The Diagnosis
Whats gone wrong with modern moral theory? Humes emotivism, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. With that kind of a heritage, its no wonder Nietzsche went mad. The only treatment for him would have been to give it all up and play backgammon.
Hume wants to found a moral theory on desire--on one desire in particular, sympathy. Sounds fine so far. Trouble is, Hume's thoroughly empirical theory of meaning tricks him into thinking that if a moral theory is founded on x, then all the subsequent claims within that theory must be claims about x. (Compare Humes "one general proposition" of the opening section of the Treatise of Human Nature: "That all our simple ideas in their first appearances are derivd from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent." Page 4 of Selby-Bigges Oxford edition.) So for Hume all moral claims come out referring to our feelings. Feelings are not simply the presuppositions of any moral claim, but the content of any moral claim. Hence what we would usually describe as you and I arguing about abortion, is no such thing. We cant talk about abortion, so we cant argue about it; we can talk only about our feelings about abortion. And there is no argument about our feelings; we both agree about what each others feelings are. (Gee, Hume, then what is going on in such debates? Might your theory of meaning be wrong? Or cant we disagree about that either?)
Kant reacts against this and concludes that there has to be a way to make sense of morality without appeal to desires. We get the good will and a picture of the self as essentially distinct from the desires. Acting from desires becomes acting unfreely--in Kants terminology, acting heteronomously.
Mill reacts against Kant, and throws himself back into the temple of desire. And it all sounds fine as we get the sensitive and sensible distinction between higher and lower pleasures. But then we come up with cases like the framed hobo. We get cases of slavery, where even if all such cases come out as unjustified according to Mill (because he might be able to argue that all such cases lead to less long-term utility than abolition would), one is puzzled, if not disturbed, by the utilitarian counting a given quantum of slave-owners happiness under slavery equally with that quantum of slaves happiness under abolition. One wonders why the happiness of the slave-owner should get to count at all. Are we really to think that the badness of a rape diminishes as the pleasure of the rapist(s) increases?
What seems to have gone wrong here is that both Kant and Mill treat all desires as a class. There are no distinctions. Kant takes them all as irrelevant to the foundation of morality, and Mill takes them as all relevant. Enter Nietzsche. He thinks that some desires are better than others, but what a theory! At least his theoretical heart is in the right place: hes distinguishing some desires as worthy and some as unworthy of our moral attention.
The reason I say that this is the right sort of approach (even if not the right version of that approach; thats for you to come to some decision about on your own) is that what Kant and Mill miss is any discussion of how acting morally is a way of transforming the self. They have lots to say about transcending the self (by conforming my behavior to the categorical imperative or to the principle of utility, both of which are in some sense not wholly within me, even if they are attained, in some sense, by me), but why should I want to transcend myself? Whats so good for me about losing the me? Nietzsche has an answer to this, for he refers morality back to the self; look at how your psyche can be strengthened by acting morally (that is, master-morally).
This emphasis on the self is something Nietzsche owes to Aristotle. So if were not thrilled with Nietzsche (and if we should not be thrilled with him, I expect to learn why from you), then lets take a second look at Aristotle.
A Cure
We have seen that central to Aristotles moral theory is the notion of a human telos, the actualization of human capacities. At least two problems arise with this way of grounding morality.
First, morality seems to require some sort of commonality, if not universality. We want trustworthiness to be a virtue for Jack as well as for Jill. The problem is that humans are all so very different from each other even within a society (never mind cross-culturally), that why should we think that there is a human telos? Mightnt there be at most male and female tela, or different tela for the Akan, the Iroquois, the Goths, etc.?
The second problem with basing morality on human capacities is that even if there is one common human telos, it seems that this requires ruling certain capacities out as parts of the human telos. For example, men have the capacity for refusing to take women seriously for their ideas and feelings about the world. (That its a capacity actualized all too often shows, of course, that it is a capacity.) Why, then, does this capacity not get to be part of the human telos, but the capacity for, say, being trustworthy does?
One candidate for a solution to this problem seems to be a non-starter. We might try saying that the reason that capacities for sexism arent, and capacities for trustworthiness are, parts of a human telos is that sexist actions arent, and trustworthy actions are, good actions. But this avenue is closed to us, for the human telos is taken by the Aristotelian to be the foundation of moral claims; the telos is what makes true moral claims true and false moral claims false. Accordingly, it would be fatally circular for the Aristotelian project to use morality to specify the human telos.
