Whose Justice, Which Rationality - Alasdair MacIntyre ( In-Depth Book Summary) - Chapter 1 - “Rival Justices, Competing Rationalities”
This is chapter 1 of an in-depth summary of this book. For previous chapters or parts, look into the blog page. My objective is to avoid being overly technical and make clearer what incredible thinkers, such as this one, have communicated through their books.
All the quotes or pages are from the following edition:
Alasdair MacIntyre: Whose justice? Which rationality?, London: Duckworth, 2001.
THE MAIN PROBLEM
Some conceptions of justice make the concept of desert central, while others deny it any relevance at all. Some conceptions appeal to inalienable human rights, others to some notion of social contract, and others again to a standard of utility […] So those who had hoped to discover good reasons for making this rather than that judgment on some particular type of issue…will find that once again they have entered upon a scene of radical conflict. What this may disclose to them is not only that our society is one not of consensus, but of division and conflict, at least so far as the nature of justice is concerned, but also that to some degree that division and conflict is within themselves. (1-2)
This quotes explains itself, but perhaps it would be still good to highlight the fact that any conception of justice prioritizes or accords a place of privilege to some concept or principle as the most important (desert, utility…).
The main problem becomes evident: how can we decide what “moral concept” is the most relevant when coming up with a conception of justice?
FIRST POTENTIAL SOLUTION
It would be natural enough to attempt to reply to this question by asking which systematic account of justice we would accept if the standards by which our actions were guided were the standards of rationality. (2)
This might seem a viable option, however, the disputes about what “rationality” is are as endless as the debates about “justice”.
TWO WAYS PRIVATE CITIZENS LOOK FOR ANSWERS
They either find answers in “modern academic philosophy”, or “communities of shared belief” (3).
Answers from the modern academic philosophy
MacIntyre offers a synthesis of what he understands as the most common answer from the academia to the problem of justice and practical rationality.
The argument is as follows: you should rid yourself of any loyalty to any kind of conception of “justice” . Only then you are able to achieve moral neutrality and impartiality. From this position freed from onesidedness, we are able to discern the rival standpoints with regard to justice.
This is a fiction, MacIntyre immediately points out: “one problem is that those who agree about this procedure then proceed to disagree about what precise conception of justice it is which is as a result to be accounted rationally acceptable” (3).
What’s more, the very fact that one has adopted this type of procedure to arrive at neutrality begs the question whether such procedure is not another manifestation of partiality. For example, the previous theory of rationality “presupposes one particular partisan type of account of justice, that of liberal individualism…while its conception of ideal rationality as consisting in the principles which a socially disembodied being would arrive at illegitimately ignores the inescapably historically and socially context-bound character which any substantive set of principles of rationality, whether theoretical or practical, is bound to have.” (4)
In light of this, one can see how this utopia of arriving at a place freed from any type of partisanship is full of moral ideals taken for granted.
Answers from “communities of shared belief”
The answers (5) revolves around the “beliefs embodied in the life of a group”. This, of course, means that we put our trust in “persons rather than in arguments”. However, this comes with a price tag, since it involves to come to terms with things or beliefs that seem to us, in a moment of honesty, quite arbitrary and baseless.
MacIntyre sets out some reasons why people are complacent with that arbitrariness: fideism (this is a theological attitude in which the person claims that God and the spiritual realities cannot be known through rationality, but only through faith). He sees a secularized version of fideism where people do not see any importance to rational arguments, in part, because the rhetoric of rationality has been weaponized, and ultimately, rational arguments are just the disguise of hunger for power and control (5).
The outlook seems loomy with the following diagnosis based on the previous analysis:
We thus inhabit a culture on which an inability to arrive at agreed rationally justifiable conclusions on the nature of justice and practical rationality coexists with appeals by contending social groups to sets of rival and conflicting convictions unsupported by rational justification…Disputed questions concerning justice and practical rationality are thus treated in the public realm, not as matter for rational enquiry, but rather for the assertion and counterassertion of alternative and incompatible set of premises. (5-6)
HOW DID THIS COME TO BE THE CASE?
The answer falls into two parts, each having to do with the Enlightenment and with its subsequent history. It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment…to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which alternative courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would displace authority and tradition. (6)
Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural particularities. (6)
This did not succeed because both the thinker of that period and their successors “proved unable to agree as to what precisely those principles were which would be found undeniable by all rational persons.” (6) In other word, this ideal of rationality has been shown to be a fiction.
