Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, 432 pp, $22.95)

PHRONESIS, PRUDENTIA, JUSTICE Thomas Fleming 

SINCE BEFORE the eighteenth century, the most influential writers on ethics have agreed to hold certain truths to be self-evident. Many of these truths are stated in our own Declaration of independence, among them that human beings are naturally equal and endowed with certain rights, and that the state's authority rests upon the consent of the governed. The more fundamental doctrines are only implied in the classic texts of Jefferson and Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Mill, who took it for granted that all political questions could be reduced to two fundamental units of analysis: the individual and the state. Because the methods are as abstract as geometry and as unviersal as the law of gravity, this system of thought which goes by the name of liberalism -- can be applied to any circumstance. Such details as race, religion, kinship, ethnic origin,and cultural tradition are seen as, at best, peripheral concerns.

Liberalism is the philosophical tradition of modern times, and as Alasdair MacIntyre observes in his latest and most ambitious book, "the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals." Of course, liberals have refused to recognize that they are, in fact, working within an historically limited tradition, a tradition with no more obvious claim to our allegiance than, say, neo-Thomism.

MacIntyre devotes most of this book to case studies of specific ethical traditions, and he provides extensive treatment of Homer, the age of Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Lord Stair, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume. The aim of this exhaustive search is to determine the connection between practical reasoning (what the ancients called phronesis and prudentia) and the conceptions of justice that evolved within each tradition.

The point is, very simply, this: liberals claim that their own style of abstract rationality allows them to adopt the position of a disinterested umpire in moral conflicts; even when their own interests are engaged, they pretend to act like a Cabinet official with a blind trust. In fact, as MacIntyre quite clearly demonstrates, the rationality of liberals is only one among many methods of moral reasoning, one that presupposes the whole body of liberal theory.

No brief review can do justice to the learning and deliberation that has gone into this book. The discussions of Aristotle, Hume, and Hutcheson could serve as introductions to those authors. The treatments of Homer and Pericles, while they will not satisfy every scholar, are lucid and often original. However, the real hero of Macintyre's narrative in Aristotle, who emerges as an original but faithful heir of plato.

MacIntyre insists that we must learn to accept philosophical traditions on their own terms, and in his final chapters he has hard words for the liberal generalizers and ideoloques who hawk values and traditions like so many rags and bones. He has the philosopher's contempt for cant, a contempt that sometimes spills over into downright rancor against the "self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives" who celebrate "that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as 'the judaeo-Christian tradition, and sometimes as "Western values.'"

It is just this sort of abstract universalism, according to MacIntyre, that has proved the -undoing of those great liberal institutions, the modern universities. By abolishing religious tests, universities did not become orderly debating-grounds for conflicting world views. Rather, they simply institutionalized such principles as "objectively." This proved disastrous for the humanities, whose task in the transmission of culture, although the sciences escaped relatively unharmed. Science's survival was due not to the objectivity of its methods but rather to the rigor of its discipline in forcing its own point of view upon all those who would study physics or biology.

While MacIntyre seems to appreciate the rugged traditionalism of modern science, he does not share Aristotle's enthusiasm for the study of nature or the collection of empirical evidence. Before elaborating his theory of politics, Aristotle made a point of collecting the "constitutions" of Greek and barbarian states. His interest was twofold: he wanted to be able to classify the various types of government like so many plant specimen, but he was also looking for evidence of what he called "natural justice" and later writers termed natural law.

Ever since Franz Boas began sending students like Margaret Mead into the field, it has been an axiom of American anthropology that human nature is infinitely variable. In fact, there is a wealth of evidence from a variety of cultures to suggest that on certain basis points -- murder, theft, incest, etc, -- the moral systems of the human family converge. There are, of course, exceptions, but cultures can fall into bad habits as much as individuals. By drawing his conclusions from humans cultural norms and not from exceptions, David Hume anticipated, for example the cross-cultural surveys of G. P. Murdock.

Properly used, a survey of cross-cultural data could be the first step in re-establishing an empirically grounded theory of natural law. Such a natural law would be entirely compatible with MacIntyre's own emphasis on tradition, because human nature is never found in a purse state; it is always concrete and historical. The individual-as-such is the fantasy of liberals who have failed, after two centuries of effort, to realize their grand system of a world without superstition, prejudice, and traditional piety. In reality, it is not religion but philosophy that is an endangered species. As Mary Midgley said in a recent article, it is not a point of honor with ethical philosophers that their work has no pracital significance. If philosophers cannot agree even on the terms of their debate, ordinary people must still muddle through somehow, making decisions on whether or not they should cheat on their taxes, pay for their daughter's abortions, or get a divorce. Their best resource remains "participation in the life of one of those groups whose thought and actions are informed by some distinctive profession of settled conviction." Making moral sense of the world turns out to depend not upon what we can glean from the pages of John Rawls or Robert Nozick, but upon our allegiance to the blood of our ancestors and the faith of our fathers. Professor MacIntyre might not care for their company, but intelligent conservatives cannot afford to ignore the most subversive conservative thinker since T.S. Elliot and Richard Weaver.