HERE, as summarized by Ari Schulman. The theologian-novelist gave a polemical response to to MacIntyre at a recent conference. And Ari not only offers a tight and astute summary of her remarks. If you scroll down, you can also find his summary of AFTER VIRTUE. Here’s one highlight among many:
Distortive Notions of Ourselves and Others
• MacIntyre’s work posits that we are living in the midst of a great disaster. But where is the great disaster? Most people (Robinson herself included) seem to be able to live without much sustained incoherence or anomie.
• Consequent to the notion of disaster, and fueled by MacIntyre’s polemicism, there is a streak of victimhood running through MacIntyre’s work, and especially through the attitudes of his adherents — “we poor moderns” and such. (Robinson especially criticized many of the Marxists whose talks she attended, whose abstract language and sense of victimhood, she said, seem entirely out of touch with the real suffering of hundreds of millions of laborers worldwide today.)
• The polemicism of MacIntyre’s work, combined with its argument about the will to power behind modern moral inquiry, leads us to picture all modern arguments as inherently manipulative. It thus leads us to assume that the arguments of others are insidious, and to avoid engaging in the hard work of trying to understand their arguments or to appreciate them either as rational agents or as human beings. In short, it makes worse the problem of irresolvable moral arguments between people.
I especially like the parts about the rather abstract sense of victimhood, which blinds us to real suffering, and the assumption that modern thinkers aren’t “rational agents” who give arguments that need to be engaged, because they’re characteristically neither wholly true nor wholly false. We Tocquevillians know that things have been getting better and worse, and that these are, in some key ways, the best and worst times to live.
February 14th, 2012 | 10:22 am
“where is the great disaster?”
Just the question the Romans were asking themselves in 200 AD: What disaster? We’re at the peak of our game!
“The polemicism of MacIntyre’s work, combined with its argument about the will to power behind modern moral inquiry, leads us to picture all modern arguments as inherently manipulative.”
Leads HER to picture that. Was her talk called “Misreading MacIntyre”?
February 14th, 2012 | 10:24 am
Robinson’s work seems strangely devoid of angst (esp. given her subject matter), which can be acknowledged without giving oneself over to an apocalyptic narrative about modernity and/or romanticizing the Greek polis.
This reservation about her characters’ psychology aside, the spirit of her criticism of MacIntyre is spot on.
February 14th, 2012 | 10:48 am
I agree with Sara’s first sentence–she calls attention to a shortcoming of the neo-Puritan/Calvinist position.
February 14th, 2012 | 12:40 pm
If you were subjected to moral philosophy classes in the British universities, you would feel like a “victim” too. MacIntyre’s audience (at least in “After Virtue”) is students and scholars of contemporary ethics, who were stuck in the emotivist mold of GE Moore, RM Hare, et al. Their style of analytic philosophy presupposing the is/ought distinction (and ignoring intention) simply wasn’t going to do the work that a system of ethics needs to; in a sense they were victims of their own vocabulary.
If you’re looking for a “crisis” occurring in modernity for MacIntyre, it’s got to be the reformation.
February 14th, 2012 | 12:52 pm
A lot of important recent work has been done in virtue ethics (and relatedly, human intentional action, i.e. the will) both before and after “After Virtue”, mostly by people influenced both by Aristotle and Wittgenstein: Anscombe, Geach, Kenny, Foot, Hursthouse, Thompson, Teichmann. I’m not widely read in MacIntyre, but maybe his lack of interest in Wittgenstein has something to do with some of his shortcomings, and maybe Robinson’s lack of familiarity with this work has something to do with her misunderstanding of what a virtue could be.
February 14th, 2012 | 3:23 pm
Given its contribution to political liberalism, I don’t know why MacIntyre shouldn’t be grateful for the Reformation, which helped make such biographies as his possible.
Seriously, it’s just too much illiberalism and anti-modernism (see the Schulman analysis). Modernity deserves at least two cheers–though some of us might be inclined to give it more.
February 14th, 2012 | 3:29 pm
Her criticism comes from a distinctly liberal point of view. Given that we see liberal society in a period of extensive degeneracy, why should we listen to what she has to say? As an example look at the following statement:
“there are countless examples of people acting in a way that would so qualify as “virtuous” but that are obviously morally wrong — particularly since so many social roles have been defined by their subjugation of less privileged people”
She simply presupposes that it is morally wrong to rule over someone who is defined as inferior. I do not see that to always be the case. Parents rule over children, and teachers over students, so if we are going to argue that social roles defined by subjugation to be inherently evil we will have to reject the traditional family and traditional education. And that does not help us conserve our society in the slightest.
