Getting Out of This Mess
Revisiting Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue"
I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died about a month ago, aged 96. His book After Virtue was one of the most influential works of philosophy for my thinking—up there with Martin Heidegger, Luciano Floridi and Shannon Vallor.
Though MacIntyre wrote several other major works, After Virtue continues to be his most well known. It was in large part responsible for the resergence of virtue ethics we are seeing today—and virtue ethics is the ethical approach I find the most compelling and useful.
Here I share some of the most striking insights from After Virtue.
The key virtue, so to speak, of virtue ethics when it comes to design and technology is that virtue ethics is fundamentally about providing direction. Other ethical theories, in contrast, attempt to describe once and for all what is good and bad. Virtue ethics isn’t fussy about providing an airtight definition for things like “wisdom” and “justice,” but rather moving us toward them, understanding that there will be tinkering and iteration along the way. Virtue ethics is also future-oriented, just like design. Other ethical theories emphasize the past (as in calculating the consequences of a past action to judge if it was good or bad) or the present (as in providing a list of rules for actions to take). Virtue ethics is practical and future-oriented—and thus a perfect fit for design, which shares these qualities.
Why Do We Disagree About Morality?
We are highly polarized today about certain topics, particularly those in morality and politics. Each camp argues passionately with a deep sense of righteousness.
MacIntyre suggests that moral disagreements today are impossible to settle because their arguments are based on different concepts and use different lines of approach. “Every one of the arguments is logically valid … But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against the other.”
For example, one might argue against abortion based on the concept of dignity, and someone else might argue in favor of abortion based on the concept of freedom. Dignity and freedom are apples and oranges—there’s no shared basis by which to say which argument is better. This incommensurability is evident in the very name of these two camps: pro-life and pro-choice.
Because different people are making fundamentally different arguments, there is no conversation. Everyone simply shouts louder and more confidently. Here MacIntyre observes: “Protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises.”
Alas, morality today tends toward the mere expression of preference, as if we were talking about flavors of ice cream.
Hence any search for moral clarity in today’s public leadership is doomed. The conversation is limited to competition and negotiation. In American politics, the two major parties do not represent coherent philosophical positions but rather loose assemblies of competing interests—i.e., coalitions.1
Part of the problem is that our society has come to valorize what MacIntyre calls “external goods,” to the extent that we hardly see anymore that there’s such a thing as “internal goods.”
These concepts refer to the outcomes of human practices, which are organized human activities that involve skill-building and social organization. External goods, which we’re very familiar with, include money, prizes and status. They’re extrinsic motivators. Internal goods, on the other hand, are the outcomes of the practice itself: the experience, the feeling of getting better at something, being in flow… External goods such as money are more visible than internal goods. And of course they’re fungible, and you can play status games with them. We like money, we like prizes.
MacIntyre writes: “In any society which recognized only external goods, competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature.” That’s where we seem to be today.
How Did We Get Here?
After Virtue presents not just a philosophy, but also a history of philosophy. Its central thesis is that our understanding of morality started to go askew in the 18th century. In that period, which we call the Enlightenment, thinkers began to seek rational justifications for everything—it was the dawn of empirical science as we know it today, as well as things like written constitutions. It was also when secularism came to a head, which meant shared religious assumptions could no longer provide a basis for morality.
A goal of the Enlightenment was to codify and find a logical, natural, universal basis for everything. MacIntyre points out several ways that, when this project reached morality, it was doomed. That is, this project ultimately undermined morality. First, it’s a mistake to try to derive moral principles from human nature, given that moral principles were originally intended to correct and improve (i.e., change) human nature. Next, it’s a mistake to assume that there is a universalizable morality, because morality is always socially local (“respecting your elders” means very different things in different cultures). Third, it’s a mistake to conceive of morality as a distinct realm of thought, since morality needs to be integrated in other realms of human life to have any use. MacIntyre goes on, but I’ll stop here.
MacIntyre says that Nietzsche was the first thinker to discover that the Enlightenment project regarding morality had failed. His solution was that each individual should come up with their own morality. See above for how well that has gone.
How Can We Get Somewhere Better?
MacIntyre wants to articulate a moral foundation and guide for life today. To do that, he looks for the points of harmony between what is good for each individual and what is good for the group. He says to find the good we must systematically ask:
What is the good for me?
What is the good for man? (What everyone’s answers to the first question have in common)
Reflecting on these questions, MacIntyre concludes: “The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.” And so on MacIntyre’s account, the virtues are the traits and qualities that help us identify and move toward the good; they aren’t some kind of prerequisite, nor are they the ultimate reward.
This may still be a bit abstract. MacIntyre offers a more precise method for identifying virtue and seeking the good life: The way, he says, is story. We are storytelling creatures; we can’t help but understand our lives through the lens of story. And so: “I can only answer the question, What am I to do? if I can answer the prior question, Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”
The virtues, then, are those qualities that help you in your story, whatever roles you’re playing at present (student, sibling, athlete), and whatever roles you’re striving toward (manager, role model, champion).
Notice that the virtues are defined according to internal goods (defined above), rather than external ones; and they are directional (often called by the Greek telos), since every story is going somewhere—it has an end.
To define MacIntyre’s notion of virtue a little more formally: A virtue is an acquired human quality, the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve goods internal to practices, and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving them, and which do so not only within particular practices but also across individuals’ life narratives (each life conceived as a whole) as well as broader social traditions.
MacIntyre emphasizes that in different times and places, there are different virtues (i.e., different qualities for success in our individual and collective stories). But there are a few virtues that are universal or nearly so: practical wisdom (often called by the Greek phronesis), which underlies the ability to correctly select the goals that are genuinely good; as well as justice, courage and honesty.
Another feature of this understanding of virtue is that it isn’t a one-time task to identify what is good or how to achieve the good. Rather, these things “have to be discovered and rediscovered,” MacIntyre says, in both individual lives and entire social traditions.
So MacIntyre is arguing against the notion of a one-size-fits-all ethics, even as contemporary digital technologies seem to be ushering us in that direction—even more so today than when MacIntyre wrote this book.
The best hope, MacIntyre says, is small moral communities. He draws an analogy to Saint Benedict, who in the early 500s founded an order of monasteries that continues to this day, also writing a guide to moral life for the monks within them. On the last page of After Virtue, MacIntyre remarks, “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.”
Ports of Call
Western States 100: This weekend I’m finally running the Western States Endurance Run after being in the lottery for many years. I ran my first qualifying race 10 years ago, almost to the day! If you’re bored on Saturday, you can track the race or watch the livestream.
I was struck several years back when I read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, written in 1987, which argued that there is a coherent worldview underlying conservatism and liberalism; maybe so, but I don’t believe these any longer characterize Republicans and Democrats. The current Trump regime’s activities express—to use Sowell’s language—both the constrained and unconstrained visions of humankind. (I am not so up on Sowell’s thinking, but I sense he would agree.) Anyway, I digress.