PLSC 118: The Moral Foundations of Politics

Lecture 20

 - Contemporary Communitarianism (I)

Overview

In addition to the traditionalist-conservative view covered last time, the other anti-Enlightenment school the course explores is contemporary communitarianism. While Burke and Devlin appealed to tradition as the basis for our values, communitarians appeal to the community-accepted values as the basis for what should guide us. Communitarian Richard Rorty criticizes the Enlightenment endeavor of justifying philosophy from the ground up from indubitable premises as a fool’s errand and a dangerous mug’s game. The main focus of this lecture is the communitarianism of Alasdair MacIntyre. Professor Shapiro introduces this school by exploring the symptoms of the problem wrought by the Enlightenment. One is the rise of emotivism and complete moral subjectivism–that is, the abandonment of the instruments for making moral judgments as a consequence of trying to justify philosophy from the ground up. The second symptom is the triumph of instrumentalism and the rejection of teleology, which is actually a coping mechanism for society’s deep pluralism of values. Professor Shapiro discusses MacIntyre’s two symptoms, as well as introduces his conceptions of practices and virtues.

 
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PLSC 118 - Lecture 20 - Contemporary Communitarianism (I)

Chapter 1. Introduction: Alasdair MacIntyre and Contemporary Communitarianism [00:00:00]

Professor Ian Shapiro: Okay, good morning. One prefatory point before we get into today’s lecture. That’s occasioned by having you read MacIntyre, but I ought really to have mentioned it before. MacIntyre’s book, After Virtue, is in part a conversation with major figures in the tradition who you have not read, or at least not in this course, Aquinas, Nietzsche, Hegel and many others. And of course this came up with John Rawls, and indeed Robert Nozick, both of whom depended on arguments from Immanuel Kant that we haven’t studied in this course either.

And so one question that arises is, well, to what extent are you responsible for understanding the people on whom they are commenting? And of course you’re entering into an ongoing conversation among these thinkers that’s been going on for centuries, and to some degree you just have to jump in somewhere. Nonetheless, for the purposes of our course here you’re certainly not responsible for understanding Kant’s ethics, and indeed I could give several lectures on why it is the case that Kant would not have agreed either with Rawls’s interpretation of his own work or with the Rawlsian enterprise. But we’re not really interested in Kant in this course, but in Rawls, in that instance. So to the extent he depends upon a faulty reading of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, that’s not a question with which we’re engaged in this course. It’s not that we’re taking a position about it; we’re just agnostic.

Likewise, with the various thinkers that MacIntyre engages, you’re not expected to know Saint Benedict, or Nietzsche, or Aquinas, or anybody else, or indeed Aristotle, about whom I’ll have quite a bit to say today, except insofar as they are building blocks for MacIntyre’s argument. So MacIntyre’s work, in some ways, is a commentary on the history of ideas, but really it’s first and foremost an argument, and we’re interested in it as an argument, and that’s how we’re going to evaluate it. So, of course, it’s an invitation to you, later on, to go into some of these thinkers in-depth with whom he is engaged and see whether ultimately you agree or disagree with the way in which he engages those thinkers, but that’s not our agenda here. Our agenda here is to think of Alasdair MacIntyre as somebody who’s making an argument in his own right, and that’s how we’re going to engage with his work.

He is a political theorist who currently teaches at Notre Dame. Interestingly, they say that the hand that rocks the cradle controls the person forever after. He started out, I think he was raised in a Catholic — he had a Catholic upbringing, but early on in his career, he must be well into his 80s now, early on in his career he wrote a book called Marxism and Christianity, and he was clearly wrestling with who wins out of Marx and Christianity. And in that book he concluded the Marxism won. And in his early incarnations he was a fairly conventional Marxist, but then gradually he came full circle and ended up rejecting not only Marxism, but the larger Enlightenment project of which Marxism, as you all know, is only one part. And he ended up affirming a kind of traditional mix of Aristotelianism and the Catholic tradition that informs his argument both in After Virtue and then a subsequent book, which I’m not having you read, called Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

So he is somebody who, in an important sense, has come full circle. And I think that’s an important piece of background to know in understanding his work After Virtue. He’s written many other books too but this is the book for which he will be remembered. You might think it odd that a book with a title like that could have become a bestseller, but it really was a philosophical bestseller when it was published, I believe, in 1984, and the edition you have includes an afterword where he responds to critics of the original book.

