Alasdair MacIntyre was right all along His philosophy has new resonance

“The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed,” wrote Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (1981). Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant had attempted to justify rationally what was effectively Christian morality. But, despite titanic efforts, they hadn’t succeeded. The result, as MacIntyre described it, was that the morality of Western Enlightenment culture lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. Philosophy, therefore, had lost its central role in culture, becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject.

That philosophy has a marginal role, even in the academy, is undoubtedly true in the West. But After Virtue doesn’t just examine what MacIntyre saw as the exhausted political traditions and moral confusions of liberal individualist Western societies. It also tries to offer an alternative, grounded in an idea of human essence and purpose, of the good life, inherited from the philosophy of Aristotle and largely, as MacIntyre saw it, abandoned.

In other words, in this book, MacIntyre is trying to change the world. He does so in a way that has particular resonance today, even a year after his death. His endeavour, in After Virtue, is to push humanity in a different direction — sometimes referred to as a “post-liberal” one — and, in a sense, to go backwards, to recover something lost through the turn to Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism. You don’t find much that even vaguely resembles this in modern philosophy, characterised as it is largely by pedantic quibbling and unreadable obscurantism.

The critique that MacIntyre presents also informs his alternative. He argues that Western mankind became morally homeless by abandoning the foundations of Aristotelian morality in community and arete — excellence in one’s work. This Aristotelian morality does still live on, but only as a sort of remnant, being found for example in distaste for “dysfunctional” individuals or institutions which fail to serve any useful purpose. But it rarely carries the day.

Its abandonment exposes us to the claims of untutored human nature, for which there are no ethics, no enduring standards and little conception of  excellence in and of itself. In this context, other types of moral assertion tend to prevail, generally based around ideas of equality and equity which tend to be suspicious of achievement. But these moral assertions often seem inappropriate — rewarding dysfunctional and even illegal behaviours.

One example would be the current arguments surrounding illegal migration in Britain. Our moral discussions on such topics typically go around in circles of assertion and counter-assertion. The state and other conforming institutions try to enforce a consensus, invoking Christian-style moral sentiments  like “kindness” and “compassion”. But these attempts don’t convince — and indeed, often appear to be attacks on other kinds of moral sentiment, say, based on ideas of deserving versus not-deserving. Meanwhile we find the “harm” of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” — that individuals should be free to act just as long as they don’t harm others —  expanded and exploited. Anything disliked is asserted to be harmful, thereby turning the harm principle into a rationale for preventing freedom when in fact, it was meant to facilitate it.

There is an unreality to a lot of this cod-Christian, equity-centred moral assertion and its opposition. Both appear disconnected: sometimes futile; sometimes open to exploitation by the powerful. Moral statements about right and wrong still project moral passion. But the aims and ambitions those passions embody die on contact with the real world. Immigration activists preach compassion to refugees, but the migrants they seek to help hardly meet a compassionate world, trapped as they are between bureaucracy on the one hand and criminal gangs on the other. Those who wish to “Stop the Boats” meanwhile find themselves talking into a void. MacIntyre says: “We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have — very largely, if not entirely — lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.” Nothing works, nothing improves — and our divisions embed themselves more and more over time.

MacIntyre suggests that the government’s inability to express a moral consensus makes patriotism, which he sees as a virtue, no longer possible like it once was. Western governments appear merely as means to impose “a bureaucratized unity on society”. As a result, they struggle to mobilise collective commitment. The nature of political obligation itself “becomes systematically unclear.”

Our customary way out of this state of confusion is to fall into a pervading cynicism, MacIntyre tells us, reflexively dismissing moral statements from others as mere projections of self-interest. This cynicism gathers itself into a theoretical approach that he called “emotivism” and which sees self-serving, arbitrary motives behind others’ moral utterances, exposing the very idea of morality to routine denunciations of hypocrisy.

MacIntyre saw emotivism in everyone from Evangelicals to the Bloomsbury Group, Sartre and Nietzsche, and the liberal rights theorist John Rawls. Freud’s “superego” is another example. This conceptualises an arbitrary, irrational eye of society that controls our actions via conscience, preventing us from being free. Emotivism coheres into a reflexive refutation of inherited morality, treating existing social bonds as oppressive. But the alternative it presents, of self-realisation — the individual creating their own values — only leads us into more confusion as individual examples are unmasked in turn and rejected. And so we go around again, propelling ourselves into a brighter future only to refute it.

As MacIntyre presents it in After Virtue, emotivism is the dominant philosophical standpoint of our times. As with previous moral worldviews, it finds itself embodied through characters who morally legitimise certain forms of behaviour. While in past times the public school schoolmaster, explorer and engineer furnished such ideals, MacIntyre says, nowadays the function of emotivism is fulfilled by the archetypes of the rich aesthete, the bureaucratic expert, the therapist and the protestor.

We might think of DEI as a sort of culmination of the emotivist spirit. For it is demonstrative and assertive, placing all wrongness outside itself and the groups it sponsors. It operates very much in the moral register. And it brings at least three of those archetypes together: wielding expert authority via the law-like generalisations of critical social science; protesting against the oppressive existing reality decreed by this science; and prescribing the overturning of existing functional society in order to fix it.

