Alasdair MacIntyre The Common Good as Common Project
Alasdair MacIntyre: “Common Goods, Frequent Evils.”
Keynote by Alasdair MacIntyre at the "The Common Good as Common Project" Conference at Notre Dame on March 26-28, 2017. Title: "Common Goods, Frequent Evils" (with his response to the "Benedict Option" in the Q&A at 1:08:00).
It is always a privilege to hear Alasdair MacIntyre: clear, concise, careful, cogent, compelling.
“As everyday agents we all recognise a distinction between common goods and other types of good. There are goods that I as an individual set myself to achieve and enjoy as an individual, indeed that I can enjoy only as an individual. So it is with the pleasure that I take in the taste of oysters and Guinness stout on my palate or that you take in the taste of smoked salmon and malt whiskey on yours. By contrast there are goods that I can only achieve and enjoy as a member of a family, as someone’s child, as someone else’s parent or as a performer in an orchestra, as second violin or as percussionist. The goods of family life and the goods of performing and enjoying performing great orchestral works are common goods. But this distinction between common goods and individual goods is not the only distinction we make. There are many individual goods that we may enjoy as individuals and can enjoy only as individuals, but that we can achieve only through cooperation with others. I have in mind here not that incidental cooperation with others involved even in consuming oysters and Guinness. What I have in mind, rather, are those cases where I and others cooperate, setting ourselves a common goal, but only so each of us may benefit as an individual. So I and my neighbours may cooperate in having someone to work in our yards. None of us individually could afford to hire such a person, and each of us individually is interested in only having work done in her or his yard. By so cooperating, however, each of us achieves and enjoys an individual good. But now we need to make a further distinction between different types of cooperatively achieved individual goods. The achievement of some such goods is so important for the making and sustaining of social life that it became necessary for government to invoke its authority and employ its resources in order to achieve them. So it has been with the building of roads, with the provision of clean water, and with the maintaining of an educational system. Most individuals want the benefits of these, few individuals or groups of individuals are able to pay the costs, and so these goods have to be provided by local or national governments and paid for by taxation. Let us call these public goods. Some contemporary political rhetoric blurs the distinction between public goods and common goods, since politicians, advocating the achievement of some public good, often claim to be acting for the common good, as if public goods and common goods were one and the same, which they are not. It is, however, the case that the common goods of families and households, or workplaces, can often be achieved only if certain public goods are provided, clean water, for example, or education in certain skills. So the achievement of public goods and the achievement of common goods are not always unrelated. And it is only when we begin to pose questions about such relationships that we are able to recognise some of the complexities in the relationships between the different types of goods that we have distinguished. So every day agents find themselves posing and answering at least three different kinds of question: first of all, family members or participants in a workplace or members of a string quartet find themselves asking, if we were to act so as to achieve our common good in these particular circumstances, how would we be acting? That is, they ask what it is to find application for the concept of a common good in their everyday lives. Secondly, individual agents, whatever the common or individual goods they aim to achieve can’t but ask and answer the questions ‘what place am I going to give to the pursuit of this or that particular good in my life?’ and ‘ how am I going to rank or order goods in making my choices?’ And thirdly, both individual agents and agents deliberating together as family members or colleagues in a workplace or whatever have reason to ask, ‘what do we owe to others by way of collaboration with them in achieving the promotion of the provision of public goods?’ These three kinds of question need to be distinguished, but it is generally impossible to give an answer to a question of any one of these kinds without also answering questions of the other two kinds. Note that these questions are such that if we answer them mistakenly, we are apt to bring about not goods but evil. Note too that these are not initially philosophers’ questions, but questions the asking and answering of which are part of the fabric of everyday social and political life. Yet it is often difficult to formulate anything like adequate answers to them without philosophical reflection. So what do we learn from philosophers?
Aristotle insists that the good of the polis is the greater good than that of the individual citizen, the good of the whole, the greater good, than that of the parts. But he doesn’t mean that individual citizens have to subordinate themselves to the greater good of the polis. It’s rather through acting together to achieve the common good of the polis, that they achieve their own individual goods … A good not particularly mine nor yours, but a good of the polis and ours.
