Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? shows much learning and thought, but gives short shrift to Kant and Burke.
The most fascinating part of MacIntyre's book is his discussion of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides and Plato. MacIntyre demonstrates how they lead to Aristotle. Sophocles' plays in particular demonstrate the conflict between Effectiveness (skills at practical tasks) and Excellence (moral virtues). In Sophocles' Philoctetes, Neptolomos compromises his morals, and yet fails on the battlefield anyway. Similarly, Plato rejects the idea that anyone can have practical reasoning, insisting that one must have understanding (based on morality) to have practical reasoning. Plato's standard of truth is testability: "The theory of forms is primarily a theory of inquiry, a theory ignorance of which by those engaged in enquiry will necessarily lead them to fail, because they will not understand adequately what they are doing (p. 79)." Yet even Plato's mouthpiece, Socrates, admits he doesn't know the forms! Plato must also defeat Isocrates' opinion that rhetoric is superior to philosophy, as well as Thucydides' view that the success of the strong is justice. Eloquence is inferior to logic, just as rules and procedures are necessary for justice. All of this seems unexceptional enough now, but it made Plato's contemporaries think he was a lunatic.
Aristotle continued Plato's fight to make logic and morals triumph over eloquence and brute force. MacIntyre thinks there was a gulf between Plato and Aristotle over the nature of the forms. (Francis A. Grabowski's Plato, Metaphysics and the Forms argues that a misreading of Plato is responsible for the traditional assumption that Forms are not concrete particulars.)
This brings me to nous, the sort of thought that allows us to classify things of a type together. Nous operates without logical demonstration, and is necessary for both practical knowledge and the knowledge of what it is possible to know.
In an important sense, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? was written to correct false impressions drawn from MacIntyre's earlier After Virtue. Apparently, many who reviewed the latter came away with the misapprehension that After Virtue was only written to argue against rules-based ethics. As a follower of Aquinas, MacIntyre is necessarily a follower of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that virtues were a precondition for practical reason, and practical reason was the basis of ethics. The bulk of today's ethicists are living on an island between moral realism and moral idealism known as Utilitarianism. As such, MacIntyre argues they are modern-day sophists who 1) see no independent source of morals, 2) cannot agree on logical standards and, 3) recognize no teleology (that is, no common vision of The Good or The Good Life). These result in several problems. First, modern conservatives usually reject the government as a moral entity with the end of creating a just society. This is totally at odds with Aristotle's polis, which he considered morality in individuals impossible without. A rejection of a common good by both right and left reduces all politics to class warfare. Second, the utilitarians have reverted us into a state of confusion existing prior to Plato, where Effectiveness and Excellence are either conflated, or Effectiveness is deemed superior to Excellence. Right and left-wing Philistines are both guilty of conflating Effectiveness and Excellence, and thus one sees the fingerprints of Utilitarianism on both forms of Philistinism. Our legal system is a prime example of a system where Effectiveness is held to be a higher value than Excellence. The dishonest lawyer is a return to Isocrates' belief that eloquence beats philosophy.
Third, Plato and Aristotle's emphasis on experience being a necessary requirement before one can be an ethicist lies by the wayside. MacIntyre touches on a similar issue when he says, "It is a Cartesian error, fostered by a misunderstanding of Euclidean geometry, to suppose that first by an initial act of apprehension we can comprehend the full meaning of the premises of a deductive system and then only secondly proceed to enquire what follows from them. In fact it is only insofar as we understand what follows from these premises that we understand the premises themselves (p. 175)." For an author who abhors Burke, it is hard to imagine a more thoroughly Burkean statement! MacIntyre starts his book by proclaiming "Burke theorized shoddily," apparently not realizing Burke's avoidance of intellectual system came from a realization that abstract premises lead to the unanticipated conclusions he himself acknowledges. Burke was a fine Aristotelian, a stark contrast to the egocentricity of A.A. Cooper, which evolved through Hume into Utilitarianism. Nor would Burke agree with Dugald Stewart that no behavior engaged in by any society was entirely immoral.
MacIntyre bemoans the death of the sort of classical liberal arts education that allowed moderns to read classical authors in their original language, rightly saying this implies a disinterest in understanding what the ancients actually meant. In a society that only values Effectiveness (eg. STEM, business, engineering) this is sadly not surprising.
