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“After Virtue” annoys me because it basically argues that morality only makes sense within cultural traditions, as if we’re all just trapped in our local narrat

by cm2012 1y ago

“After Virtue” annoys me because it basically argues that morality only makes sense within cultural traditions, as if we’re all just trapped in our local narratives with no access to universal truths. MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices—like slavery, misogyny, or human sacrifice—and calling those ‘virtuous’ just because they fit a narrative feels like moral relativism in disguise. I get that modern ethics can feel fragmented, but the answer isn’t to retreat into tribalism or pretend reason can’t give us shared values across cultures. Just because some people are bad at finding moral clarity doesn’t mean it’s impossible or meaningless.

varunneal 1y ago
How can reason give us shared values across cultures? Why do you suppose your moral clarity was generated from your brain and not your gut?
- cm2012 1y ago
  That's what the field of philosophy is about. I think, for instance, utilitarianism makes a lot more sense than "follow whatever your birth community historically does."
  - intuitionist 1y ago
    I dunno. Utilitarianism sounds nice on the surface—how can you be against the greatest good for the greatest number?—but it’s pretty under-specified (hedonic or preference? act or rule? do you discount future beings’ utils, and at what rate?) and if you take any particular specification seriously you get moral claims that are wildly counterintuitive, like “insect suffering is orders of magnitude more important than heart disease in humans” or “there may be quadrillions of sentient beings in the far future, and making their lives 1% better is a better use of resources than eradicating malaria now” or “it’s morally justified to steal billions of dollars of other people’s money to give to pandemic prevention and AI safety.” And maybe these are correct claims, but they definitely don’t align with many people’s moral intuitions, and it’d be a tall task to convince those people.
  - cess11 1y ago
    How did you come to this hedonic position? MacIntyre wrote in response to the failures of utilitarianism and deontology, and certain responses to that, so you'd better have arguments for utilitarianism that top those he knew about. You've also clearly misread him. His argument is that morality is inherently social and good morals necessarily dependent on a good society. To show how deeply connected morals and society are he opts for the use of descriptions of historical societies, because superstition and fantasy alone, like math or thought experiments, just aren't good enough for him. In this he agrees with Marx and disagrees with parts of the analytic tradition in philosophy. Specifically in After Virtue he also uses such examples to show that the ethics of a society might carry little moral weight, and that some historical societies were better at understanding and teaching morals than his own, in particular the philosophical ethics of the Enlightenment, i.e. deontology and utilitarianism. If you actually have an argument for why the napkin math morals and disregard of freedom at the center of utilitarianism would be the pinnacle of human ethics I'd really like to hear it.
Isamu 1y ago
Often people are justifying moral systems that make sense overall but contain individual values that are grandfathered in, but maybe don’t make as much sense as the rest. There is a resistance to the kind of clarity that could force you to question some traditional values. Slavery is a good example to think about.
AquinasCoder 1y ago
I think that's why I find his later works more compelling, particularly "Dependent Rational Animals," in which he grounds traditions in human telos. There are aims or goods which are common and transcend social constructs. After Virtue suffers from a great premise but doesn't quite stick the landing.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Aidevah 1y ago
> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized. -- Richard Taruskin [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassical-music-a-beethoven-season-like-last-season-the.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...
- cm2012 1y ago
  Yes, for instance, I think its fine if people who support hurting other innocent people are marginalized.
  - defen 1y ago
    That doesn't actually solve the problem, it simply moves the debate into what constitutes innocence and hurting.
bpshaver 1y ago
> MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices What makes you think that? A huge part of After Virtue (basically the whole part, after the initial diagnosis of where we are now and how we got here) is about how to construct and understand communities that might provide a shared idea of human good without simply going back to an Athenian idea of what that looks like. In fact if I were to summarize the book in a nutshell I would argue its an attempt to rehabilitate Aristotelian ethics without simply accepting Aristotle's own moral percepts.
antithesizer 1y ago
Different cultures have a lot in common and so do their morals. Culture is not arbitrary; it always has a grounding in universal human needs and features as well as somewhat variable factors such as environment.
zoogeny 1y ago
I think there is a difference between there being a universal moral Truth (ontological) vs. a particular individuals ability to know that universal (epistemological). The former doesn't necessarily imply the latter. Rejecting the latter (the ability to know) doesn't require rejecting the former (the universal). If one considers that these two are decoupled, it poses a question: how could one live in alignment to a universal truth that one cannot know. It makes me wonder, can we find meaning without certainty. Even in this age of the rejection of religious dogma, I tend to notice that people still want to cling to certainty. They are certain there is no morality (nihilism) or they are certain that morality can be found either in the study of nature (through empiricism) or reason (through rationalism). I hardly ever see anyone suggest that they humbly do not know.
- senderista 1y ago
  Most people never introspect their own moral beliefs enough to even consider their validity.
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
I am very confused by these claims, because MacIntyre was exactly opposed to relativism, and emotivism, which he saw as characteristic of the hollow shell of modern morality [0]. He acknowledges Nietzsche's criticism of the farce of Enlightenment morals. He appealed to telos as the objective basis for ethics and morality and in that book advocated for return to Aristote. Perhaps you misunderstand what culture is. It isn't some kind of fiction we lay on top of reality that gets in the way of reality. It is a shared language of a people about reality and one that is not static, but hopefully developing, but at the very least changing. Science is itself a part of culture. You are born into a culture, which can be anything form pretty good to downright lousy, and the "dialogue" of this culture of a people with reality, and other cultures, moves the development of this culture. Think of all the things you have learned in the scope of science. That aggregate of learning is culture. The presuppositions that science rests on is culture. This doesn't contradict the possibility of knowing the universal. Rather, it is through the cultural that you come to know the universal and through which you are better prepared to know it. We benefit from thousands of years of cultural dialogue. We cannot attain a very high understanding of reality without immersing ourselves in this dialogue of cultures spanning human history. (Incidentally, as MacIntyre was a Catholic convert, one thing the Catholic Church makes possible is the existence of both the particularity of ethnos and the universality of the Church; "catholic" means "universal". A multiplicity of cultures sharing in the universal, avoiding both cultural parochialism and an alienated cosmopolitanism.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
keybored 1y ago
You’re talking about the past. What locales (I can’t say communities) right now do not practice or tolerate as a matter of course any horryfying practices?

