Royal Institute of Philosophy

Review: Reviews
Reviewed Work(s): After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre
Review by: Anthony Ellis
Source: Philosophy, Vol. 57, No. 222 (Oct., 1982), pp. 551-553
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619611
Accessed: 03-09-2018 02:25 UTC

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 New Books

report what one sees or saw, in phrases that give 'objects which are, wholly or in
part, merely intentional' (p. I3). Why must this be so?
Returning from a morning run on Hampstead Heath I was asked whether I
had seen anyone else there. I replied: 'I saw three people running and two others
walking their dogs'. As I understand the matter, this sentence as used by me on
that occasion, did not give an object that was, even in part, merely intentional.
In other words, the verb 'saw' in my sentence was used 'materially' and not
'intentionally'.
As might be expected, Anscombe makes the following claim: that 'to say "X
saw A" where "saw" is used materially, implies some proposition "X saw-"
where "saw" is used intentionally' (p. 17). Now I wonder what that proposition
might be that is supposed to be implied, or indeed entailed, by my account of
what I saw on the Heath, and in which 'saw' would be used intentionally?
Would it be a proposition that described 'colours with their variations of light
and darkness'? But normally I would not be able to supply any such proposition
at all. Or would it be a proposition merely about my sense-impressions, without
any commitment as to what was really there on the Heath? Might such a proposi-
tion go like this: 'I saw what looked like three people, apparently running: and
also what seemed to be two other people that apparently were walking what
seemed to be dogs'? Except in very special circumstances, such a way of talking
would be either comical or crazy.
These questions of mine may only show how little I have understood Professor
Anscombe's essay. Be that as it may, her assertion that 'an intentional object is
necessarily involved in seeing', appears to endorse something that is a funda-
mental tenet of the sense-impression or sense-datum philosophy, and is also
something that can be seen to be false or unintelligible once one tries to work
it out.
Norman Malcolm

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

By Alasdair MacIntyre
London: Duckworth and Co., I98I, x+252 Pp., ?24.00

MacIntyre thinks that, for us, morality is in disarray. It is no more than t

fragments of a conceptual scheme which has lost the context which once ma
intelligible, and some 'moral fictions' (such as that of natural rights and utili
which were invented as a way of trying to cope with the breakdown of th
traditional moral philosophy. These things do not even cohere, and that expla
the nature of moral argument as we know it: it is characteristically intermin
because the disputants appeal to different, and 'conceptually incommensura
premises. It also explains why neither the rights-based approach to moralit
which is currently fashionable, nor utilitarianism is able to make good its clai
there are no natural rights, nor is there such a thing as utility. And it also expla
why the view that moral judgments are merely the expression of subjectiv
preference, a view which MacIntyre calls Emotivism, has been so popu
Though as a theory of the meaning of moral utterances it is false, as an accoun
what we use moral utterances to do it is correct.

