Prof: Okay, good morning.
 
One prefatory point before we
get into today's lecture.
That's occasioned by having you
read MacIntyre,
but I ought really to have
mentioned it before.
MacIntyre's book,
After Virtue,
is in part a conversation with
major figures in the tradition
who you have not read,
or at least not in this course,
Aquinas,
Nietzsche, Hegel and many
others.
 
And of course this came up with
John Rawls,
and indeed Robert Nozick,
both of whom depended on
arguments from Immanuel Kant
that we haven't studied in this
course either.
 
And so one question that arises
is, well, to what extent are you
responsible for understanding
the people on whom they are
commenting?
 
And of course you're entering
into an ongoing conversation
among these thinkers that's been
going on for centuries,
and to some degree you just
have to jump in somewhere.
Nonetheless,
for the purposes of our course
here you're certainly not
responsible for understanding
Kant's ethics,
and indeed I could give several
lectures on why it is the case
that Kant would not have agreed
either with Rawls's
interpretation of his own work
or with the Rawlsian enterprise.
 
But we're not really interested
in Kant in this course,
but in Rawls,
in that instance.
So to the extent he depends
upon a faulty reading of Kant's
Groundwork of the Metaphysics
of Morals,
that's not a question with
which we're engaged in this
course.
 
It's not that we're taking a
position about it;
we're just agnostic.
 
Likewise, with the various
thinkers that MacIntyre engages,
you're not expected to know
Saint Benedict,
or Nietzsche,
or Aquinas, or anybody else,
or indeed Aristotle,
about whom I'll have quite a
bit to say today,
except insofar as they are
building blocks for MacIntyre's
argument.
So MacIntyre's work,
in some ways,
is a commentary on the history
of ideas,
but really it's first and
foremost an argument,
and we're interested in it as
an argument,
and that's how we're going to
evaluate it.
So, of course,
it's an invitation to you,
later on, to go into some of
these thinkers in-depth with
whom he is engaged and see
whether ultimately you agree or
disagree with the way in which
he engages those thinkers,
but that's not our agenda here.
 
Our agenda here is to think of
Alasdair MacIntyre as somebody
who's making an argument in his
own right,
and that's how we're going to
engage with his work.
He is a political theorist who
currently teaches at Notre Dame.
Interestingly,
they say that the hand that
rocks the cradle controls the
person forever after.
He started out,
I think he was raised in a
Catholic--
he had a Catholic upbringing,
but early on in his career,
he must be well into his 80s
now, early on in his career he
wrote a book called Marxism
and Christianity,
and he was clearly wrestling
with who wins out of Marx and
Christianity.
And in that book he concluded
the Marxism won.
And in his early incarnations
he was a fairly conventional
Marxist,
but then gradually he came full
circle and ended up rejecting
not only Marxism,
but the larger Enlightenment
project of which Marxism,
as you all know,
is only one part.
And he ended up affirming a
kind of traditional mix of
Aristotelianism and the Catholic
tradition that informs his
argument both in After
Virtue and then a subsequent
book,
which I'm not having you read,
called Whose Justice?
Which Rationality?
So he is somebody who,
in an important sense,
has come full circle.
 
And I think that's an important
piece of background to know in
understanding his work After
Virtue.
He's written many other books
too but this is the book for
which he will be remembered.
 
You might think it odd that a
book with a title like that
could have become a bestseller,
but it really was a
philosophical bestseller when it
was published,
I believe, in 1984,
and the edition you have
includes an afterword where he
responds to critics of the
original book.
 
So who is Alasdair MacIntyre,
and how does he relate to the
historical anti-Enlightenment
thinkers we've already
discussed, namely Burke and
Devlin?
Well, he is very much in the
spirit of the tradition in which
they both wrote,
although, as you could probably
guess from his historical
trajectory,
one thing that differentiates
him is that at least for much of
his life he thought of himself
as somebody on the political
left,
whereas they were people on the
political right,
and we'll come back to the
significance of that later.
 
