Online Event: MacIntyre's Historicist Reconstruction of Virtue Ethics

Note this is an online event. An In person event is linked here) Modern ethics has largely been concerned with the project of justifying our ordinary moral intuitions by reference to abstract principles rooted in human nature. The problem has been to show how, using some basic assumptions, one can derive the legitimacy of moral rules from an irrefutable principle that will generate all the moral consequences we are concerned to establish. Thus, Bentham and later utilitarians have tried to derive morality from the seemingly self-evident proposition that we seek for pleasure and avoid pain. Kant tries to base it on the presuppositions of rational agency, etc. In a similar way modern politics, has employed a number of abstractions, such as equality, liberty, equity, fairness, justice, utility which similarly function as a set of abstract almost disembodied rules prescribing conduct. And yet, despite hundreds of years of debate, modern ethical philosophers cannot agree on principles, and similarly, modern political agents cannot justify their principles or resolve disputes about which ones should be prioritized. One actor shouts liberty, the other person shouts equity, and there does not appear to be any way to adjudicate how much liberty matters and how much equity matters. Our inability to agree on principles, both in the practical and in the theoretical sphere, might be the indication that something is wrong with our moral practice, but it is also hard to imagine any alternative to modern theory and practice.
One interesting and remarkable attempt to suggest an alternative theory and practice is outlined in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. The foundational suggestion of this text is that modern moral theory has gone astray because it attempted to divorce the notion of morality from the classical notion,(perhaps most iconically embodied in the philosophy of Aristotle) of the common good or common purpose that humankind is driving towards. Within such a framework of purpose towards which human nature strives, the main focus of moral theory is what sort of person one ought to become, not what sort of principle one ought to trust. And therefore the locus of moral theory and practice is character formation and is only secondarily concerned with consequences and principles.
Enticing as such a picture is, many would be skeptical that any notion of common purpose can be sustained within the modern context. As modern subjects in an industrial and pluralist society in which many ethical and political traditions live side by side, the idea that we might be able to resolve moral disputes by reference to a common purpose may seem outlandish and quaint. And from the metaphysical side, many believe that the presuppositions of modern science and modern philosophy rule out the notion that human nature can be understood as having a purpose.
Answering such objections forms the main purpose of the second half of After Virtue. The primary resource that MacIntyre turns to in seeking answers is the historicist suggestion that human agency is something that only makes sense in terms of a social-historical process. Drawing on insights from Collingwood, Marx, Wittgenstein, and Hegel, MacIntyre tries to show how we can only understand ourselves in terms of a social history in which common and century-long successes and failures to understand and strive for human goods define who we are and what we can be. Our common purpose, therefore, has to be understood in terms of how our human identity is constructed in pursuit of goods that we achieve and understand only through each other and through our inheritance as human beings. Some of these goods are specific to specific social histories and others are essential to sustaining the life of any community that is capable of pursuing and deliberating about the good life for humanity. The virtues, therefore, are subject to debate and to changing conditions within a core body of agreement secured by a framework of purpose. In this way, we can imagine a resolvable dialogue about good within a pluralist society and one that is at least partially, metaphysically agnostic about a disclosed human essence.
In this meetup, we wish to discuss this bold project for a historicist virtue ethics, referencing the second half of MacIntyre's classic statement of this conception in After Virtue. Readings are linked here.