PLSC 118 - Lecture 21 - Contemporary Communitarianism (II)

Chapter 1. Introduction: Aristotelian Conception of Human Psychology [00:00:00]

Professor Ian Shapiro: Okay, so let’s pickup where we left off on Monday, and we were starting to talk in more detail about MacIntyre’s argument. And one of the things I want to zero in centrally on today is his account of human psychology, or what used to be called human nature. And that differs importantly from every account of human psychology we’ve looked at thus far for a number of reasons, and I’m going to spell them out in a little bit more detail than we talked about on Monday.

Basically it is an Aristotelian conception of the structure of human psychology, and that has a number of features to it. One is that I mentioned to you, that we think of human beings as teleological creatures. We are purposive creatures. We always want to know what the point of an activity is. Now if you go back to Aristotle, Aristotle held the view that while we are purposive creatures we only reason about the means to achieve our goals, not the goals themselves. For Aristotle, Aristotle’s conception of virtue, the virtues, the virtues were given for all time, and he had his list of the virtues which you can find if you go back and read the Nicomachean Ethics. They’re things like, courage, honesty, and various others, perhaps debatable, perhaps not.

But in any event in Aristotle’s scheme of things, what we reason about is the means to achieve the virtues, not the virtues themselves. And I’m going to come back to that because one of the respects in which MacIntyre differs from Aristotle is that he wants to say the virtues — he wants to at least go this far with the Enlightenment thinkers, he wants to say that what counts as a virtue is, to some extent, up for debate. Just to what extent and how we debate it are things that I’ll come back to.

But the more important point is that this as an account of the structure of human psychology we need to know what the point is. We have goals. We have purposes. When those purposes are met we’re happy and fulfilled. When they’re not met we’re frustrated and unsatisfied and discontented.

Just to give you a somewhat different perspective on this approach to thinking about human psychology I would say that the other influential Aristotelian of our time, besides Alasdair MacIntyre, is the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen who develops the idea of human potentiality as the core notion. That we’re people who have potential, and unless we realize our potential we’re going to be in some basic sense incomplete, not fulfilled not happy human beings. And so in Sen’s account of justice, which I wish we had time to talk about in this course but we don’t, it’s analogous that he’s an economist, not a philosopher, so he brings the considerations of an economist to this question. But it’s the same question of human beings who have a certain kind of potential that has to be realized in order for them to be fulfilled in their teleological capacity, that has to occur. And so with MacIntyre, too, it’s this idea of the structure of human psychology being goal-directed, and we’ll get into the content later.

But so that’s the first thing, and then the second was that our behavior is, in a very fundamental way, other-directed. So just, again, by way of comparison think back to the assumptions about other-directedness in previous thinkers who we have considered in this course. When we focused on the utilitarian tradition we saw people as essentially self-referential. Remember Ronald Reagan’s famous question in 1984, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” was a self-referential question. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” All you have to look at is how you were faring four years ago and how you’re faring now, and ask yourself that question. Other people don’t enter into it at all.

Then when we considered Marxism we came to think about other-directed conceptions of human psychology in that Marx made our welfare critically reliant on what others get. And so he said that your perception of whether you’re exploited turns upon what your employer gets. Remember we talked about this in some depth and concluded that Marx was half-right in that people are often other-directed in that their sense of whether what they get is legitimate is dependent on what others get, but what he was wrong about was that people tend to compare themselves to people who are similarly situated in the socioeconomic order. So autoworkers compare themselves maybe to steel workers, but not to auto executives, and they don’t make those kinds of global comparisons.

Nonetheless there is something to this idea that people’s conception of their welfare is connected to what others get, and so relative inequalities matter simply from the perspective of your feeling of how well-off you are. And you can tell yourself any number of stories to make this point. The telling one, quite often, I think is you give a child a glass of orange juice that’s half full and he’s very happy, and then you give his sister one that’s completely full and he immediately becomes unhappy because what matters to him is the relative difference and not what he has in his glass. So that’s a notion of other-directed.

