Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre | Hacker News Reader

Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre

wordonfire.org

139 pointsdanielam68 comments

The MacIntyre piece I read first and got the most from is "Hegel on Faces and Skulls". It explains Hegel's critique of physiognomy and phrenology, which is about what we can and cannot learn about someone by looking at them. Said another way, the difference between expressions and physical traits. I think about it a lot whenever I see claims made about facial recognition systems, and in my day job working on motion capture.

Yes, this is still the most persuasive and concise argument I’ve encountered against a whole host of forms of biological reductionism, including those based on modern fmri techniques.

For the Chesterton buffs here, I will mention an essay of GKC's, which you can find at http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/alarms_and_discursions.html#.... It concludes

"I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know whose are imbecile."

I recommend some of his other works: Whose Justice, Whose Rationality and Dependent Rational Animals.

It’s rewarding to seem him attempt a reconciliation between some modern epistemologies and Augustinian Thomism. I’m not sure he really pulls it off but his stature as a thinker in moral philosophy is undeniable.

Also his very late work, ethics in the conflicts of modernity is often looked over for his older ones but is probably my favorite.

After Virtue is his most important work, I think, but the above titles are the logical follow-ups to read next.

I am not Roman Catholic anymore, but I read After Virtue shortly after I graduated from college and it fundamentally changed my moral worldview for the better. I owe him a great debt.

Requiescat in pace.

What would you consider yourself now, spiritually, if not Catholic?

To paraphrase Ricky Jervias (and probably Richard Dawkins before him)...

He just believes in one fewer gods now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SGOGH5-SCA

Eastern Orthodox Christian. After Virtue is not a specifically Roman Catholic work, even though MacIntyre started slowly agree with its Aristotelian ethical system, and I still recommend the book to anyone willing to put in the work to understand it.

Thank you brother

"Aristotle, not Nietzche."

I read After Virtue while in college and suffering something of an existential crisis. That book really challenged me to shift my thinking on purpose and meaning. It holds great value to me on a personal level. Thank you, Professor MacIntyre.

I certainly see a through line between Chesterton and After Virtue. As a certified Heretics Enjoyer I'm sold.

"Being asked to die for the nation state is like being asked to die for the telephone company."

-Alasdair MacIntyre

RIP

After Virtue was one of my favorite books, and it helped me get started learning about the history of ideas. I knew he was getting older, but I'm saddened to see him pass. In college, I had hoped that I could meet him one day. Rest in peace.

I disagree with MacIntyre about a lot, both in theology and political philosophy, but I respect him for having tried to engage with both Nietzsche and the french philosophers heavily influenced by him as well as sticking by his egalitarian ethics even after the successful revolt of Reagan and the yuppies.

'When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.”'

> every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post

As the joke from the 00s went - in other news, Cisco has become today the first company to close its doors because all its employees cashed out their stock options and quit.

That is, hanging rich persons from the lamp posts is probably not the maxim that would resonate well on the HN :)

On average I think it has changed some in later years. I don't see as much eugenics and far-right apologia as I used to.

You think the majority of the HN is now in favor of hanging the rich from the street poles?

How did I give that impression?

Thanks to the poster: I remembered that a local bookstore might still have a copy of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and have ordered it.

“After Virtue” annoys me because it basically argues that morality only makes sense within cultural traditions, as if we’re all just trapped in our local narratives with no access to universal truths. MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices—like slavery, misogyny, or human sacrifice—and calling those ‘virtuous’ just because they fit a narrative feels like moral relativism in disguise.

I get that modern ethics can feel fragmented, but the answer isn’t to retreat into tribalism or pretend reason can’t give us shared values across cultures.

Just because some people are bad at finding moral clarity doesn’t mean it’s impossible or meaningless.

How can reason give us shared values across cultures? Why do you suppose your moral clarity was generated from your brain and not your gut?

That's what the field of philosophy is about. I think, for instance, utilitarianism makes a lot more sense than "follow whatever your birth community historically does."

I dunno. Utilitarianism sounds nice on the surface—how can you be against the greatest good for the greatest number?—but it’s pretty under-specified (hedonic or preference? act or rule? do you discount future beings’ utils, and at what rate?) and if you take any particular specification seriously you get moral claims that are wildly counterintuitive, like “insect suffering is orders of magnitude more important than heart disease in humans” or “there may be quadrillions of sentient beings in the far future, and making their lives 1% better is a better use of resources than eradicating malaria now” or “it’s morally justified to steal billions of dollars of other people’s money to give to pandemic prevention and AI safety.” And maybe these are correct claims, but they definitely don’t align with many people’s moral intuitions, and it’d be a tall task to convince those people.

