Alasdair MacIntyre Leaves a Legacy to Wrestle With
The major intellectual and moral preoccupations of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died this week at the age of 96, speak to key issues of modernity and morality that leftists will be grappling with for a long time.
British-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. (Wikimedia Commons)
Alasdair MacIntyre, the preeminent moral philosopher known for his critiques of liberal modernity, died yesterday at the age of ninety-six. Born in Glasgow in 1929 and teaching for the last several decades of his life in the United States, he traversed an idiosyncratic intellectual path. MacIntyre joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, then moving onto Trotskyist organizations the Socialist Labour League and International Socialists, he eventually became a prominent member of the British New Left in the 1960s.
MacIntyre’s early intellectual output grappled seriously with Marxism. But he moved away from that tradition in the 1970s. In 1981, he published perhaps his most famous work, the ambitious After Virtue, which introduced the main themes that would take up the rest of his career.
The central argument of After Virtue was that the Enlightenment, with its sweeping away of notions of the human telos and divine law rooted, respectively, in Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian doctrine, undermined the possibility of a rational basis for morality. Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers, most notably Immanuel Kant and the British utilitarians, made heroic efforts to construct secular rational justifications of moral concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. But these justifications all failed and were doomed to fail, MacIntyre argues, because no such basis can be provided in the absence of the metaphysical and theological commitments that modern philosophers rejected.
The result is that we in contemporary liberal societies have no shared framework for justifying moral claims or resolving disagreements. Although we continue to engage in moral discourse about justice, rights, obligations, and so on, these are just linguistic holdovers from a pre-Enlightenment world where that language had a determinate meaning.
When we decry an action as “morally wrong” or “unjust,” MacIntyre contends, this is just a disguised way of voicing our own arbitrary preferences. In fact, all of social life now centers around the pursuit of individual preference, whether organized through the market or (perhaps just as deviously, for the erstwhile Trotskyist) through bureaucratic institutions. This situation is destructive to social solidarity and the very possibility of human flourishing.
MacIntyre worked to develop a response to this dark predicament in his follow-up, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and the rest of his intellectual life. Through wide-ranging engagements with philosophy, history, and literature, he proposed a return to a kind of Thomistic-Aristotelian understanding of human nature. (MacIntyre himself was a convert to Catholicism.) The core idea is that human beings can flourish only in communities that recognize and enable the realization of certain kinds of goods — like chess, say, or teaching, or fishing, or the goods of friendship and family life — that have their own, tradition-based internal standards of evaluation.
Such communities train their members in the virtues, “those qualities that enable agents to identify both what goods are at stake in any particular situation and their relative importance in that situation and how that particular agent must act for the sake of the good and the best,” as he put it in his last book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016). And the defense (or recreation) of such virtue-enabling communities requires resisting the commodifying market logic of contemporary capitalism.
Marxism After MacIntyre
After Virtue and MacIntyre’s later works deserve serious questioning. Philosophers have criticized his historical argument — claiming, for instance, that many of the moral concepts inherited by modern Europeans were not as dependent on Aristotelian teleology as MacIntyre alleges. More generally, it is doubtful that MacIntyre has a convincing argument for why there could not be, in principle, a secular justification of morality that might secure wide assent. To my mind, the influential contractualist approach defended by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other (1998), which defines moral obligation in terms of principles that fairly balance individuals’ objectively defined interests, is a promising direction.
When it comes to the thinker’s positive views, we might worry that a return to a tradition-based virtue ethics would, in practical terms, stifle individual liberty. MacIntyre himself has disavowed contemporary political conservatism. But it is not entirely coincidental that his work has been cited by “postliberal” right-wingers like Patrick Deneen to argue for a return to restrictive sexual and social mores, opposing gay marriage and advocating for making it harder for married couples to divorce.
Many on the political left could agree with MacIntyre’s criticism of the corrosive effects of capitalism and its attendant hyper-individualism, and on the need for the recovery of a notion of common goods. But socialists are likely to find his practical proposals, such as they are, wanting. In this later work, inspired by Catholic social teaching, he seems to advocate for a localist defense of community life, noncommodified practices, and cooperative enterprise. Yet the prospects of isolated, local efforts at successfully resisting the encroachment of global capitalism look very bleak. Worker-owned co-ops, for instance, struggle to thrive in the context of privately controlled finance and in the face of competition from capitalist firms. And addressing crises like climate change requires economic transformation on a much larger scale.
MacIntyre’s localism is bound up with his rejection of Marxism. In After Virtue, he accused the Marxist tradition of failing to overcome the liberal individualism of the broader culture; when they needed to take explicit moral stances, Marxists fell back on (to his mind) bankrupt utilitarian and Kantian theories.
In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre charged more concretely that Marxists had failed to articulate a vision of the transition beyond capitalism that would avoid the tyranny associated with actually-existing socialist states and explain “how from their starting point they could arrive at what was . . . most needed, a series of genuinely local political initiatives through which the possibilities of a grassroots distribution and sharing of power and property could be achieved.” He claimed, too, that the Marxist focus on the working class as the agent of social change was misplaced, since capitalism undermines the ability of all people to flourish.
These criticisms are not convincing. To the last point: it may be that even the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world would be better off, in some ways, in a more egalitarian, less commodified society. But it is the (by comparison) extreme material injustices and deprivation suffered by workers — as well as their numerical strength and their economic power at the point of production — that is why Marxists believe the working class is the social agent with both the interest in overcoming capitalism and the capacity to do so.
The other questions — about the moral foundations of Marxist theory and the nature of the transition to socialism — are more compelling. Marxists have paid inadequate attention to the normative basis of their theory, and developing a worked-out account of our moral principles remains a key task. The same goes for our vision of the transition to a just democratic-socialist society. A big part of such a vision, though, must be worked out in practice by socialists and fellow travelers attempting to organize at the grassroots in workplaces and local communities as well as contending for state power at the ballot box.
Still, MacIntyre’s major preoccupations — the moral depredations of capitalist modernity and its individualist ethos, and the need for a different ethical framework to support an alternative form of social organization — are among the most pressing questions for intellectuals today. And MacIntyre left us a substantial, fascinating, and provocative body of work to help us grapple with them.