What kind of city would we have to inhabit if the common good were to be achieved?
An adequate answer to that question would appeal to some conception of how homes, workplaces, and schools are best related geographically and architecturally, some conception of what provision needs to be made for those practices, participation in which contributes to human flourishing …; and above all some conception of how citizens can best be educated so that they are able to contribute to the city’s shared decision making. A city is a rational community, only insofar as its decisions and decision making presupposes a significant degree of rationally justifiable agreement on these and related issues, that is, on how the city’s common good is to be understood…’
‘First, that it is only through deliberating with our fellow citizens as to what our political common good is, how to achieve it, that we realise our potentialities as rational agents; and secondly, that it’s through thus learning how to identify and achieve our political common good that we learn to rank order goods, whether individual or common; thirdly, that we can only become thus educated if we become able to judge and act justly, but it is not possible to judge and act justly without possessing some measure of the other virtues of courage, temperateness and especially practical intelligence, phronesis. So a political education that enables us to act for the sake of the common good will have to have been an education into the virtues.’
If true, we could not have learned these from Aristotle or any other theorist; we could only have learned their truth in and through practice and through critical reflection upon practice. Any philosophical account of them is to be judged an articulation of good practice.
What this suggests is a disquieting conclusion.
‘We need to be educated into and participate in a politics of the common good if we are to develop our full human potentialities. The predominant forms of contemporary political life provide no such education. How then should we think about our condition?’
Aquinas, natural law, law and virtues, prudence ... the key relationship between common good and the virtues ... integrated in our practical lives and expressed through the habits of the common life. This education into the virtues involves the transformation of the agent's desires. Those who address some call for obedience to the precepts of the natural law or to any other set of precepts, those whose desires have not yet been adequately transformed, become the voices of an ineffective and abstract moralism .... '
Keynote: Common Goods, Frequent Evils by Alasdair MacIntyre
There are times when I think I'm talking to myself and a handful of philosophers and theologians when it comes to ethics, a soliloquy in face of the final curtain. But I keep giving it a go. It is interesting to note the lamentation that we live in a 'post-fact', 'post-truth' society, the way in which empirical fact is equated with truth as such. If I was to mention that there is such a thing as moral truth, as well as scientific truth, many of these same people outraged by the way facts - as they see, select and present them ... - would look askance. Morality is just a series of value judgments, they reply. In which case, I respond, you are left justifying the value of fact-seeking and truthseeking - reason - on non-rational grounds. If someone comes along who, whether for reasons of self- or sectional interest, power or money, and denies facts that you think are clear and incontrovertible, you will urge that they ought to respect facts and the truth. But that ought is an ethic, and once you put it on non-rational, subjective, constructed grounds, it loses its force and its purchase. Welcome to the post-truth world as a world 'after virtue' and after moral truth.
If you think that morality is just value judgments, think again. If morality is just subjective preferences, then let’s end talk of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and bad. It’s all opinion. If you make morality something that is non-rational, then you lose the rational basis of truthseeking. MacIntyre gets us to the heart of the post-truth/after virtue emotivist mess of the modern world.