How did you come to this hedonic position?

MacIntyre wrote in response to the failures of utilitarianism and deontology, and certain responses to that, so you'd better have arguments for utilitarianism that top those he knew about.

You've also clearly misread him. His argument is that morality is inherently social and good morals necessarily dependent on a good society. To show how deeply connected morals and society are he opts for the use of descriptions of historical societies, because superstition and fantasy alone, like math or thought experiments, just aren't good enough for him. In this he agrees with Marx and disagrees with parts of the analytic tradition in philosophy.

Specifically in After Virtue he also uses such examples to show that the ethics of a society might carry little moral weight, and that some historical societies were better at understanding and teaching morals than his own, in particular the philosophical ethics of the Enlightenment, i.e. deontology and utilitarianism.

If you actually have an argument for why the napkin math morals and disregard of freedom at the center of utilitarianism would be the pinnacle of human ethics I'd really like to hear it.

Often people are justifying moral systems that make sense overall but contain individual values that are grandfathered in, but maybe don’t make as much sense as the rest. There is a resistance to the kind of clarity that could force you to question some traditional values. Slavery is a good example to think about.

I think that's why I find his later works more compelling, particularly "Dependent Rational Animals," in which he grounds traditions in human telos. There are aims or goods which are common and transcend social constructs. After Virtue suffers from a great premise but doesn't quite stick the landing.

> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized.

-- Richard Taruskin [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...

Yes, for instance, I think its fine if people who support hurting other innocent people are marginalized.

That doesn't actually solve the problem, it simply moves the debate into what constitutes innocence and hurting.

> MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices

What makes you think that? A huge part of After Virtue (basically the whole part, after the initial diagnosis of where we are now and how we got here) is about how to construct and understand communities that might provide a shared idea of human good without simply going back to an Athenian idea of what that looks like. In fact if I were to summarize the book in a nutshell I would argue its an attempt to rehabilitate Aristotelian ethics without simply accepting Aristotle's own moral percepts.

Different cultures have a lot in common and so do their morals. Culture is not arbitrary; it always has a grounding in universal human needs and features as well as somewhat variable factors such as environment.

I think there is a difference between there being a universal moral Truth (ontological) vs. a particular individuals ability to know that universal (epistemological). The former doesn't necessarily imply the latter. Rejecting the latter (the ability to know) doesn't require rejecting the former (the universal).

If one considers that these two are decoupled, it poses a question: how could one live in alignment to a universal truth that one cannot know. It makes me wonder, can we find meaning without certainty.

Even in this age of the rejection of religious dogma, I tend to notice that people still want to cling to certainty. They are certain there is no morality (nihilism) or they are certain that morality can be found either in the study of nature (through empiricism) or reason (through rationalism).

I hardly ever see anyone suggest that they humbly do not know.

Most people never introspect their own moral beliefs enough to even consider their validity.

I am very confused by these claims, because MacIntyre was exactly opposed to relativism, and emotivism, which he saw as characteristic of the hollow shell of modern morality [0]. He acknowledges Nietzsche's criticism of the farce of Enlightenment morals. He appealed to telos as the objective basis for ethics and morality and in that book advocated for return to Aristote.

Perhaps you misunderstand what culture is. It isn't some kind of fiction we lay on top of reality that gets in the way of reality. It is a shared language of a people about reality and one that is not static, but hopefully developing, but at the very least changing. Science is itself a part of culture. You are born into a culture, which can be anything form pretty good to downright lousy, and the "dialogue" of this culture of a people with reality, and other cultures, moves the development of this culture.

Think of all the things you have learned in the scope of science. That aggregate of learning is culture. The presuppositions that science rests on is culture. This doesn't contradict the possibility of knowing the universal. Rather, it is through the cultural that you come to know the universal and through which you are better prepared to know it. We benefit from thousands of years of cultural dialogue. We cannot attain a very high understanding of reality without immersing ourselves in this dialogue of cultures spanning human history.

(Incidentally, as MacIntyre was a Catholic convert, one thing the Catholic Church makes possible is the existence of both the particularity of ethnos and the universality of the Church; "catholic" means "universal". A multiplicity of cultures sharing in the universal, avoiding both cultural parochialism and an alienated cosmopolitanism.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

You’re talking about the past. What locales (I can’t say communities) right now do not practice or tolerate as a matter of course any horryfying practices?