Chapter 2. Alasdair MacIntyre and Other Anti-enlightenment Thinkers [00:05:25]

So who is Alasdair MacIntyre, and how does he relate to the historical anti-Enlightenment thinkers we’ve already discussed, namely Burke and Devlin? Well, he is very much in the spirit of the tradition in which they both wrote, although, as you could probably guess from his historical trajectory, one thing that differentiates him is that at least for much of his life he thought of himself as somebody on the political left, whereas they were people on the political right, and we’ll come back to the significance of that later.

He is part of a general undertow or reaction against the Rawlsian enterprise in political theory. Other thinkers, which you’re not reading but with whom he would naturally have some elective affinities, are the philosopher Richard Rorty who died recently, who wrote a fabulously good book called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which was a critique of the Enlightenment project in philosophy.

Rorty’s argument was basically that the Enlightenment quest with certainty was a fool’s errand. That there is no such thing as certainty to be had, we’ve discussed this quite extensively, of course, in connection with the early versus late Enlightenment, which is not a distinction Richard Rorty made. But in any event, he made the argument that the Enlightenment quest for certainty was a fool’s errand begun basically by Descartes and taken to its apotheosis in Kant’sCritique of Pure Reason, and that philosophers from Descartes to Kant got engaged in this hopeless endeavor of justifying philosophy from the ground up from indubitable premises. And when they failed to do that they thought that some important philosophical failure had occurred, whereas Rorty’s point was they should never have been engaged in that enterprise to begin with. And he connects importantly to the modern pragmatist tradition of Dewey, and Peirce, and James, and to the postmodernist thinkers like Lyotard, to some extent Michel Foucault, and others that we don’t have time to read in this course.

So Rorty is an anti-modernist, but he’s a postmodernist anti-modernist if you want lots of jargon. He thinks we should get beyond the Enlightenment project. He has also written some about politics, and indeed he has a political analog of his philosophical argument, which the bumper sticker version of it is that thinking we have to justify our political institutions from the ground up is also a mug’s game, and indeed a dangerous mug’s game, because when we fail to do that we start to think that there’s something wrong with our political institutions that they’re illegitimate because we couldn’t justify them from the ground up successfully by the terms of the Enlightenment project. Therefore, they’re not justifiable. And this, Rorty thinks, puts us at a competitive disadvantage.

Though he was writing during the Cold War, so with our antagonists behind the iron curtain, but I think he would make the same argument were he alive today about fundamentalist antagonists who we would, by Rorty’s way of thinking, be putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage with by holding ourselves and our institutions to a standard which cannot be met, and then when we fail to meet it losing confidence in our institutions.

So we could have read Richard Rorty in this course, but the truth is, and this is a dogmatic statement and maybe some of you will second-guess me on it later, the truth is Rorty is a much better philosopher than he is a political theorist. And so I’ve chosen to have you read MacIntyre who I think is a better political theorist than he is a philosopher. There are others. Perhaps one of the most famous is Michael Walzer who wrote a book called Spheres of Justice, who also rejects the idea that the values guiding politics can be justified in a logical sense from indubitable first premises and generate guides for action in politics that must be compelling to any right-thinking rational person.

