Practice and Virtue

In Memoriam Alasdair MacIntyre

JMW Turner, Seascape with storm coming on, 1840 (Image: Wikimedia Commons). “When Turner transformed the seascape in painting or W.G. Grace advanced the art of batting in cricket… their achievement enriched the whole relevant community.” – Alasdair MacIntyre.

A few weeks ago, the Scottish American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died, aged 96. His best known work, After Virtue, is an extraordinary book. Despite its considerable impact over the past few decades (it was published in 1981), it still reads as a startlingly original, radical critique of modern society, and of moral philosophy itself. Essentially, MacIntyre argues that we have lost the ability to think coherently about what constitutes a good life. To rectify this situation, we have to look beyond our own time and place, viewing our assumptions in a broader cultural perspective; but we also have to consider human life on a more intimate scale, noting the kinds of social settings and narrative structures through which it tends to unfold. I’m no moral philosopher, but this bifocal curiosity, attentive to the unfamiliar as well as the taken-for-granted, strikes me as a compelling way to try to understand the world.

“We have to learn from history and anthropology of the variety or moral practices, beliefs and conceptual schemes,” writes MacIntryre in a preface to After Virtue. An awareness of variety does not, however, lead him to conclude that morality is arbitrary. After Virtue begins with a rejection of what he calls emotivism: the belief, characteristic to modern society, that moral judgements are ultimately just expressions of personal preference, and so cannot be rationally justified. Emotivism, for MacIntyre, is the product of a moral culture which has dramatically lost its bearings. By way of analogy, he asks us to imagine a world in which the natural sciences have been almost wiped out in a political upheaval, and later only partially recovered, so that “all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; … instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred.” This, according to MacIntyre, is the state of morality today.

How did this come about? The thesis of After Virtue is that a great rupture occurred during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, only to be subsequently forgotten. Philosophers of that era abandoned the notion of telos, or “man-as-he-could-be,” an ideal state which human beings have the potential to achieve. The purpose of moral principles, or more particularly moral virtues, is to guide us towards our telos. Once we lose the crucial concepts of character and potential, we are left with a morality consisting of abstract rules, or an acceptance of “human nature” as it is, or judgements about particular actions removed from their proper context. As MacIntyre illustrates with abundant examples, ranging from the Homeric epics to Jane Austen, different cultures have developed their own understandings of the good life and the virtues necessary for it. Yet all are part of a greater human quest for moral truth that each society, and each individual, must undertake from a given starting point.

But while the virtues often find lasting expression in great works of literature and philosophy, they do not originate in the minds of intellectuals. Rather, they emerge organically from the practices that constitute culture. This is the aspect of MacIntyre’s theory which most resonates with me, not least because it shows how, even if modern society is as morally defective as he claims, we still have the resources on a more local level to live with purpose.

A practice is an activity involving skill and knowledge, in which people strive to achieve things that they consider to be valuable in and of themselves. In certain cases, a practice might also be called a discipline, a field, an art or a vocation. Practices are social in the sense that those pursuing them form a kind of community, and they are open-ended, evolving from one generation to the next. Examples of practices (some from MacIntyre, some not) could include painting and piano playing, boxing and ballet, photography, football and fashion design, astronomy and gastronomy, acting and architecture, mathematics and historiography, carpentry and medicine, gardening and fishing, singing, surfing, and scientific research, to name but a few.

Such activities provide not just pleasure but deep emotional nourishment, in specific ways that only those who in engage in them can appreciate. They allow us to develop our talents and capacities. And as MacIntyre emphasises, they require us to cultivate moral virtues, whether we realise it or not. Humility, for instance, is necessary for anyone entering a practice; in order to learn, the beginner must first accept that his opinion is not just as valid as anyone else’s. Similarly, practices demand honesty and integrity, for if we love the practice we will value its health more highly than our own self-interest. They demand perseverance and fortitude, without which no practice can be mastered. The list goes on.

As someone who is interested in the role of artefacts in human life, it can’t escape my notice that many practices also rely on tools, instruments, and objects of various kinds (the design and fabrication of which often constitutes a practice unto itself). While buying equipment can never substitute for commitment and skill, part of the satisfaction of a practice comes from an intimate familiarity with the artefacts involved. This is obviously not the focus of MacIntryre’s philosophy; and yet, any theory of human flourishing and virtue that is grounded in an appreciation of culture will, at least implicitly, show the importance of our relationship with inanimate things.