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New Books

The decline of the traditional moral philosophy has not, of course, occurred
in isolation. MacIntyre holds that one cannot understand a moral philosophy
without knowing what its 'social embodiment' would be. And the social embodi-
ment of 'Emotivism' would be a society in which the distinction between treating
people as ends and manipulating them had lost its grip. It is no coincidence, then,
that the central 'characters' for us, those occupants of social roles who provide
our moral focuses, are the bureaucratic manager and the therapist, both in their
different ways dedicated to the ideal of manipulating resources, both human
and other, in pursuit of a (fictitious) value-free efficiency and guided by a
(fictitious) expertise.
MacIntyre is not optimistic about our plight. But if morality is again to make
sense for us then we must recapture something like the Aristotelian notion of
the virtues. And given the nature of our society, and its ruling liberal individualist
ideas, this will not be easy. One concept that is essential if the virtues are to play
a significant role in our moral thinking exists, for us, only on the fringes of our
life. That is a 'practice', a co-operative enterprise in pursuit of goods internal to
the enterprise. Games are, or can be, a paradigm of such enterprises, but nothing
at the centre of our lives is like this. And in particular, the creating of our political
society is not. Another way of thinking that would be essential is one in which
we could think meaningfully in terms of a human life as a whole. Such a way of
thinking is hardly possible for us now because liberal, bureaucratic modernity has
seen to it that our lives have no unity. We are dissociated from our social roles,
each of which is dissociated from the others; and the course of our lives is
segmented into separate stages. And a third idea that would have to be recaptured
is that of a tradition. We are what we are in large part because of our history, our
place in traditions which ideally will be living and self-questioning. And the
same can be said for our 'practices'. The virtues are necessary to sustain the
traditions that make possible a life in which the good for man is realised.
And what, finally, is the good for man? It is a life with the unity of a narrative
quest, a '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' (p. 204). All that we can know now, perhaps, is that
what the concrete realisation of the good life will be depends upon what traditions
we are part of, and what place we have in them.
I have made little reference to MacIntyre's account of the history of ethics
which serves here as the main vehicle of argument. Indeed, it is fair to say, I
think, that MacIntyre is obsessed with history, and it would be hard otherwise
to explain how the author of so brilliant a book could, in characterizing the
positive reconstruction that lies ahead for him, say of Aristotle, 'he is the pro-
tagonist against whom I have matched the voices of liberal modernity; so that I
am clearly committed to giving his own highly specific account of the virtues a
central place' (p. I37). 'Liberal modernity' may be in a mess because it has
failed to find anything satisfactory to fill the space left by the rejection of Aris-
totle; nothing could be less clear than that this forces us to give something like
an Aristotelian scheme of thought a central place. (The central place that
MacIntyre has in mind is 'a tradition in which the Aristotelian moral and
political texts are canonical' (p. 239).) And in fact MacIntyre's positive account
is Aristotelian only in a very modified sense. The 'metaphysical biology', for

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 New Books

instance, is rejected-and not replaced, as in some other recent writers, by

ordinary biology.
Unfortunately (perhaps, if MacIntyre's story is correct, inevitably) the
positive account we are given of the way of thinking we must recapture is of
daunting opacity, though tantalizingly interesting. The notion(s) of seeing one's
life as a unity, or seeing it as a whole; the (very full-blooded) claim that an
adequate understanding of a life, or even of a human action, will be a narrative
understanding; the sort of relationship with our traditions that MacIntyre finds
attractive as well as necessary-such notions, and others, are not sufficiently
explored in the two chapters that are given to their positive elaboration and
justification. The result is often that one is left wondering how far one's doubts
and objections are germane to what MacIntyre had in mind. For instance, one
aspect of the fragmentation of our lives that MacIntyre stresses is the way in
which childhood and old age have become 'distinct realms'. Is that necessarily
an obstacle to seeing one's life as a unity? Could not it be, on the contrary, one
of the ways in which we are enabled to see our lives as a unity? The answer, of
course, depends upon what seeing one's life as a unity is, and on the nature of the
'distinctness' of the 'realms'.
Even if MacIntyre's history were correct (and it would be foolish to enter into
discussion of that here) it could not impel MacIntyre's attitude to our present.
All that could do that would be a demonstration that no sense can now be made
of our ways of thinking. And here MacIntyre is at his weakest, I think. He does
not engage in detail those who have argued that sense can be made of our
moralities, whatever their history and however diverse they may be. Nor does
he engage in detail the best representatives of the broadly rationalist approach
that is again becoming popular. (His discussion of Rawls and Nozick, though
interesting in the context of the book, is slight and assertive.)
I do not wish to end on a negative note. MacIntyre's book concerns itself
with difficult and fundamental ideas, it is packed with argument, and it consist-
ently elicits doubts and questions that are fruitful to follow up. And despite
always wanting to argue, one is left with a picture that is sufficiently plausible to
remain deeply worrying. I do not see what more one could demand of a book.
The book is not well printed; and Messrs Duckworth, as usual, demand
a considerably higher price than is justified.
Anthony Ellis

Against Empiricism: On Education, Epistemology and Value

By R. F. Holland
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, I980, 243 PP., ?12.50

If anything is certain, it is perhaps that David Hume did not expect a day to
come when his views would have become an oppressive orthodoxy, calling for
vigorous and explosive protest under the banner of Plato. (Had he expected it,
he might have phrased some of them differently.) Professor Holland, however,
argues forcibly that that day has indeed come. He begins his book with four
papers on the philosophy of education. He points out how epistemological
atomism works to impoverish the notions of teaching, learning and enquiry.

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