He is part of a general
undertow or reaction against the
Rawlsian enterprise in political
theory.
Other thinkers,
which you're not reading but
with whom he would naturally
have some elective affinities,
are the philosopher Richard
Rorty who died recently,
who wrote a fabulously good
book called Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature,
which was a critique of the
Enlightenment project in
philosophy.
Rorty's argument was basically
that the Enlightenment quest
with certainty was a fool's
errand.
That there is no such thing as
certainty to be had,
we've discussed this quite
extensively,
of course, in connection with
the early versus late
Enlightenment,
which is not a distinction
Richard Rorty made.
 
But in any event,
he made the argument that the
Enlightenment quest for
certainty was a fool's errand
begun basically by Descartes and
taken to its apotheosis in
Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason,
and that philosophers from
Descartes to Kant got engaged in
this hopeless endeavor of
justifying philosophy from the
ground up from indubitable
premises.
And when they failed to do that
they thought that some important
philosophical failure had
occurred,
whereas Rorty's point was they
should never have been engaged
in that enterprise to begin
with.
And he connects importantly to
the modern pragmatist tradition
of Dewey,
and Peirce, and James,
and to the postmodernist
thinkers like Lyotard,
to some extent Michel Foucault,
and others that we don't have
time to read in this course.
 
So Rorty is an anti-modernist,
but he's a postmodernist
anti-modernist if you want lots
of jargon.
He thinks we should get beyond
the Enlightenment project.
He has also written some about
politics,
and indeed he has a political
analog of his philosophical
argument,
which the bumper sticker
version of it is that thinking
we have to justify our political
institutions from the ground up
is also a mug's game,
and indeed a dangerous mug's
game, because when we fail to do
that we start to think that
there's something wrong with our
political institutions that
they're illegitimate because we
couldn't justify them from the
ground up successfully by the
terms of the Enlightenment
project.
Therefore, they're not
justifiable.
And this, Rorty thinks,
puts us at a competitive
disadvantage.
 
Though he was writing during
the Cold War,
so with our antagonists behind
the iron curtain,
but I think he would make the
same argument were he alive
today about fundamentalist
antagonists who we would,
by Rorty's way of thinking,
be putting ourselves at a
competitive disadvantage with by
holding ourselves and our
institutions to a standard which
cannot be met,
and then when we fail to meet
it losing confidence in our
institutions.
 
So we could have read Richard
Rorty in this course,
but the truth is,
and this is a dogmatic
statement and maybe some of you
will second-guess me on it
later,
the truth is Rorty is a much
better philosopher than he is a
political theorist.
And so I've chosen to have you
read MacIntyre who I think is a
better political theorist than
he is a philosopher.
There are others.
 
Perhaps one of the most famous
is Michael Walzer who wrote a
book called Spheres of
Justice,
who also rejects the idea
that the values guiding politics
can be justified in a logical
sense from indubitable first
premises and generate guides for
action in politics that must be
compelling to any right-thinking
rational person.
All of these thinkers,
Rorty, Walzer,
MacIntyre sometimes get grouped
under this idea of
communitarianism.
 
Communitarianism.
 
And communitarianism is linked
to the anti-Enlightenment
endeavor in that it is the
ahistorical version of
tradition.
 
That is instead of with Burke
and Devlin appealing to
tradition as the basis for our
values,
communitarians appeal to the
community-accepted values as the
basis for what should guide us.
 
Now obviously the two things
are connected and we'll see
they're deeply connected in
MacIntyre's historical account
because communities are shaped
by traditions.
But at the end of the day
what's going to be important for
us is that the individual is
subservient to the community
rather than the community being
the creature or the creation of
the individual.
 
So the community comes first.
 
The individual is born into the
community rather than the
community being the product of
some contract,
or creation,
or construction of the
individual.
 
So that's what all of these
thinkers share in common.
Now, one of the things that
makes MacIntyre's book a little
bit difficult to read is it's a
work in the history of ideas
that's written backwards.
 
That is he starts with the
present and works back to the
ancients.
 
It's a very interesting thing
to do.
In fact, I once taught the
political science 114 course,
the intro to the history of
ideas, and partly inspired by
MacIntyre's effort I did it
backwards.
I went from Rawls to Plato.
 
