of his enquiry has to do with answering the following key question: “Can Aristotle’s ethics, or something very like it, after all be vindicated?” (AV. 118) The goal MacIntyre envisages is to provide a positive answer to this question, showing that “the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments.” (AV. 259) In vindicating and reviving Aristotle’s ethics and the Aristotelian tradition in contemporary ethics, MacIntyre aims to develop a new Aristotelian ethical theory.
It might be relevant and useful to introduce here two expressions from Chinese philosophy regarding the interpretation of the classics. In editing and commenting on the classics, Confucius claims: “I transmit but do not create.” (Analects, 7:1) By this he means that he only explains the original meaning of the classics, with no intention of adding anything of his own. Such an attitude is usually called “I-comment-on-the-classics.” In contrast, the Neo-Confucian philosopher Lu Hsiang-Shan (1139-1193) holds that to produce faithful commentaries on ancient classics is not his aim. For him, “if in our study we know the fundamentals, then all the six classics comment on me.”[6] By “all-the-classics-comment-on-me,” he means that the classics are no longer the objects of commentary, but become resources to exploit. One should appropriate the themes and ideas of the ancient classics to develop new philosophical views. This practice leads to the production of interpretive texts that are no longer historical commentaries, but are themselves original philosophical works and may even be classics themselves. In history of philosophy, Lu himself is not called a Confucian commentator, but a “Neo-Confucian.”
In terms of these two approaches,[7] the first aspect of MacIntyre’s enquiry can be called “I-comment-on-Aristotle,” and the second aspect “Aristotle-comments–on-me.” In the second, Aristotle’s ideas are used to criticize modern moral philosophy, and his approach is borrowed in order to grapple with contemporary ethical issues. Aristotle’s Ethics becomes a source from which MacIntyre’s own theory is constructed and developed. After Virtue is, then, an important work in contemporary virtue ethics rather than merely a historical commentary. MacIntyre is more a “Neo-Aristotelian” moral philosopher than an Aristotelian commentator.
“I-comment-on-the-classics” and “the-classics-comment-on-me,” however, are clearly two different and even conflicting interpretive practices. They reflect the traditional contrast between the historian of philosophy and the philosopher. Most philosophers represented in this volume adopt the “the-classics-comment-on-me” type of interpretation, but historians of philosophy usually dismiss this type of interpretation and favor the “I-comment-on-the-classics” approach.For many historians of philosophy, as long as philosophers use a classic as a source to defend or develop new thinking, the faithfulness of the philosophers’ interpretations of the original classics are held in doubt. Hence, for instance, few Aristotelian commentators take seriously Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle. Indeed, it is with regard to the approach of “the-classics-comment-on-me” that the problem of uses and abuses arises.
If this is right, the two aspects of MacIntyre’s enquiry, “I-comment-on-Aristotle” and “Aristotle-comments-on-me,” are in conflict. How, then, is it possible for MacIntyre to pursue both in his inquiry? The answer seems to be that Macintyre holds a unique conception of how moral philosophy should be carried out. For him, philosophical analysis cannot be isolated from historical inquiry, and the prevalent academic division of labor between philosophy and history should be abandoned. The present is intelligible only as a commentary on the past. Taking Vico, Hegel and Collingwood as models, MacIntyre seeks to write a philosophical history, a narrative which is a fusion of historical inquiry and philosophical analysis. It is by historical narrative, rather than by logical argument, that he justifies and defends his thesis. As he himself states:
I hold not only that historical enquiry is required in order to establish what a particular point of view is, but also that it is in its historical encounter that any given point of view establishes or fails to establish its rational superiority relative to its particular rivals in some specific contexts. (AV. 269)
This approach makes MacIntyre’ commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics an intrinsic part of his project. In the remainder of this paper, section II focus on Macintyre’s “Aristotle-comments-on-me.” Section III will deal with his “I-comment-on-Aristotle,” and the final section will examine the implications of his combination of these two approaches.
II. An Aristotelian Account of Virtue
One of the fundamental features that distinguishes Aristotle from modern moral thinking, according to MacIntyre, is that Aristotle focuses on the question of “what sort of person I am to become.” This “is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life.” (AV, 118) Aristotle answers it by locating virtue in the central place of ethics. Modern moral philosophy, however, ignores this question and turns, instead, to the question of “what rules we should follow.”
This turn in modern moral philosophy, according to MacIntyre, results from the rejection of Aristotle’s teleology (AV, 119). Aristotle holds a teleological view in which human beings have a specific and essential nature that determines their proper aims and goals (telos). His ethics starts from human nature as it happens to be, and seeks to understand human nature as it could be if its telos were realized. Its central task is to show the way to fulfill this telos. To become a good man is to actualize or fulfill this nature, and the virtues are excellences of character that enable people to achieve their telos (AV. 148). With the development of modern science, this teleological view of human nature is dismissed. As a consequence, a moral agent is simply seen in modernity as a rational agent who has no specific or identifiable purpose independent of his own choice.