February 14th, 2012 | 3:32 pm
Interesting issues:
1. MacIntyre’s virtues and vices are connected to his rising out of the analytic world.
2. The same with Finnis/Robby George.
3. Yet Robby and his people seem distant from MacIntyre and his medieval village people.
4. The virtue of the neo-Puritanical tradition–which is basically Marilynne Robinson–is that it, with Tocqueville, sees the modern idea of equality as largely Christian. And so there’s a lot of liberal American progress that Christians, in justice, should affirm. Not of course everything, as our president insists on reminding us right now.
5. I’m inclined to give Locke about 1.5 cheers, because modern liberty in a distorted, abstractly unrelational sense remains personal.
February 14th, 2012 | 3:47 pm
I do think that many of us are losing sight of reality here.
We know that Japan had no legal abortion before 1900, and does have legal abortion today. We know that the Faroe Islands has large healthy families and a high right of adoption, while Denmark and many parts of the U.S. have neither.
That should suggest that a lifestyle that resembles that of the Faroe Islands or Imperial Japan is more likely to lead to virtue than the Hyper Modern societies we see today. That leads me to embrace traditional societies and reject modernity.
Any serious conservatism needs to grapple with these facts.
February 14th, 2012 | 5:14 pm
Not sure what you mean by “rising out” of the analytic world, Peter. Absorbing some of its typical virtues/vices, or putatively transcending them? Everyone I mentioned above is generally considered part of the analytic world (moreso than MacIntyre is), and they’ve all moved forward our understanding of virtue ethics. None of them subscribes to the sort of views that CJ Wolfe mentions above; Anscombe indeed has produced the only rigorous refutation of the is/ought separation that I’ve seen, in her delightfully brief paper On Brute Facts, and Geach undermined any variety of emotivism by pointing out the “Frege/Geach problem”. I don’t know of anyone in any other philosophical “school” (e.g. neo-Thomist, phenomenological) who’s done anything remotely as good (traditional neo-Thomism is basically hermetic babble anyway). The New Natural Law guys seem to ignore the New Analytic Aristotelianism; don’t know why. Finnis seems to possess some originality; George doesn’t.
February 14th, 2012 | 5:32 pm
HT, lots of great points. More soon.
February 14th, 2012 | 6:29 pm
Wow, that Schulman piece is cool–brilliant quotes from Marilynne Robinson!
BTW, his piece is careful about delineating what Robinson gets wrong about MacIntyre.
February 14th, 2012 | 7:36 pm
I agree with everything you say, HT. In addition, Anscombe’s 1958 “Modern Moral Philosophy” article really crushed emotivism, and is a major basis of MacIntyre’s chapter on “Aristotle or Nietzsche.”
There needs to be an article written distinguishing New Natural Law from Virtue Ethics, because my colleagues at the politics dpt. continually talk about them as if they’re the same, but they’re not.
As far as I’m concerned, John Finnis and Germain Grisez were writing in response to Rawls but retain many of his neo-Kantian presuppositions. Virtue ethics is focused on the agent, it is not deontological. There’s also no teleology in New Natural Law.The style of Rawls, Finnis, and Anscombe is all logically rigorous, so people conflate them by calling them “analytic.” But “analytic” is just a style, not a set of presuppositions. I’ve seen articles where Finnis will write directly against Anscombe, such as on the Thomistic topic of “double effect.”
June 5th, 2012 | 8:29 pm
HT,
MacIntyre is extremely interested in Wittgenstein, but much of Wittgenstein’s influence is somewhat below the surface in his best known writings. To see an explicit discussion of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s thought and MacIntyre’s project, I’d recommend MacIntyre’s essay “Colors, Cultures, and Practices,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume 17 (1992), 1-23.
As for MacIntyre’s estimation of Wittgenstein’s importance, here’s a clear statement from an interview that he did for Kinesis in the 90s:
“It seems to me that Wittgenstein is unquestionably the great philosopher of the twentieth century. I do not of course mean by this that everything that the later Wittgenstein asserts is true. Far from it. What I mean when I speak of Wittgenstein as a great philosopher is that there is no way to do good philosophy any more which does not involve coming to terms, insofar as one can, with what he said.”
I’d be inclined to defend MacIntyre against Robinson’s charges – at least in the form in which they’ve been reported – but since I don’t think there’s any way to do so briefly I won’t even attempt to here. I’ll just say that whatever shortcomings his work may have, I don’t think they can plausibly be attributed to a lack of interest in Wittgenstein.
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