Alasdair MacIntyre - Philosophical Approach

Philosophical Approach

MacIntyre's approach to moral philosophy has a number of complex strains that inform it. Although his project is largely characterized by an attempt to revive an Aristotelian conception of moral philosophy as sustained by the virtues, he nevertheless describes his own account of this attempt as a "peculiarly modern understanding" of the task.

This "peculiarly modern understanding" largely concerns MacIntyre's approach to moral disputes. Unlike some analytic philosophers who try to generate moral consensus on the basis of an ideal of rationality, MacIntyre presents a historical narration of the development of ethics in order to illuminate the modern problem of "incommensurable" moral notions—i.e., notions whose value can not be reduced to a common measure. Following Hegel and Collingwood he offers a "philosophical history" (which he distinguishes from both analytical and phenomenological approaches to philosophy) in which he concedes from the beginning that "there are no neutral standards available by appeal to which any rational agent whatsoever could determine" the conclusions of moral philosophy.

Indeed, one of MacIntyre's major points in his most famous work, After Virtue, is that the failed attempt by various Enlightenment thinkers to furnish a final universal account of moral rationality led to the rejection of moral rationality altogether by subsequent thinkers such as Charles Stevenson, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche. On MacIntyre's account, it is especially Nietzsche's utter repudiation of the possibility of moral rationality that is the outcome of the Enlightenment's mistaken quest for a final and definitive argument that will settle moral disputes into perpetuity by power of a calculative reason alone and without use of teleology.

By contrast, MacIntyre is concerned with reclaiming various forms of moral rationality and argumentation that claim neither ultimate finality nor incorrigible certainty (the mistaken project of the Enlightenment), but nevertheless do not simply bottom out into relativistic or emotivist denials of any moral rationality whatsoever (according to him, the mistaken conclusion of Nietzsche, Sartre and Stevenson). He does this by returning to the tradition of Aristotelian ethics with its teleological account of the good and moral persons, which was originally rejected by the Enlightenment and which reached a fuller articulation in the medieval writings of Thomas Aquinas. This Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, he proposes, presents 'the best theory so far', both of how things are and how we ought to act.

More generally, according to MacIntyre it is the case that moral disputes always take place within and between rival traditions of thought that make recourse to a store of ideas, presuppositions, types of arguments and shared understandings and approaches that have been inherited from the past. Thus even though there is no definitive way for one tradition in moral philosophy to vanquish and exclude the possibility of another, nevertheless opposing views can call one another into question by various means including issues of internal coherence, imaginative reconstruction of dilemmas, epistemic crisis, and fruitfulness.