As an article in The Nation noted, ‘When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.”’

Now I want to know whose work McIntyre described as "the philosophical equivalent of Vogue".

Richard Rorty, whose humanism and love of democracy MacIntyre despised.

Over the course of his career, MacIntyre went from an extreme left Marxist to an extreme right Thomist, and the only constant was his hatred of liberalism. He really couldn't stand the idea that people could believe in rationalism, feel the moral force of individual rights, or make purpose and meaning for themselves, all without appealing to an authoritarian source of control.

> […] all without appealing to an authoritarian source of control.

Well that was partly what After Virtue was about: arguing it wasn't possible to have an objective moral system without the supernatural.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

And he's not the only one to hold this view (many atheists do as well):

* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/atheist-overreach-97...

You're left with either Nietzsche's arbitrary will, or virtues (à la Aristotle). For the latter, MacIntyre attempted to develop a system of morality (? ethics?) based on human biology:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/655623.Dependent_Rationa...

Once can certainly tell oneself that there is a certain purpose or meaning to one's life, but if you're a materialist, then (the argument goes (AIUI)) it's not true.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem

The arrangement of atoms is arbitrary and without meaning, and to call some arrangement(s) "good" or "bad" or better / worse is a value judgement that is just as arbitrary and meaningless.

Link dump at the ready.

> And he's not the only one to hold this view (many atheists do as well):

The author Christian Smith is apparently a Roman Catholic. What do you mean?

> Link dump at the ready.

Links to three books which I've read recently (some owned, some library), and a link to an overview of the topic which they cover.

> The author Christian Smith is apparently a Roman Catholic. What do you mean?

Whether he is or not, the book in question has numerous footnotes to people / philosophers who are atheists.

> Whether he is or not, the book in question has numerous footnotes to people / philosophers who are atheists.

“Many atheists do” (they are in the footnotes of this book written by a Catholic). That’s misleading.

Perhaps, but 20 years after Rorty's death, he's largely forgotten. I think it unlikely the same will be true of MacIntyre two-decades hence.

> Perhaps, but 20 years after Rorty's death, he's largely forgotten.

No, he's not. Not at all. Rorty has been and always will be more important, and more famous, than MacIntyre. This is not to insult MacIntyre, who was important within philosophical circles but not so much in the general public, except perhaps within religious groups, with which I'm not well acquainted.

Rorty's breadth of influence was also greater than MacIntyre's, ranging from "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" to "Achieving Our Country", addressing vastly different subjects and audiences.

Not to mention the huge posthumous bump that Rorty got for being labeled "The Philosopher who predicted Trump." There was even a new collection of his essays out in 2022 [0].

[0] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691217529/wh...

By who, people who want to tell themselves that they weren’t idiots/had their heads stuck in the sand for being blindsided by someone like Trump?

This is an odd take. Rorty is one of the major philosophers of the 20th century. MacIntyre is more obscure, probably unknown to plenty of academic philosophers.

My sense is that they're pretty comparably famous. I think MacIntyre gets a bit of extra press from people who like him for basically religious reasons (e.g., the OP's author bio begins by saying he's "the Honorary Professor for the Renewal of Catholic Intellectual Life at the Word on Fire Institute"). But I'd guess that most academic philosophers have heard of MacIntyre and could name at least one of his books.

I do agree that it seems very weird to call Rorty "largely forgotten".

(One pair of data points, from the person whose knowledge of such things I know best, namely myself. I am not a philosopher in any sense beyond that of having a bunch of books on philosophy. If you asked me out of the blue to name a book by MacIntyre, I would definitely remember "After Virtue", might remember "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?", and would not be able to think of any more. I could give you a crappy one-or-two-sentence summary of what AV is about (which would e.g. largely fail to distinguish his ideas about ethics from Anscombe's) but couldn't tell you much more about his work. If you asked me out of the blue to name a book by Rorty, I probably wouldn't be able to but would probably recognize a couple of his. I could tell you I thought he did important work in the general area of epistemology but not more than that. So to me MacIntyre is a bit more famous than Rorty. But my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative among not-really-philosophers, and probably quite a lot unrepresentative among actual philosophers.)

> So to me MacIntyre is a bit more famous than Rorty.

What you mean is that you know MacIntyre better than Rorty. To be famous is literally to be known about by many people, so there's no such thing as "famous to me".

