After Virtue, Chapter 6

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition

Alasdair MacIntyre

University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 2007

Chapter 6 - historical consequences, and modern moral fictions

In Bentham’s utilitarianism, the new telos is simply maximizing pleasurable sensation, avoiding painful sensation - which is rooted in a simple psychology that says that humans are motivated merely by sensation. Main problems: how to derive morality from psychology? and, in Mill, how to choose w/ diverse types of pleasure and varying preferences for them? Utilitarianism is an easy tool for justifying nefarious social engineering projects. The failure of utilitarianism, seen in Sidgwick, is the direct antecedent to emotivism in Moore and his followers.

Moving on, AM offers a critique of Gewirth as paradigm example of the analytic attempt to justify morality (the originally Kantian project): requirements to the free exercise of will imply rights to them. But the argument does not follow: (1) just because I need something doesn’t mean I have a right to it and (2) why are rights universal? “Rights” are social/historical invention, relatively new concept.

Utilitarianism and analytic philosophy failed to answer why individual moral agency, free from divine law, teleology, or social hierarchy, has any authority. The meanings of moral language suppose that these projects have succeeded, but the use is emotivist, which admits that they failed. This schizophrenia is reflected in the self, seen simultaneously as autonomous and as the subject of bureaucratic manipulation.

Critique of key modern concepts:

“Rights” fails as a concept b/c the enlightenment project gave us no good reason for believing in them. It is a convenient fiction, which clashes with the other fiction, ‘utility,’ in contemporary culture. Individuals assert their rights in the face of bureaucratic utility - the incommensurable premises of each guarantee that debates go nowhere. (Popular quote about belief in rights being of the same status as belief in witches & unicorns)

Protest arises out of the incommensurability of these fictions, and admits an unconscious awareness that incommensurability cannot be overcome rationally.

“Unmasking” is showing that somebody’s justifications, whether of rights or utility, are mere masks for arbitrary will or desire. (Hence Freud’s scheme of inherited superego as essentially irrational, arbitrary, which we must free ourselves from).

The “characters” from Chapter 3 trade in these fictions. The rich aesthete is the most likely to be cynically aware that they are fictions. Therapy is obviously based in fiction, as evidenced by so much internal disagreement — why does it even persist as a discipline?

Critique of managerial effectiveness as yet another fiction. Managers are seen as morally neutral, yet trade in systematically manipulating others. “Effectiveness” is a masquerade of social control and justifying otherwise unjustifiable authority. Ability for the manager to actually do what he says he can is based in fictions. Thus we are not really oppressed by power, but by impotence. Claims to managerial effectiveness are of the same kind as unjustified appeals to fictional religious authority.

As for managerial claims to knowledge: social science is not “science,” i.e., not falsifiable, and does not produce law-like generalizations as it would like to. Appearance of “scientific” expertise implies authority and neutrality, but is baseless, and yet another fiction.