All of these thinkers, Rorty, Walzer, MacIntyre sometimes get grouped under this idea of communitarianism. Communitarianism. And communitarianism is linked to the anti-Enlightenment endeavor in that it is the ahistorical version of tradition. That is instead of with Burke and Devlin appealing to tradition as the basis for our values, communitarians appeal to the community-accepted values as the basis for what should guide us. Now obviously the two things are connected and we’ll see they’re deeply connected in MacIntyre’s historical account because communities are shaped by traditions.

But at the end of the day what’s going to be important for us is that the individual is subservient to the community rather than the community being the creature or the creation of the individual. So the community comes first. The individual is born into the community rather than the community being the product of some contract, or creation, or construction of the individual. So that’s what all of these thinkers share in common.

Chapter 3. A Closer Look at MacIntyre’s Book [00:12:13]

Now, one of the things that makes MacIntyre’s book a little bit difficult to read is it’s a work in the history of ideas that’s written backwards. That is he starts with the present and works back to the ancients. It’s a very interesting thing to do. In fact, I once taught the political science 114 course, the intro to the history of ideas, and partly inspired by MacIntyre’s effort I did it backwards. I went from Rawls to Plato. And there are interesting pedagogical challenges there, and I’m not sure whether it’s worth doing just for its own sake, but MacIntyre does it for a reason; not just to be cute which I think maybe what I was trying to do.

MacIntyre does it for a reason and his reason is that he thinks that at sometime around the beginning of the Enlightenment the Western intellectual project went badly off the rails. And in some way his argument is an analog of the argument I made to you about Locke and workmanship. Because, after all, think about what I said about Locke and workmanship. I said there was basically a coherent story. God created the world. He has workmanship knowledge and rights over it. He creates humans with the capacity to act in a god-like fashion, miniature gods, although they’re constrained by God’s will, and it all fits together as a kind of coherent whole.

Once you buy into the premises it all fits together, but then what happens in the history of the workmanship model is people start to secularize it, and so start taking on bits and pieces of the original workmanship idea without the unifying assumptions that gave that model its coherence. And we saw the various difficulties everybody ran into in doing that, Marx, and Nozick, and Rawls and many others.

So MacIntyre does something analogous in his book. What he wants to say is that the task of coming up with compelling moral values to guide politics made sense in a framework of assumptions that we inherited, but we inherited in a kind of degraded way. That the unifying assumptions that used to give political morality its coherence have been jettisoned as a byproduct of the Enlightenment project and for that reason we need to go back in time and see where the project went off the rails, see what it was that happened that caused modern thinkers to get involved in this fool’s errand of justifying morality from the ground up.

Justifying morality from the ground up cannot be done because of the expectations about justification that we have developed, but MacIntyre’s claim is you can’t see that unless you go backwards in time to understand how and where the project went off the rails. So that’s the big enterprise of his book, and we’ll mostly get into that big enterprise on Wednesday.

Chapter 4. Emotivism: From Subjective Certainty to Relativist Morality [00:16:18]

But I want to focus at the start on the beginning of his book, and the beginning of his book deals with the symptoms of our problem. Perhaps the most important symptom of our problem you’ve already confronted in this course when we talked about the transition from classical to neoclassical utilitarianism and the rise of emotivism, Charles Stevenson and all that. Does anyone remember? Maybe you’ve already forgotten all of this it was so long ago now.

Remember Stevenson said — this is the guy who didn’t get tenure in the Yale Philosophy Department because he seemed to have this extreme relativistic and subjectivist view of ethics where moral choices were just differences in taste, differences in flavors of ice cream. You say the welfare state is good. I say the welfare state is bad. It’s just like saying chocolate ice cream is good or strawberry ice cream is good. The differences about morality are just merely subjective differences.

So we go from this certainty, subjective certainty in the early Enlightenment as making politics like mathematical geometric proofs for Hobbes and Locke to the mere subjectivism of the mature Enlightenment which produces this kind of relativist morality where everything is just subjective opinion that morality is nothing more than emotion, and there’s no particular reason even to think we have the same emotions. Remember that, as I think I said to you at the time, Stephenson was criticizing David Hume, who’s another important utilitarian thinker who we didn’t have time to read in this course either but you should all read at some point in your lives.

