After Virtue chapters 7-9

[Jordan Simpson]

Chapter 7 - 

This chapter sets up the next, and is primarily concerned with the
fallacy of trying to understand society in a mechanistic way. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Enlightenment thinkers tried to
transfer the mechanistic way of understanding physics to understanding
society. Just as every planet obey's Kepler's Law, it was assumed
human beings and organizations obeyed scientific laws. This assumption
gave rise to the concept of expertise, which claimed to be able to
understand these laws and is wielded by the manager and therapist. 

Chapter 8 - 

MacIntyre argues there are no laws that can govern human behavior and
points to the consistent failure of social scientists to find such
laws. However they keep trying, since they operate in a philosophical
culture that expects such laws to exist. 

In contrast, MacIntyre introduces Machiavelli, who always made room in
his thinking for "Fortuna, bitch-goddess of unpredictability."
MacIntyre lays out four sources of unpredictability in human society:
1. The inability to predict radically new inventions.
2. We cannot know decisions we still haven't made. Omniscience
precludes making decisions. 
3. Game theory. Real life is usually much messier than the theory. 
4. Pure contingency. S#*! happens. 

On the other side, there are highly predictive elements to society:
1. Necessity of scheduling and coordinating social activity. 
2. Statistical regularity - although we often can't know the reason
behind the regularity. 
3. Knowledge of causal regularities in nature - we know snow is going
to affect humans in certain ways. 
4. Knowledge of causal regularities in social life - we know how
social class influences educational opportunities. 

Human lives have to be predictable for any of our institutions (e.g.
marriage) to function, yet there is always a strong degree of
unpredictability that introduces fragility and vulnerability into our
lives. Unpredictability also frees us from being mere slaves in the
plans of others. Fortuna cannot be eliminated, and MacIntyre even
suggests scientist try to measure error rather than simply calling it
failure. 

For someone to remove unpredictability from life they would have to
create an organization that is both predictable and efficient. Yet the
two cannot go together, since any efficient system has to be extremely
flexible in order to deal with unpredictability in the world. This
need for unpredictability renders any claim to expertise bogus -
society is quite literally out of our control. 

Chapter 9 -

Here we reach the split MacIntyre believes we are forced to make:
Nietzsche or Aristotle. The Enlightenment's failure is brutally
apparent, and Nietzsche clearly pointed the only way forward. Any
attempt to articulate a system of rational ethics eventually collapses
into a matter of will. MacIntyre sees no escape from the Nietzschian
conclusion that the Enlightenment emperor has no clothes.

If we are forced to accept Nietzsche's conclusions, are we left with
no hope of any ethic that escapes becoming merely an expression of a
non-rational will? Not by going forward, but MacIntyre sees a hope in
looking backward. He argues we do not have to accept the
Enlightenment's critique of the traditional virtue ethics. We can
rehabilitate Aristotle and evade Nietzsche's slide into nihilism. This
is what MacIntyre hopes to be able to accomplish.