And there are interesting
pedagogical challenges there,
and I'm not sure whether it's
worth doing just for its own
sake,
but MacIntyre does it for a
reason;
not just to be cute which I
think maybe what I was trying to
do.
MacIntyre does it for a reason
and his reason is that he thinks
that at sometime around the
beginning of the Enlightenment
the Western intellectual project
went badly off the rails.
And in some way his argument is
an analog of the argument I made
to you about Locke and
workmanship.
Because, after all,
think about what I said about
Locke and workmanship.
 
I said there was basically a
coherent story.
God created the world.
 
He has workmanship knowledge
and rights over it.
He creates humans with the
capacity to act in a god-like
fashion,
miniature gods,
although they're constrained by
God's will,
and it all fits together as a
kind of coherent whole.
Once you buy into the premises
it all fits together,
but then what happens in the
history of the workmanship model
is people start to secularize
it,
and so start taking on bits and
pieces of the original
workmanship idea without the
unifying assumptions that gave
that model its coherence.
 
And we saw the various
difficulties everybody ran into
in doing that,
Marx, and Nozick,
and Rawls and many others.
 
So MacIntyre does something
analogous in his book.
What he wants to say is that
the task of coming up with
compelling moral values to guide
politics made sense in a
framework of assumptions that we
inherited,
but we inherited in a kind of
degraded way.
That the unifying assumptions
that used to give political
morality its coherence have been
jettisoned as a byproduct of the
Enlightenment project and for
that reason we need to go back
in time and see where the
project went off the rails,
see what it was that happened
that caused modern thinkers to
get involved in this fool's
errand of justifying morality
from the ground up.
 
Justifying morality from the
ground up cannot be done because
of the expectations about
justification that we have
developed,
but MacIntyre's claim is you
can't see that unless you go
backwards in time to understand
how and where the project went
off the rails.
So that's the big enterprise of
his book, and we'll mostly get
into that big enterprise on
Wednesday.
But I want to focus at the
start on the beginning of his
book, and the beginning of his
book deals with the symptoms of
our problem.
 
Perhaps the most important
symptom of our problem you've
already confronted in this
course when we talked about the
transition from classical to
neoclassical utilitarianism and
the rise of emotivism,
Charles Stevenson and all that.
Does anyone remember?
 
Maybe you've already forgotten
all of this it was so long ago
now.
 
Remember Stevenson said--this
is the guy who didn't get tenure
in the Yale Philosophy
Department because he seemed to
have this extreme relativistic
and subjectivist view of ethics
where moral choices were just
differences in taste,
differences in flavors of ice
cream.
You say the welfare state is
good.
I say the welfare state is bad.
 
It's just like saying chocolate
ice cream is good or strawberry
ice cream is good.
 
The differences about morality
are just merely subjective
differences.
 
So we go from this certainty,
subjective certainty in the
early Enlightenment as making
politics like mathematical
geometric proofs for Hobbes and
Locke to the mere subjectivism
of the mature Enlightenment
which produces this kind of
relativist morality where
everything is just subjective
opinion that morality is nothing
more than emotion,
and there's no particular
reason even to think we have the
same emotions.
 
Remember that,
as I think I said to you at the
time,
Stephenson was criticizing
David Hume,
who's another important
utilitarian thinker who we
didn't have time to read in this
course either but you should all
read at some point in your
lives.
 
And Hume had said,
"Well yes,
you can't get any important
statements about what ought to
be the case from empirical
statements about the world.
There's no way to get from is
to ought,"
as Hume said,
"But, you know what?
Most people are pretty much
alike.
Most people are pretty much the
same."
So we can, to use the jargon of
utilitarianism,
we can make pretty confident
interpersonal judgments about
people.
 
People are pretty similar,
and so what's good for one
person is likely to be good for
another,
and that's why Hume has this
rather cryptic one-liner that
scholars have debated,
to the effect that "if all
factual questions were resolved
no moral questions would
remain."
 
It's this notion,
well, people are pretty much
the same and so even though
morality is rooted in people's
emotional reactions to
situations it's not a big
problem to having a morality
that can form the basis of a
society.
 
Stephenson said,
"How do you know?
How do you know?
 
