A few times, I've mentioned Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. I'm still not entirely sure what the message was, though I liked a lot of the substance. Wee, the parts that I understood. To try to help deepen this understanding I went on to A Short History of Ethics. Again, I think I failed to make sense of most of it. But I did feel that he is arguing for an understanding of ethics in a historical and societal context. This is not to say that he is a relativist, but that I believe his view is that you cannot extract a theory of morality from a past culture without taking into account its cultural setting, the embedded and assumed values of that culture.
As we saw with Coriolanus, the idea of virtue transforms over time from something masculine and martial to, in Victorian society, female chastity. To read The Aeneid as a Victorian demanded semantic dexterity. Indeed, when I was reading it for my A Levels, I had to learn what pius meant to Virgil, which was a more nuanced and complicated concept than the meaning of 'pious' is to us.
The issue of morality doesn't rest with whether or not there is a foundation in reality for a moral structure, nor with what can be empirically determined to be 'good' - say, lessening suffering and increasing pleasure.Nor indeed with whether the motivation to be moral should be intrinsic (I do what is good because it is good) or extrinsic (I do what is good or I will be punished). We have to understand how different thinkers at different times built on or reacted to the tradition in order to attempt to make sense of this.
In all honesty, I'm inclined to believe that if 2,500 years of great thinkers have been unable to come up with a doctrine, even one as potentially defeasible as Relativity Theory, then, Q. E. D., there's no empirically unquestionable foundation.
It is a truth that every theorist approaches the issue from a perspective: their view of life and what appears philosophically true at the time of writing. Just as an architect or an artist cannot fail to be influenced by the current tradition - or another tradition that they deem worthier than their own and can only design houses with the materials that are available, nor can an ethicist. Bauhaus may have been very different from what came before, but it was as a reaction to it - and would not have been imagined had there not been something to push agaist. To understand the values of Bauhaus, one needs to know what was being rejected as well as what was being stated in the designs. Moreover, the architect cannot say, this house must be built of stone from Venus and clad in dust gathered from the Andromeda Galaxy. We are all stuck in our own varieties of camel or, at most, dromedary.
I do not necessarily think this is a limitation, though. I mean: what use an ethical system that bears no relationship with life as it is lived? Ideas could appear as divorced from reality as the architect's list of inter-galactic building supplies, but the concepts would be as meaningless as the house would be unbuildable.
This is why, perhaps, Nietzsche can be so unsatisfying as well as so infinitely malleable - he says a big 'no' but what in fact is he really saying 'yes' to*? What is his grand design, when you remove the rhetoric and the passion? A house built of Venusian stone is no use to anyone - but a Nazi could claim that, ah, what he meant by Venusian was in fact Teutonic supremacy.
So I guess that right now I come to a place where I see great value in utilitarianism to work through complex issues in a rational and systematic fashion, and yet I also feel that there remains space for an ethics developed according to Susan Nieman's conception of growing up. What I mean by that is to have a big conversation about the kind of world that we want, that allows for the Rawlsian idea of the Veil of Ignorance and the concept of virtues within projects and institutions that MacIntyre discusses. That we create a vision, one which is not the done-deal, for our descendants may condemn some of our practices much as we condemn some of those of our ancestors, but one which gives us a mattering-map of values and ideals which we can strive for individually and collectively.
NOTES
*Added 15th August 2020 - he was saying yes to life, passion, creativity. See here.
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