If the rejection of Aristotelian virtue ethics results from the dismissal of Aristotelian teleology, what should MacIntyre do with regard to teleology in his attempt to revive virtue ethics? Like modern ethics, MacIntyre also does not find Aristotle’s version of teleology acceptable. Indeed, he sees Aristotle’s teleology as the first of the major difficulties that Aristotle’s ethics faces, because it “presupposes his metaphysical biology,” and that biology has been rejected.[8]
Nevertheless, MacIntyre maintains that for answering adequately the question of “what sort of person I am to become,” a general teleological scheme is necessary. “Without an overriding conception of the telos of a whole human life, conceived as a unity, our conception of certain individual virtues has to remain partial and incomplete.” (AV, 202) We need a telos of human life to view life as a whole and to provide some general account of what human flourishing consists in; we also need a telosto find a rational way of discriminating and ordering different individual virtues. In short, a teleological account of a life provides a basic structure for a virtuous life.
Accordingly, MacIntyre envisages that he needs to replace Aristotle’s metaphysical biology with a new version of teleology:
Hence any adequate teleological account must provide us with some clear and defensible account of the telos, and any adequate generally Aristotelian account must supply a teleological account which can replace Aristotle’s metaphysical biology. (AV, 163)
A contemporary attempt at developing a new teleology is, as MacIntyre is fully aware, a challenge, given that modernity has divided human life into many segments and our dominant way of thinking is atomistic analysis. Yet, for him, this is a mission that must be accomplished in order to revive virtue ethics. For to provide this alternative version of teleology amounts to providing “the necessary background against which the concept of a virtue has to be made intelligible.” (AV.186)
This new teleology is developed in MacIntyre’s three-tiered conception of virtue which consists of a notion of a practice, an account of the narrative order of human life, and an account of what constitutes a moral tradition. They form three stages of logical development in the sense that each of the earlier stages provides an essential constituent for each of the later stages, and each of the later stages presupposes and modifies each of the earlier ones. The first stage is to understand virtues in terms of “practices.” Practice is defined not by rules but by goods. Each practice has its internal goods which refer to those objective standards of excellence appropriate to the activity itself, and external goods which refer to the goods such as money, status, or reputation. Virtue at this stage is defined as the quality the possession and exercise of which enables one to achieve the internal goods of a practice.
This practice-based account of the virtues, however, is only preliminary. There are competing practices and competing goods worth pursuing. To bring specific practices into harmony with one another, we need to put practices and virtues in the larger arena of human life. For this reason, we must regard a life not merely as a sequence of individual actions and episodes, but as a unity. MacIntyre therefore proceeds to stage two of his concept of virtue “to envisage each human life as a whole, as a unity, whose character provides the virtues with an adequate telos.” ( AV. 204) It is at this point that the new teleology emerges.
The unity of an individual life consists in the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. It is through narrative that human conduct can be made intelligible. A whole life is a course of living out a story that runs from one’s birth to death. The unity of a life always has to be understood in a social context. “For the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity.” (AV. 221) Furthermore, such a unity of life lies in “the unity of a narrative quest.” (AV. 219) It is a quest for the human good. The good is not something fixed, not something already adequately characterized so that all other actions are moving toward it progressively. Rather, it is a process of self-understanding: “A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge.” (AV. 219) In this quest, one encounters and deals with various events and episodes. Through these one comes to understand the meaning of the life and the direction it should take: “The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man.” (AV. 219) At stage two, virtue is further defined as a quality which not only enables us to achieve the internal goods of a practice and to sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, but also “will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good.” (AV. 219)
This account of virtue is complemented by a notion of tradition. It is within a tradition that practices are situated, shaped, and transmitted across generations. It is the tradition that provides the resources for a narrative quest and makes intelligible one’s claims of the good life. The given of one’s life constitutes one’s moral starting point and makes us bearers of a tradition. Virtue is embedded in a tradition. “Hence the individual’s search for his or her good is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual’s life is a part, and this is true both of those goods which are internal to practices and of the goods of a single life.” (AV. 222)The end is discovered and rediscovered within a living social tradition. MacIntyre’s account of tradition in After Virtue is brief, yet tradition becomes the central theme of the two volumes subsequent to After Virtue: Whose Justice? Which Rationality?[9] and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.[10]
In MacIntyre’s own assessment, there are three aspects in which his account of virtue is clearly Aristotelian (AV. 197-199). First, he defends and elaborates various ideas of Aristotle, such as voluntariness, the distinctions of different kinds of virtues, the relation between virtue and passion, the structure of practical reasoning, and so on. Second, his account “can accommodate an Aristotelian view of pleasure and enjoyment.” Third, his account “is Aristotelian in that it links evaluation and explanation in a characteristically Aristotelian way.” To this list, we can add that the view of the relation between virtue and practice at stage one has an Aristotelian origin.[11] The emphasis on the social embeddedness of conceptions of the good and on the social constitution of the person at stage two is derived from Aristotle’s thesis that “man is by nature a political animal.” More important, MacIntyre’s insistence that an appropriate account of virtue must put it in the human life as a whole is clearly inspired by Aristotle’s point that virtue must be related to the function of human life. The list can go even further, but MacIntyre’s concept of virtue is impressive not because it is full of Aristotelian elements, but because MacIntyre moulds all these and other Aristotelian elements together and works out an original theory of virtue.