Aristotle himself uses one route out of both of these difficulties: his biology. The telos of a creature is given by its ergon (its special activity; often translated "function"), and its ergon is given by its species. Jack92's ergon is the
activity that differentiates him from members of other species. And that is to be a certain sort of social and/or contemplative being, namely, one that employs reason, either practically (to make decisions, instead of being restricted to instinct or habit) or theoretically (to contemplate the best the universe has to offer). Since erga, and so tela, are individuated by species, Jack and Jill will have the same telos. This is his solution to the first problem.
This biology affords Aristotle a way to start solving the second difficulty. The criterion which differentiates between capacities which foster the attaining of the telos and capacities which hinder, is whether the capacity conduces to the flourishing of the individual. The cardinal that builds its nest too low to the ground will lose its eggs to predators, and so will not exemplify an important capacity which constitutes a flourishing cardinal; it will be, to that extent, a bad cardinal (that is, a poor example of a cardinal being all it can be). Likewise for humans. Sexism doesn't get to count as a capacity constituting the human telos because the sexist isnt a fully actualized human; he isnt all he can be, because he is choosing for himself a smaller, narrower life by cutting off some important human connections. So he wont flourish fully, wont be fully eudaimon (happy). In fact, the Aristotelian (although, lamentably, not Aristotle himself) would go further and claim that the sexist isnt fully a human, for not to be a fully actualized x is not to be fully an x. The second baseman who repeatedly boots routine grounders will attract the jeer, "Get im outa dere! Hes no second baseman!" Hes not fully a second baseman, just as someone who routinely makes moral errors isnt fully a human. So Aristotles general biology, conjoined with a particular view of what human flourishing consists in, is his way of responding to both of the above-mentioned problems.
An Alternate Cure
Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1981 book After Virtue (second edition in 1984), thinks that this recourse to Aristotelian biology wont do. There is something musty about Aristotles biology, loaded as it is with terms like form, function, end, goal, and species. Contemporary Darwinian theory represents the destruction of this (as MacIntyre puts it) "metaphysical biology." In the Darwinian picture, there are no ideal types by reference to which we can compare specimens. There is no enduring telos, humanity or human nature, according to which I can say that I more or less fully exemplify that type. Organisms become competitive vessels of DNA. In fact, Darwinism destroys the notion of a species: a species becomes simply shorthand for a group of individuals who can generate viable offspring. It is no longer a fixed group all members of which are approximating a common type or "striving" to exemplify a shared ideal.
So MacIntyre is out to save Aristotelian ethics from Aristotelian biology. There seems something commendable about this project. Especially if our other options are Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche, one would hope not to pin the chances for an Aristotelian morality on the falsity of Darwinian biology. The street wisdom seems to be that even Gingrichs becoming president is a safer bet than the rehabilitation of Aristotle's biology.
MacIntyres proposal is to use history instead of biology. In particular, he wants to ground the shared ideal we are trying to exemplify, not on the nature of our species, but on our social traditions. Ones social traditions, as revealed, for example, in the mythology which constitutes the culture of which one is a member and to which one adds the "narrative history" of ones own life, provide a common, social enterprise which can then serve as the foundation of the virtues for that society. Social traditions do the unifying, so theres no need for an antique biology.
This is why MacIntyre is at such pains to import the social aspect to what he calls a practice (p. 187). Tic-tac-toe isnt a practice because one can do it alone. This is also why he lays out what he calls the narrative character of a human life. Each life is a subplot, with each social tradition being the plot. A sub-plot needs other sub-plots or else there would be nothing for it to be a sub-plot of. (Maclntyre accordingly criticizes at length the individualism of modern thought, the apex of which he takes to be Nietzsches bermensch.) What binds together Jack and Jill is that they take part in the same plot; they go up the hill together. Similarly, what binds you and Hilary Rodham Clinton together is that you both participate in the same social tradition, each adding in your own ways to that tradition. And it is in this common tradition that we are to find what counts as a virtue and what doesnt. Virtues cant be specified outside of a tradition.
A Problem with Alternative Medicine
Now, dont get me wrong: MacIntyre surely
has a rich account for doing moral anthropology, and his work has
occasioned a choir of responses (most of them sympathetic). But has he given us
a moral theory? That is, his account ranges freely over
many different systems of moral beliefs (even though he unfortunately restricts
himself to those of European stock: Aristotle, St. Benedict, the figures of the
Enlightenment, Jane Austen, Benjamin Franklin, Nietzsche, Trotsky), but what
can he tell us about whether or not those moral beliefs are morally valid? The
British have a tradition (exemplified most recently in the
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