How do you, David Hume, know?
 
Maybe Adolph Eichmann has one
set of emotional reactions to
the prospect of shipping people
off the concentration camps,
and you and I have a different
set of emotional reactions to
shipping people off to
concentration camps,
and if you're saying there are
no principles by which we can
adjudicate among those
reactions,
those emotional reactions,
you're throwing us into a sea
of relativism."
 
And so when you get to
emotivism, you're getting to
this world in which we are
completely without instruments
for making moral judgments when
people disagree.
That is the emotivist culture.
 
It is a culture of tastes and
not of interpersonal judgments.
And one of the things MacIntyre
wants to say is that all of this
becomes inevitable in the
seventeenth century.
It's just a question of time.
 
It's just a question of time.
 
Once you look at what was
really going on in the beginning
of the Enlightenment you're
going to wind up with emotivism.
Just a question of time.
 
And the politics that comes out
of it is pretty ugly.
The politics that comes out of
it basically leaves you without
standards of moral judgment and
indeed without questioning the
raw assertion of power.
 
So it's not only that in
philosophy we wind up with
emotivism, but in politics we're
ultimately going to wind up with
Nietzsche.
 
We're going to wind up with
kind of nihilist assertion of
the inevitability of the triumph
of the will, the triumph of
power.
 
So again, Nietzsche is somebody
else I wish we had time to talk
about in this course,
but you'll have to read him for
our purposes through the eyes of
MacIntyre.
So it all goes back around the
late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century and then
we're just rolling down this
hill into the abyss of modern
subjectivism in philosophy and
nihilistic politics.
 
Pretty depressing story you
might think.
So that's one symptom,
that we live in this what
MacIntyre wants to describe as
an emotivist culture.
 
 
Another symptom of it,
which you might not find as
dispiriting as what I've just
said,
is what we--this isn't
MacIntyre's terminology,
but I think it makes the
point--is a world in which
instrumentalism has triumphed.
 
A world in which there has been
a total separation between means
and ends.
 
One symptom of this,
again, not one he mentions in
his book,
but I think captures neatly
what he's talking about is the
proliferation of business
schools.
 
A hundred years ago there was
no such thing as a business
school in a university.
 
Nobody had ever thought of the
idea of even having a business
school.
 
 
 
And what's, I think,
notable about business schools
is that they're teaching skills
that are unrelated to purposes.
So business schools,
after all, are trying to teach
people how to become good
managers.
Whether you're going to manage
the Coca Cola Corporation,
or whether you're going to
mange Goldman Sachs,
or whether you're going to
manage a university.
The assumption is there are
certain kinds of skills that
managers have,
that it's important to know.
But business schools will not
teach you whether it's a good
idea to manage Coca Cola,
or Goldman Sachs,
or Yale University.
 
That is not what business
schools are about.
So business schools,
if you like,
are predicated on the divorcing
of means from ends.
They're teaching certain kinds
of instrumental skills that you
can find helpful regardless of
what the enterprise is you're
going to end up managing.
 
 
 
Being a good manager is being
somebody who is inherently an
instrumental person.
 
And of course that leaves
unanswered the question,
"Well, but shouldn't we
attend to what it is we are
managing?"
 
After all, that was a question
that came up in our very first
lecture in this course when we
talked about the Eichmann
problem;
that he didn't care.
He wanted to do well.
 
He wanted to impress his
superiors.
He wanted to get an A.
 
He was happy shipping Jews
around the Third Reich to
concentration camps as well as
he could,
but he would have been equally
happy shipping munitions parts,
or for that matter office
supplies.
It wasn't important as far as
he was concerned.
He wanted to be a good manager.
 
So this is a very
twentieth-century kind of
preoccupation that we put the
goal,
the purpose,
the ultimate endeavor aside,
and we say, "What are the
characteristics of being an
effective manager?"
 
To use the philosophical jargon
it is an erratically
anti-teleological view.
 
Teleology, teleological,
have I told you what
teleological--what does
teleological mean,
somebody?
 
Student:
>
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Right, telos comes from the
Greek word telos or purpose.
 
Goal-directed, right?
 
