After Virtue chapters 1-3

[Jordan Simpson]

Hey everyone,

Hope those of you who are joining us for After Virtue have gotten a
copy and started reading. We'll be working on this book for the rest
of the summer, so feel free to take your time going through it. I'd
like to get a group together in a week or two to discuss the first
four or five chapters. Let me know when would be a good time.

I've put together a reading guide for chapters 1 - 3. I'l try to do
this periodically, and hopefully it will help keep us on the same
track. Feel free to post any questions or comments you might have!


Chapter 1 -

MacIntyre begins by suggesting that we have suffered a catastrophic
loss in how we understand ethics and morality. He describes a future
where our knowledge of natural sciences have been lost and centuries
later humanity tries to put that knowledge back together. The terms
and phrases might by the same, but the context has been completely
lost.

Anyone observing from the past would notice how the science was being
misused, but it would be impossible to for anyone in the future to see
the mistakes. MacIntyre believes we have gone through a similar break
in our understanding of morality. Unfortunately, we have all been
convince this massive break from our tradition of morality was a
positive development in Western history.

Chapter 2 -

There is no way today to rationally come to moral agreement. MacIntyre
takes several moral issues, including abortion and war, and shows how
we all come to arguments with rival claims. The different arguments
prevent finding agreement on the same terms. Moral agreement today has
become impossible due to a lack of common starting point.

The main culprit MacIntyre sees is emotivism. Emotivism is "the
doctrine that all evaluative judgements...are nothing but expressions
of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are
moral or factual in character." This means that all moral judgements
come down to mere personal choice. There are no underlying truth
claims or consensus on morality that can be allow us to come to
agreement in ethical arguments.

Emotivism's strength lies in its universal claims - it professes to
give an account of all other value judgements. All attempts throughout
history are dismissed as merely expressions of preference, and all
arguments are reduced to simply trying to convince others of your
position through rhetorical prowess.

MacIntyre traces the birth of emotivism to a reaction against the
certainty of G.E. Moore's work in ethics. Around the turn of the
nineteenth century, Moore believed he had found impersonal and
objective measures in discerning morality. Hailed as a revolutionary
breakthrough at the time, it was believed that Moore had freed
morality from the bounds of tradition and ethics.

There are three main parts to Moore's arguments. First, that good is
the name of a non-natural property, such as yellow or weight. Second,
a right action is one that produce the most good - thus utilitarian.
And thirdly, the greatest goods are personal affections and aesthetic
enjoyments. These arguments went over well with many of the
intellegnsia of the time, who liked the idea that beauty and pleasure
were objectively the highest goals one could aspire to achieve, and
whatever actions produced the most beauty and pleasure should be
pursued most actively. Moore also claimed to explain all previous
arguments for the good through his criteria.

The idea that good can be objectively and rationally determined, and
then reduced to personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments is
silliness. Once people realized this basis of argument was ineffective
it was seen that the appeal of Moore's philosophy was based solely on
the personal appeal of it to those professing it's virtues. Moore's
understanding of morality opened up philosophy to the power of
personal choice. What was left was a belief that anyone trying to
argue for the good was merely attempting to argue for their feelings
and attitudes.

And thus we have emotivism. MacIntyre writes that "what emotivism
asserts is in central part that there are and can be no valid rational
justification for any claims that objective and impersonal moral
standards exist and hence that there are no standards." And so any
previous attempt to find rational justification for an objective
morality has failed. MacIntyre believes that the vast majority of
people today behave as if emotivism were true.

Chapter 3 -

MacIntyre uses this chapter to provide the social background of
emotivism. The main social reality he sees is a bureaucratic one,
which attempts to match means and ends in the most economical and
efficient manner. This social reality provides the values used by
moral agents.

In any culture there are characters that represent the morals of the
culture. MacIntyre identifies three characters in our bureaucratic
culture:
- the Rich Aesthete: those who are bored with the state of leisure
their material prosperity has left them in. They seek to control the
behavior in others as a way to escape the boredom.
- the Manager: those who direct the organizations resources in a
bureaucracy. She represents "the obliteration of the distinction
between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. The ends
are given, and all that matters is the manner used to achieve these
ends - however is most economical and efficient.
- the Therapist: the compliment of the Manager, he represents the
obliteration of distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative
means in personal life. The end is again already given, and the goal
is to create well-adjusted persons by any means.

Neither Managers nor Therapists are concerned with moral debate. What
matters is getting results.

Another important point MacIntyre observes is that moral agency is now
located solely in the self, rather than social roles or practices. Any
social identity or telos for the self has been done away with. This is
far different from pre-modern or traditional societies, where identity
was influenced by social roles and was teleological - pointed towards
an end. Today arguments often fall back on individualism vs.
collectivism, a bifurcation that MacIntyre finds paralyzing to debate.
What is needed is a rediscovery of the traditional understanding of
self.