And of course you can take this notion of other-directed further, still, by linking your utility not just to what other people get, but to actually what other people experience. And this is the concept of interdependent utility, as it gets referred to in the literature. And the examples here are things like a parent taking pleasure in their child’s success and feeling pain at their child’s lack of success. One of the famous one-liners that parents will resonate with is, “You can only be as happy as your least happy child.” So if your kids are unhappy then you are miserable. That’s the notion of interdependent utility. Your happiness is conditioned on what others get, but not just in making us a relative judgment with the orange juice kind of a case, but your happiness becomes dependent on what people actually themselves experience, hence interdependent utility. The example of the child’s happiness making the parent — or the child’s success making the parent happy is an interdependent positive utility, but of course there are interdependent negative utilities as well as when a sadist’s or a rapist’s utility goes up as a byproduct of their victim’s utility going down. Again, that interdependent negative utility, and it’s the mirror image of interdependent positive utility.

The Aristotelian conception that MacIntyre embraces takes interdependent utilities a step further even than that, though, in that it’s not just that your happiness, or satisfaction, or fulfillment is conditioned upon the experience of others, but it’s the experience of others as it relates to you. It’s the others’ experience of you, if you like.

And so a good example of this actually comes from Hegel’s Phenomenology where he talks about this dialectic between the master and the slave as being inherently unstable. But it’s not just unstable because the slave is going to find it unsatisfactory. It’s unstable because the master will find it unsatisfactory. Hegel says, in The Phenomenology, that what we want most fundamentally is recognition from others, but it can’t be recognition from others that we don’t respect. So recognition of a slave saying, “Yes, master. No, master,” is not going to be satisfactory or fulfilling to you. What you want is recognition from an equal or perhaps a superior, but you want recognition from somebody whose recognition can be valuable to you. It’s a source of feeling valued by somebody you value.

So it takes this idea, as I said, of interdependent utility even a step further because it now goes to the reciprocal relationship between you and the other person, and that is the idea of practices. It’s this sort of neo-Hegelian idea in this particular sense that informs MacIntyre’s notion of a practice. When I gave you the example on Monday I said, “If I build sheds and write books, it’s not enough for me to have the carpenters say, ‘Oh, you wrote a good book,’ and the academics say, ‘That’s a nice shed.’ I want the carpenter to say that’s a good shed, and the people who know about writing books to say, ‘This is a good book.’” That’s the notion of he’s a pitchers’ pitcher. You want recognition from people for whom you have esteem at the relevant activity.

So this is a different, again, view of the structure of human psychology. All of these different theories are predicated on some account of the structure of human psychology. And indeed, I think that one thing you should be seeing as we move through and examine these different arguments is that every political theory has an account of human psychology, and an account of how the world operates causally. And you need to sometimes dig to get them out, but one of the ways in which you should evaluate them is you should ask yourself, “What is the theory of human psychology driving this? Does it make sense? Is it true to my own experience or not, and if not why not?” That’s one question, and then the second is, “What are the assumptions about how the world works causally?” and I’ll come back to those in relation to MacIntyre again.

But you could go through all the thinkers we’ve considered and find assumptions and arguments about those two things, and they provide a very good comparative reference point for thinking about how they stack up against one another as we’ve just seen as went from the utilitarian, to the Marxian, to the different variance of other-referential assumptions about human psychology.

So this is the MacIntyre approach that what we really want out of life is esteem from people who we esteem, and that operates through these practices as he describes them. And this is just a summary statement of what I’ve already told you, where he says, virtues as he describes them are embedded in practices. “It belongs to the concept of a practice as I have outlined it — and as we’re all familiar with it in our actual lives, whether we are painters or physicists or quarterbacks or indeed just lovers of good painting, or first rate experiments or a well-thrown pass — that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves within the practice in our relationships to other practitioners. We have to learn to recognize what is due to whom; we have to be prepared to take whatever self-endangering risks are demanded along the way; and we have to listen carefully to what we are told about our own inadequacies and to reply with the same carefulness for the facts.”