MacIntyre thinks that the
rejection of teleology is a huge
problematic enduring mistake,
and I'm going to come back to
why in a few minutes.
 
But first I want to return to
the first symptom I mentioned of
our times.
 
There are these two symptoms,
the rise of subjectivism and
emotivism and the nihilistic
kinds of politics it brings with
it on the one hand,
and secondly this rejection of
teleology on the other hand,
and I'll say a little bit more
about each of them.
 
"Neither of them is what
is seems,"
says MacIntyre.
 
Who knows what the TV program
that used to be on CNN for a
long time called
Crossfire was?
Anybody, anyone ever see
Crossfire on CNN?
Yeah? Tell us how it works.
 
Take the microphone and tell us
how it works.
How did it work?
 
Student:
>
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Anyone?
You might be too young.
 
It's kind of sad.
 
Yeah, some of you might not be
quite too young.
How did it work?
 
Student: I think it was like a
point-counterpoint exchange.
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Yeah, so how did it work?
Student: So I'm not sure going
into it whether you knew which
side you--you definitely had to
have known which side you were
debating, or no?
 
Do they just kind of give it to
you,
and then you either debate for
or against a certain thing,
and then there was a judge at
the end who decided who the
winner was?
 
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Basically, except for your last
point.
 
There was no winner.
 
I'll come back to that.
 
But basically you've got it
right.
The idea was they have a
left-wing host and a right-wing
host.
 
So they would have Robert Novak
as the right-wing host and
Michael Kinsley,
say somebody like that,
as the left-wing host,
and there would be some topic
du jour,
whether it was partial birth
abortion,
or whatever it was,
affirmative action.
 
And what would happen was they
would then usually have two
guests, and the guests were
chosen also to be sort of
ideologically different.
 
And the Novak type person would
fire questions at the left-wing
guest,
and the Kinsley like person
would fire questions to the
right-wing guest and they would
argue back and forth,
and it would get more and more
voluble and impassioned.
 
And then at two minutes to
eight the commercial would come
on and it would end.
 
Why do I bring this up?
 
I bring this up because of
MacIntyre's observation right at
the beginning of the book where
he says there's a certain odd
feature to moral argument in
this emotivist world.
There's a strange feature.
 
On the one hand it's
subjectivist in all the ways
we've talked about.
 
Everybody's views are equal to
everybody else's.
There's no authoritative figure.
 
There's no authoritative figure
to settle our disagreements,
at least not an earthly one,
and everybody is what they are
and who they are and that's
that.
On the other hand,
MacIntyre says,
"If you look at things
like abortion,
or affirmative action,
or nuclear weapons,
people argue about these
questions as though there were a
right answer."
 
They give reasons for their
views.
They try to show the other side
as being hypocritical.
They want to say,
"My premises are more
plausible than your
premises."
They argue with each other as
though there were an answer to
this question,
should we outlaw abortion,
or should we outlaw partial
birth abortion.
The arguments they get into
suggest that everybody's
assuming there is an answer to
that question,
 
 
but actually nobody expects the
question to be resolved.
And that's why I mentioned the
Crossfire because what
could never have happened on
that TV show is sort of,
at 7:46, Michael Kinsley
turning to Novak and saying,
"Hmm, you know,
I never thought of that.
Actually maybe you're
right."
If they did that,
first of all the sponsors would
pull their commercials.
 
Kinsley would be fired.
 
That's not what it's about,
but then it's bizarre,
isn't it?
 
Because if everybody agrees
that we're all subjectivists and
that all our views are equally
tenable or untenable,
which they seem to,
then why is everybody going
through the motions of arguing
like this?
Why is everybody saying,
"You don't make any sense,
and this is misuse of evidence,
and you're blah,
blah, blah.
 
And look, my argument's much
stronger, and blah."
Why would anybody bother if we
really believed the subjectivism
which we seem to take for
granted?
 
 
That, for MacIntyre,
is the real symptom of what's
wrong with our circumstances.
 
The fact that we engage in
interminable moral arguments
that we do not expect to be able
to resolve is the symptom of the
malady of our time in his view
because it suggests a kind of
thirst and a set of expectations
from the past,
he wants to say,
that we need to be able to
recover.
 
