“The change with After Virtue, however, is that in an important sense [MacIntyre] turns against modernity as a whole. He argues that the move to modernity involves the destruction of morality—that in modernity we no longer know what we’re talking about when we deploy moral language.”
Dan Addison, a philosophy professor living in New York, joined Merion West editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince to discuss why he decided to teach a course at Hunter College focused on Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue. Dr. Addison, who moved to the United States from Australia in 2003, completed his PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013. His dissertation was on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s critique of Immanuel Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Dr. Addison did not discover MacIntyre’s work until he was teaching philosophy himself after completing his studies. In the time since, Dr. Addison has argued that After Virtue is the essential text for understanding polarization and fragmentation in the modern United States, and this coincides with After Virtue receiving increased attention from a number of thinkers at present, including in the post-liberal movement. In their conversation, Dr. Addison and Mr. Prince discuss the book’s central claims, including emotivism; how his students have reacted to engaging with MacIntyre’s ideas, given that they so often contradict popular messaging today; and the idea of community and incurring obligations.
Dan, can you start by telling me about Alasdair MacIntyre and describing his background?
He’s from Scotland. He published his first book, Marxism, in 1953 and is still alive at the age of 95. He was first drawn to both religion and political Marxism in his youth. I think he considered entering the Presbyterian church when was young, but politics won out, and he was—for decades—a committed Marxist. He moved from Scotland to England, and he came over to America in around 1969. His early works are in academic philosophy but also deeply involved in sociology and history and philosophical history, which of course is very central to everything that happens from After Virtue on.
So he was an active Marxist for all that time, and then the publication of After Virtue in 1981 does define a break with Marx. In the original preface of After Virtue, he describes his path to that book. He describes how he was very involved with questions concerning the moral criticism of Stalinism. Many people responded to Stalin’s atrocities by basically just adopting a liberal morality—a commitment to liberal individual rights and so on—and used that to criticize all of Stalin’s actions. MacIntyre was unsatisfied with that. In his 1958-1959 “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” in The MacIntyre Reader, he describes how he’s looking for a standpoint from which he can issue well-grounded moral judgments. He really only achieved that standpoint in 1981, and it does involve a break with Marxism, though he remains indebted to Marx’s critique of capitalism to this day. But it’s a matter of interpretive controversy what his political standpoint is, even whether he should be placed on the Left or the Right (or neither). There are left-wing MacIntyreans and right-wing MacIntyreans, like Patrick Deneen and other post-liberal conservatives. MacIntyre’s own most important works clarifying his political stance are “The Theses on Feuerbach” and “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” both from the 1990s and both in The MacIntyre Reader. Most academic followers of MacIntyre call themselves “radical Aristotelians” and emphasize his continuing closeness to Marx; these papers support that interpretation.
The change with After Virtue, however, is that in an important sense he turns against modernity as a whole. He argues that the move to modernity involves the destruction of morality—that in modernity we no longer know what we’re talking about when we deploy moral language. This view, of course, has a conservative air to it. After writing After Virtue, MacIntyre converts to Catholicism and becomes a Thomist.
There are various books of academic philosophy published in the second half of the 20th century. We could probably rattle off quite a few right now, but I think an argument can be made that After Virtue was one of the most influential or significant. Can you explain why After Virtue matters so much; why you’re teaching it; and, consequently, why we’re having a discussion about a book of philosophy published more than 40 years ago?
From what I understand, its influence on the academy is not as massive as it is in the broader public sphere outside of academic philosophy. People have taken this with a grain of salt, but he even says—in the prologue—that After Virtue was written for what he calls the plain person or the common man. Very satisfyingly, they tended to be its readers. But my own personal interest in After Virtue was really that I found in him the best explanation for our polarization. I think the reason why he’s still being read earnestly today is his whole oeuvre—from After Virtue on—can be read as an explanation of why we are in this polarized state. He gives a great characterization of modern morality’s polarization, offers a historical explanation for this state of affairs, and then provides a path for how to get out of this state where we are not able to find any rational criteria for resolving our moral disputes.
When I was in college—in a class that some of our writers have written about “The Moral Foundations of Politics” taught by Ian Shapiro—one of the topics we discussed was the idea of emotivism, as expressed by MacIntyre. Can you provide a summary for those who’ve not yet read the book of what emotivism is and why MacIntyre thinks it’s so important?
A two-word answer to what After Virtue is about is “moral ontology.” Emotivism or expressivism is basically a claim that moral utterance—moral claims and moral language—are nothing but the expression of preferences, the expression of one’s attitude or feeling. So it holds that moral language is to be distinguished from the realm of facts. Facts are things that are capable of being true or false. When there’s a disagreement about the facts, there are rational criteria for resolving this dispute. It’s emotivism that issues the fact/value distinction.
The most important thing about moral language, MacIntyre says, is that it’s used to express disagreement, and the most important thing about the debates in which we have this disagreement is that they’re interminable: Our contemporary culture has no way of deciding how to go about resolving them.
Can you give an example of a contemporary issue that might exemplify this?
