Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre

Background

MacIntyre, Alasdair Chalmers was born in 1929 in Glasgow.

Education

Universities of London and Manchester.

Career

Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion, University of Manchester, 1951-1957. Lecturer in PhilosophyUniversity of Leeds, 1957-1961. Fellow of University College, Oxford, 1963-1966.

Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, 1966-1970. University Professor of Philosophy and Political ScienceUniversity of Boston, 1972 80. W. Alton Jones Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University, 1982-1988.

McMahon/Hank Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, from 1988. Various other positions at OxfordYale, Princeton, Brandeis University, Wellesley College.

Views

MacIntyre, Alasdair, Dahl, Norman O. Baier, Annette and Schneewind, J. B. (1991) ‘Book symposium'on Whose Justice? Which Rationality?,,n Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11: 149-78. MacIntyre’s first book, written when he was 23, tried to rescue both a purified Christianity and a Purified Marxism for the modem world. He argued that, properly understood, Marxism, as the historical successor to Christianity, largely shares both its content and its function as an •nterpretation of human existence. In 1955 New Essays in Philosophical Theology, 'vhich MacIntyre edited with Antony Flew, and which gathered together a number of essays aPplying the methods of conceptual analysis to specific religious issues, reinaugurated the serious study of the philosophy of religion, a subject vvhich had been moribund in the analytical tradition for some decades. Since the mid-1960s most of MacIntyre’s work uas been concerned with ethical and social theory. In A Short History of Ethics (1966) he attacked he notion that moral concepts are a timeless. unchanging, determinate set. He held rather that they are embodied in, and partially constitutive of, forms of social life, and so change as social life changes. This does not mean merely that different societies have held different things to be right or good but, much more radically, that what it means to describe something as right or good may itself change; indeed, the very idea of morality is subject to change. So, to take one central case, the peculiarly moral, Kantian sense of ‘ought’ that characterizes much modern ethical thought—an ‘ought’ that expresses obligations binding on all rational beings as such, but unable to be derived logically from any factual statements—is completely absent in, for instance, the Homeric period. It arose, according to MacIntyre, in the modern period when the social roles and ideals that had originally provided a backing for it gradually dropped away. And this development explains the peculiarly intractable nature of moral disputes in the modem world, which is not a feature of all possible moralities but of one with a certain history. MacIntyre developed in detail this diagnosis of the problems of modern morality in After Virtue (1981). Its central claim is that modern morality is in deep disarray. It is, he suggested, no more than the fragments of a conceptual scheme which has lost the context which once made it intelligible, and to which have been added, as a way of attempting to cope with the breakdown of the traditional moral philosophy, such moral fictions as natural rights and utility. The attempt is a failure since, for one thing, there are no such things as natural rights or utility; and, for another, this yoking of incompatible moral traditions has largely made of morality just what Nietzsche and various forms of emotivism have claimed that it is: the mere expression of subjective preference with no objective criteria for deciding between them. If morality is again to make sense for us, we must, according to MacIntyre, recapture something of the Aristotelian tradition of moral philosophy. Further, given the nature of our society and its ruling liberal individualist ideas, this will not be easy. It would entail recapturing a number of ideas that are now lost. The concept of what MacIntyre calls a practice—a cooperative enterprise in pursuit of goods internal to that enterprise—would be essential; this, outside of the area of games, and particularly in our participation in political life, we have all but lost. So too we should need to recapture the notion of a whole human life, an idea lost to us now because bureaucratic modernity has seen to it that our lives have no unity. And, third, we should need to recapture the sense that what we arc is largely a matter of what we have become through our history and traditions. Without these notions, morality can make little sense for us. The choice, as MacIntyre puts it, is between Nietzsche and Aristotle. Given this analysis, a central problem is how rationally to recommend one tradition of thought as against another. MacIntyre turned to this issue in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and in his Gifford Lectures. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). The accounts of justice that we find in Aristotle and Hume—to take what are for us two of the most central examples are, according to MacIntyre, embedded in overall systems of thought which respectively impose their own standards of rationality on them. That being so, how may we adjudicate between them? MacIntyre argues that there can be no such thing as a rational enquiry which docs not adopt the standpoint of a particular tradition; this, however, need not involve any form of relativism, since the tradition from which one reasons may itself involve an absolute conception of truth. So it is with the Thomist tradition that MacIntyre recommends in these works. And it can show itself rationally superior to both the Nietzschean tradition and the tradition of post-Enlightenment ethics that we have inherited; it can solve problems that these traditions themselves must recognize to be problems, and explain why they themselves cannot do so. If the state of modernity is characterized by lack of agreement about even the most fundamental questions, what role does this leave for the university? In ‘The idea of an educated public' (1987), MacIntyre argued that the dual aim of the liberal university—to prepare students for a social role and to teach them to think for themselves—could no longer be achieved: the demise of the ‘educated public’, a self-conscious body of people with a common intellectual inheritance and shared standards of argument, has made it impossible. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry he envisages the university ‘as a place of constrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict, in which a central responsibility of higher education would be to initiate students into conflict’. MacIntyre’s work has been widely influential. Some, however, have questioned his historical interpretation; and many have not found modern moral thought to be in such comparative disarray as he suggests.

Interests

• Ethics; history of ethics. Aristotle: Aquinas; Confucianism.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Franz Steiner, Karl Polanyi and St Thomas Aquinas.

Connections

Father:

Eneas John MacI.

Mother:

Margaret Emily (Chalmers) MacI.