The most fascinating part of MacIntyre's book is his discussion of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides and Plato. MacIntyre demonstrates how they lead to Aristotle. Sophocles' plays in particular demonstrate the conflict between Effectiveness (skills at practical tasks) and Excellence (moral virtues). In Sophocles' Philoctetes, Neptolomos compromises his morals, and yet fails on the battlefield anyway. Similarly, Plato rejects the idea that anyone can have practical reasoning, insisting that one must have understanding (based on morality) to have practical reasoning. Plato's standard of truth is testability: "The theory of forms is primarily a theory of inquiry, a theory ignorance of which by those engaged in enquiry will necessarily lead them to fail, because they will not understand adequately what they are doing (p. 79)." Yet even Plato's mouthpiece, Socrates, admits he doesn't know the forms! Plato must also defeat Isocrates' opinion that rhetoric is superior to philosophy, as well as Thucydides' view that the success of the strong is justice. Eloquence is inferior to logic, just as rules and procedures are necessary for justice. All of this seems unexceptional enough now, but it made Plato's contemporaries think he was a lunatic.
Aristotle continued Plato's fight to make logic and morals triumph over eloquence and brute force. MacIntyre thinks there was a gulf between Plato and Aristotle over the nature of the forms. (Francis A. Grabowski's Plato, Metaphysics and the Forms argues that a misreading of Plato is responsible for the traditional assumption that Forms are not concrete particulars.)
This brings me to nous, the sort of thought that allows us to classify things of a type together. Nous operates without logical demonstration, and is necessary for both practical knowledge and the knowledge of what it is possible to know.
In an important sense, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? was written to correct false impressions drawn from MacIntyre's earlier After Virtue. Apparently, many who reviewed the latter came away with the misapprehension that After Virtue was only written to argue against rules-based ethics. As a follower of Aquinas, MacIntyre is necessarily a follower of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that virtues were a precondition for practical reason, and practical reason was the basis of ethics. The bulk of today's ethicists are living on an island between moral realism and moral idealism known as Utilitarianism. As such, MacIntyre argues they are modern-day sophists who 1) see no independent source of morals, 2) cannot agree on logical standards and, 3) recognize no teleology (that is, no common vision of The Good or The Good Life). These result in several problems. First, modern conservatives usually reject the government as a moral entity with the end of creating a just society. This is totally at odds with Aristotle's polis, which he considered morality in individuals impossible without. A rejection of a common good by both right and left reduces all politics to class warfare. Second, the utilitarians have reverted us into a state of confusion existing prior to Plato, where Effectiveness and Excellence are either conflated, or Effectiveness is deemed superior to Excellence. Right and left-wing Philistines are both guilty of conflating Effectiveness and Excellence, and thus one sees the fingerprints of Utilitarianism on both forms of Philistinism. Our legal system is a prime example of a system where Effectiveness is held to be a higher value than Excellence. The dishonest lawyer is a return to Isocrates' belief that eloquence beats philosophy.
Third, Plato and Aristotle's emphasis on experience being a necessary requirement before one can be an ethicist lies by the wayside. MacIntyre touches on a similar issue when he says, "It is a Cartesian error, fostered by a misunderstanding of Euclidean geometry, to suppose that first by an initial act of apprehension we can comprehend the full meaning of the premises of a deductive system and then only secondly proceed to enquire what follows from them. In fact it is only insofar as we understand what follows from these premises that we understand the premises themselves (p. 175)." For an author who abhors Burke, it is hard to imagine a more thoroughly Burkean statement! MacIntyre starts his book by proclaiming "Burke theorized shoddily," apparently not realizing Burke's avoidance of intellectual system came from a realization that abstract premises lead to the unanticipated conclusions he himself acknowledges. Burke was a fine Aristotelian, a stark contrast to the egocentricity of A.A. Cooper, which evolved through Hume into Utilitarianism. Nor would Burke agree with Dugald Stewart that no behavior engaged in by any society was entirely immoral.
MacIntyre bemoans the death of the sort of classical liberal arts education that allowed moderns to read classical authors in their original language, rightly saying this implies a disinterest in understanding what the ancients actually meant. In a society that only values Effectiveness (eg. STEM, business, engineering) this is sadly not surprising.
