Episode #245 ... The Rival Moral Approaches of the Modern World - Alasdair Macintyre

Hello everyone, I'm Steven West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. Philosophical Writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today. So there's a pretty innocent statement I want to start this episode with that by the way I'll return back to throughout the episode and no doubt annoy some of you with it along the way. Just doing my job here. But it is a crucial piece of information that we need to remember if we want to understand where Alistair McIntyre is starting his thinking for the rest of his work. A big point that'll ground all the rest he has to say is that there is no view from nowhere when it comes to statements that we make about morality or value. That is something we need to remember is a guarantee of what we even mean when we're talking about morality as a concept. And you know it's easy to forget that this is a premise he's always operating from. But just remember all we talked about last time when we went over his book After Virtue that when we try to remove teleology from moral discussion or any shared ideas about what a human life is for. In other words when a view from nowhere becomes your biggest goal in moral conversation then what we end up with is something like a hellscape of emotivism. Kind of world we live in today he thinks. A world where people in good faith often have what looks like moral conversation but they almost always end up with something at the end of it that's deeply unsatisfying and barely productive. Moral conversation becomes incommensurable he says without a shared conception of the good. And if this is what he tried to diagnose about the world in After Virtue then what he tries to do in the next two books he writes what we're talking about today is him giving a much more detailed account of how exactly this process goes on. How whenever somebody makes a moral claim in any capacity it requires them to be making it from a host of assumptions that are completely unavoidable. Assumptions we largely inherit from our education and don't really think about. Again the premise being that morality is never something that comes from a view from nowhere and it's never something that is valued neutral. He says if you wanted evidence of this if you just zoomed out and you looked at most of the moral conversations that are going on from the most prestigious levels of the university today all the way to the most serious moral discussions between everyday people there are three dominant sets of assumptions you will see in the world that have emerged historically that people are bringing into these moral conversations whether they realize it or not. He calls them one the encyclopedic viewpoint, two the genealogical viewpoint and three the tradition-based viewpoint. Three rival versions of moral inquiry you could say which also happens to be the title of the book. We're going to talk about all of them today and where they come from and we'll talk about how each of these not only have their own sort of vibe to them each of these have their own strengths and weaknesses and ultimately by the end of the episode we'll understand why McIntyre has a very strong preference for one of these viewpoints over the other two. We'll also see today how he thinks that when two people seem to disagree on a moral issue say one person is for abortion and one person's against it it may seem like they disagree at the level of their actual positions but many of the most culture-defining disagreements like this are actually occurring at a deeper level in the very criteria these people use to form their arguments. Anyway let's get started on all that though and let's begin with explaining these three rival versions of moral inquiry and start with what he calls the encyclopedic viewpoint because it's probably the most common one you'll see in today's world. The name encyclopedic is a reference by McIntyre to a particular set of assumptions people bring into things that can be clearly seen in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica released in the late 1800s. Lot of things here that are going to sound pretty familiar to you because it's honestly the way many of us have been trained to think about things. The encyclopedic view is the closest thing we're going to get to an approach that really believes it's operating from a view from nowhere. One way to think of it is that it's a pretty scientific way of looking at things. We're at the same logic for how we try to be neutral in the lab and use a method to arrive at better and better facts about the universe. That same approach apparently needs to get applied to the way they think we should be handling our moral questions. For example, say a moral dilemma presents itself in a moment. And what does an encyclopedist think we should do about it? Well, you gather all the facts about the situation you can, you define the terms you're going to be debating about, you clarify whatever concepts are involved in that debate, you then translate your disagreement to a common language you can use, and the assumption is that if everyone's being reasonable there and they're coming to the conversation in good faith, well then with enough time gone by of us doing this, we should all start having better and better conversations. The quality of our concepts should gradually improve over time. And eventually a kind of rational convergence is going to happen where anyone who's thinking in the right way will move towards the same moral answers to the same moral questions. Moral disagreements between people then under this logic become something like just a technical problem to McIntyre. If two people don't see eye to eye on something, one of them must