I don't judge fame by my own familiarity, otherwise many obscure people would be "famous" and many famous people "unknown".

> But my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative among not-really-philosophers, and probably quite a lot unrepresentative among actual philosophers.

Indeed.

Yes, obviously strictly speaking "famous to me" makes no sense. On the other hand, you correctly understood what I meant, and I made it clear at the outset ("One pair of data points") and at the end ("my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative") that I understand that my own state of familiarity isn't anything like definitive and am not attempting to "judge fame by my own familiarity". So I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make that actually needed making.

I mean, if you want to complain about people making judgements of relative fame on insufficient evidence, fair enough. But I'm having trouble figuring out why my comment is the one that requires that complaint, when the other three people in this thread passing judgement on the relative fame of Rorty and MacIntyre (1) in no instance give any more evidence than I did, and (2) in fact give no indication at all of where their opinion comes from.

(I actually don't think I quite do mean "that [I] know MacIntyre better than Rorty", though I agree that that's the specific thing I gave a bit of kinda-quantitative evidence about. I think what I actually meant is more like "I have heard more about MacIntyre than about Rorty". That correlates well with who I know more about, for obvious reasons, and in this case it matches up OK, but there are philosophers I know more about than either but who I would consider less famous even with the yes-I-know-strictly-incorrect "to me" qualifier; for instance, I have read zero books by M. or R. but one by Peter van Inwagen, but I have hardly ever heard other people talking about him and I think I encountered his work while browsing bookshop shelves. I know Inwagen better than MacIntyre but I hear about MacIntyre much more often. Again, I admit that you couldn't reasonably have got that distinction from what I actually wrote; to whatever extent I'm offering a correction it's a correction of my previous unclarity, not of any perceived misunderstanding on your part.)

> So I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make that actually needed making.

My point is that the anecdotal data of one person is completely worthless. And for what it's worth (nothing), my own personal anecdotal data is the opposite of yours, so we cancel each other out. I would also note that the commenters on a MacIntyre obituary are an extremely biased sample.

> the other three people in this thread passing judgement on the relative fame of Rorty and MacIntyre (1) in no instance give any more evidence than I did, and (2) in fact give no indication at all of where their opinion comes from.

It's true that I've offered no empirical evidence for my claim. My objection to you is that you offered your own personal experience as a data point, whereas I did not, and indeed deny that my experience is data: "I don't judge fame by my own familiarity". I actually have no wish to get into a long argument about the relative fame of two persons and was mainly just reacting to the ridiculous, "20 years after Rorty's death, he's largely forgotten", which by the way was not supported with evidence either (and was not even numerically accurate, because Rorty died 18 years ago). In any case, another commenter did mention how Rorty has entered into the wider culture in at least one respect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074114

The value of one person's anecdata is in fact not zero. I agree it's small. That's why I festooned what I said with caveats about how my own experience need not be representative, etc., etc. But it's not zero, which is why I thought it worth saying anything.

(Zero plus zero plus zero plus ... plus zero equals zero. But if you ask 1000 people and they all say "I've heard of X but not of Y" or "I've heard of them both but heard more about X than about Y" then you have, in fact, got pretty good evidence that X is more famous than Y. Even if they're in the comments on an article about X, which of course I agree will give you a biased sample.)

Anyway, I think this argument is taking up something like 10x more space than it actually deserves and don't propose to continue it further.

> The value of one person's anecdata is in fact not zero. I agree it's small.

It's less than zero. It's negative. Taking a very biased, unrepresentive anecedote and presenting it as positive evidence for some conclusion is fallacious and misleading. It's worse than presenting no data at all. You should have no confidence in a broad conclusion based on an anecdote.

> But if you ask 1000 people and they all say "I've heard of X but not of Y" or "I've heard of them both but heard more about X than about Y" then you have, in fact, got pretty good evidence that X is more famous than Y. Even if they're in the comments on an article about X, which of course I agree will give you a biased sample.

I couldn't disagree more. If you ask 1000 randomly selected people, that's pretty good evidence, but it's not good evidence if the sample is highly biased.

He didn’t write as if he hated liberalism. Maybe he did. But in his work you get deep, principled critique from the basis of epistemology and selfhood.

Lenin wrote like someone who hates liberalism. Stephen Miller gives that vibe from the right, though I doubt he can write anything coherent at all.

Excellent -- thanks! Do you know where/when he said it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_MacIntyre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

Reply on news.ycombinator.com