And Hume had said, “Well yes, you can’t get any important statements about what ought to be the case from empirical statements about the world. There’s no way to get from is to ought,” as Hume said, “But, you know what? Most people are pretty much alike. Most people are pretty much the same.” So we can, to use the jargon of utilitarianism, we can make pretty confident interpersonal judgments about people. People are pretty similar, and so what’s good for one person is likely to be good for another, and that’s why Hume has this rather cryptic one-liner that scholars have debated, to the effect that “if all factual questions were resolved no moral questions would remain.” It’s this notion, well, people are pretty much the same and so even though morality is rooted in people’s emotional reactions to situations it’s not a big problem to having a morality that can form the basis of a society.

Stephenson said, “How do you know? How do you know? How do you, David Hume, know? Maybe Adolph Eichmann has one set of emotional reactions to the prospect of shipping people off the concentration camps, and you and I have a different set of emotional reactions to shipping people off to concentration camps, and if you’re saying there are no principles by which we can adjudicate among those reactions, those emotional reactions, you’re throwing us into a sea of relativism.”

And so when you get to emotivism, you’re getting to this world in which we are completely without instruments for making moral judgments when people disagree. That is the emotivist culture. It is a culture of tastes and not of interpersonal judgments. And one of the things MacIntyre wants to say is that all of this becomes inevitable in the seventeenth century. It’s just a question of time. It’s just a question of time. Once you look at what was really going on in the beginning of the Enlightenment you’re going to wind up with emotivism. Just a question of time.

And the politics that comes out of it is pretty ugly. The politics that comes out of it basically leaves you without standards of moral judgment and indeed without questioning the raw assertion of power. So it’s not only that in philosophy we wind up with emotivism, but in politics we’re ultimately going to wind up with Nietzsche. We’re going to wind up with kind of nihilist assertion of the inevitability of the triumph of the will, the triumph of power. So again, Nietzsche is somebody else I wish we had time to talk about in this course, but you’ll have to read him for our purposes through the eyes of MacIntyre.

So it all goes back around the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and then we’re just rolling down this hill into the abyss of modern subjectivism in philosophy and nihilistic politics. Pretty depressing story you might think. So that’s one symptom, that we live in this what MacIntyre wants to describe as an emotivist culture.

Chapter 5. Instrumentalism Has Triumphed: A Separation between Means and Ends [00:22:52]

Another symptom of it, which you might not find as dispiriting as what I’ve just said, is what we — this isn’t MacIntyre’s terminology, but I think it makes the point — is a world in which instrumentalism has triumphed. A world in which there has been a total separation between means and ends.

One symptom of this, again, not one he mentions in his book, but I think captures neatly what he’s talking about is the proliferation of business schools. A hundred years ago there was no such thing as a business school in a university. Nobody had ever thought of the idea of even having a business school. And what’s, I think, notable about business schools is that they’re teaching skills that are unrelated to purposes. So business schools, after all, are trying to teach people how to become good managers. Whether you’re going to manage the Coca Cola Corporation, or whether you’re going to mange Goldman Sachs, or whether you’re going to manage a university. The assumption is there are certain kinds of skills that managers have, that it’s important to know.

But business schools will not teach you whether it’s a good idea to manage Coca Cola, or Goldman Sachs, or Yale University. That is not what business schools are about. So business schools, if you like, are predicated on the divorcing of means from ends. They’re teaching certain kinds of instrumental skills that you can find helpful regardless of what the enterprise is you’re going to end up managing. Being a good manager is being somebody who is inherently an instrumental person.

