This is another in the useful, ‘Contemporary
Philosophy in Focus’ series from Cambridge, that offers exposition and critical analysis
of major modern thinkers.  In this case, Mark Murphy has brought together six
other scholars to present major themes in Alasdair MacIntyre’s 50-odd years of
philosophizing.

What would a student comparatively unfamiliar
with this body of work make of it on the basis of this book?  Beginning in the
hey-day of ordinary language philosophical analysis, and its logical positivist
background, MacIntyre was one of the great dissenters, calling for fundamental
re-appraisals of many of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the then
orthodox.  One of his earliest books, The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis
(1958), appeared in the famous series of little red books published by Routledge,
in which Geach, Kenny, Winch, Kovesi, and others threw out various challenges
to contemporary shibboleths. In MacIntyre’s case, attention focused on the
nature of human action and its explanation, and thus the nature of rationality,
and on the historical situatedness of our moral thinking, a theme he championed
in his well-known, A Short History of Ethics (1966), and which he has
elaborated in much of his subsequent work.  Since the 1981 After Virtue,
MacIntyre’s work in moral philosophy has been an integral part of a widespread
neo-Aristotelian movement to reinstate the virtues in any adequate account of
our moral life.

As a dissenter, however, MacIntyre presents a
paradoxical appearance.  His fulminations ‘against the self-images of the age’
(a title he used for a 1971 collection of essays) reveal a man deeply convinced
of the inescapability of tradition, and whose modest hopes for the modern world
are conceived in terms of a second Saint Benedict.  Indeed, I think one major
omission from this volume is a serious confrontation with MacIntyre’s religious
views.  They may not explicitly occupy a large proportion of his published
work, though there is much on Thomism as a moral tradition, but when a position
leads one to think that Abelard’s submission to the Church is to be preferred
to Galileo’s opposition, I would have thought this consequence serves as a reductio
ad absurdum rather than an anomaly to be cleared up later.  (Jean Porter
alludes to this issue at the end of her essay on the notion of tradition in MacIntyre’s
thought, p. 66.)  For those of us for whom the continuing existence of any
church is the mystery, it is not unlikely that MacIntyre’s position here is not
merely a consequence of some philosophical ideas about authority within a
tradition of rational thought and action but is bound up with what he thinks
about some key doctrines belonging to that tradition.

Besides Porter on tradition, the volume contains
essays by Gordon Graham on history and historicity in MacIntyre’s thinking, by
Stephen Turner on some topics in the philosophy of the social sciences (mainly
rational versus causal explanations of action and the idea of
"identifications", which are used to exclude alternative
explanations), two by J.L.A. Garcia and David Solomon on MacIntyre’s impact on
moral philosophy, one by the editor on his political thinking, and the last by
Terry Pinkard on his critique of modernity.  As can be imagined, several topics
crop up repeatedly €” I think MacIntyre’s conception of a practice is quoted at
least three times, and his suggestion that incompatible traditions can be
objectively ranked by appeal to how well they account for each other’s problems
should be well impressed upon the thorough reader  €” but perhaps these
repetitions obstruct a deeper engagement with the difficulties of MacIntyre’s
main ideas.  I doubt, however, that they could easily have been avoided, given
the format of independent essays adopted for this series.  Not that the
contributors are not critical: most indicate gaps and problematic issues for
the views they consider.

I want to briefly mention two of the many ideas
thrown up in reading this volume.  One concerns the degeneration of traditions
(perhaps this reflects my feeling that Aristotelians have much to say about
generation but precious little about decay).  MacIntyre’s characterizations of
practices emphasize the goods that are internal to the practice (fairly scoring
a goal, rather than the prize money one may get for playing), the authority
initiates must bestow upon those who induct them into the practice, and the
kinds of knowledge such authorities must possess.  My impression is that all
this reflects a flourishing practice, but may not hold of those cases where a
practice is in temporary or chronic decline.  What Lakatos called ‘degenerating
problem shifts’ are not always invisible to participants.  People learn all too
easily how to behave in ways that remain pretty mysterious to them. 

The second point is that many of MacIntyre’s
problems seem to derive from a general point about justification in the human
sphere.  Quine has emphasized the ‘underdetermination of theory by data’; what
we have here is the underdetermination of practices by principles.  To take a
possibly trivial example, humans need a certain amount of food and drink.  This
is not, pace Garcia, ‘something like €¦ an Aristotelian teleology,
in which a valid value judgment is a species of factual judgement’ (p. 107),
since there is no natural norm that humans should exist or continue to exist (a
Thomist divinity might create such a norm, so the relevance of that item of
doctrine becomes clearer).  It is what Quine called a purely technological
issue: if you want to keep these humans alive, they need €¦: exactly the same
question as arises for a sample of smallpox virus.  The underdetermination
comes in because there are any number of ways in which this biological need can
be satisfied: ackee and saltfish, steak and kidney pie, dhal and rice, even Big
Macs.  This plasticity permits culture and history to play a part, and it means
that the kind of consideration that generates the biological need does not give
any help with choosing within this historico-cultural sphere.  Although there
may be considerations to determine a disinterested intellect with respect to
some cultural differences, in many cases it is pretty clear that there are not,
that human beings are faced with an arbitrary choice, whose justificatory
arbitrariness is not diminished by the contingent fact that we happen to be
living here and now rather than then and there.  The impression many of these
essays give that MacIntyre wants his cake and eat it too (on the non-relativity
of supposed moral truth, on the radical credentials of his hoped-for Ms
Benedict, as Pinkard has it, on the existence of an audience that can
understand him, among others) arises, I suspect, in part from his wishing to
close this gap.

© 2004 Ed Brandon

Ed Brandon is, by
training, a philosopher, and now is working in a policy position in the
University of the West Indies at its Cave Hill Campus in Barbados.

Categories: Philosophical