Alasdair MacIntyre: An Appreciation
Alasdair MacIntyre passed away last month at the age of 96. Professor MacIntyre’s writings have influenced my thinking and work more than any other philosopher (well, any other philosopher born in the last 1500 years or so). I won’t attempt to address his work in any kind of complete way. But I would like to reflect on his work by examining his underappreciated elaboration of what he called human practices and reflect on the continuing relevance of the idea. I was only very slightly acquainted with Professor MacIntyre. But I do have some personal remembrances that I’ll share at the end of the post.
John Haldane has written an excellent tribute to MacIntyre here: Haldane on MacIntyre.1
After Virtue and MacIntyre on Practices
MacIntyre introduced the concept of practices in After Virtue2, his most famous and influential book. He introduces and discusses the concept in Chapter 14, the first chapter where he elaborates his own Aristotelian conception of ethics and the virtues as an alternative to what he called in After Virtue the “Enlightenment Project” of justifying morality (his account is also an alternative to Nietzsche who MacIntyre argued effectively critiqued enlightenment moral philosophy and practice). I won’t attempt to summarize the argument of After Virtue,3 but I’ll touch on it briefly.4 Suffice to say that the concept of a practice is crucial for elaborating a conception of moral judgment that is an alternative to emotivism and other forms of expressivism that MacIntyre argued had not only become the default view of philosophers, but had come to characterize cultural discourse and practice.5 In short, MacIntyre argued that emotivism is false about the meaning of ethical language, but has come to characterize our use of ethical and evaluative language. MacIntyre attributed this mismatch of meaning and use to the breakdown of the Enlightenment Project of justifying morality.
For our purposes, here are the key claims of the first 9 chapters of After Virtue:
The Enlightenment project of justifying morality failed and had to fail.6
This failure is what generated not just emotivist views of ethical language, but what MacIntyre called an emotivist culture. One key feature of such a culture is that it does not recognize a distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative discourse (!!!), between persuading as simply influencing by causally effective means on the one hand and persuading on the basis of good reasons.
Nietzsche unmasked and effectively critiqued this breakdown. However, Nietzsche thinks he has effectively critiqued all objective morality; MacIntyre thinks Nietzsche’s critique works against the Enlightenment project and its aftermath, but not against the teleological ethics of Plato and Aristotle (and Augustine, and Aquinas, etc, etc.)
In chapters 10-13, MacIntyre turns to what he calls “the tradition of the virtues” first turning to Homeric conceptions, then Plato, Aristotle, and Medieval views. Beginning in chapter 14, MacIntyre attempts to elaborate his own account in a way that defends and extends the core of this “tradition of the virtues.” It is in chapter 14 that MacIntyre introduces the concept of a practice. In his view, one core place of the virtues in human life is that they are the traits that enable us to pursue the goods “internal” to practices. For MacIntyre practices are human activities that are an enclave within the wider emotivist culture.7 Okay, so here is MacIntyre’s definition of a practice:
By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (After Virtue 187).
Singing in a choir, playing in an orchestra, participating in a football team, or ballet company are practices. Fixing cars is a practice. Household management and family life are practices. Gardening is a practice. Teaching is a practice.
I want to focus on MacIntyre claim that there are goods that are “internal” to these practices. What is an “internal good” of a practice? MacIntyre provides three criteria:
Internal goods of an activity can only be achieved through that activity or some similar activity.
Internal goods can only be specified in terms of the activity.
Internal goods can only be adequately recognized by practitioners of the activity.8
An internal good is “internal” because it is integral to the activity itself, rather than a further end that we can achieve by the activity. External goods by contrast are goods that we can get through the activity, but the activity is not essential to that end. Reading philosophy can help you sleep, but that is not the point of philosophy, and Nyquil will do the job. Cooking well can make you money, but, you can make money many other ways (including in some cases by cooking badly - or by putting up videos of cooking badly as “rage-bait” on social media). Playing music can relax you, but so can a shot of whiskey. Relaxation is not intrinsic to the activity of music-making and listening.
Practices are familiar to us. And they are meaningful to us because of the internal goods of these activities (which indeed, to borrow an Aristotelian formulation about pleasure, are not distinct from the activity at all, but simply are the activity in completion). To appreciate a practice and its internal goods is to value what the activity is instead of valuing what else it can be turned into. It resists commodification of meaningful human activities.
Practices and Public discourse
Despite the ubiquity and importance of practices and internal goods for all of us, discourse around these activities tends to ignore or fail to recognize the goods internal to activities.9 The power of Marianne’s most recent substack is that she paused to ask about goods internal to writing. But so much of the discussion of AI is about what external uses of writing and other human activities can be achieved by large language models. And AIs defenders and detractors too often share the assumption that the argument turns on whether AI can indeed achieve those external goods. But that’s to give up the game, and to give up our humanity with it. The terms of engagement of these arguments ignore internal goods, and seek to justify human activities only in terms of the external goods we can achieve by them. But that way madness lies. Not only will writing fail to justify itself exclusively in those terms, but so will friendship, family, music, art, craftsmanship, conversation, dinner parties and the list goes on. Not to mention preservation of ecosystems, forests, oceans, topsoil.
Thankfully, we can recognize internal goods, and because of that we can spot their neglect in public discourse. One source of confusion is this: we can and often must pursue external goods alongside and in connection with our pursuit of goods internal to practices. Orchestras need to keep the lights on, their musicians need to eat, etc. So orchestras have budgets and charge ticket prices, and fundraise, etc. That does not inherently sacrifice the pursuit of the internal goods of orchestras. Charging ticket prices does not by itself require “selling out.” But an important part of the practice is pursuing such necessary external goods without making them the point of the orchestra; it requires organizing the orchestra’s activities so that pursuit of a solvent budget is for the sake of excellent music, not the other way round.
