Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

I didn't find this book as engaging as "After Virtue." If you have not read "After Virtue," I would start there first, and then move to "Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry" and then to "Dependent Rational Animals." If you want more, then move to "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" My bias is classical liberal, pro-market and anti-state, but always with tension with a more communitarian/Thomistic approach which MacIntyre gives. He does not get economics, however, and true to his Marxist roots, for example, he indicates that Aquinas "held a version of the labor theory of value," that the Summa to support that "exorbitant prices" are theft, that capitalism is incompatible with St. Thomas, in pp.199-200. In truth, Aquinas has a rudimentary understanding of prices as being the result of the subjective value of the buyer, an idea later fully developed by his followers, the Late Scholastics of Salamanca. Still, you will find great Thomistic nuggets in "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?"

Haven't gone through much of the book, but I like how it starts, and I believe it will be a great read.

Excellent book and a great seller.

Excellent, must read follow up to After Virtue. Adding another twenty required words to this review will not make either the review or the book any better than it already is.

This is a review of _Whose Justice? Which Rationality?_ by Alasdair MacIntyre.This is a very challenging book to read, but also one that will deepen your thinking about the world, whether you agree with it or not.We largely take it for granted that (1) people disagree significantly about a wide range of issues related to ethics, and that (2) people do not agree about enough standards of rationality to resolve these ethical disagreements. MacIntyre puts this by saying that "logical incompatibility and incommensurability" both obtain (p. 351). What conclusion should we draw from these facts? One common response is relativism, which is roughly the view that the truth or falsity of a claim depends on the perspective from which it is evaluated. However, MacIntyre argues against relativism based on a brilliant reinterpretation of several major Western philosophical traditions.The Western Englightenment (of which Descartes is paradigmatic), rejected appeals to tradition, canonical texts and authority, and attempted to put in their place the "appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person," and hence independent of culture, history, etc. "Yet both the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors proved unable to agree as to what precisely those principles were which could be found undeniable by all rational persons" (p. 6). Since the Enlightenment, most Western thinkers have either (1) continued to search for principles that are universally acceptable to all minimally rational humans (and continued to fail in this quest), or (2) given up on the quest for universal principles of reason, but -- paradoxically -- continued to assume the Enlightenment prejudice that any rational justification would have to be universal, ahistorical, and acultural.MacIntyre suggests that neither approach has learned the lesson of the failure of the Enlightenment project, which is that any rational justification has to be parochial, historical and in a particular cultural context.Since rational justification must be historical, the bearers of justification are not "theories" in the abstract, but embodied traditions. MacIntyre examines four sample traditions in this book (although he admits there are many more): the Aristotelian-Thomistic, the Augustinean, and those of the "Scottish Enlightenment" and modern liberalism.Traditions like these can undergo "epistemological crises": situations in which a tradition, by its own standards, increasingly discloses "new inadequacies, hitherto unrecognized incoherences, and new problems for the solution of which there seem to be insufficient or no resources within the established fabric of belief" (p. 362). A tradition may find a way to survive such a crisis (as Thomas Aquinas helped Christianity to do by synthesizing Augustineanism and Aristotelianism), but it may also fail. And because the possibility of failure is there, relativism is false: a tradition can come to see that its claims are false even by its own standards.Even if my tradition is not in an obvious crisis, I can realize that I have a rational justification for rejecting or modifying it. Suppose I am confronted with an alien intellectual tradition which is both incompatible and incommensurable with my own. Because the two are incompatible, I cannot simply agree with both traditions. But because of incommensurability, I cannot directly convince the adherents of the rival tradition that they are wrong (nor can they directly convince me). I can, however, learn to be "bilingual" in the two traditions. The Aristotelian can learn, for example, to "speak Confucian," as it were. Having done so, he occupies a special perspective, from which he may conclude that the Confucian worldview offers a superior interpretation of the strengths and weaknesses of his own tradition. Or he may conclude the opposite. Or he may conclude that some sort of synthesis is possible, which is superior to either one individually. For this reason also, relativism is not true, despite the fact that traditions are, when speaking one to the other, incommensurable: someone occupying one tradition *can* see that his views are fundamentally mistaken.MacIntyre argues that, of the four traditions he considers in this book, three have entered inescapable epistemological crises, while one (the tradition of Thomas Aquinas) has answered all challenges so far. The bulk of the book is a history of the four traditions. If you want to get the outline of MacIntyre's view, I recommend chapters 1 (the intro), 7-8 (on Aristotle), 9 (on Augustine), 10-11 (on Aquinas's synthesis), 16 (on Hume), 17 (on liberalism), and 18-20 (MacIntyre's grand theory).This is, of course, an easier book to read if you have read some previous philosophy (Thomas Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ is in the background of much of what MacIntyre says, even though he doesn't cite Kuhn very often), but a bright, motivated non-philosopher can read and greatly enjoy this book too.

MacIntyre continues the amazing intellectual work he began in After Virtue by examining four paradigms of practical reasoning, their history, and most importantly, their incompatibility. MacIntyre looks at the Homeric and Aristotelian tradition; the Biblical and Thomist; Hume’s theory of passion; and the modern privileging of individual market choice. He observes that each views the individual who is wanting to make a moral decision in a different social capacity that determines how they will make that moral choice. The Aristotelian considers the individual qua a voting (i.e. male landowning) citizen in a specific polis; that is, moral theory does not consider women, slaves, or persons outside the city. The Thomist tradition of course considers the individual in light of God’s commandments; now moral responsibility is extended equally to every person on Earth under one moral law. Hume, who argued that only passions ruled moral decisions and the only goal of moral decision was to protect the satisfying of those passions without bloodshed, considers the individual qua noble landowning citizen. As MacIntyre observes, this means that what was formerly considered the vice of greed (pleonexia) has now been transformed into a capitalist virtue. And this individualist capitalism led to modernity, in which each individual makes a choice qua individual, and passions no longer need to be regarded but are a de facto right of the individual in the marketplace.MacIntyre’s depth of reading (particularly in obscure texts that support his argument) is staggering and his writing clear and occasionally humorous. I was most struck by his observation that extending the moral law in the Thomist tradition protects the poor and oppressed in a way that neither Aristotle nor Hume support – Aquinas says that if you have to steal bread to feed your family, that is moral! Likewise, MacIntyre does a provocative job of illustrating how Hume’s theory of passions (with which I have been mostly sympathetic) is based on the notion that the best people are rich, classy, landowning Englishmen (Hume explicitly rejected his Scottish heritage because it wasn’t classy enough). Poor people have nothing to be proud of from a Humean view. And MacIntyre finally characterizes modernism accurately as pretending to be objective when in fact it is just another socially constructed tradition like Aristotle or Aquinas, one which allows the principles of the marketplace to make moral decisions for the individual – even if the individual thinks they are making decisions themselves. MacIntyre’s observations about what it takes to make a good ruler and a good society are painfully necessary in the vicious political cycle in which we find ourselves in postmodern global capitalism. Those of us who subscribe to a tradition that does value the poor and oppressed would do well to read this history. Recommended for philosophers, theologians, and graduate students of philosophy and theology in particular.