Alex Traub’s recent New York Times obituary of Alasdair MacIntyre makes a mess of the author of After Virtue. Unlike other memorials, Traub gives so much attention to critics of MacIntyre that the reader isn’t given sufficient understanding of MacIntyre’s thought in its own right. Traub’s obit also spends disproportionate time highlighting Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, while ignoring more influential and recent works like Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, Dependent Rational Animals, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity.
But the main problem with Traub’s obituary is that he doesn’t know enough about moral philosophy to properly situate MacIntyre’s work in the field. An obituary of a famous musician should be written by someone who knows the difference between a major and a minor scale. And an obituary of Alasdair MacIntyre should be written by someone who knows the basics of moral philosophy.
Traub correctly notes that MacIntyre rejected “modern liberal individualism,” which includes “not just supporters of the Democratic Party but also conventional conservatives, leftists and even anarchists.” Why does MacIntyre disagree with this disparate group? Traub writes, “Moral beliefs are widely considered matters of private conscience—up for debate, of course, but not resolvable in any sort of final consensus. That is why, for example, people generally think teachers should guide students toward self-realization rather than proselytize their own beliefs. The same neutrality is expected of lawyers, therapists, government officials and others. Mr. MacIntyre belonged to a different moral universe.”
According to Traub, what makes MacIntyre so different from his contemporaries is his rejection of “emotivism.” Traub defines emotivism as “the belief that humanity was essentially a collection of autonomous individuals who selected their own principles based on inner thoughts or feelings.” Traub then marshals philosophers Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and Thomas Nagel to correct MacIntyre on various points. What’s wrong with this account of moral philosophy?
An obituary of Alasdair MacIntyre should be written by someone who knows the basics of moral philosophy.
Williams, Nussbaum, and Nagel did indeed disagree with MacIntyre in various ways, as they also disagree with each other. But they agree with MacIntyre in accepting the objective truth of ethical claims. As a recent survey of philosophers makes clear, MacIntyre was not an outlier but was in the mainstream of philosophy in being a moral realist about the objective truth of ethical claims.
In other words, like most philosophers, Williams, Nussbaum, and Nagel agree with MacIntyre that moral beliefs are not merely private matters, like taste in food, in which there are no “right” or “wrong” answers to be found. According to Williams, utilitarianism is wrong. According to Nussbaum, it is right to take human capabilities into account. According to Nagel, it is wrong to violate the rights of persons.
Williams, Nussbaum, and Nagel also agree with MacIntyre in that none of them think that moral philosophy is about guiding students neutrally toward self-realization of whatever views they happen to currently have. Indeed, “values clarification” “disappeared from the vocabulary of school reformers and teachers by the early 1980s.”
Traub also misunderstands emotivism. In After Virtue, MacIntyre situates emotivism as arising from the intuitionism of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). A more proximate influence was A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936). In this widely influential book, Ayer argued that statements are factually meaningful only if they are empirically verifiable in principle (e.g., the sun is hotter than ice cream) or tautologies true by definition (e.g., a bachelor is an unmarried man of marriageable age). But moral claims are not statements of empirically verifiable fact nor statements true by definition. So, are sentences like “racism is wrong” or “caring for the vulnerable is good” meaningless?
C. L. Stevenson’s 1944 book Ethics and Language gave an answer. According to Stevenson, moral statements express the emotions of the speaker. So, “racism is wrong” actually means “boo to racism.” “Compassion is good” expresses the sentiment “Hooray for compassion!” Emotivism is a theory of the meaning of moral language arising from logical positivism.
But the central claim of logical positivism is false. The claim “propositions are meaningful only if they are empirically verifiable or tautologies” is a claim that is neither empirically verifiable nor true by definition. Self-defeating claims cannot be right. So, after a short period of dominance, logical positivism was rejected by philosophers. Indeed, A. J. Ayer himself recognized, “Logical Positivism died a long time ago. I don’t think much of Language, Truth and Logic is true. I think it is full of mistakes.” The failure of logical positivism undercut a rationale for emotivism.
Emotivism also fails on its own terms. In his early book A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (1966, 2nd edition 1998), MacIntyre pointed out that emotivism fails as a theory of meaning:
“The White House is on fire” does not have any more or less meaning when uttered in a news broadcast in London than it does when uttered as a warning to the President in bed, but its function as a guide to action is quite different. Emotivism, that is, does not attend sufficiently to the distinction between the meaning of a statement which remains constant between different uses, and the variety of uses to which one and the same statement can be put.
In After Virtue, MacIntyre pointed out other problems with emotivist theories of the meaning of moral language. Most philosophers today (including Williams, Nussbaum, and Nagel) agree with MacIntyre in rejecting emotivism.
In sum, Traub’s obituary misrepresents MacIntyre, misunderstands moral philosophy, and misleads its readers. In 1988, MacIntyre wrote:
To the readership of the New York Times, or at least to that part of it which shares the presuppositions of those who write that parish magazine of affluent and self-congratulatory liberal enlightenment, the congregations of evangelical fundamentalism appear unfashionably unenlightened. But to the members of those congregations that readership appears to be just as much a community of prerational faith as they themselves are but one whose members, unlike themselves, fail to recognize themselves for what they are, and hence are in no position to level charges of irrationality at them or anyone else.
The hit obit MacIntyre got is exactly what the author of After Virtue would have expected from The New York Times.