Because the fact that we carry
on arguing suggests we don't
want to accept this emotivist
culture.
We're not comfortable with it.
 
It's not emotionally,
morally, psychologically,
philosophically,
satisfying to us,
not even acceptable.
 
But so he thinks one of the
things we need to be able to do
is account for this puzzle,
this puzzle that we engage in
moral argument using the forms
of persuasive reasoning that we
don't actually expect to
resolve,
so that moral argument has this
quality of Crossfire.
So that's the one thing that we
need to get some kind of grip on
if we're going to understand
what's wrong with emotivist
culture.
 
The second is this problem with
teleology.
They turn out to be related,
but here's the problem with
rejecting teleology.
 
If I walked in here one morning
and got up on this stage and I
said to you,
"Well, this morning I got
up,
got dressed,
went for a run,
came back home,
took a shower,
got dressed again,
started walking down to the
office.
I crossed down to Orange
Street, and then I crossed
Cannon Street,
and I got down to Whitney
Avenue.
 
At some point pretty soon you'd
say, "What is the point of
this?
 
Why is he telling us this?"
 
 
 
Human beings always want to
know the purpose.
What is the point?
 
So we will never be satisfied
with any activity that is
pointless, that doesn't have a
point.
And the Enlightenment endeavor
of trying to be agnostic about
purposes and scientific about
means is never going to be
satisfying to us for that
reason.
People want to know the point.
 
They want to believe their
existences have a point,
and if they don't they become
disaffected, bored,
agitated, unhappy,
or worse.
 
 
MacIntyre actually has a
brilliant little essay called
Epistemological Crises and
Dramatic Narratives
where he points out that if a
young child asks you why the
earth doesn't fall down,
you tell them,
say, a story that it's being
held up by a giant,
giant's holding the earth in
his hands,
that's why it doesn't fall down.
 
That's adequate for a while,
and then they ask for another
story when they stop believing
in giants.
But his claim is,
it's something about the
structure of human psychology
that even explanations rooted in
physics ultimately take the form
of narratives.
People want to be able to tell
a story that we fit into,
that has some point or purpose;
that our basic understanding of
the world is as teleological
purposive creatures who tell
narratives to give point to
their existence.
And we're going to become
uncomfortable if we don't have a
way of understanding politics
that has a point.
So that is the symptom of our
plight,
that we live in this emotivist
world that we can't accept,
and we have this bizarre
love-hate relationship with it
when you look at the kinds of
moral arguments we actually
engage in.
 
And secondly we live in this
world in which we have tried to
cope with the deep pluralism
Rawls writes about by taking
goals off the table,
purposes off the table and
seeing can we just be
instrumental.
So if you want another
political theorist we don't have
time to read,
but who has a good one liner to
capture what MacIntyre thinks is
the problem,
it's Rousseau's line in the
first paragraph of The Social
Contract where he says,
he's going to come up with a
design of institutions for
society "taking men as they
are and laws as they might
be."
Taking men as they are and laws
as they might be,
and the reason MacIntyre would
think that problematic is,
taking men as they are,
men and women we might say
today,
as they are,
ignores important questions
about how they have come to be
as they are and what the role of
morality is in shaping and
reshaping human nature.
 
So the title of the book is
After Virtue,
and virtue, what modern
philosophers call virtue ethics,
come out of a different
tradition than anything we've
considered thus far in this
course,
namely the Aristotelian
tradition.
Aristotle was the person who
talked about the virtues,
and what MacIntyre wants to say
is,
"We are at some important
level that we don't fully
appreciate or understand,
products or the inheritors of a
kind of degraded Aristotelian
tradition."
We have taken over concepts and
categories for thinking about
ethics from the Aristotelian
tradition,
but in a way that has become
degraded,
in a way that abandons the most
important assumptions behind the
Aristotelian tradition that make
it all hang together.
And the two key notions,
the two analytical devices that
make this argument work are what
he calls a practice and a
virtue.
 
