Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne

This discussion begins from the dilemma, posed in some earlier writing by Alasdair MacIntyre, that education is essential but also, in current economic and cultural conditions, impossible. The potential for resolving this dilemma through appeal to ‘practice’, ‘narrative unity’, and ‘tradition’(three core concepts in After Virtue and later writings) is then examined. The discussion also explores the relationship of education to the modern state and the power of a liberal education to create an ‘educated public’ very different in character from the electorates of contemporary democratic regimes. It concludes with some remarks on the role of education in combating prejudice against certain kinds of human difference.

Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency

Imagine first the case of J (who might be anybody, jemand ). J used to inhabit a social order, or rather an area within a social order, where socially approved roles were unusually well-defined. Responsibilities were allocated to each such role and each sphere of role-structured activity was clearly demarcated. These allocations and demarcations were embodied in and partly constituted by the expectations that others had learned to have of those who occupied each such role. For those who occupied those roles to disappoint those expectations by failing to discharge their assigned responsibilities was to invite severe disapproval and other sanctions. To refuse to find ones place within the hierarchies of approved roles, or to have been refused a place, because judged unfit for any such role, was to be classified as socially deviant and irresponsible. The key moral concepts that education had inculcated into J were concepts of duty and responsibility. His fundamental moral beliefs were that each of us owes it to others to perform her or his assigned duties and to discharge her or his assigned responsibilities. A good human being performs those duties, discharges those responsibilities, and does not trespass into areas that are not her or his concern. A philosopher who comes across the likes of J will understand his attitudes as cultural parodies, in part of Plato (conceiving of justice as requiring ‘that each do her or his own work and not meddle with many things’ Republic 433a) and in part of Kant (doing ones duty just because it is ones duty and not for the sake of any further end), authors who had influenced Js school teachers. A sociologist will entertain the suspicion that in certain types of social order it may be only in the form of parodies that some types of concept can continue to find expression. But for the moment let us put this thought on one side and return to J.

The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts

I begin with a set of actually debated and debatable questions: Do the dominant social groups in Tudor England comprise an instance of a rising bourgeoisie? Are the sexual liaisons of the Nayars to be counted as instances of marriage? Are Ibsens dramas tragedies? Were the loosely connected alliances of the eighteenth-century English parliament political parties? Are slavery in Attica in the fifth century B.C., in Ireland in the ninth century A.D., and in Virginia in the nineteenth century A.D. variants of the same institution? Is there such a thing as postindustrial society?

Hume on ‘is’ and ‘ought’

Sometimes in the history of philosophy the defence of a particular philosophical position and the interpretation of a particular philosopher become closely identified. This has notoriously happened more than once in the case of Plato, and lately in moral philosophy it seems to me to have happened in the case of Hume. At the centre of recent ethical discussion the question of the relationship between factual assertions and moral judgements has continually recurred, and the nature of that relationship has usually been discussed in terms of an unequivocally sharp distinction between them. In the course of the posing of this question the last paragraph of book III, part i, section i, of Hume’s Treatise has been cited over and over again. This passage is either quoted in full or at least referred to — and with approval — by R. M. Hare,1 Professor A. N. Prior,2 Professor P. H. Nowell-Smith,3 and a number of other writers. Not all contemporary writers, of course, treat Hume in the same way; a footnote to Stuart Hampshire’s paper, ‘Some Fallacies in Moral Philosophy’,4 provides an important exception to the general rule. But very often indeed Hume’s contribution to ethics is treated as if it depended largely on this one passage, and this passage is accorded an interpretation which has acquired almost the status of an orthodoxy. Hare has even spoken of ‘Hume’s Law’.5

Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing

Begin with an elementary puzzlement. In any discussion between sceptics and believers it is presupposed that, even for us to disagree, it is necessary to understand each other. Yet here at the outset the central problem arises. For usually (and the impulse to write ‘always’ is strong) two people could not be said to share a concept or to possess the same concept unless they agreed in at least some central applications of it. Two men may share a concept and yet disagree in some of the judgements they make in which they assert that objects fall under it. But two men who disagreed in every judgement which employed the concept — of them what could one say that they shared? For to possess a concept is to be able to use it correctly — although it does not preclude mishandling it sometimes. It follows that unless I can be said to share your judgements at least to some degree I cannot be said to share your concepts.

Toward a theory of medical fallibility.

N o species of fallibility is more important or less understood than fallibility in medical practice. The physicians propensity for damaging error is widely denied, perhaps because it is so intensely feared. Patients who suffer at the hands of their physicians often seek compensation by invoking the procedures of malpractice claims, and physicians view such claims as perhaps the only outcomes more earnestly to be avoided than even the damaging errors from which they presumably arise. Malpractice insurance rates soar, physicians strike, legislatures intervene, and, in the end, health care suffers from the absence of a clear understanding of what medical error is, how it arises, to what extent it is avoidable, when it is culpable, and what relationship it should bear to compensation for harm. It is to this cluster of questions that we direct our efforts. We seek to provide the basic outlines of a theory of medical fallibility. Such a theory, to be accepted as adequate, must account for certain basic data. Those data include the fact that medical error not only occurs, but seems unavoidable; that some medical error seems innocent even when severely damaging, whereas other medical error seems culpable; that the harm that results from medical error seems some-

The Nature of the Virtues

O ne response to the history of Greek and medieval thought about the virtues might well be to suggest that even within that relatively coherent tradition of thought there are just too many different and incompatible conceptions of a virtue for there to be any real unity to the concept or indeed to the history. Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, the New Testament and medieval thinkers differ from each other in too many ways. They offer us different and incompatible lists of the virtues; they give a different rank order of importance to different virtues; and they have different and incompatible theories of the virtues. If we were to consider later Western writers on the virtues, the list of differences and incompatibilities would be enlarged still further; and if we extended our enquiry to Japanese, say, or American Indian cultures, the differences would become greater still. It would be all too easy to conclude that there are a number of rival and alternative conceptions, but, even within the early Western tradition, no single core conception. The case for such a conclusion could not be better con-

THE VERY IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY: ARISTOTLE, NEWMAN, AND US

© 2009 The Author Journal compilation

The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays

How should we respond when some of our basic beliefs are put into question? What makes a human body distinctively human? Why is truth an important good? These are among the questions explored in this collection of essays by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most creative and influential philosophers working today. Ten of MacIntyre’s most influential essays written over almost thirty years are collected together here for the first time. They range over such topics as the issues raised by different types of relativism, what it is about human beings that cannot be understood by the natural sciences, the relationship between the ends of life and the ends of philosophical writing, and the relationship of moral philosophy to contemporary social practice. They will appeal to a wide range of readers across philosophy and especially in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and theology.

How Virtues Become Vices: Values, Medicine and Social Context

I begin with three distinct groups of problems, each so urgent that the medical conscience ought to be — and indeed clearly is — haunted by them — and not only the medical conscience. Consider first such problems as: ought abortion to be legal? Is it ever morally right? Ought those in extremes of pain to have the right to take their own lives? Ought physicians to have the right to take the lives of patients with terminal cancer, who are in extreme pain?