You can take any moral argument you want. You could take debates over Israel vs. Palestine. His own opening examples in After Virtue include abortion, war, and the ethics of governmental redistribution. The idea is that the warring sides have arguments with their own moral first principles (i.e., the starting points), but we have no way of weighing these principles against one another. He calls them “incommensurable.”
It seems that people often have an opinion about whether or not abortion is right or wrong, and it seems like they just feel that way, like how they feel almost about where they want to go on vacation or where they want to eat etc. In “Moral Foundations of Politics,” we called it “hooray/boo morality.” Often it’s a mere feeling or an emotional reaction, sometimes coupled with an astonishing lack of knowledge about an issue at hand. Then there is the irreconcilability between methods of moral reason, say, deontology vs. consequentialism that one encounters if he is actually trying to reason through things and escape the knee-jerk, “I feel this way”-type response. One hits a dead end quickly.
That’s the problem: the lack of a way forward. It’s that we’re in aporia: We are stuck with me shouting my first principle and you shouting your first principle back at me and not knowing a way forward. That’s why MacIntyre thinks that we have to turn to premodern Aristotelian morality to be able to see how this problem came to pass. In the second paragraph of the Prologue (ix), he says you can only understand the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity from a standpoint external to that culture—basically from the Aristotelian standpoint. We need to get outside of modernity and its moral assumptions to be able to see why modernity is stuck in precisely this way, with these moral arguments which don’t go anywhere and are interminable: just a “clash of antagonistic wills,” as MacIntyre says. We need to recover from premodernity certain ways of thinking about the self and about the human being, a concept of the human essence, to see how we could restore morality as a rational part of our lives, where we are not just starting from a criterionless choice or an arbitrary starting point.
What does an ideal individual and/or moral society look like for MacIntyre?
It’s complicated, but he has this whole story about the self and the developments of the self as well. He contrasts the pre-moderns that had morality and we moderns who have lost it and for whom it’s been destroyed, and he contrasts our different conceptions of the self. There’s a story the modern world tells about itself. It’s a story of the liberation of the individual from hierarchies and from the teleological conception of the human being, which it takes to be mythological. We moderns congratulate ourselves on liberating the self from all that. But MacIntyre sees that as precisely the degeneration of morality and the loss of morality. It’s not an advance but a degeneration.
In those pre-modern societies that had morality, the individuals in those societies knew who they were and what they ought to do through their social roles. The paradigm of this is pre-Socratic Greece, especially as embodied in the play Antigone, where basically your social roles gave you objective obligations. I am the sister to this brother, and so it’s absolutely necessary for me to bury him. But I’m also a citizen of the state, and I have to follow the laws that forbid this and this objective incompatibility is on me. But it’s not up to me; it’s not available to me in the pre-modern world to choose not to identify or to abstract from those obligations and those social roles into which I’m born. They are given to me and they are absolute obligations.
So obligations are much more real for the pre-moderns than they are for us. And MacIntyre thinks that their more demanding morality is largely a good thing. He rejects the accusation that he’s nostalgic for the pre-modern world and so on, but he does see something good in those moral cultures. They tended to be well ordered, whereas ours are disordered in certain ways. The only way to recover morality is by building communities where we’re all seeking essential human goods. He very much thinks it’s necessary to reconceive of the human being in a way that doesn’t distinguish facts from values and explains human behavior by reference to virtues and vices.
You mentioned MacIntyre’s influence in the world today. I think about some of our writers, Henry George for instance, who are broadly critical of the Enlightenment project. You mentioned Patrick Deneen and the cadre of thinkers currently associated with him. How do you see MacIntyre’s ideas most reaching the popular consciousness or influencing policy debates, perhaps through something like the NatCon movement?
The Catholic New Right is very inspired by MacIntyre. Similarly, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option gets its very title from the very end of After Virtue, where MacIntyre says we’re waiting for a new St. Benedict. But MacIntyre explicitly rejects Rod Dreher because Dreher is right wing. But the shape of the post-liberal’s philosophy, Deneen’s especially, really is inspired by MacIntyre in a big way.
MacIntyre has been anti-liberal all his life. He was Marxist against liberalism, and he’s still massively anti-liberal. People contest identifying his anti-liberalism with the post-liberal right’s. But whenever he says basically “I am anti-liberal, but don’t take this for any kind of sympathy with conservatism,” when he gives the reason why he’s not sympathetic to conservatism, it’s this pro-capitalist version of conservatism that he references: being guided by market economics as one’s North Star etc. And, of course, the post-liberals, not only Deneen but also e.g. John Milbank’s The Politics of Virtue, share much of MacIntyre’s critique of capitalism. Those guys are very much communitarian. MacIntyre rejects the label communitarian, but he’s usually lumped in with Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel as one of the communitarians. He’s very much against individualism, and he wants to form healthy communities.
I’ll read a quote that I marked to that effect: “I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not characteristics that belong to human beings, accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover ‘the real me.’ They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties.”
That’s the passage I was thinking of when I was talking about how he characterizes pre-modern cultures as having objective obligations. So here’s one way to answer modern people who celebrate modernity and liberal life and so on: What MacIntyre is trying to bring back is a demanding conception of morality, which will necessarily appear to them as oppressive. You could say, sure, he does want an oppressive morality. He wants a very demanding morality, and he wants communities to enforce them.
