Goodreads Review of After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a very satisfying read for me. I couple it with my recent read of Ruth Garrett Millikan's Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language and Natural Information. Both books scrape away much wordy nonsense, in the one regarding morality and in the other regarding philosophies of language.

Millikan cuts through dense philosophical tomes to replace most theory with what seem to me the utterly sound observation that we pick up words quickly and easily by noting what others mean by them. Gone are wacko considerations of qualia and color naming. It clicked with me.

With MacIntyre there is the same no-nonense getting to the essence about what virtues really are. He seems to have refreshed his own philosophy rather late in his career, where reading Kuhn on scientific evolution/revolution goaded him to place philosophical reasoning in its proper historical context. There is no final reckoning to morality.

Just as there is no final understanding which might be arrived at in and by science, there is no moral understanding which can be stripped away from its historical context. There is only mild despair when the reader comes to realize that individualism is destructive of morality, or that bureaucratic government and industry contribute to the fracturing of a unitary narrative self.

I say 'mild despair' because so much of contemporary life truly is an improvement on what once was. But he does identify the usual suspects for what remains wrong: inequality of opportunity, the ceding of character to be distributed among the many separate roles a modern person must compose. He also doesn't fail to take note of the totalizing composition of our world when motives are outsourced to money.

Here is my own maxim: At no point ever will human competency and intelligence surpass the combined natural wisdom of all life together on earth. Meaning, among other things, that no good can come from the attempt. In MacIntyre's terms, there is no proper "practice" which destroys our living substrate. Virtue requires a practice within which it may be defined, and there is no virtue in the practice of destruction when no public good comes from it.

I can't attempt to summarize, since I'll have to read the book again. The sentences are long and require antecedents to be kept in mind longer than this old mind can hold them. So instead, I want to meditate on his casual and unexamined usage of "intention."

We all must have a narrative for our lives, and that narrative is meaningless without intention. This also seems to mean that there is a telos. There is no teleology to history, and we will never discern what might be the ends of mankind. But a narrative must have a direction if not a goal. And without intention that direction is meaningless.

But without examination "intention" seems to relate to reason and the intelligence of problem-solving. If that were the case, then sophisticated AI's might be said to be alive. The reason that they won't ever be alive is that they are apart from the intricate matrix of emotion that ties us to our world, and especially to our fellow humans.

Decisions don't come first, emotional response does. So intention is triggered by a feeling and then the narrative rationalization follows. Character, or a character, is composed by feelings and not by intelligence. Intelligence relates to a practice, and intelligence takes many forms. Many human problems can't be solved logically. One can't trouble-shoot one's way out of an attack.

History has no telos. Humans must if they are to be good. I am not a good student, but I have studied a bit of the philosophy of language, and have read a bit about consciousness. As with virtue, our reads about these matters borrow their logical positivism from science. We should know much better than we do what language isn't and what consciousness isn't. We have the cart in front of the horse with those and so many other matters. Our premises close our minds. Which is to say, as MacIntyre does, that we can't remove ourselves from history, nor know our ends which we can only want.

I surely do intend to read his subsequent books.

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