After Virtue: The Downfall of Moral Relativism
“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.” - Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
For context, Alasdair Macintyre is a Scottish-American virtue ethicist, Aristotelian apologist, and philosopher who published a phenomenal work entitled "After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory." He published this book in 1981. He has worked as a professor and visiting scholar for institutions of higher education ranging from Notre Dame, Duke University, Yale, and Vanderbilt throughout his career. Frustrated with what he perceived as the incoherence of modern liberal moral philosophy, he set about analyzing the current modern moral dilemmas from the perspective of teleology and Aristotelian ethics.
His thorough and albeit dense literary work identifies and faithfully tracks the arc of moral philosophy from its classic roots, through the enlightenment project and its peak found in the work of Immanuel Kant, and into the modern day with the birth of a new moral theory that Alasdair has coined "emotivism." Emotivism, quite simply, is the idea that any moral judgment is merely one individual's emotional reaction to that thing. Morality is based solely on the impressions given to us by our emotions about a specific action or event and thereby does not require any objective or rational basis. From this perspective, there is no objective or a priori basis that underpins our ethical frameworks. It is merely based on our perspectives, emotional biases, and choice. Another, likely interchangeable, term for this would be moral relativism.
For Alasdair, this evolution began with decoupling traditional ethics from moral philosophy sometime during the beginning of the enlightenment. This initial enlightenment project culminated in Immanuel Kant's attempt to rationalize ethics through the creation of his categorical imperatives. The incoherencies and ultimate failure of this project ultimately led to the creation of emotivism, as we see it manifested today. It is born from the fruits of Nietzche and Kierkegaard and rejection not only of Kant's endeavor to find morality through pure rationality and the categorical imperative but traditional ethics and morality as a whole, whether they were rooted in philosophical, religious, or even utilitarian efforts.
This moral relativism is strikingly prevalent but also logically incoherent in today's modern world. We so often declare that others are entitled to feel, believe, and act in accordance with their own wills, but how often do we embody that for the thief, the murderer, or the leader of a genocide? While this might be taking the example to some degree of absurdity, it does adequately illustrate how while we say that an objective or a priori standard for morals does not exist, we generally act as though there is some natural law, first principles, or objective moral standard. This demonstrates how inadequate an answer emotivism is to these two fundamental questions: How are we to act and why? Emotivism provides us with no shared collective aim or Telos, it provides subjective and nebulous virtues that are at the whim of human emotion, and it ultimately undermines our ability to reason with one another because it is impossible to reason with emotionally motivated positions.
Another powerful lesson drawn from Alasdair is the capacity for moral paradigms to generate stories and characters that invite cultural and individual emulation. For the Ancient Greeks and their virtue-based moral paradigm, we need to look no further than Hector, the tamer of horses, the courage and physical prowess of Achilles, the intelligence and wit of Odysseus, and the time-honored wisdom of Nestor. During the Victorian Age and their enlightenment paradigm, the British reveled in the characters of the Explorer, the noble charter of the uncharted, the Engineer, the builder of a magnificent and bold new world, and the Schoolmaster, who reared up his pupils in enlightenment ideas and the natural sciences.
For our modern relativist paradigm, Alasdair categorized the archetypes as the Aesthete, the promoter of the visual 'beautiful life', the Therapist who provides quasi-spiritual tools to enable people to 'live their best lives, and the Manager, the efficient producer of material success. This lesson is also a powerful heuristic tool to measure and judge the health of society, and Alasdair argues as much towards the end of his book.
How, then, should we live & why? We look forward to posing Macintyre's, Aristotle's, Thomas Aquinas's, and maybe even C.S. Lewis's more contemporary positions on this in next week's essay.
"A great many of those who "debunk" traditional or (as they would say) "sentimental" values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process"- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.