In his 1989 essay, “The Privatization of the Good,” Alasdair MacIntyre writes that a liberal society’s failure to endorse a common vision of the good ends up dismantling any shared moral ground in that society. Liberal society does not seek to orient its citizens to the good; instead, it tries to create space for individuals to pursue their own visions of the good. But coherent moral claims in law, MacIntyre argues, require a comprehensive system of morality endorsed by the political community: “Insofar as it is this liberal view which has been embodied in social practice in contemporary advanced societies, the good has been privatized.”
Something similar is happening in the university. In the wake of our society’s privatization of the good, liberal education is declining. Modern liberal education is no longer oriented to the formation of moral and intellectual character but to the acquisition of particular skills. Liberal universities open countless new specialized departments while eliminating core requirements and rigorous curricula. Schools largely allow their students the “freedom” to confine themselves to their preferred areas of study. Not every school has adopted Brown University’s requirement-free “Open Curriculum,” but the trend is to allow students to choose more and more of their own classes. As a common vision of liberal education is dismantled, truth becomes privatized. This expansive freedom of choice—the ability to direct one’s own ends—maps perfectly onto the ideals of liberalism. The rejection of comprehensive curricula follows the abandonment of explicitly normative laws and the public promotion of traditional morality.