And of course that leaves unanswered the question, “Well, but shouldn’t we attend to what it is we are managing?” After all, that was a question that came up in our very first lecture in this course when we talked about the Eichmann problem; that he didn’t care. He wanted to do well. He wanted to impress his superiors. He wanted to get an A. He was happy shipping Jews around the Third Reich to concentration camps as well as he could, but he would have been equally happy shipping munitions parts, or for that matter office supplies. It wasn’t important as far as he was concerned. He wanted to be a good manager.

So this is a very twentieth-century kind of preoccupation that we put the goal, the purpose, the ultimate endeavor aside, and we say, “What are the characteristics of being an effective manager?” To use the philosophical jargon it is an erratically anti-teleological view. Teleology, teleological, have I told you what teleological — what does teleological mean, somebody?

Student: [inaudible]

Professor Ian Shapiro: Right, telos comes from the Greek word telos or purpose. Goal-directed, right? MacIntyre thinks that the rejection of teleology is a huge problematic enduring mistake, and I’m going to come back to why in a few minutes.

But first I want to return to the first symptom I mentioned of our times. There are these two symptoms, the rise of subjectivism and emotivism and the nihilistic kinds of politics it brings with it on the one hand, and secondly this rejection of teleology on the other hand, and I’ll say a little bit more about each of them.

Chapter 6. Emotivism and the Rejection of Teleology [00:28:04]

“Neither of them is what is seems,” says MacIntyre.

Who knows what the TV program that used to be on CNN for a long time called Crossfire was? Anybody, anyone ever see Crossfire on CNN? Yeah? Tell us how it works. Take the microphone and tell us how it works. How did it work?

Student: [inaudible]

Professor Ian Shapiro: Anyone? You might be too young. It’s kind of sad. Yeah, some of you might not be quite too young. How did it work?

Student: I think it was like a point-counterpoint exchange.

Professor Ian Shapiro: Yeah, so how did it work?

Student: So I’m not sure going into it whether you knew which side you — you definitely had to have known which side you were debating, or no? Do they just kind of give it to you, and then you either debate for or against a certain thing, and then there was a judge at the end who decided who the winner was?

Professor Ian Shapiro: Basically, except for your last point. There was no winner. I’ll come back to that. But basically you’ve got it right. The idea was they have a left-wing host and a right-wing host. So they would have Robert Novak as the right-wing host and Michael Kinsley, say somebody like that, as the left-wing host, and there would be some topic du jour, whether it was partial birth abortion, or whatever it was, affirmative action. And what would happen was they would then usually have two guests, and the guests were chosen also to be sort of ideologically different. And the Novak type person would fire questions at the left-wing guest, and the Kinsley like person would fire questions to the right-wing guest and they would argue back and forth, and it would get more and more voluble and impassioned. And then at two minutes to eight the commercial would come on and it would end.

Why do I bring this up? I bring this up because of MacIntyre’s observation right at the beginning of the book where he says there’s a certain odd feature to moral argument in this emotivist world. There’s a strange feature. On the one hand it’s subjectivist in all the ways we’ve talked about. Everybody’s views are equal to everybody else’s. There’s no authoritative figure. There’s no authoritative figure to settle our disagreements, at least not an earthly one, and everybody is what they are and who they are and that’s that. On the other hand, MacIntyre says, “If you look at things like abortion, or affirmative action, or nuclear weapons, people argue about these questions as though there were a right answer.” They give reasons for their views. They try to show the other side as being hypocritical. They want to say, “My premises are more plausible than your premises.” They argue with each other as though there were an answer to this question, should we outlaw abortion, or should we outlaw partial birth abortion.

The arguments they get into suggest that everybody’s assuming there is an answer to that question, but actually nobody expects the question to be resolved. And that’s why I mentioned the Crossfire because what could never have happened on that TV show is sort of, at 7:46, Michael Kinsley turning to Novak and saying, “Hmm, you know, I never thought of that. Actually maybe you’re right.” If they did that, first of all the sponsors would pull their commercials. Kinsley would be fired.