have just had bad information, they must have had bad arguments at some level, personal bias they can't see past. And if we could just get everybody into the same room looking at the exact same evidence, then we have every reason to expect that the world of moral discussion will start to look less like a bunch of rival camps screaming at each other, talking past each other, and more like a single, shared human project that's slowly improving over time with rationality. What McIntyre would want to point out right here at the start is notice how morality, under this set of assumptions, becomes basically a matter of rules and obligations we reason to, where the claim is that we didn't assume anything in order to get to them. Now remember, the title of the book was Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, and that this encyclopedic viewpoint is only one of them. Well, for the sake of explaining this in a way that gets us closer to how McIntyre's viewing these things, I'd like to invite you to think of these three approaches as effectively three rival civilizations we're talking about here, each of which having their own distinct identity that matters to them a lot. And McIntyre, if we had to talk about the identity of the encyclopedic civilization in particular, well, it's a very strange kind of moral tradition, all things considered. Unique, I guess, is the HR-friendly way of phrasing it, because think about it, this is a civilization where a key piece of their whole moral identity is that they don't really have a moral identity. They might say something like, look, we're not making the same kinds of assumptions as someone like an Aristotle, for example. I mean, that guy, he talks about morality, and he's got all sorts of pre-canned ideas he brings into it that shade the entire way he's thinking about it. For example, he has a whole picture of what he thinks a human being even is, of what a life is for, of what counts as flourishing. And all this stuff is rooted in standards of evidence he had that are not only ancient, but he pulls all these assumptions from things that are foundational to his culture, what a coincidence they might say. And look, that whole thing he's doing there is part of what we try not to do here in the encyclopedic civilization. Morality should be something that's true regardless of whatever culture you come from. I mean, give us enough time with any moral issue, and any right-thinking rational agent would have to agree that what we're saying here is valid. But again, from McIntyre, there is no view from nowhere when you're doing morality. Because, he'd say, the encyclopedic set of assumptions also smuggles in standards that it operates by. Notice how it magically begins with the idea that morality is fundamentally about laws or obligations or duties. Notice the assumption that virtue is for the most part a disposition by someone to be able to follow those rules consistently. Notice the assumption that a normal everyday person not only has access to the knowledge required to live a life of virtue, but also the rational capacity to get better. Notice how this civilization assumes that its philosophies job to systematize this moral knowledge, or at the very least to remove confusion about it. And maybe most importantly, notice the assumption that there can be some sort of moral consensus practically on the level of a universal, where a disagreement that persists in a moral discussion, that's not a normal piece of what a moral discussion is. It must be some kind of confusion or ignorance at some level. Now that's a lot of assumptions for a civilization that's supposedly starting from a view from nowhere. Aren't they smuggling these things in, not unlike the example of Aristotle? Except to McIntyre, that's the whole thing. When you're not a member of this encyclopedic civilization, none of this that's going on in Aristotle is seen as smuggling in anything. There's no smuggling. You're not doing something wrong by having standards you adhere to. You're just engaging in what morality is and has always been. Once again, the only way this would ever be weird to you is if a piece of your identity was that you don't really have an identity in this way. Several examples we can give here of these encyclopedic assumptions being applied to the ideas that shape our world. And for McIntyre, one of the most useful examples of this, one that he dedicates a good deal of time to in his work just because of its popularity, is enlightenment liberalism. See, as much as liberalism might like to claim that it's all about individual, rational agents acting on their own, choosing whatever values matter to them, liberalism also, like everything else, has a standard for what they think a human being is for, of what counts as flourishing. Liberalism also has standards of evidence they use, standards of what even counts as a valid reason to believe something at all. More than that, they also cite the foundational texts of liberalism, not unlike Aristotle. They even have an origin story rooted in history. Is this so different from what Aristotle was doing, he might ask? Now, knowing all this, he says, the real question just becomes, do a citizen in a liberal society, how self-aware are you of all these assumptions that you're bringing in? I mean, if there's no view from nowhere, truly, then you can understand how this looks from McIntyre's perspective. It is a civilization of people that for very interesting reasons, constantly need to believe they're operating from a view from nowhere. And if this was the moral tradition you used to try to come up with moral guidance during times of crisis, the next thing to consider is, what sort of problems might a person run into if they use this method? More importantly, what