So this is the notion that I translated into the proposition that when you walk into your first Yale College course, you don’t look around and say to the people next to you, “How should we run this course? What should we agree too?” On the contrary what you do is say, “What is the practice? What are the norms? What are the rules? How do I do well here? What’s expected of me? How will know if I’m doing well?” It might occur to you much later on to say, “That wasn’t a very well-run course. It could have been run better if this, that and the other.” So you can criticize, and I’ll come back to that point later, but you can only criticize on the basis of first having internalized the norms governing the practice. You don’t criticize somebody’s pitching style in major league baseball until you’ve learned a lot about pitching. Or maybe you do. You sit there and throw your beer can at the screen, “Err, he’s terrible,” but it’s not the form of criticism he is going to care about, and that’s the point, and it’s not likely to be the criticism that makes any difference.

So rather than the voluntary agent being at the center of things, which is the workmanship story, this anti-Enlightenment story subordinates the individual to the practice, to the group, to the inherited system of norms and values. And if you want a contemporary reference point just, again, to sharpen the comparison here, compare the Cartesian idea which puts the willing agent at the center of the universe with the Ubuntu, which is a kind of African religion which does the contrarian thing. Instead of, “I think therefore I am,” it’s “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” So it’s this idea of subordinating yourself to an inherited system of norms and practices in which you find yourself, not which you created or hypothetically might have created, but rather in which you find yourself.

So this is a fundamental difference. It doesn’t get more fundamental than this, I think, because as you’ve seen in every variant of Enlightenment thinking, it’s the willing creative agent that is at the ultimate bottom of the heap, and here it’s not. It’s the subordinated individual, and the community, or the practice, or the tradition to which the person is subordinated that is at the very bottom of the heap. So this is really a fundamental difference.

So, features of Aristotelian, or we might call it neo-Aristotelian psychology; one is we’re teleological in the sense of being purposive. We have potential to realize and realizing that potential is essential to our happiness. It’s not just getting more of what gives you utility. There’s some developmental dimension to this. Second, the individual is subordinated to a practice, and that translates into this idea of the community becoming before the individual in politics.

But third, and in some ways for MacIntyre’s story most important of all, is that on the Aristotelian scheme human nature is malleable. It’s plastic. It can be shaped in different ways. And what is so deeply misguided about the Enlightenment project from MacIntyre’s point of view is that it does not take account of this fact. It does not take account of the fact that human beings are malleable creatures. Human psychology is shaped by circumstances. And so when Rousseau says at the start of The Social Contract, “I’m going to reason about politics taking men as they are and laws as they might be,” that underscores the fact that Rousseau is missing the developmental features of human psychology and reasoning about politics. And it’s in missing that that the Enlightenment project went off the rails.

Chapter 2. Aristotle’s Teleological Scheme and the Hopelessness of the Enlightenment Project [00:20:26]

So let’s talk about Aristotle’s scheme. Let me just read this to you and then I will explain it if you haven’t understood it. He says in his description, “We thus have a threefold scheme in which human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be (human nature in its untutored [or raw] state) is initially discrepant and discordant with the precepts of ethics and needs to be transformed by the instruction of practical reason and experience into human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos. Each of the three elements of the scheme — the conception of untutored human nature, the conception of the precepts of rational ethics, and the conception of human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos — requires reference to the other two if its status and function are to be intelligible.”

So his point here is, if you go back and read Aristotle, he had a view of raw, or untutored, or brute human nature, how we are when we are born. Then he had an account of human beings as they could be if they realized their telos, their purposes, and then he had an account of the rules that get you from the one to the other. The rules, the norms that get you from the one to the other, and those are the rules of ethics.

So what are the rules of ethics? The rules of ethics are those things that get you from untutored or raw human nature to the kinds of beings who realize their telos or purposes. And that’s why, if you look at ancient philosophers like Aristotle or Plato, the two central features of their political theories that are completely absent when you read, say John Rawls, are a theory of family life and a theory of education. It would have been bizarre beyond imagining for Aristotle or Plato to think you could have a theory of politics that didn’t put a huge amount of attention to those two things.