That’s not what it’s about, but then it’s bizarre, isn’t it? Because if everybody agrees that we’re all subjectivists and that all our views are equally tenable or untenable, which they seem to, then why is everybody going through the motions of arguing like this? Why is everybody saying, “You don’t make any sense, and this is misuse of evidence, and you’re blah, blah, blah. And look, my argument’s much stronger, and blah.” Why would anybody bother if we really believed the subjectivism which we seem to take for granted?

That, for MacIntyre, is the real symptom of what’s wrong with our circumstances. The fact that we engage in interminable moral arguments that we do not expect to be able to resolve is the symptom of the malady of our time in his view because it suggests a kind of thirst and a set of expectations from the past, he wants to say, that we need to be able to recover. Because the fact that we carry on arguing suggests we don’t want to accept this emotivist culture. We’re not comfortable with it. It’s not emotionally, morally, psychologically, philosophically, satisfying to us, not even acceptable.

But so he thinks one of the things we need to be able to do is account for this puzzle, this puzzle that we engage in moral argument using the forms of persuasive reasoning that we don’t actually expect to resolve, so that moral argument has this quality of Crossfire. So that’s the one thing that we need to get some kind of grip on if we’re going to understand what’s wrong with emotivist culture.

The second is this problem with teleology. They turn out to be related, but here’s the problem with rejecting teleology. If I walked in here one morning and got up on this stage and I said to you, “Well, this morning I got up, got dressed, went for a run, came back home, took a shower, got dressed again, started walking down to the office. I crossed down to Orange Street, and then I crossed Cannon Street, and I got down to Whitney Avenue. At some point pretty soon you’d say, “What is the point of this? Why is he telling us this?”

Human beings always want to know the purpose. What is the point? So we will never be satisfied with any activity that is pointless, that doesn’t have a point. And the Enlightenment endeavor of trying to be agnostic about purposes and scientific about means is never going to be satisfying to us for that reason. People want to know the point. They want to believe their existences have a point, and if they don’t they become disaffected, bored, agitated, unhappy, or worse.

MacIntyre actually has a brilliant little essay called Epistemological Crises and Dramatic Narratives where he points out that if a young child asks you why the earth doesn’t fall down, you tell them, say, a story that it’s being held up by a giant, giant’s holding the earth in his hands, that’s why it doesn’t fall down. That’s adequate for a while, and then they ask for another story when they stop believing in giants. But his claim is, it’s something about the structure of human psychology that even explanations rooted in physics ultimately take the form of narratives. People want to be able to tell a story that we fit into, that has some point or purpose; that our basic understanding of the world is as teleological purposive creatures who tell narratives to give point to their existence. And we’re going to become uncomfortable if we don’t have a way of understanding politics that has a point.

So that is the symptom of our plight, that we live in this emotivist world that we can’t accept, and we have this bizarre love-hate relationship with it when you look at the kinds of moral arguments we actually engage in. And secondly we live in this world in which we have tried to cope with the deep pluralism Rawls writes about by taking goals off the table, purposes off the table and seeing can we just be instrumental.

So if you want another political theorist we don’t have time to read, but who has a good one liner to capture what MacIntyre thinks is the problem, it’s Rousseau’s line in the first paragraph of The Social Contract where he says, he’s going to come up with a design of institutions for society “taking men as they are and laws as they might be.” Taking men as they are and laws as they might be, and the reason MacIntyre would think that problematic is, taking men as they are, men and women we might say today, as they are, ignores important questions about how they have come to be as they are and what the role of morality is in shaping and reshaping human nature.

So the title of the book is After Virtue, and virtue, what modern philosophers call virtue ethics, come out of a different tradition than anything we’ve considered thus far in this course, namely the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle was the person who talked about the virtues, and what MacIntyre wants to say is, “We are at some important level that we don’t fully appreciate or understand, products or the inheritors of a kind of degraded Aristotelian tradition.” We have taken over concepts and categories for thinking about ethics from the Aristotelian tradition, but in a way that has become degraded, in a way that abandons the most important assumptions behind the Aristotelian tradition that make it all hang together.

