After Virtue

...Academic ethics is quite simply bankrupt: positivism has failed, utilitarianism has failed, existentialism has failed...

...Shibboleths like the is-ought distinction and value neutrality have no sound grounds...

...Such an account, for Maclntyre is the right one and the moderns were mistaken in rejecting teleology...

...Moreover, our moral vocabulary is a hodgepodge of ideas from different sources, all now divorced from the traditions and contexts that originally gave them meaning...

...Let us consider each of these claims further...

...Astoundingly, there is no discussion of Dewey in After Virtue...

...Maclntyre fails just where a moralist should succeed: to make sense of and to confirm our contemporary experience...

...Professor Maclntyre is sanspareil as a demolitionist...

...He is not sufficiently aware of the totalitarian implications of this position...

...Maclntyre writes well enough and commands his materials so masterfully that one is induced to read on to see where his line of reasoning will lead, hoping that we'll get beyond the ethics of heroic societies and pre-modern natural law theory...

...But that is true of modern societies as well as primitive ones...

...But rarely can students relate their sentiments to any recognizable ethical theory or tradition...

...My experience illustrates the central problem Alasdair Maclntyre deals with in his learned new book...

...Because he drew all the logical consequences of the claim that values and ends are purely subjective, Nietzsche is the eponym of the modernist and, admits Maclntyre, furnishes "one of the two genuine alternatives" to our present outlook...

...I make three specific criticisms of After Virtue...

...Bernard Murchland EACH TIME I begin a course in ethical thought I confront my students, by way of a test case, with the Holocaust in Nazi Germany...

...Organismic ways of thinking, like Maclntyre's, favor statism in which, as Hegel put it, "truth, real existence, and ethical status" are inseparable from the state...

...Why, I ask, was it wrong for Hitler to kill the Jews...

...There is, he writes, "a cosmic order which dictates the place of each virtue in a total harmonious scheme of human life...

...there morality and social structure are one...

...He admires the virtues of heroic societies...

...Now let us consider the alternative to emotivism...

...What promised to be a stunning work of scholarship turns sour and captious, in the end little more than a jeremiad...

...His thesis is that we lack rational canons for settling moral disputes because emotivism, the reigning ethical theory of our times, holds moral judgments to be "nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling...

...The fundamental flaw of Enlightenment thinkers (e.g., Hume and Kant) was the ahistorical nature of their thinking...

...Having thus posed in sharp terms the difficulty, Maclntyre goes on to say a great number of interesting things but in the main devotes himself to an elaboration of two propositions: (1) the Enlightenment (i.e...

...Far too much blood has been shed in the name of that ideal to make it very palatable to me...

...Those political thinkers (Locke, Hobbes, Mill) who postulated a moral order independently of the state began a bright new chapter in ethical history and fathered a range of values that cannot be summarily dismissed as illusions...

...BERNARD MURCHLAND is chairman of the philosophy at Ohio Wesley an University...

...To say the choice is between Nietzsche or Aristotle is dogmatic and unduly tendentious, ignoring all the moral richness and complexities of the in-between places...

...To be sure...

...In other words, they cannot give reasons for what they feel...

...But we have-very largely, if not entirely-lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality...

...By separating moral judgments from judgments about human nature they obelized precisely those elements of traditional thought that made a coherent moral theory possible...

...Two, Maclntyre draws our moral alternatives too tightly...

...The disjunction of moral concepts from a unifying theory about human nature is the hallmark of liberal thinking and the wide portal through which the alienated self marched onto the contemporary moral landscape...

...Three, what finally makes Maclntyre unconvincing, I think, is his reactionary fascination with societies in which man is identified with his social role...

...This is, to say the least, a bold thesis...

...Mythology, says Maclntyre, is at the heart of things...

...When we add to this the Aristotelian idea of telos, or specific end of human nature, we can construct with great accuracy an account of the virtues, that is those habits, practices, and dispositions which fulfill the telos...

...In denying the functional (or teleological) notion of man as a creature capable of transcending his given state in light of ideals rationally conceived, they eliminated the rational foundation of morality...

...modern) attempt to justify morality has failed, and (2), Aristotle's account of morality is superior to all others...

...So it is that "we possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many key expressions...

...One obvious alternative is the ethics of John Dewey, perhaps the greatest moral philosopher of this century...

...But Maclntyre nowhere in this book shows himself reluctant to cast his bread upon the waters...

...Emotivism bids reason to be silent about questions of ends and values...

...All agree it was a horrendous act...

...Maclntyre believes, indeed argues, that Aristotelianism is the most philosophically persuasive of pre-modern moral systems and that only some version of Aristotelianism can prevail against modernity...

...Implied in this latter claim is the counsel that we must get back to Aristotle and the tradition he represented if we are to make any headway...

...But we don't...

...Professor Macln-tyre puts it this way: "Within this tradition moral and evaluative statements can . be called true or false in precisely the same way in which all other factual statements can be so called...

...REVIEWERS MONSIGNOR JOHN TRACY ELLIS 15 the well known historian, now professorial lecturer in church history at the Catholic University of FATHER ROBERT IMBELLI is a professor of systematic theology at Maryknoll School of Theology...

...there all value questions are questions of social fact...

...But once the notion of essential human purposes or functions disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral judgments as factual statements...

...The large truth about these societies that delights him is that there man had no moral substance apart from or anterior to his social role...

...First, it seems to me Maclntyre is somewhat disingenuous to label our modern values "moral fictions" yet conveniently ignore in his praise of heroic societies that their values too were fictions-sustained by complex traditions of story-telling and ritual enactments...

...Virtually all of our characteristic beliefs are consigned to a limbo of moral fictions: our belief in rights, the notion of utility, the claims of the social sciences, individualism, bureaucracy, much of democracy, I gather all of capitalism, therapy, managerial expertise, and so forth...

...Truth in the moral sphere consists of the conformity of moral judgment to the order of this scheme...

...Thus we argue endlessly, without hope of agreement, for one preference must in principle be considered as good as another...

...Such are the conceptual dragons and witches which clutter up the moral universe of discourse but do not exist...

...NOBERT F. GAUGHAN is Auxiliary Bishop of Greensburg, Pennsylvania...

...And this reader was sorely disappointed...