Think of how many people in this room have read Plato’s Republic, at least a good number of you. That’s a book about politics. Think how much of that is about how to rear children and the system of education that has to prevail, an enormous amount of it, probably half the book. There’s nothing of that in Rawls’s Theory of Justice, or Mill’s account inOn Liberty. So it’s a big difference, and the reason is — and the same is true of Aristotle’s ethics and his other writings about politics. Lots of attention to education, to the family, to these things that involve shaping this malleable plastic human nature so that we have a good outcome rather than a bad outcome.

And so what bugs MacIntyre is, he’s saying, “We want to derive the rules of ethics from human nature as it is, as we find it. But that’s never going to work because the rules of ethics are designed to improve behavior, not to simply aggregate behavior. And so anything we design that’s just derived from people as they happen to be is going to seem unsatisfying to us, unsatisfactory to us.

So to go back to the examples, we discussed affirmative action, the ones he mentions at the beginning of the book, abortion, affirmative action and so on. Yes, we’re going to see people have different values and therefore different views about those questions, but they’re not going to ultimately be satisfied with just recognizing their differences, because they have inherited a whole language of talking about ethics that presumes these things can be resolved. There is more to ethical disagreement than just accepting the differences among us.

And that, at the end of the day, is why the Enlightenment project was a fool’s errand. This is just MacIntyre’s more eloquent and lucid statement of what I’ve been saying to you for the last five minutes, that I’m capable of. He says, “Since the moral injunctions were originally at home in a scheme in which their purpose was to correct, improve and educate that human nature, they are clearly not going to be such as could be deduced from true statements about human nature.” Just think of Bentham. He says, “We are driven by pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding. I’m going to derive a whole system from that.” MacIntyre is saying, “That’s crazy because these moral injunctions were designed to be at odds with human nature.”

“The injunctions of morality, thus understood, are likely to be ones that human nature…has strong tendencies to disobey. Hence the eighteenth-century moral philosophers engaged in what was an inevitably unsuccessful project; for they did indeed attempt to find a rational basis for their moral beliefs in a particular understanding of human nature, while inheriting a set of moral injunctions on the one hand and a conception of human nature on the other, which had been expressly designed to be discrepant with each other.”

“They inherited incoherent fragments of a once coherent scheme of thought and action and, since they did not recognize their own peculiar historical and cultural situation, they could not recognize the impossible and quixotic character of their self-appointed task.”

Whether it’s Bentham trying to derive maxims of conduct from the postulative pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance, or Rousseau trying to come up with a system of government taking men as they are and their laws as they might be, or Kant trying to see what principles human beings as they currently are would affirm from every conceivable standpoint, it’s never going to work. The morality that comes out of this kind of reasoning is going to seem, and actually will be, unsatisfying to us.‚

And so if you now go back and look at some of the puzzles and conundrums we came up with when we were considering those different theories, MacIntyre would say, “Well, you shouldn’t be surprised. You shouldn’t be surprised that objective utilitarianism allows people to take advantage of one another in appalling ways, and you shouldn’t be surprised that subject of utilitarianism allows people to ignore one another in a morally appalling way. Because what makes things seem morally appalling to you, treat people with dignity, don’t lie, cheat and steal, these are maxims that we know people have a tendency to disobey, and so that’s the point of them. They’re to make us behave better, and you’re not going to be able to derive them in this sense from a completely empirically accurate description of human beings as we find them in the world.”

So it’s a kind of secular doctrine of the fall. In Christian thinking we have the fall, and then we have inadequate human beings, and the possibility of redemption through internalizing and accepting Christ as your savior. This is a secular version of the fall; the secular version of fallen man, untutored, ill-formed human nature, and then we have what we could be if we are properly formed, and then the system of the rules of ethics that are going to get us from the one to the other. And it’s the virtues within practices that achieving them, or achieving lives lived in accordance with them that enable us to realize our purposes in a good way, and it’s the rules and norms governing those practices that get us from A to B.