Chapter 7. Some Definitions: Practice and Virtue [00:41:24]

And the two key notions, the two analytical devices that make this argument work are what he calls a practice and a virtue. Practice comes first, and I’ll say a little bit about that, and then I’ll say a little bit about virtues, and then we’ll go into his argument in more detail on Wednesday. A practice he says here, “Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that activity are realized.” Not an engaging sentence.

Let me try and give it content for you, so first of all the idea of a practice. This is the intuition. When you walk into a class at Yale for the first time, say, as a freshman, think about what you don’t do. You don’t say to yourself, “How should this class be run?” You don’t immediately interrupt other people and say, “Let’s all decide how to run this class. Shall we vote on it? Shall we talk about it?” That’s not what you do, right? When you walk into your first Yale class as a freshman you sit down, you look around, you say, “What’s going on here? What are the norms? What’s expected of me? What am I supposed to do?” That’s what you say to yourself.

So right there MacIntyre wants to say the social contract metaphor is really bad, it’s the misleading of the human experience because people don’t create tabula rasa. Rather people are born into practices that they inherit from the past and reproduce into the future. A practice, it’s complicated. It’s already socially established. It’s ongoing when you discover it. People have been teaching courses at Yale for centuries and there have been freshmen who have walked into them and saying, “What do I do now? What’s expected of me?” So the point is that the practice precedes the participants, not the other way around. So that’s the first idea, a coherent and complex — it’s coherent in that it has some goal, purpose. Enlightenment, let’s say, is the purpose in this course, not in the sense of the Enlightenment, but enlightening you. Socially established, it’s cooperative that everybody, he wants to say practices are not coercive (we’ll come back to that later), it’s cooperative.

Human activity through which goods internal to that activity are realized. So that’s an important term, internal. And here he has in mind let’s suppose you’re playing chess. You’re playing chess with me and I have to go and answer the phone in the middle of the game. And while I’m not in the room you take one of my pawns off the board, I come back and you win. That’s not playing by the rules. That’s not an internal realization of a good. That’s what we would call in his terminology, “External.” So the idea of a practice is there are rules constituting the practice by which you have to excel. So you have to learn the rules. Cheating doesn’t count. So that’s the notion of a practice. I’ll go into it in more detail.

Virtues are what give practices their point. Virtues have to do with the goals imminent in practices. He says a virtue is “an acquired human quality, the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.” So, I’ll leave you with this thought and we’ll pick up from it on Wednesday. “What human beings want is to excel internally in practices,” says MacIntyre. You’ve all heard the phrase “he’s a pitchers’ pitcher.” When we say “he’s a pitchers’ pitcher” what we have in mind is the notion that he’s so skilled that only a true pro can appreciate how skilled he really is.

So if I write books and I also build sheds, if I show my books to people who know how to build sheds and they say, “Oh yeah, a really good book,” and I show my carpentry to a bunch of nerdy academics and they say, “Oh, that’s really good,” that’s not going to be satisfying to me because I want to be a pitchers’ pitcher. I want people who know about books to be impressed with my books, and I want people who know about carpentry to be impressed by my sheds. That’s the notion of internal goods that every practice has goods by reference to which you excel within that practice. You don’t want to win at chess by stealing the pawn when the person’s not looking. You want to beat them in terms of the norms and rules of playing good chess.

So the notion is you walk into the classroom, you want to get an A, but not by downloading a paper off the internet. You want to get the A by reference to the norms and practices governing what goes on in the classroom. So that’s the basic idea of virtues being internal to practices and giving them their point. And MacIntyre wants to say that these two terms, these practices and virtues capture a lot more that is relevant about human psychology than the assumptions that drove the Enlightenment. And we’ll start with that on Wednesday.

[end of transcript]

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