(ii) Diagnosis

MacIntyre wants to attack a particular set of narratives about human beings and their purposes that seems to him to permeate contemporary culture, but he wants simultaneously to argue that the tradition within which these narratives seem intelligible is in serious decay. Narrative and tradition reinforce each other in a mutually damaging symbiosis. Our only hope for avoiding the consequences of this is to recover and reconstitute the tradition in its original integrity, which will in turn enable us to escape the incoherent prison of our own narrative dilemmas (ibid.: 263).

MacIntyre thinks we live in a world dominated by instrumental politics where riches, power, status, and prestige, wholly detached from the pursuit of goods for their own sake, have become external rewards. This is reflected in a "rootless cosmopolitanism" characterized by "the late twentieth-century language of internationalized modernity" where people aspire to be at home anywhere except in "what they regard as the backward, outmoded undeveloped cultures of traditions." We are "in an important way citizens of nowhere." We live fragmented lives, manifested

in "divided moral attitudes expressed in inconsistent moral and political principles, in tolerance of different rationalities in different milieus, in protective compartmentalization of the self, and in uses of language that move from fragments of one language-in-use through the idioms of internationalized modernity to fragments of another" (MacIntyre 1988: 32, 388, 397).

MacIntyre aims to render this thesis plausible by describing and explaining its genesis. To get us to take it seriously at the outset, he describes symptoms of the disease. He notes that everyday disputes on such issues as nuclear disarmament, abortion, what, if anything, to do about racial discrimination, and public versus private provision of health care are interminable; they are never resolved and people do not, characteristically, expect them to be resolved. They think it normal for wide areas of disagreement on such questions to prevail, "people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint may be." Emotivism is thus "embodied in our culture" (MacIntyre 1984: 22, 253; see also 1988: 1–2).

It is an individualist culture, inhabited by "post-Enlightenment" people, who respond to "the failure of the Enlightenment to provide neutral, impersonal tradition-independent standards" of rational argument by concluding that no set of beliefs proposed for acceptance is justifiable. We live in a culture in which "individuals are held to possess their identity and their essential human capacities apart from and prior to their membership in any particular social and political order" (MacIntyre 1988: 395, 210, see also 343). Such persons "cannot understand the action of entering into any scheme of belief except as an act of arbitrary will, arbitrary, that is, in that it must lack sufficient supporting reasons." With the development in universities of a conception of scholarly competence based on the fiction that there could be an objective neutrality in terms of which moral questions could be debated, "considerations of belief and allegiance were excluded from view altogether." As a result there is "a deep incompatibility between the standpoint of any rational tradition of enquiry and the dominant modes of contemporary teaching, discussion, and debate, both academic and nonacademic" (ibid.: 396, 399, 400).

Yet emotivism runs much deeper than this for MacIntyre; he offers an almost Foucaultian analysis of its social and political consequences in terms of an obliteration of the distinction between "manipulative and non-manipulative social relationships" (MacIntyre 1984: 23–24). But where Foucault would see such a conflation as endemic to all forms of social organization, varying only in its institutional manifestations, for MacIntyre it is the distinctive feature of emotivist culture, dominated by

a fundamental indifference to all ends. Thus although the initial liberal aim was to "provide a political, legal and economic framework in which assent to one and the same set of rationally justifiable principles would enable those who espouse widely different and incompatible conceptions of the good life" to live together in the same society, this has resulted in a "compartmentalized" self for whom no good is supreme and who takes an instrumental attitude towards the satisfaction of his own preferences. "What each individual and each group has to hope for from these rules [of liberal association] is that they should be such as to enable that individual or that group to be as effective as possible in implementing his, her, or their preferences." This instrumental rationality is epitomized for MacIntyre in Rawls's open embrace of an heterogeneous conception of the good with the remark that "although to subordinate all our aims to one end does not strictly speaking violate the principles of rational choice … it still strikes us as irrational or more likely as mad." In saying this "Rawls equates the human self with the liberal self" that "moves from sphere to sphere, compartmentalizing its attitudes (MacIntyre 1988: 335–36, 337).^[8] The liberal acceptance of irreducibly different and competing conceptions of goods and ends makes the fragmented life of the emotivist self all but inevitable for MacIntyre; in moving into liberal modernity we "move into a world in which the exercise of practical rationality, if it is to occur at all, has to be embodied in contexts of fundamental disagreement and conflict" (ibid.: 325).