also -
ethics is about more than social construction
Here is a critical view, in line with the views I developed in my thesis. ("In contrast, in discerning the means by which to subvert the rationalised structures of alienated social life Marx is able to identify the features and agents of an alternative future as opposed to those which lament a lost past.") Rather than look to recover morality through the residues of a lost past (often hierarchical and insular communities), I look to new forms of socialisation and new solidarities in the process of emerging, lines of development immanent but repressed in the social world. But Mac is on the right lines on morality and modernity, giving us an answer to Hume, Nietzsche et al and the emptiness of the modern moral landscape, showing us the real roots of that landscape.I avoid the nostalgic frame. In my thesis, I wrongly criticized MacIntyre for being nostalgic, though I stand by the view that if there is hope, then it lies not in trying to revoke past solidarities but in those lines of development pointing to new solidarities that are immanent but repressed within capitalist modernity. Marx wrote that within modernity, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ We call this liquid modernity now. We are being called on to resolidify our existence by generating practices and creating communities and forms of life that are capable of achieving a solidarity based upon a conviction in and a commitment to transcendent truths and norms. But I am loathe to criticise MacIntyre as 'nostalgic', simply because the view is wrong. Andrew Lynn shows how the Benedict Option cannot be quietist for MacIntyre - in the lecture above MacIntyre explains this as a call for new forms of social engagement, not social and political withdrawal - giving examples drawn from the local politics of grassroots organizations, trade unions, cooperatives, small businesses that serve neighborhood needs, schools, clinics, and transport systems. MacIntyre identifies such forms of local political engagement as the primary locus of the practice of the virtues in the contemporary world. In a recent book review, he refers to “those areas in our own social order within which the relationships between the virtues, friendship, and directedness towards the achievement of the human good have taken on a distinctively contemporary form.” He proceeds to argue: "The relevant list includes on the one hand those engaged in by members of some rank and file trade union movements, of some tenants’ associations, of the disability movement, of a variety of farming, fishing, and trading cooperatives, and by some feminist groups, and on the other by those who are at work within schools, hospitals, a variety of industrial and financial workplaces, laboratories, theaters, and universities in order to make of these, so far as possible, scenes of resistance to the dominant ideology and the dominant social order." That's great. But I would also want to know about a more 'global' politics and ethics. The problems facing the world are global in scale and scope, and their resolution will require 'global' forms, means and mechanisms.
What do you care about? Final ends, effective commitments, fulfillment, reason, love and human nature - a natural law ethics is not a naturalism, but nature seen through the (critical and normative) eyes of reason. When it comes to natural law (Aristotle/Aquinas and those who stand in that tradition - those who think morality matters and morality amounts to more than subjective preferences/irreducible subjective opinion/value judgments) and the emotivist/expressivist view (Hume and all who fall in his camp), the fact is there are no conclusive rational philosophical grounds to resolve the debate. I hear that Hume stands unrefuted. Could he be with philosophical reason alone? So which side offers a better, richer, more satisfying account of human life, experience, and its significance? Hume carried atomism and accidentalism - the world as no more than discrete events - to its logical conclusion, so that the world became a dissociated flux of sensations, the human individual mere impulses or passions. Hume understood well that no society could survive, let alone thrive, on such ultra-nominalist premises. If we raise Hume's ideological disintegration to a philosophical dogmatism of radical scepticism, then social disintegration will assuredly follow. Hume was concerned to point out the limitations of philosophy and reason, not the limits of life and its living. In practice, he didn't live in accordance with his strict scepticism. He used logic to dissolve all the relations of cause and effect, to remove value from sensation, to separate impulse from intelligence, passion from reason in order to point to the limitations of the very philosophical instruments he used to accomplish this feat of extraordinary dissociation and disintegration. He didn't take his metaphysics as seriously as many who followed in his footsteps - he knew that it would be impossible to live in accordance with such a philosophy. No wonder Hume retired into the world of history and social convention. The best account of a rich, meaningful and fulfilled human life? A life of ends? A life well lived? What kind of story makes sense of life depends upon the end you live in accordance with. Instead of endless debates between empty words ... I am very glad that David Lay Williams has recently published a book Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment that draws attention to the affirmation of transcendent norms by the modern philosophers I admire the most, against the amoral, nihilistic, sophist self-aggrandizement of those who follow in the footsteps of Thomas Hobbes. Sophist is what Rousseau called Hobbes, and sophist is the "after virtue"/"post-truth" age we have been plunged into as a result of what Max Weber calls 'disenchantment.' In the title of Keith Breen's book, we live "Under Weber's Shadow". If you don't understand that, you understand nothing (I just wish Breen had engaged with Marx equally with Weber, rather than just focus on Weber, because that would have shown that the problem doesn't lie in some ahistorical Reason and process of rationalisation, but in specific, alienative, social relationships.
I still think we need some help from Kant (his synthetic a priori), to avoid dissolution into scepticism, positivism or custom/conventionalism or a lurch into metaphysical speculation that may be considered unwarranted on empirical and rational grounds - to say something that is more than vacuously true).
But, hey, all you need is love.
What kind of love? The love of money? Love needs to be ordered to its proper object, otherwise it becomes a vice that leads us astray.