Practice comes first,
and I'll say a little bit about
that,
and then I'll say a little bit
about virtues,
and then we'll go into his
argument in more detail on
Wednesday.
A practice he says here,
"Any coherent and complex
form of socially established
cooperative human activity
through which goods internal to
that activity are
realized."
 
Not an engaging sentence.
 
Let me try and give it content
for you, so first of all the
idea of a practice.
 
This is the intuition.
 
When you walk into a class at
Yale for the first time,
say, as a freshman,
think about what you don't do.
You don't say to yourself,
"How should this class be
run?"
 
You don't immediately interrupt
other people and say,
"Let's all decide how to
run this class.
Shall we vote on it?
 
Shall we talk about it?"
 
That's not what you do, right?
 
When you walk into your first
Yale class as a freshman you sit
down, you look around,
you say, "What's going on
here?
 
What are the norms?
 
What's expected of me?
 
What am I supposed to do?"
 
That's what you say to yourself.
 
So right there MacIntyre wants
to say the social contract
metaphor is really bad,
it's the misleading of the
human experience because people
don't create tabula rasa.
Rather people are born into
practices that they inherit from
the past and reproduce into the
future.
A practice, it's complicated.
 
It's already socially
established.
It's ongoing when you discover
it.
People have been teaching
courses at Yale for centuries
and there have been freshmen who
have walked into them and
saying,
"What do I do now?
What's expected of me?"
 
So the point is that the
practice precedes the
participants,
not the other way around.
So that's the first idea,
a coherent and complex--it's
coherent in that it has some
goal, purpose.
 
 
Enlightenment,
let's say, is the purpose in
this course, not in the sense of
the Enlightenment,
but enlightening you.
 
Socially established,
it's cooperative that
everybody, he wants to say
practices are not coercive
(we'll come back to that later),
it's cooperative.
Human activity through which
goods internal to that activity
are realized.
 
So that's an important term,
internal.
 
 
And here he has in mind let's
suppose you're playing chess.
You're playing chess with me
and I have to go and answer the
phone in the middle of the game.
 
And while I'm not in the room
you take one of my pawns off the
board, I come back and you win.
 
That's not playing by the rules.
 
That's not an internal
realization of a good.
That's what we would call in
his terminology,
"External."
 
So the idea of a practice is
there are rules constituting the
practice by which you have to
excel.
 
 
So you have to learn the rules.
 
Cheating doesn't count.
 
So that's the notion of a
practice.
I'll go into it in more detail.
 
Virtues are what give practices
their point.
Virtues have to do with the
goals imminent in practices.
He says a virtue is "an
acquired human quality,
the possession and exercise of
which tends to enable us to
achieve those goods which are
internal to practices and the
lack of which effectively
prevents us from achieving any
such goods."
 
So, I'll leave you with this
thought and we'll pick up from
it on Wednesday.
 
"What human beings want is
to excel internally in
practices,"
says MacIntyre.
You've all heard the phrase
"he's a pitchers'
pitcher."
 
When we say "he's a
pitchers' pitcher"
what we have in mind is the
notion that he's so skilled that
only a true pro can appreciate
how skilled he really is.
So if I write books and I also
build sheds,
if I show my books to people
who know how to build sheds and
they say,
"Oh yeah,
a really good book,"
and I show my carpentry to a
bunch of nerdy academics and
they say,
"Oh, that's really
good," that's not going to
be satisfying to me because I
want to be a pitchers' pitcher.
I want people who know about
books to be impressed with my
books, and I want people who
know about carpentry to be
impressed by my sheds.
 
That's the notion of internal
goods that every practice has
goods by reference to which you
excel within that practice.
You don't want to win at chess
by stealing the pawn when the
person's not looking.
 
You want to beat them in terms
of the norms and rules of
playing good chess.
 
So the notion is you walk into
the classroom,
you want to get an A,
but not by downloading a paper
off the internet.
 
You want to get the A by
reference to the norms and
practices governing what goes on
in the classroom.
So that's the basic idea of
virtues being internal to
practices and giving them their
point.
And MacIntyre wants to say that
these two terms,
these practices and virtues
capture a lot more that is
relevant about human psychology
than the assumptions that drove
the Enlightenment.
 
And we'll start with that on
Wednesday.
 
 