Kant distinguished ends from means by arguing that no human relationship can be informed by morality unless it is geared toward respecting others as ends. On MacIntyre's interpretation this at least involves offering to those affected by our actions "good reasons for acting in one way rather than another," leaving it to them "to evaluate those reasons." To respect the other as an end "is to be unwilling to influence another except by reasons which that other … judges to be good." This in turn requires an "appeal to impersonal criteria of the validity of which each rational agent must be his or her own judge" (MacIntyre 1984: 23–24). Emotivism

[8] This is a misreading of Rawls's account of the good in that Rawls's primary good are intended to be universal and, in the terminology of political economists, at least in part interpersonally comparable. Rawls wanted to argue that his primary goods were things one would want more of rather than less of, whatever one's particular conception of the good turned out to be. See Rawls (1971: 87, 91–94; 1982: 164–85). The view that MacIntyre here attributes to Rawls—that the "recognition of a range of goods is accompanied by a recognition of a range of compartmentalized spheres within each of which some good is pursued: political, economic, familial, artistic, athletic, scientific" (MacIntyre 1988: 337)—is actually closer to Walzer's view. See chapter 3 above.

as an outlook is indifferent, by contrast, to the ways in which we try to influence one another, and indeed to our purposes in so doing.^[9] In an emotivist world "the generalizations of the sociology and psychology of persuasion are what I shall need to guide me, not the standards of normative rationality" (ibid.: 24). The quality shared by such distinctive characters of modernity as the aesthete, the bureaucrat, and the therapist is their indifference to social ends. The aesthete is consumption personified, the kind of character who occupies the intellectual milieu with which Henry James concerned himself in The Portrait of a Lady, where the use of others for personal gratification was accepted, even encouraged. It was a culture "in which the manipulative mode of moral instrumentalism triumphed." Although James was concerned with a small, circumscribed elite, MacIntyre's claim is that he captured the essence of a much larger tradition of moral commentary reaching back to Kierkegaard and Diderot. "The unifying preoccupation of that tradition is the condition of those who see in the social world nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom." The cultural impact of emotivism is exemplified for MacIntyre by the way in which the Bloomsbury group appropriated parts of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica to rationalize their elevation of aesthetic pleasure above all other goods, ignoring the dimensions of his theory that were hostile to emotivism (ibid.: 24, 25, 14–16).

Another facet of emotivist culture is illustrated by contemporary psychotherapy, in particular its indifference towards ends, its preoccupation with technique, with "transforming neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones." The therapist cannot engage in moral debate about ends from within his therapeutic role, and he thereby reinforces the emotivist tendency to regard them as exogenous. This means centric therapeutic mode of being extends outward from the professional's office; its idiom shapes vast areas of social and religious existence. But the contemporary character who embodies its spirit most powerfully and who gives emotivism its social content of "bureaucratic

[9] Despite this appeal to Kantian autonomy as the basis for this critique of emotivism, it is to Aristotle, not Kant, to whom MacIntyre ultimately turns. Given this, the nature and relevance of this implicit appeal to Kant is unclear, not least because Kant's conception of autonomy has been argued by many to entail a radically subjectivist ethics. See, for instance, Nozick (1974: 32, 228, 337n4, 338n1), Hayek (1976: 166–67), Rawls (1971: 31n, 43n, 251–57, 586; 1980: 515–72), and Shapiro (1986: 161–64, 242–46, 253, 276–84, 296–97).

individualism" is the manager who, once again, "treats ends as given, as outside his scope." His concern "is with technique, with effectiveness in transforming raw materials into final products, unskilled labor into skilled labor, investments into profits" (ibid.: 30). The bureaucratic manager is the embodiment of instrumental reason; his judgments are "in the end criterionless," for his very definition as a manager requires indifference to ends. Emotivism, then, is no defunct philosophical doctrine; many of the social roles we frequently think of as definitive of contemporary culture instantiate it as a social practice.

This state of affairs is perplexing for MacIntyre in that most people's "avowed theoretical standpoints" are not emotivist. People argue about moral questions in terms of all the forms of rational discourse; they argue from premises that they believe to be true to conclusions via chains of allegedly consistent and relevant reasoning. They criticize opponents' proffered premises for alleged lack of accuracy and opponents' reasoning for irrelevance and internal inconsistency. In short, people argue about moral questions in a terminology that would be entirely without point if there were no solutions to moral disagreements. That the moral argument of modernity is thus interminable we have come to accept. It is characteristic of "modern political orders" that they "lack institutionalized forums within which these fundamental disagreements can be systematically explored and charted, let alone there being any attempt made to resolve them." Academic philosophy fares no better because it turns out "by and large to provide means for a more accurate and informed definition of disagreement rather than for progress toward its resolution." Professors of philosophy disagree with one another as much as anyone else about basic moral questions; thus the pursuit of neutrality in university teaching has confronted students with "an apparent inconclusiveness in all argument outside the natural sciences, an inconclusiveness which seems to abandon him or her to his or her prerational preferences" (MacIntyre 1988: 2, 3, 5–6, 400).

MacIntyre sees the paradoxical tension between the simultaneous presence of emotivist practices and the forms of rational moral argument as the central fact about contemporary culture that needs to be understood historically. He thinks that the very existence of this paradox should make us suspicious; it suggests that our inherited moral vocabulary may once have allowed for the resolution of moral disagreements. Hence his dual thesis is that the philosophical tradition we have inherited did once make moral agreement possible and that it has since been eroded so as to generate our current paradoxical circumstances. It is as if a cataclysmic revolution destroyed our normative tradition at some point in the distant past,

and all that remains are fragments of it, without the unifying assumptions that gave them their coherence as a tradition.^[10]