And the big problem with the Enlightenment philosophically is what I’ve just said to you, that they try and engage in this quixotic task, but in politics itself it’s the creation of an emotivist world. It’s a creation of a world that separates means from ends; that values instrumental reasoning, the business school world at large. The world in which we make ourselves agnostic about people’s purposes and just try to set ourselves up as a most efficient executor of any purpose. “Have skills, will travel.” “I’m a consultant.” “For what?” “Well, whatever you need.” That’s what he finds politically shocking and appalling, but he thinks it’s underpinned by this whole philosophical scheme.

Chapter 3. MacIntyre’s Prescription [00:32:04]

Now, MacIntyre wrote this during the — this book came out in 1984, which was at the height of the Cold War. One of the points he was making was everybody thinks that the great battle of our time is the confrontation between capitalism and communism, but for MacIntyre these are two sides of the same coin because they are both ways in which this Enlightenment project has been played out in politics and they’re both, for him, appalling.

I started out saying to you MacIntyre thought of himself as a person on the political left, at least when he was young when he wrote Marxism and Christianity and Against the Self-Images of the Age and those early books, but it’s in a different sense. It’s not like Robert Bork said at one point in his confirmation hearings, you all are really too young to remember this, but they questioned him about his changing ideological beliefs and at one point he said, “Well, I’ve always thought if you’re not a socialist before the age of 30 you have no heart, and if you are a socialist after the age of 30 you have no head.” This isn’t MacIntyre. He wants to say the whole Enlightenment venture, whether it’s in its capitalist or its socialist form is a variant of this deeply muddled, hopeless quest to develop a science of politics based on human nature as we find it.

And so his prescriptions are rather different. He says, “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” He’s not a utopian; he’s a dystopian, almost. “And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

Now people criticized MacIntyre for a variety of things, but one of the things they criticized him for was that this seems to be sort of throwing up your hands and saying, “The whole world is terrible. We’re about to enter the new dark ages, and there’s not much we can do about it except hunker down and hope.” And he wrote several books, probably the most important of which is a book called, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in an attempt to respond to these criticisms. I’ll talk about some of that in a minute. On the actual politics that flow from this, he never had anything more to say than this, so it is a diagnosis without a cure.

I said this was written at the height of the Cold War. If you look at the post-Cold War and you say, “What would MacIntyre say today?” it’s not at all clear because he certainly would not be a fan of militant Islam, but it’s not clear what he would, you know, he would probably find the spread of globalization as just one more step in this appalling triumph of instrumental reasoning and values. So I think he would be no less despondent, and I think his diagnosis — this is pure speculation, I haven’t had this conversation with him — but my guess is that his diagnosis of militant Islam and Jihadism and all of that would be, he would just say, “Well, it’s an inevitable undertow. It’s an inevitable reaction by the losers from globalization against the endless spread of Enlightenment ideas.”

I think in some ways there could be a more interesting MacIntyrian analysis of China in that, in China, we see now the fusion of communist politics and capitalist economics neither of which shows any signs of going anywhere. And so when in 1984 somebody had said, “Well, capitalism and communism are two sides of the same coin,” people would have been quite dismissive. When you think about China today, it’s quite thought provoking.

So that’s MacIntyre in a nutshell. Lots of it’s quite appealing. This account of human beings, how many people — never mind the unrealism of the politics, how many find this account of human nature plausible, true to your own experience? At least some. Not that many? We do, you know we want — we’ve sort of got lots of unrequited love. We want to be liked. We want to be wanted, and we want to be wanted by cool people, or people we think are cool.

So that whole side of it seems right, and the notion that political morality should somehow be an improving thing seems right. That you can’t just derive it from the — as Rousseau said it, “If you take all of our individual preferences, and add them up, and get rid of the pluses and minuses that cancel one another out,” that’s maybe the general will, but MacIntyre would say, “It’s going to be the lowest common denominator. It’s going to cater to our base instincts and we are malleable, shapeable, improvable creatures and we’re not happy unless that’s actually happening.”

So all of that seems right, but on the other hand, as I mentioned to you, MacIntyre makes one huge concession to the way of thinking that at least motivated the Enlightenment, which was that Aristotle was wrong to say we don’t reason about ends. Aristotle took ends as given and said we only reason about means.