For the emotivist, MacIntyre says, moral agency is located in the “in the self and not in social roles or practices.” That individual self can pass judgement on the world — and can freely reject it. The emotivist perspective is universal and abstract and protected from criticism. It is apart from the world — at least until it starts to shape the world itself, at which point it finds itself assailed variously for cynicism and hypocrisy. And so we go around again.

MacIntyre’s alternative, Aristotelian, version of morality seems strange and counter-intuitive to the Western individualist mind. Bound up in social roles and the work we do, it does not exist in a walled-off individual self. It is not purely our own. MacIntyre uses the example of a sea-captain to justify it, showing that, in his role, the sea-captain should do whatever good sea-captains do. At least some moral agency is to be found in him being functionally effective in his work rather than in some sort of inner essence of goodness.

MacIntyre uses the idea of the “practice” to articulate this perspective further, explaining it as a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized”. In this sense, kicking a football isn’t a practice, but the game of football is. Planting turnips isn’t, but farming is. Bricklaying isn’t, but architecture or housebuilding is. To enter into a practice is “to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice” — standards which change over time through a continuous process of critique and improvement. Painting and music qualify, since they are long-term traditions with standards that evolve over time; so does academic work like physics, chemistry and the study and teaching of history.

There is contrast here with our conventional utilitarian way of seeing things, for which the point of work is to achieve external goods — that is, work as a means for achieving separate ends. MacIntyre doesn’t dismiss such things, but focuses also on the “internal” goods of the practice, on maintaining and extending standards, which in turn requires the presence of virtues like justice, courage and honesty. For this perspective, your moral essence is to be found not in statement-making nor in abstract ideas about who you are, but rather attached to what you do — and whether this reflects the virtues of the practice. In this view, a sea-captain is no more virtuous for striving to ensure his crew is diverse.

The virtues help protect the integrity of practices against the acquisitiveness of institutions. But practices require institutions to protect and nurture them. When we consider the decline of institutions like the Civil Service and BBC, we might see it in MacIntyre’s framing, as reflecting a discarding of the virtues in favour of a sort of moralistic self-promotion.

Is there a possible political philosophy in all of this?

John Gray, perhaps our greatest current political philosopher, dismissed After Virtue in a New Statesman article soon after MacIntyre’s death a year ago, suggesting that, as “an avowed critique of the modern world”, it offered little useful guidance for modern urban-industrial societies. “Reading the book when it first appeared in 1981, I was struck by its political thinness,” he said.

This seems unfair. MacIntyre’s account of virtues and practices applies to modern industrial societies as much as any other society, embracing as it does science and improvement as part of a continual process of criticism and critique. Gray’s account, accusing MacIntyre of “pursuing an imaginary prelapsarian idyll”, appears to be at least partly influenced by a torrid four-hour exchange they once had in an Oxford college garden.

I, at least, found the book to be original and refreshing. It also offers a contrast to the reflexive pessimism that Gray falls into. It taps into our confusion about morality. But it also offers an alternative, and strangely practical vision, based on a deeper, more meaningful conception of work. Under MacIntyre’s idea of practices, work is essential to human flourishing, giving us meaning and purpose, a role and status in our community, something we can be expert in and work to improve. This emerges as a different way of looking at morality, assigning moral value away from judgement-making and towards making a contribution through our actions.

There is plenty to question about this vision. Applying such an idea to the low-paid drudgery of much work is not straightforward. But giving extra substance and recognition to work that is “socially useful”, in Mervyn King’s phrase, like street cleaning and caring for the elderly, is surely well within the bounds of our imagination.

It is also easy to imagine “practices” being employed to prop up unjust and oppressive regimes. But on the other side, you could argue that the integration of practices into the workplace could be transformative in a good way, infusing both capitalism and the state with a new spirit, infused with the virtues. There is hope here, possibility, surely a sine qua non for any democratic politics.

In a postscript included in a later edition of After Virtue, MacIntyre admitted that the book’s argument is underpowered in certain aspects. Its confrontation with modern moral confusions is certainly limited, having little to say about sexual morality for example.

The book’s value can be found precisely in application. MacIntyre’s analysis offers both critique of what has gone wrong and a route back to what may be made right again. Under his framing, such things as media production, academia, housebuilding and architecture, town planning, war-fighting, crime-fighting, public cleanliness and sport might all be thought of as practices to which standards of excellence apply over and above the assertion of moral supremacy. Certainly, the idea of practices runs counter to the promotion of self that we find so widespread in institutional life nowadays, which divert attention and resources away from delivery.

Indeed, far from being politically thin, After Virtue appears to open up a deep and rich seam of applications. As an account of work, it applies equally to public and private sectors. And, encompassing these two sometimes antagonistic sectors, it might just confer on us a practical theory of state and society: a political philosophy, requiring collective political action to implement in all areas where work matters. It ought to be an ideal prompt for the think-tank world.

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