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Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 2. The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and
the Claims of Emotivism The
Problem: There seems to be
no rational way of securing moral agreement in our
culture. Why not? Incommensurability
of rival arguments: From
our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival
premises, but when we do
arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation
of one premise
against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and
counter-assertion. If I lack
any good reasons to
invoke against you, it must seem that I lack any good
reasons. Hence
it seems that underlying my own
position there must be some non-rational decision to adopt
that position:
hence, there is underneath all public arguments, a
disquieting private
arbitrariness. Note the
odd illusion: I seem to
be arguing based on impersonal
principles
independent of the relationship between speaker and
hearer. Thus
MacIntyre recognizes what
Rawls did as well: the fact of moral
pluralism. But
he goes on to point out
that: “In the transition from the variety of contexts in
which these moral
theories were originally at home to our own contemporary
culture, terms such as
virtue, justice, piety, duty and even “ought” have become
other than they once
were. [More on that in the last chapter below.] So much for
“The Nature of Moral
Disagreement Today.”
What are the
“Claims of Emotivism”? Emotivism:
the doctrine that all
evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral
judgments are nothing
but expressions of preference,
expressions of attitude or feeling. To large
degree, people no think
talk, and act as if
emotivism were
true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint
may be. Emotivism
has become embodied in our culture. How do we
know? What
does that look like? 3. Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context What is the
key to the social
content of emotivism?
It is the fact
that emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine
distinction between
manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. Non-manipulative:
To treat
someone as an end [remember Kant] is to offer them what I
take to be good
reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to
leave it to them to
evaluate those reasons.
It is to be unwilling
to influence another except by reasons which that other he
or she judges to be
good. If
emotivism is true, this
distinction is illusory.
For evaluative
utterance can in the end have no point of use but the
expression of my own
feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the
feelings and attitudes of
others. I
cannot genuinely appeal to
impersonal criteria, for there are no impersonal criteria. What then
would the social world
look like if
seen with emotivist
eyes? What
would it be like if emotivism were widely
presupposed? The
unifying preoccupation of
that traditio is the condition of those who see in the
social world nothing but
a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own
set of attitudes and
preferences and who understand that world solely as an
arena for the
achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret
reality as a series of
opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last
enemy is boredom. In
other words: the rich aesthete. The rich
aesthete with a
plethora of mans searches restlessly for ends on which he
may employ them, but
the organization is characteristically engaged in a
competitive struggle for
scarce resources to put to the service of predetermined
ends. Bureaucratic
rationality is the rationality
of matching means to ends economically and efficiently. On this
view: Questions of ends
are questions of values, and on values reason is silent:
conflict between rival
values cannot be rationally settled. Bureaucratic
authority appeals
to its own effectiveness. And what this
appeal reveals is that
bureaucratic authority is nothing other than successful
power. (Power
at the service of whatever ends.) A manager’s
function is that of
controlling behavior and suppressing conflict. Oddly
enough, the “rich
aesthete” and “the manager” may even on occasion be found
in one and the same
person who partitions his life between them. Thus, as we
have seen, emotivism
is a theory embodied in characters who all share the
emotivist view of the
distinction between rational and non-rational discourse,
but who represent the
embodiment of that distinction in very different social
contexts. To
the Rich Aesthete and the Manager, we must
now add: the Therapist. The manager
represents in his character
[as a character] the
obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and
nonmanipulative social
relations; the therapist represents the same obliteration
in the sphere of
personal life. [Which is why corporations and advertizers
were some of the
first to recognize the potential of modern techniques of
the therapist. Work
harder.
Buy more.] The manager
treats ends as
given, as outside his scope; his concern is with
technique, with effectiveness
in transforming raw materials into final products,
unskilled labor into skilled
labor, investment into profits. The
therapist also treats ends
as given, as outside his scope; his concern also is with
technique, with
effectiveness in transforming neurotic symptoms into
directed energy,
maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones. Neither manager
nor therapist, in their role
as manager and therapist, do or are able to engage in
moral debate. They are
uncontested figures,
who purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which
rational agreement is
possible — that is, of course from their point of view to
the realm of fact,
the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness. The Modern Self The
specifically modern self,
the self that I have called emotivist, finds no limits set
to that on which it
may pass judgment for such limits could only derive from
rational criteria for
evaluation and, as we have seen, the emotivist self lacks
any such
criteria. Everything
may be criticized
from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including
the self’s choice of
standpoint to adopt.