sorts of problems might a civilization like this run into? If again, in real time, this is the strategy it used to try to solve the moral issues it's dealing with. Well, history may have already answered that question for us. That civilization may find itself incapable of real moral leadership during times of crisis, like leading up to the Second World War. It would be this way, because you'd have no real moral tradition to stand on to give a strong critique to rival viewpoints. I mean, maybe in that world, it just becomes a place where whoever can manage to seize power for a time, however they can do it, giving it to them, just becomes the fate of the encyclopedic civilization because they have no method to disagree with anyone in a strong enough way. More than that, though, maybe if you had no shared concept of what human beings are for, maybe that kind of civilization would find itself with its government institutions turning mostly into just bureaucracy or technical procedures. Maybe a society like this turns overly litigious because of this fact. Most of all, though, for McIntyre, maybe moral conversation in cultures like this starts to become something that is mostly just performative. Where, you know, two really smart people will come together, have a conversation, the audience that's watching them gets really excited, hey, we're finally going to see these two intellectuals clash, and we're going to get closer to moral answers in a way that's satisfying. But instead, in practice, what happens is they just spend two hours talking past each other, making pretty much zero headway. And what's worse for McIntyre, the people living in this kind of moral tradition actually learn to accept this as an outcome and not be disappointed when things are so unproductive. You know, they just sit around after the fact, holding a towel, dabbing their head like a like a Baptist preacher going, well, I'm a little confused about what happened there. But, you know what, at least we tried, right? Maybe one day we'll find that view from nowhere, and rational convergence will just come together for us somehow. But as we know by now, it's never going to happen in the eyes of McIntyre. Because the entire viewpoint and the unique set of assumptions that was at the base the whole time, it makes it impossible to adjudicate between rival moral claims. The aspiration for value neutrality led to a lack of self-awareness, which then led to all these problems we're talking about. Okay, so if the encyclopedic view was the first one of these in the book, let's move on to the second moral tradition that in many ways has come about because it's so critical of the encyclopedic view. This one's called the genealogical viewpoint. Many of you will probably be familiar with Nietzsche's genealogy of morality, or maybe Foucault's genealogy of criminal punishment or sexuality that he did. The point for McIntyre is that the genealogical viewpoint asks a completely different set of questions about morality because they view what morality is in a totally different way. See, any idea, they would say, that anyone ever has about morality has emerged historically from former ideas that we can do the work and literally trace the history of. You can see right where they came from, where else would they have come from? And if this was your viewpoint, then the new question becomes, when we're doing morality, what does a valid moral question even start to look like? Well, it's certainly not what is objectively right written into the universe, right? It's not what is real human flourishing, really, or what's a neutral moral conclusion, we can all arrive at together holding hands, jump rope and together. No, morality in this viewpoint becomes more questions like, what ideas led to these other moral ideas that we see today? Can we trace them through history? How do they function in relation to other ideas that are going on? But probably most importantly to them, the question becomes, who in a position of power, they often ask, currently benefits from these ideas being the current dominant way of thinking about things? Also no doubt, who becomes a victim when whatever current set of ideas are the dominant ways of thinking about things? By the way, McIntyre would say notice so far how all of this genealogical view is also built on a host of assumptions about what human flourishing is, what counts as evidence, what counts as a valid reason to believe something at all. Again, there is no view from nowhere when we're making these sorts of moral claims. It's just a matter of how aware you are of the leaps you've made to get here. And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today, this episode sponsored by NordVPN. 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And now back to the podcast. Now seeing how critical the genealogical civilization is at its core, you can start to imagine how this civilization might start viewing the encyclopedic civilization as pretty delusional. I mean from their point of view, you know, when these people think they're just gathering evidence, neutrally clarifying their concepts and then arriving at better and better moral answers, these are people that are completely ignorant to the real historical origins of where the morality actually comes from. It's also a civilization, it seems, that completely waste their time dreaming of having the correct answer to a moral question when it's clear that something like that doesn't even exist. And this level of critique was certainly something that McIntyre appreciated during his time, but he thought this genealogical approach as a moral tradition, it fails in practice for perhaps even worse reasons than the encyclopedic one does at times. Because the genealogical view is