by cm2012 1y ago

varunneal 1y ago

How can reason give us shared values across cultures? Why do you suppose your moral clarity was generated from your brain and not your gut?

cm2012 1y ago
That's what the field of philosophy is about. I think, for instance, utilitarianism makes a lot more sense than "follow whatever your birth community historically does."
- intuitionist 1y ago
  I dunno. Utilitarianism sounds nice on the surface—how can you be against the greatest good for the greatest number?—but it’s pretty under-specified (hedonic or preference? act or rule? do you discount future beings’ utils, and at what rate?) and if you take any particular specification seriously you get moral claims that are wildly counterintuitive, like “insect suffering is orders of magnitude more important than heart disease in humans” or “there may be quadrillions of sentient beings in the far future, and making their lives 1% better is a better use of resources than eradicating malaria now” or “it’s morally justified to steal billions of dollars of other people’s money to give to pandemic prevention and AI safety.” And maybe these are correct claims, but they definitely don’t align with many people’s moral intuitions, and it’d be a tall task to convince those people.
- cess11 1y ago
  How did you come to this hedonic position? MacIntyre wrote in response to the failures of utilitarianism and deontology, and certain responses to that, so you'd better have arguments for utilitarianism that top those he knew about. You've also clearly misread him. His argument is that morality is inherently social and good morals necessarily dependent on a good society. To show how deeply connected morals and society are he opts for the use of descriptions of historical societies, because superstition and fantasy alone, like math or thought experiments, just aren't good enough for him. In this he agrees with Marx and disagrees with parts of the analytic tradition in philosophy. Specifically in After Virtue he also uses such examples to show that the ethics of a society might carry little moral weight, and that some historical societies were better at understanding and teaching morals than his own, in particular the philosophical ethics of the Enlightenment, i.e. deontology and utilitarianism. If you actually have an argument for why the napkin math morals and disregard of freedom at the center of utilitarianism would be the pinnacle of human ethics I'd really like to hear it.