It is in this
capacity of the self to evade any necessary identification
with any particular
contingent state of affairs that some modern philosophers,
both analytical and
existentialist, have seen the essence of moral agency. To be a moral
agent is, on this view,
precisely to be able to stand back from any and every
situation in which one is
involved, from any and every characteristic that one may
possess, and to pass
judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point
of view that is
totally detached from all social particularity. [Kant,
Rawls: at least for the
“political notion of the self”] Managers
and therapists enjoy
their status in virtue of their membership within
hierarchies of imputed skill
and knowledge. In
the domain of fact
there are procedures for eliminating disagreement; in that
of morals the
ultimacy of the disagreement is dignified by the title
“pluralism.” If any
minimally rational agent
is to be accounted a moral agent, but “experts” are
experts in fact and
technique, who is going to be dominant in a society that
is called
“democratically pluralistic”? Back to the
modern “self” The
democraticized self
[political notion of the self for the purposes of
pluralistic democratic
liberalism] has no necessary
social
content and no necessary
social
identity; it can then be anything, can assume any role, or
take any point of
view, because it is in and for itself nothing.
Cf. Sartre
and Goffman What moral
modes are open to the
self thus conceived — as lacking any ultimate criteria? Whatever
criteria or principles
or evaluative allegiances the emotivist self may profess,
they are to be
construed as expressions of attitudes, preferences and
choices which are
themselves not governed by criterion, principle or value. But from
this it follows that
the emotivist self can have no rational history in its
transitions from one
state of moral commitment to another. It is a
self with no given
continuities, save those of the body which is its bearer
[and even that has
become questionable] The self
thus conceived, utterly
distinct on the one hand from its social embodiments and
lacking on the other
any rational history of its own. Thus one
way of re-envisaging
the emotivist self is as having suffered a deprivation, as
stripping away of
qualities that were once believed to belong to the self. The self is now
thought of as criterionless
because the kind of telos
in terms of
which it once judged and acted is no longer thought to be
credible. No longer
identified as brother,
cousin and grandson, etc.: the “encumbered self.” These are not
characteristics that belong to
human beings accidentally, to be stripped away inn order
to discover ‘the real
me.’ They are
a part of any substance
defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my
obligations and my
duties. Individuals
inherit a particular
space within an interlocking set of social relationships. To know
oneself as such a social
person is however not to occupy a static and fixed
position. It
is to find oneself on a journey with set
goals: to move through life is to make progress — or to
fail to make progress —
toward a given end. This
conception of a whole human
life as the primary subject of objective and impersonal
evaluations, of a type
of evaluation which provides the content for judgment upon
the particular actions
or projects of a given individual, is something that
ceases to be generally
available at some point in the progress — if we can call
it that — towards and
into modernity. Is this a
liberation? Or
did the modern ‘self,’ the emotivist self,
in acquiring sovereignty in its own realm lose its
traditional boundaries
provided by a social identity and a view of human life as
ordered to a given
end? And if
so, then what? The
bifurcation of the
contemporary social world into a realm of the
organizational in which ends are
taken to be given and are not available for rational
scrutiny and a realm of
the personal in which judgment and debate about values are
central factors, but
in which no rational social resolution of issues is
available. Modern
political debates are
often ‘staged’ in terms of a supposed opposition between
individualism and
collectivism. On
the one side there
appear the self-defined protagonists of individual
liberty, one the other the
self-defined protagonists of planning and regulation, of
the goods which are
available through bureaucratic organization.
But in fact what is crucial is that on which the
contending parties
agree, namely that there are only two alternative modes of
social life open to us,
one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals
are sovereign and
one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so
that it may limit the
free and arbitrary choices of individuals. Freedom as
nothing but a lack of
regulation of individual behavior linked to forms of
collectivist control
designed only to limit the anarchy of self-interest. The climate
of bureaucratic
individualism: the bourgeois bohemian. 5. Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying
Morality Had to Fail Untutored
human nature as it
happens to be; human nature as it could be if it realized
its telos; and
the precepts of rational
ethics as the mean for the transition from one to the
other. |