And if your North Star is just the liberation of the individual against all forms of coercion, then you’re going to be against what he actually wants. What you quoted is his first clear passage where he’s characterizing what it was like in those healthy, pre-modern moral cultures that had morality, from which we have unfortunately fallen away. They were healthier because of the way they found who they were, what they ought to do, and found their social identity in their social roles. And to do what we moderns do and abstract from those particular commitments and those particular roles was for the premoderns to become a stranger, to have no social substance anymore and to just be lost in nothingness.
In his chapter, “Why the Enlightenment Project Had to Fail,” MacIntyre talks about something we’ve talked about: man reaching his potential. He talks about trying to achieve that good of rational happiness, which is peculiarly ours as a species to pursue. So for people who are reading this and aren’t quite as familiar with this Aristotelian project of arriving at one’s telos, can you talk about that project and perhaps how, in our modern society, we’re not emphasizing that as much when we’re telling people how properly to flourish?
The important thing is that MacIntyre wants to recover the Aristotelian view, which sees there being objectively true claims about what our human essence is. In Aristotle, you’ve got a hierarchy of human goods. There are objective facts about what is good for the human being or any species of animal to go for. You’ve got the goods of digestion, like food and water and so on that you share with the plants, you’ve got the goods of the senses, pleasure and so on, the pleasures of the body, which you share with the animals, but you’ve also got these highest goods, which are the highest goods for you because you’re an individual of the species that has reason. Your good is to actualize that capacity, such that if you do not actualize that capacity by doing mathematics and philosophy or in any way you want to actualize this rational capacity, if you don’t actualize that, if you live, so to speak, the life of the beasts, the cows in the field just eating grass all day or smoking weed and playing video games all day, and not tending to this essence, you’ll be frustrated from achieving your potential.
So MacIntyre wants to recover the human telos that the modern world saw as mythological and rejected. When we lost that, we lost morality. The moral rules, which we have inherited in fragmentary and distorted ways, came from a culture that was objectively committed to the idea of a human telos. These moral rules are very demanding: no sex before marriage, don’t lie, etc. The moral rules were very much imposing upon your childish nature and tamping your untutored impulses down, but they were justified by the idea of a human telos: By following these rules, you will get to actualize your higher capacities, your reason, and so on. And once you abandon that, then there’s no way to ground these demanding moral rules. And then, over time, all of these terms such as “duty” and “virtue” degrade, and we get the licentious subjective morality we have today.
Russell Kirk has this famous line, which I’ve quoted before: “In a revolutionary epoch, sometimes men taste every novelty, sicken of them all, and return to ancient principles so long disused that they seem refreshingly hearty when they are rediscovered.” MacIntyre is talking about very old ideas. The students you’re teaching have, in most cases, grown up in modern New York, the epitome of modernity. What do they make of MacIntyre and these ideas? When you step back and think about these ideas from a very modern mindset, including some of the passages I’ve quoted, they seem to fly in the face of almost all of the messaging these young people have been getting, even in literature. While this quotation doesn’t necessarily imply Stephen Dedalus is the avatar of modernity (maybe he’s just fed up with a stifling upbringing), James Joyce writes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” What do your students make of After Virtue, after having spent most of their lives hearing precisely the opposite message?
I thought the classes went quite well. You’re right to suspect there was some resistance to his ideas. That’s why I harped on those few passages where he says he’s very much against the modern world, with its way of celebrating the individual, throwing off all the shackles of hierarchy and so on. Even in the preface, he goes against Marx and Marxists, and that’s because the Marxists, in his view, inherit too much of modernity, and we have to turn against modernity as a whole.
But I was pleased by how open the students were to new ways of thinking, and they didn’t have angry responses to After Virtue. They weren’t shouting about the church’s oppression of women or something like that.
Right—because if you’re a young person whose perspective is, say, that of a committed feminist, you’re probably going to look askance at some of the arguments MacIntyre is making.
Yes, and I heard some of those objections, but we dealt with them fine, and it was a good and rational discussion.
Last question, Dan: When we met in New York about a year ago, you were telling me that a few years ago, you discovered this book. You’ve read it a few times now, and this is you’re—I don’t want to overstate it—but your North Star now, maybe even your Bible.
[Laughs] You can call it my Bible.
How and why did After Virtue become your Bible?
I read it because I was seeing references to it by a lot of contemporary conservatives. I finished my PhD in 2013. I first read it shortly thereafter and then read the sequel to it, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in 2017.
The reason why I went back to After Virtue and wanted to teach it was because it’s the best explanation of our polarized time, which more and more seems to me to be the central problem of our moral and political discourse. His characterization of our polarization—our culture’s general lack of shared rational criteria through which to resolve disputes—seems to me where one should start in thinking about polarization and, thus, where to start in thinking about our culture’s moral disagreements. And I find quite convincing both his long historical explanation for how this state of affairs came to be and his suggestions for how we might begin to climb our way out of it.
