Online Event: Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of Technocracy and Emotivism

Note this is an online event, an in person event is scheduled here) One fundamental feature of modern life in all developed societies is the domination of society by large institutions with bodies of experts and managers. Such institutions have highly complicated official processes and chains of command in which power is carefully segmented and organized. This is a highly impersonal form of administration, in which rules and policies are constructed by a small group of executives and administrators and then are executed by functionaries with limited autonomy.
The justification of this form of social organization is often technocratic, it has to do with the idea that the only way that effective decisions can be made with large populations is by employing bodies of specialized experts and decision makers who can design policies that are likely to effectively put human labor to its best use In a competitive struggle, either political or economic.
This form of governance seeps into all institutions, even ones of medium size, and it leads to a particular form of self-presentation, a particular code of ethics and a way of thinking about ourselves and others that emerges into something like a philosophy of life. This form of life has many discontents. Many have talked about the climate of fear, irresponsibility, idiocy and boredom that is operative in many a mid-sized organizational bureaucracy, but there have been few examinations of the philosophical underpinnings of this form of governance.
Related to the dominance of public life by technocratic administration, justified in terms of its efficient use of its means and not its comprehension of appropriate ends, is the growth in private life of a purely egocentric understanding of one’s life journey. Increasingly, the lives of individuals are interpreted in terms of purely personal preferences and subjective interests, with only very sparse appeal to moral concepts. These curious phenomena have been remarked upon by a variety of theorists and traditions, but perhaps one of the most perceptive and thought provoking attempts to understand the philosophical roots of these orientations is found in Alasdair MacIntyre's vastly influential After Virtue. While the philosophical project behind MacIntyre’s book goes significantly beyond mere critique, the first eight chapters are a remarkably perceptive critique of the philosophical underpinnings of both the egocentric private sphere and the technocratic public sphere.
Welding together a remarkable welter of influences, including Historicism, Aristotelianism, Marxism and Catholicism, MacIntyre attempts to understand the roots of both egocentric private life and technocratic public life in terms of a rejection of classical understandings of moral education and moral attainment. At the root of this rejection is a rejection of the idea, common to the Nordic Veddas, to Aristotle and Confucius alike, that the aim of moral training and moral thinking is the formation of character. In the absence of such an understanding of character formation, morality becomes increasingly fragmented and reduced to irrational assertion, abstract but arbitrary rules, and personal preference. The place in the public sphere at one point occupied by the notion of the virtuous man is replaced by the ideal of the effective man, the technocrat. And the place occupied in private life by the idea of the good life for a human being is replaced by the notion of personal satisfaction and personal expression.
In the first eight chapters of After Virtue, MacIntyre makes his case for the philosophical brittleness of the concepts underlying this retreat into technocracy and egocentrism. This involves, first and foremost. a critique of emotivism, the notion that moral language is merely an expression of personal preference and attitudes, and of bureaucratic effectiveness, the idea that bureaucrats are particularly well situated to govern by their special insight into the laws that govern social situations. Last but not least, it involves a critique of the notion of morality without character, of conceptualizing morality without an understanding of the good towards which human nature tends.
Readings are linked here.