rooted in critique, it often gets stuck in the mode of critique and can't offer sufficient answers to anything without ultimately consuming itself. And if you think about it, just like we imagined earlier with the encyclopedic approach, can you imagine all the real world problems the genealogical civilization might run into if this was the moral tradition they tried to use to solve crises as they arise? What are two intellectuals trying to have a public debate look like under this logic? Is it productive? Is this an approach that can give moral answers when a society needs them? What problems do the citizens of this kind of society ultimately run into? One example McIntyre explores in the book as an answer to this last question is a person who questions things about their identity. Take any example of how society gives people these identity boxes they got to fall into, and picture any example of someone who thinks these are historically constructed, a bit too narrow, and they decide they're not going to deny their own inner complexity just to fit into the identities they've been given to choose from. Okay, well McIntyre on one level would say he appreciates the level of critique going on there when it comes to these categories. This certainly isn't someone falling into the trap of the encyclopedic viewpoint, more power to you for that. But he says notice how this logic ultimately has to consume itself and can't practically function if the person decides to remain consistent. Because if someone says I'm not going to conform to these identity boxes, I'm going to trace their historical origins and I'm going to reimagine my identity in a new light, well now you've just replaced one identity box with another identity box that you've created. And unless at that point you're willing to just live out the rest of your life in contradiction, you know decide you're just done trying to think about stuff, you inevitably now have to examine this new identity box and trace its historical roots in your own mind. It too has its own functions and power relations that you'd have to discover if you wanted to be consistent, at which point ostensibly you'd have to create a new identity, and then that one needs to be traced to understand its origins. In other words, citizens of a truly genealogical civilization would be constantly undermining the very self they were trying to liberate. Being stuck in the mode of critique, leave someone in a place where they can do nothing but self-consume. Imagine how maddening it would be to try to live in that place. Eventually you'd need some sort of a foundation to build a life from, or else you wouldn't have a life. And if it's not clear, this person is a metaphor for what moral conversation becomes in the genealogical moral tradition as well. For McIntyre, genealogy presents itself as a liberation from some story that you've been captured by, but you can't offer satisfying answers to moral questions if you're constantly in the business of unmasking the story that all the people believe in. Now, this is a perfect moment to talk about one of the biggest points Alistair McIntyre makes in the whole book. Mentioned it at the beginning of the episode. He says it's so common in the modern world when we see a moral debate going on. To think that what's going on there are that two people are disagreeing about different moral conclusions they've arrived at, but the reality is, he makes the case, they're really disagreeing at this more fundamental level that we've been talking about for the whole episode. Quick example of this. Imagine there's a debate going on between a person from the encyclopedic civilization on one side and the genealogical one on the other. And imagine them debating something like, should a college campus ban a speaker from coming to speak because they've engaged in hate speech online? Seems like one we may have seen before. Now, it seems on the surface like these two people are disagreeing at the level of their moral conclusions, meaning one of these people thinks we shouldn't ban them, the other person thinks we should. That's the disagreement. But the real deeper layer that this moral disagreement is happening on, he thinks, is again at the level of these more fundamental assumptions. The encyclopedist treats the entire moral question as something that should be solved through that public impersonal method that they like to use. So how do they debate when they have to? Well, first they define their terms. They ask, what is hate speech? Let's really define that. Then they gather evidence. They ask, well, banning this person on campus actually reduced harm on campus. Then they apply some set of rights or duties to the question. They ask, how do we figure out what our obligation is to reduce harm while still allowing for other goods? And then they expect that the other person, as long as they're thinking rationally along with them, they should be able to agree with them if they presented the evidence and stuck to a nice set of rules centered around reducing harm. Maybe they end up deciding that we shouldn't ban this person in favor of some higher good. Now, the genealogist, on the other hand, their entire approach would be something indistinguishable from this. See, this person would be starting from a place where they're skeptical of the entire language that frames the question itself. They might think, you know, these words we're using, like harm or dignity or safety, these are far from things we can just reason to a definition of. I mean, we've inherited our definitions of these things from power structures that we know we're not the greatest. What kind of person sits around thinking it's productive to try to define these things? And what are they really trying to accomplish