Phrases like “music is a business” are used to justify making financial outcomes the main end of practices like orchestral music. Similarly for “education is a business.” But if education is a business simply because universities have a budget, then “a family is a business.” I drive this point home to my students, and it seems to stick. A household is very much a complex and ongoing economic concern. But the monetary outcomes of a household are not the point of family life. The love and care that constitute the internal goods of family life is. But if the “x is a business” rhetoric doesn’t work for family life, then it doesn’t work for education, the arts, environmental care, or other human practices. So we should stop critiquing the value of such activities only in terms of external goods and we should stop trying to defend them only in those terms.
MacIntyre’s notion of a practice has a lot of parallels to Josef Pieper’s concept of leisure activity, and Pieper eloquently summarizes some upshots of the previous discussion:
However true it may be that the man who says his nightly prayers sleeps the better for it, nevertheless no one could say his nightly prayers with that in mind. In the same way, no one who looks to leisure simply to restore his working powers will ever discover the fruit of leisure; he will never know the quickening that follows, almost as though from some deep sleep.
The point and justification of leisure are not that the functionary should function faultlessly and without a breakdown, but that the functionary should continue to be a man. (Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, 49-50)
Personal Remembrances
When I was in grad school, the students who were working in ethics had a periodic working group - someone would send around a dissertation chapter draft, or a conference paper and we’d come together to discuss it. We’d meet in the offices of the Center for Ethics and Culture (the Center was directed by my advisor David Solomon). I mentioned in my last post that I had difficulty getting my dissertation off the ground. When I finally did get some momentum I sent around a draft of what became the first chapter of my dissertation. MacIntyre would came to some, but by no means all, of these discussions (he was in his late 70s at the time). He came to this one, and was active in the discussion. He made a lot of valuable comments and suggestions that I still think about. He had some nice things to say about it when he saw me in the Ethics Center a few days later. As I say, I did not know MacIntyre well, and he was the opposite of effusive, so I was really grateful that he engaged my work in such a helpful way.
In January of 2010 I had driven with Marianne from PA to South Bend to intensively revise my dissertation in the Ethics Center offices. MacIntyre’s 81st birthday happened to fall on a day we were there, and we got to have cake in the conference room with David Solomon, MacIntyre, and a few others. MacIntyre was gracious to spend time chatting with us, and took an interest and asked questions about the teaching I was doing, and the school, and its gen ed curriculum.
If you haven’t done so, you should read After Virtue. It’s one of just a handful of recent philosophy books that I say without exaggeration that everyone should read. As John Haldane put it, the republic of letters is diminished by his death. I am grateful for his work. I’ll close with the ending of his last book Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity on what is is to bring one’s life to completion
To live well is to act so as to move toward achieving the best goods of which one is capable of achieving those goods. But there is no particular finite good the achievement of which perfects and completes one’s life. There is always something else and something more to be attained, whatever one’s attainments. The perfection and completion of a life consists in an agent’s having persisted in moving toward and beyond the best goods of which she or he knows. So there is presupposed some further good, and object of desire beyond all particular and finite goods, a good toward which desire tends insofar as it remains unsatisfied by even the most desirable of finite goods, as in good lives it does. But here the enquiries of politics and ethics end. Here natural theology begins. (MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity 315).
The New York Times ran an obituary that you needn’t bother to read, so I won’t bother linking it here.
After Virtue was first published in 1981, with a second edition published in 1984. A third edition came out in 2007. I’ll be using the second edition. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.)
Although doing so might be fitting, as MacIntyre was known for covering too much ground in too little time. So much so that the Philosophical Lexicon (a humorous “dictionary” that made the rounds in the early days of the internet - and can now be found here: https://dl.tufts.edu/pdfviewer/1z40m5090/jw827p68f) has the following entry for macintyre, n.: An inflated wheel with a slick, impervious coating; hence, derivatively,
an all-terrain vehicle equipped with macintyres. "If you want to cover that much
territory that fast, you'd best use the macintyre."
You can read MacIntyre’s own summary of the claims of After Virtue here: https://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/Dateien/56c31a759901f_ak_macintyre_1984.pdf. I have a teaching handout document on the argument of After Virtue here: https://www.academia.edu/7324312/The_Argument_of_After_Virtue
Expressivism is the view that ethical and evaluative statements are not assertions and do not state propositions. Instead they express a non-cognitive mental state of the speaker - approval, disapproval, etc. So when we stub our toe and “say some words” we’re usually expressing our mental states, rather than making assertions - even when we use (colorful) declarative sentences. The most influential expressivist views also claimed that there is a prescriptive element to ethical and evaluative statements where one is prescribing either behavior or prescribing that others approve, etc. in the way that you do (note that prescriptions are imperatives not assertions). So, in a famous expressivist analysis “Murder is wrong” gets analyzed as expressing the speaker’s disapproval of murder and a prescription for the hearer to likewise disapprove.
It had to fail because it abandoned the teleological context that rendered intelligible the ethical claims it attempted to justify without that context. This is the argument of chapters 4 and 5 of After Virtue.
And although we didn’t have hordes of people calling themselves “influencers,” in 1981, MacIntyre’s critique of emotivist culture very much speaks to our current condition and predicament.
If you go back to my post on Plato’s Republic: https://theprofessorandmarianne.substack.com/p/citizens-of-an-impossible-city you might recognize how much MacIntyre’s conception of practices and the goods internal to practices inflects my discussion of the problem of the Republic, and indeed my conception of philosophy.
The reasons for this are complex, but MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue about emotivist culture and its connection to the ideology of commodification in corporate and bureaucratic modernity is very much to the point here.