WHAT DID THE ENLIGHTENMENT DEPRIVE US OF?
What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational enquiry as embodied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way in which they transcend the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of the same tradition. (7)
This implies that, for MacIntyre, there is no freeing ourselves from our historical context which we are bound to. So far, he has only advanced his criticism and diagnosis of the current situation with regard to ethics. It is in the following part where he shall tell us clearly what he is set out to prove.
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERTAKING
The concept of a kind of rational inquiry which is inseparable from the intellectual and social tradition in which it is embodied (8)
MacIntyre will attempt to come up with a conception of rationality which is interwoven with the tradition where it takes place.
He admits this can be misunderstood "unless four considerations are borne in mind”
First consideration: rationality embedded in its historical setting.
This way of understanding rationality is historical. Let us carefully try to understand his position. When people come up with a conception on justice and take a side with a particular rational procedure, they do so providing “a structure in terms of which certain theses have the status of first principles; other claims within such a theory will be justified by derivation from these first principles” (8). This quote can be understood easily with the following paraphrasing: when we want to defend an ethical position, we appeal to an impersonal criteria (X is good because Y). Accordingly, Y would be the most basic reason, while X would be a “derivation” from that first principle or basic reason.
It would be natural to ask, “what justifies the most basic reason or first principles of a specific moral structure?”.
MacIntyre would reply: “What justifies the first principles themselves…is the rational superiority of that particular structure to all previous attempts within that particular tradition to formulate such theories and principles.” (8)
This means that not everybody in all periods has to agree with those first principles of a specific tradition. I wonder, however, how he will prove that a moral structure of a specific tradition is the result of “rational superiority”. I could think of many other possibilities that seem to me a lot more likely: corruption, power, fraud, and the like.
Second consideration: the type of question this model answers is quite different from those of the Enlightenment or any other period.
The way of dealing with morality has been the result of the Enlightenment ideas. According to this, rival interpretations of the world are originated in a particular time and place, but their “content” and its “truth or falsity” is “independent of their historical origin” (9). MacIntyre opposes this way of looking at moral theories, because, this method universalizes the nuances of moral systems as if they can be put under a universal umbrella where the differences, erroneously, are erased.
This means that “what a particular doctrine claims is always a matter of how precisely it was in fact advanced, of the linguistic particularities of its formulation, of what in that time and place had to be denied, if it was to be asserted, of what was at that time and place presupposed by its assertion, and so on…so rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history.” (9)
In this sense, the moral understanding that it is possible to come up with timeless concept or moral definition detached from its historical embedding, is that in and of itself a concept in history (the Enlightenment). It is the moral orientation or position characteristic of the Enlightenment to adopt “moral neutrality”, when in fact, there is no such a thing.
Third consideration: this type of rational enquiry cannot be elucidated apart from its exemplifications
For MacIntyre, “it is crucial that the concept of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rational enquiry” takes into account the expressions they take in different social orders. This is key because “each carries within itself a distinctive type of account of justice and practical rationality.” (10)
4 BODIES OF TRADITION-CONSTITUTED ENQUIRY
He will use four traditions to show how “from the standpoint of traditions of rational enquiry the problem of diversity [of ethical theories] is not abolished, but it is transformed in a way that renders it amenable of solution” (10). This means that rival and incompatible traditions can be rationally resolved. BUT HOW? that answer, according to him, is found in the rest of the book.
Before finishing, let’s enumerate the four traditions, taking into account that “each has entered into relationships of antagonism or of alliance and even synthesis, or of both successively, with at least one of the others. Yet at the same time they exhibit very different patterns of development” (10).
The Aristotelian account of justice and practical rationality: this comes from “the conflicts of the ancient polis” and it is then considered and “developed by Aquinas in a way which escapes the limitations of the polis”.
The Augustinian version of Christianity: which had a complex relationship of “antagonism” and later on of “synthesis” and once again of “antagonism” to Aristotelianism.
The Augustinian Christianity (in Calvinist form) and the Aristotelianism (in Renaissance version) in 17th century Scotland.
Modern liberalism: which was a reaction to all traditions from the past and has become the new tradition.
To do this, as he already stated, we need to embark on a narrative exploration of the developments of these 4 traditions of enquiry and their own conflicts.