Isamu 1y ago

Often people are justifying moral systems that make sense overall but contain individual values that are grandfathered in, but maybe don’t make as much sense as the rest. There is a resistance to the kind of clarity that could force you to question some traditional values. Slavery is a good example to think about.

AquinasCoder 1y ago

I think that's why I find his later works more compelling, particularly "Dependent Rational Animals," in which he grounds traditions in human telos. There are aims or goods which are common and transcend social constructs. After Virtue suffers from a great premise but doesn't quite stick the landing.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Aidevah 1y ago

> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized. -- Richard Taruskin [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassical-music-a-beethoven-season-like-last-season-the.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...

cm2012 1y ago
Yes, for instance, I think its fine if people who support hurting other innocent people are marginalized.
- defen 1y ago
  That doesn't actually solve the problem, it simply moves the debate into what constitutes innocence and hurting.

bpshaver 1y ago

> MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices What makes you think that? A huge part of After Virtue (basically the whole part, after the initial diagnosis of where we are now and how we got here) is about how to construct and understand communities that might provide a shared idea of human good without simply going back to an Athenian idea of what that looks like. In fact if I were to summarize the book in a nutshell I would argue its an attempt to rehabilitate Aristotelian ethics without simply accepting Aristotle's own moral percepts.

antithesizer 1y ago

Different cultures have a lot in common and so do their morals. Culture is not arbitrary; it always has a grounding in universal human needs and features as well as somewhat variable factors such as environment.

zoogeny 1y ago

I think there is a difference between there being a universal moral Truth (ontological) vs. a particular individuals ability to know that universal (epistemological). The former doesn't necessarily imply the latter. Rejecting the latter (the ability to know) doesn't require rejecting the former (the universal). If one considers that these two are decoupled, it poses a question: how could one live in alignment to a universal truth that one cannot know. It makes me wonder, can we find meaning without certainty. Even in this age of the rejection of religious dogma, I tend to notice that people still want to cling to certainty. They are certain there is no morality (nihilism) or they are certain that morality can be found either in the study of nature (through empiricism) or reason (through rationalism). I hardly ever see anyone suggest that they humbly do not know.

senderista 1y ago
Most people never introspect their own moral beliefs enough to even consider their validity.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

I am very confused by these claims, because MacIntyre was exactly opposed to relativism, and emotivism, which he saw as characteristic of the hollow shell of modern morality [0]. He acknowledges Nietzsche's criticism of the farce of Enlightenment morals. He appealed to telos as the objective basis for ethics and morality and in that book advocated for return to Aristote. Perhaps you misunderstand what culture is. It isn't some kind of fiction we lay on top of reality that gets in the way of reality. It is a shared language of a people about reality and one that is not static, but hopefully developing, but at the very least changing. Science is itself a part of culture. You are born into a culture, which can be anything form pretty good to downright lousy, and the "dialogue" of this culture of a people with reality, and other cultures, moves the development of this culture. Think of all the things you have learned in the scope of science. That aggregate of learning is culture. The presuppositions that science rests on is culture. This doesn't contradict the possibility of knowing the universal. Rather, it is through the cultural that you come to know the universal and through which you are better prepared to know it. We benefit from thousands of years of cultural dialogue. We cannot attain a very high understanding of reality without immersing ourselves in this dialogue of cultures spanning human history. (Incidentally, as MacIntyre was a Catholic convert, one thing the Catholic Church makes possible is the existence of both the particularity of ethnos and the universality of the Church; "catholic" means "universal". A multiplicity of cultures sharing in the universal, avoiding both cultural parochialism and an alienated cosmopolitanism.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

keybored 1y ago

You’re talking about the past. What locales (I can’t say communities) right now do not practice or tolerate as a matter of course any horryfying practices?