underneath that? How might they be being used by forces they don't totally understand? Then they might be looking at the function of the event itself. They might ask, what is invoking harm to students in any capacity, then allow for the administrators to potentially do in the future? They might then consider, let's say this person comes on campus and gives a speech. Well, who gains power from this event going on at all? Who becomes vulnerable from this event going on? In other words, for McIntyre, this whole example, when you pay close attention to the way the moral arguments are being made here, to McIntyre, the real location of this moral disagreement that's going on are in these underlying assumptions, things like what counts as morality at all, what counts as evidence, what counts as a decisive reason or for what human life is even for. Again, we get so distracted, he thinks, by these surface level differences between the moral conclusions that he thinks it stops us from examining the real place our moral disagreements are actually happening. Now, before we move on to number three, quick 32nd point I want to make here for longtime listeners of the show and the people out there already knowledgeable about philosophy. I certainly don't want to alienate anyone just getting into this stuff. But there's an important point that needs to be made here that can help us place Alistair McIntyre as a thinker. And that is this, notice how the encyclopedic view seems to have a lot of parallels with modernism. And notice how the genealogical view seems to have a lot of parallels with post structuralism or post modernism. To be clear, this is not how McIntyre himself is framing it in the book. But this is a really useful shorthand, I think, when trying to understand where he fits into the story of philosophy. That's because the third viewpoint we're going to be talking about today is something that probably most resembles pre-modern thought, if it resembles anything. And McIntyre himself, as a big fan of this third way of approaching morality, McIntyre is going to end up being a very unique blend of pre-modern and post-structuralist thought that you really don't see almost ever in a thinker. Anyway, I just personally think this is helpful to consider if nothing else. So anyway, there's the encyclopedic, the genealogical, and now the third way of thinking he says you'll see out there in all the moral discussions we're having is what he calls the tradition based view of morality. But right off the bat, I want to just caution anyone listening to not be thrown off too much by the name. This is not McIntyre saying that you should follow a tradition just because it's something that worked for your grandma or something. In fact, it's going to be closer to the opposite of that. The tradition based view of morality begins from the place that anytime you're doing morality in any capacity, you are doing so from within a way of life. Meaning for within this logic, it is understood that you are always inside of a language and a set of institutions. You're inside of a set of assumptions like we've already laid out for the other two approaches. And an important piece of this that we'll call back to the end of the After Virtue episode we just did, whenever you make a moral claim, you are doing so from within shared practices and communities that produce a particular kind of person. This is a very important point to McIntyre. Because when you start to view morality through this lens, the way moral discourse often plays out starts to make a lot more sense. When morality is something absolutely inseparable from questions like what is a human life for, then the picture of what morality is becomes the cultivation of whatever virtues are going to produce a person who has good judgment. Now consider the difference there between that view of morality to the last two approaches we've laid out. Being moral isn't about deciding what your moral rules are and then working really hard every day to consistently stick to them like the encyclopedic. Morality is not just unmasking the function and power dynamics of the things you think are good, like in the genealogical. Morality in the tradition based view is the formation of a person. We're knowing your particular community in shared practices and all those assumptions that underlie your thinking. Becoming familiar with these things produces a person where when they're in a moment where they need to make a difficult moral decision, this will be a person who can individually make a good judgment in that scenario without even needing a set of rules they have to follow. A couple quick things McIntyre would want to point out at this point. First of all, this view of morality we just talked about much more resembles Aristotle than it does Enlightenment liberalism. That's just a fact he thinks. Secondly, this is a view that produces people who are capable of good judgment rather than people that are on some fake quest to find some view from nowhere about the human good or some set of universals. Lastly, this view from McIntyre just seems to correspond so much better with the actual activity that's going on when two different cultures are screaming at each other about what the right thing to do is. Both sides are coming from different sets of assumptions, communities, and shared practices that they are always embedded in. And the logic of their claims doesn't really make sense outside of that context. Why not embrace that that is always something that's going on? Now a criticism that almost every smart person I've ever talked to about McIntyre brings up right away is how is what he's saying here not just the same as moral relativism? I mean if no one my own moral traditions conception of the good is what