So the big challenge for MacIntyre is to say, “Well, how do you say ends can be put in question as subjects for debate, but not then wind up with emotivism?” How do you structure? How do you put limits, if you like, on debates about ends which recognizes that people do, in fact, you know — a difference between human beings and dogs, let say, or lions is that dogs and lions can’t think critically about their own ends. They just think instrumentally about how — their ends really are given. Dog wants to sit on a warm couch. A lion wants to kill a buck, and there’s no question about that for a dog or a lion. How you get on a warm couch without being kicked off it by some nasty human, that’s a question for a dog, but not whether you want to be on it.

Human beings aren’t like that. Human beings are capable of thinking critically about purposes and goals. What MacIntyre wants to say is we have the structure of an Aristotelian psyche but not the content. We are not, in the end, dogs and lions in that sense. We can critically appraise our goals, but then we can argue about them, and then we can disagree about them, and we can even have civil wars about them when it really gets down to it.

So what do you do with the fact that we reason about goals? That’s why he introduces the concept of a practice. He says, “Well, it’s true we reason about goals, but we don’t pluck them from nowhere. We’re born into practices where the goals are defined, where the goal of chess is to get the person checkmate with as many of their pieces on the board as possible. You don’t say, “Let’s invent a board game.” You say, “What are the goals of chess?” And so they’re given by practices or communities, and if we think about what is a practice or a community over time, it’s a tradition.

And so what he wants to say is we’re born into practices and communities and we reproduce them into the future simply by living in them. We inherit, we live, and we reproduce into the future, so it’s a little reminiscent, or perhaps even more than a little reminiscent of Burke’s line about, yes, we are part of a social contract, but it’s a contract among those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are yet to be born.

And so, yes, we do question. You might play chess for a time and say, “Well, should it really be the goal of chess to beat the person with as many of their pieces on the board as possible? Why? Maybe getting their subordinate pieces on the way to before the checkmate should be a goal of chess.” You could have a debate. Does it take more skill to knock off the knights, and the bishops and so on in order and then get the checkmate, or does it take more skill to get the person checkmate with their knights and bishops on the board. And that could be a debate you could have, but it’s a contained debate. It’s a structured debate. And he wants to say our debates about ends are always like that.

Think about debates, getting closer to home for MacIntyre, think about debates within with Catholic Church. The next generation of Catholics doesn’t say, “Should we have a church? Should it be organized? Should the bishop of Rome have a special status? Should there be papal infallibility?” No, you’re born into a structure that’s already there, and then maybe you say, “Well, why is there papal infallibility? It’s only a relatively recent creation. It doesn’t make sense.” So your questioning of ends is always from the vantage point of somebody who’s born into an inherited tradition. And it doesn’t make sense to criticize it from the perspective of outer space. It doesn’t make sense to any of the participants, and it won’t ultimately give you any answers that’ll be in any sense meaningful to you.

And so he sees traditions as the mechanisms through which practices are reproduced over time, and he wants to say, yes, there is argument about ends within traditions, but it’s always this kind of structured argument that is shaped by the way in which questions come up within traditions. He says somewhere, “Of course, part of what it means to be a Jew is to argue about what it means to be a Jew, that within the Jewish tradition that is one of the things that people argue about and disagree about, but it’s always going to be this bounded, structured disagreement that brings to bear other ideas within the tradition on some particular traditional claim.

For those of you who like philosophical jargon Michael Walzer wrote a book along comparable lines where he talked about the idea that the only effective criticism is imminent criticism which is a bit like — imminent for Walzer, is a bit like internal for MacIntyre. If you want to influence Catholics to change their behavior you’re not going to influence them unless you appeal to values they embrace, to norms they embrace, to elements of the tradition they accept and show them how they are undermined by the particular thing that you are criticizing.

So internal criticism, imminent criticism, not ex cathedra criticism made from outside a whole system of norms, and values, practices, institutions. You might think you’re right, but it’ll never have an effect on the people you’re trying to influence. So MacIntyre’s very much in that spirit. We can argue and reason about ends, but only from inside traditions and practices. Okay, we’re out of time, and I will finish up with this and then start talking about democracy on Monday.

[end of transcript]

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