Being rational about morality

I cited Alasdair MacIntyre (Fr Mark Sultana, February 6) in my article of January 15 for one purpose: To quote a prominent Catholic philosopher who shares my view that conceptions of justice, goodness and rationality are relative to different points of view, different traditions, as he styles them, and that there is no "view from nowhere", no Archimedian point outside the different traditions from which to judge which is the true one. I thought thereby (falsely, it turned out) to avoid the kind of hysteria with which Michael Axiaq greeted it.

This being the case, it is unfair of Fr Sultana to accuse me of being "reductivist" with respect to MacIntyre, a philosopher I know very well, and, as Fr Sultana rightly guesses, profoundly disagree with on many things. For one thing, I have argued (The Learning Society In A Postmodern World, Peter Lang NY, 2004, p.127) that his attempt to have his cake and eat it by simultaneously acknowledging the lack of a criterion of truth outside some tradition and wanting, at the same time, to hold that there are "objective" ways of choosing between traditions (more or less the way natural scientists choose between different theories), doesn't work - because moral theories are not like scientific theories and cannot be judged on similar criteria. This is the point of describing them as "incommensurable".

Hence, choosing between different moral theories must be a matter of preference. This is not to say that it must be irrational. Preferences may be reasoned, critical, etc. Our preferences (and this includes Fr Sultana's) will ultimately depend on influential but accidental factors in one's upbringing and experiences in life that are not themselves rational. MacIntyre seeks to disparage their rational status by referring to them as mere preferences. But a rational preference is not a contradiction in terms and I am not convinced that we can go beyond that in a modern world that presents us not with one but with several rationalities and that speaks different moral languages, religious and secular.

This fact constitutes MacIntyre's problem with the modern world which, as Fr Sultana points out, he conceives as a tower of Babel where the possibility of understanding each other, never mind agreeing on important moral issues, is remote and non-existent and where our engagement with important moral issues tends to be frustrating, interminable and acrimonious. He blames this situation on liberalism for "democratising" the moral sphere and separating morality from the state and hankers for a world which spoke with a single moral voice, recognised a single moral authority and where the state was a moral educator. He thinks that this was how the pre-modern world was.

I am not here going to go into MacIntyre's idiosyncratic caricature of liberalism. I will simply say that it includes all modern post-Enlightenment thinking, including Marxism and existentialism, which he describes as its "stalking horses". In short, it is the modern world that he hates; liberalism is just the name he gives its culture. There was a time when he was a Marxist and, though he has resented over the years, the totalitarian aspirations of Marxism have not faded from his thinking; they have simply taken a different form.

His virtue-ethics mock the modern notion of an individual as a possessor of rights, moral and political. It yearns for a return to a hierarchical order where everyone knew his/her place, where people were identified not by their individuality (by their difference) but by their rank within that order. One's virtues were defined by the role one played within it. It yearns for a community tightly bound together by its allegiance to a common intellectual and moral tradition, which could only have been kept intact for any length of time, he tells us in The Idea Of An Educated Public, by resisting economic, demographic, geographical, change and growth, by remaining relatively isolated from the world and by creating educational institutions that would guarantee its internal cohesion. Plato's republic immediately springs to mind, though MacIntyre's own example, in After Virtue, his own model for such a community in today's world is a Benedictine monastery.

I am not on MacIntyre's wavelength on any of this. MacIntyre, nostalgic as he is for this world, is less optimistic than Fr Sultana that the historical conditions that produced modern moral pluralism can be reversed by "inspecting competing moral traditions closely" and choosing which is "most correct" because correctness is defined by criteria and we are back with the same problem - whose? Fr Sultana insists that they can be defined "objectively" but he does not say how. In fact, MacIntyre himself regards the relations between different traditions more as combative than as cooperative.

Indeed, he finds refuge for his "real" communities, as Fr Sultana refers to them, in modern societies, in the idea of small, local, pockets of resistance (like Benedictine monasteries in the Dark Ages) to the modern culture, their religious and moral orthodoxy guarded by strictly denominational schools and universities where the teachers submit to strict tests of their orthodoxy and the curriculum is put under the jurisdiction of the professors of moral theology. In MacIntyre's utopia, the modern liberal polyvocal university would be consigned to the flames. He has nothing but contempt towards the modern liberal democratic state and towards anything resembling a multicultural society, both of which are tolerant of pluralism.

Fr Sultana wrongly assumes that I would agree with MacIntyre "that no conception of ethical life is possible" outside these "real" close-knit, univocal, communities he speaks of. Indeed, this assumption is demonstrably false. Modern societies, which do not, in fact, qualify as "real" communities, harbour different conceptions of ethical life, not no conception at all. MacIntyre's grossly exaggerates this factor of difference and its consequences. Though perfect moral harmony does not exist in modern societies, it did not exist in pre-modern societies either, nor does it have the nature of a "civil war". Modern disagreement, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out, does not go all the way down. We can speak of it only because there is a background of agreement we can recognise and that enables us, despite our differences, to live together in harmony.

And, yes, we do resolve our moral differences by means of an arrangement that enables us to distinguish a sphere of private morality which we leave to individual conscience, from a sphere of public morality where differences are settled democratically against a background of liberal freedoms of expression and association. Democracy, because it employs the politics of persuasion, is a not a less rational way of resolving moral differences in the public sphere than the politics of obedience to a supreme authority, be it religious or secular. Arguments are won and lost in democracies.

Finally, I am not impressed by what Fr Sultana describes as MacIntyre's "warnings". They are based on assumptions that I do not share. The role that he assigns to the notion of a human telos in moral life, on the other hand, fits one kind of moral language: The Aristotelian. Others dispense with it without suffering incoherence. Personally, I find the notion unhelpful. Take his example: "One can say that a blunt knife is a bad knife since it is not able to fulfil its telos". What, pray, is the telos of a knife? The example anticipates the answer. Its sharpness. But the sharpness of a knife is its means - its purpose is: To cut bread, to serve as a weapon in a fight, as cutlery, to murder one's rival, as a useful camping tool... Which is its proper or final purpose of the knife among these and others? There is none; there are as many purposes as its users choose to turn it to.

If it is impossible to speak so reductively of a comparatively simple implement like a knife, how much more is it so to speak of something as complex as human life and happiness - without totalitarian and/or dogmatic consequences? Besides, to conceive one's life as one governed by an overriding, pre-defined purpose, a "map" (assuming one agrees with his metaphor of life as some kind of journey), is, in my view, to have an impoverished idea of it.

Finally, when one participates in a "practice", likened to a game of chess, one puts oneself under the authority of the rules of the game and only indirectly under the authority of others. The political game I prefer to play, like Dewey, is democratic.