morality is, then isn't any tradition equally valid to any other tradition? And on that note wouldn't the encyclopedic thinkers just need to become more self-aware of what they're doing and then their approach would be magically as good as any other? The answer of course is no from McIntyre and his reasoning for this is something we've actually already been alluding to throughout the entire episode. He thinks that not all moral traditions equally accomplish what we want moral traditions to do for us. To make a case for this we have to begin from a place where we acknowledge that moral traditions do serve multiple important purposes for us. As we've already mentioned we need them to be able to provide real answers when a crisis inevitably hits. But we also need them to be able to contend with contradictions that go on internally, within a culture, with people that are part of the tradition. We need them to be able to survive critique from other approaches to not just exclude outside ideas. We need them to be able to integrate good ideas from other traditions while still being able to spot the weaknesses and other rival conceptions of the good. Maybe most of all we need them to actually be effective at forming these moral subjects within them that have good judgment. Or else what's the point of any of this? Now all these things combine to McIntyre. They create kind of a stress test that goes on in the real world. And not every moral tradition out there accomplishes these things at the same level. Some moral traditions, when these stresses are placed on them in real time, they destroy themselves or can do nothing about it. And his point is, insofar as a moral tradition can't accomplish these things, McIntyre has no problem saying that it is just worse as a moral tradition. So it's not that liberalism can't possibly function as a moral tradition for a time. He just thinks it's bad at doing certain things that we need our moral approach to accomplish for us, and in that way it's just worse than other approaches. There are of course far more extreme examples than liberalism that you can apply this to, a culture that doesn't educate half its citizens, a culture that cordons off certain groups and then castigates them for all of society's problems. The examples of how we can do this scorekeeping become almost endless. And what you're left with, he thinks, after he goes through this whole process, is the moral tradition that he will unapologetically make a case for in his later work, what he thinks is the best moral tradition that has ever existed based on these criteria, Aristotelian Tomas, or a late middle age's early Renaissance version of thought that fuses the work of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. We'll certainly talk more about it in the next couple episodes. But if we accept this as a reasonable argument for McIntyre, then what would be the important practical implications of this we can expect on the world we live in? Well, one important thing we've got to consider is that when you're viewing morality through the tradition-based lens, it just changes fundamentally what moral conversation and debate even looks like. Just as a point of contrast here, consider what the average debate looks like on the internet these days. Now, of course we know these are people that are operating from a totally different set of premises than McIntyre is, so what you get are people that usually never even try to understand their opponent's perspective. Their job is just to win the debate, either make the other person look stupid, come up with the best line that dunks on your opponent. At best, what you get in these things are usually people that try to point out where their opponent might have bad information or arguments that aren't very strong. You know, classic encyclopedic framing approaches to debate. But under the tradition-based everything changes, because if the whole premise is that everyone is making a moral claim from within a set of practices, communities, and assumptions that underlie a moral tradition, well then for McIntyre, proper moral debate then has to be something that goes on from a place where someone's done a lot of work beforehand to understand the opposing person's set of assumptions at least as well as they do. In other words, somebody knowledgeable about how morality actually functions would understand where the moral disagreement is truly located, and for that person, persuasion or changing minds in something like a debate would require them to know the opposing set of assumptions so well that they can point out to the other person the weaknesses and contradictions of their approach and then how my approach does all the jobs we want moral traditions to do for us better. That takes a lot of work to actually do. For McIntyre, there's not a low barrier to entry if you really want to change someone's mind in a debate. Again, if all you want to do is just make somebody feel stupid, then it's incredibly easy to get in. And McIntyre will go on to say for the rest of his work, and we'll talk more about this next time, that the university setting becomes a training ground that we have in the modern world for teaching young people to not have this kind of respect for other ideas. We just teach them to try to dunk on people. Next episode, we're going to talk about a change that goes on in his thinking. We move away from some of the stuff he said about morality and after virtue, and presents an entirely new picture of what a human being is that will no doubt get you questioning a lot of the modern ways we treat people. Hope this got you thinking in a slightly different way. Patreon.com slash philosophize this, writing on sub-stack and as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.