PREVIEW-Episode 59: Alasdair MacIntyre on Moral Justifications

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 59 is something like what justifies ethical claims? And we read Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue from 1981, chapters 1 through 7 and 14 18. You can join the discussion, get the text, read lots of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmeier talking to you from Medicine, Wisconsin.

0:37 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:39 Wes: This is Wes Allwin in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:44 Wes: So we gave up the funny intros is that they come and go.

0:47 Mark: They will be all the more unpredictable by the fact that they are sometimes there and sometimes not.

0:52 Seth: Okay, this has not been a week for funny intros.

0:55 Mark: For me, this book has slain us. It has made us lethargic, beaten down.

1:00 Wes: It's quite a book.

1:01 Seth: Yes, I got food poisoning this week. That was fun.

1:05 Mark: Which chapter did you get that from? I should say to the listeners that you might want to listen to episode 58 before this one, as that is where we covered the very beginning of the book and a couple of other readings that the book is reacting to. I think we will still have to review enough of that that you'll still get a pretty whole picture of the book from what we're going to say tonight, though.

1:26 Seth: Yeah.

1:27 Wes: Also, you could look at any podcast that's related to the entire history of Western philosophy as a prerequisite for this.

1:36 Mark: It's a very broad book. It mentions every chapter, mentions what, at least three or four figures from very disparate traditions.

1:45 Dylan: Everything from painting to writing to cooking.

1:47 Seth: Right.

1:48 Wes: Really?

1:48 Mark: I don't remember painting and cooking.

1:50 Seth: I'm not sure.

1:50 Wes: Oh, there's a lot of paint, portrait painting stuff, cooking. I don't remember.

1:56 Dylan: Well, there isn't a deep analysis of it.

1:58 Wes: So the Julia Childs chapter, the Internal Joy of Cooking.

2:03 Seth: It's the intelligible actions. That's what. Yes, cookbooks are examples of intelligible actions such as would make analytic philosophers drool.

2:12 Mark: Ah, well, to maybe briefly review last time, Mr. McIntyre says the state of ethical discourse today is incoherent, that we are using terminology that we inherited from bygone eras in which the people that initiated it had assumptions that we no longer share. So that when we now say things like this is good or this is right, we're more or less talking nonsense. We're pushing our own opinions, our own ungrounded sentiments on others. But that's not the way ethics has to be. It's not the way it should be. And if we would have just stuck to how the ancients dealt with it back to the age of Aristotle, there's something crucial there that has been lost.

2:52 Wes: Now, specifically, there's a tension in contemporary ethical discourse. On the one hand, it seems merely like an expression of preference and there are these interminable debates, and on the other hand there are gestures towards there being these objective standards. But the objective standards historically that we try to rely on after Aristotle have failed.

3:14 Dylan: Well, in particular, post Enlightenment.

3:16 Wes: Right, yeah, yeah. The Enlightenment rejection of Aristotelian teleology is what led to this problem. And a lot of the book is of course, the sketching out of this history of moral theory and how the rejection of Aristotelian teleology led to all these problems with establishing objective standards and then different attempts which successively failed.

3:37 Mark: Right. So now even the questions we ask in moral discourse, he thinks are just kind of wrong headed. That we approach ethics as something like how do we justify ethical claims? We think that this is good or this is right is a claim that should be true or false in any given case. And if we got a theory that would enable us to cover all of the possible cases, then we could apply that theory to this particular case and then you and I would both agree on the particular outcome and we'd be able to make consistent laws and all that kind of stuff.

4:04 Dylan: And he thinks that's just total baloney. More than that, he thinks that is a gross misunderstanding of the way ethical claims work. And it seems to me that's part of what his book is trying to establish. He certainly points us back towards Aristotle, but he doesn't do so in a simplistic way of saying, well, we should just all become Aristotelian in a particular sense. It has to do with the way you understand what moral arguments are or the existence of moral facts, what she wants to say exist. They're contingent, they're a product of our cultures, but nonetheless that doesn't mean that they don't exist. In fact, one of his deep criticisms goes to. I guess this is what he would mean by the teleology, that we can of course have our facts embedded in our histories and that does not make them non factual.

4:55 Wes: Well, let's look at his rejection of Hume's radical separation between ought and is, because that's really what teleology amounts to here. And a lot of this is in chapter five. He touches on it elsewhere. But for Hume, with merely factual premises, you can't ever derive anything that's normative or evaluative. So you can't make general claims about human beings or human nature and then get to some sort of evaluative claim as a result of that. So, for instance, you couldn't say that it's human nature to be compassionate towards others, therefore compassion is a good thing, let's say. But as MacIntyre points out, there are concepts which are functional or have normative content built in. So for instance, the idea of a watch, if you said a watch is too heavy to carry around and doesn't keep good time, then MacIntyre's idea is that it would be legitimate to derive the conclusion that it's a bad watch. And in a sense, the concept of a watch has some sort of normal normative content, even though what we say about a watch is factual. So there you get this idea that there are facts about the world which sort of have normativity or value built into them. And that's related to this Aristotelian concept of teleology or of there being certain kinds of beings, organisms especially, that have ends built into them by virtue of. Well, for Aristotle was biology, we'll see. That's different with MacIntyre. But by virtue of their structure, they tend to certain ends or goals, as a matter of fact.

6:26 Dylan: And this distinction between fact and value that MacIntyre points to, being at the center of the Enlightenment, is sort of one of the main touchstones for what he sees as just being the problem. I think you made a nice summary there, Wes. It's directly related to the ought and is question. Our facts involve values. So in a funny way, he completely embraces something like a postmodernist view that everything is values.

6:52 Wes: Well, it's unclear whether everything is, because Hume's argument is just that if there are non normative premises, you can't derive normative conclusions. So really, MacIntyre, even though he kind of purports to challenge that, it's not really a challenge to that idea. MacIntyre is saying, well, actually many premises that are purportedly non normative actually are normative. And it could be the case, like Dylan, you're right, some will claim that, well, any supposedly purely factual sentence is actually normative to some degree. So that's one route you could go. So he doesn't really address that.

7:24 Seth: But yeah, I thought what MacIntyre was saying in this section was that the concepts that we have of objects, like the concept of A watch or the concept of a farmer has implicit in it the concept of what it means to be a good watch or a good farmer, because there's a notion of what exactly a watch is supposed to be good for or what a farmer is supposed to be good at. The context in which he brought it up around Hume was that he's saying the issue is that with Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition all the way through, up until Pascal, there was a notion of that human beings had that same kind of conceptual. There was something it meant to be a good human being. And then we lose that at some point. That's what that example is, I thought.

8:05 Wes: Meant to tease out or it becomes incoherent. Yeah, yeah. And Dylan was pointing out that one might make the argument that any concept involves the idea of what it means to be a good ex. Anytime you're talking about something which is some contemporary philosophers have, and not just postmodernists but pragmatists have made that sort of claim.

8:25 Dylan: He doesn't talk about Quine very much, but he does bring him up in terms of the refutation of empiricism and the theory ladenness of concepts. And I sort of wish he had talked more about that because it seems to me that he's doing something like that in his criticism of, well, the whole Enlightenment, but also in particular emotivism, that he's considering them kind of the radical empiricists of ethical philosophy and making a go at them in that respect.

8:54 Wes: We should point out that this is kind of a surprising sort of claim. The idea that we're going to get some sort of return to Aristotelian teleology, which is widely rejected, especially because of modern science. So it's rejected not just by Hume, but by most contemporary philosophers. And MacIntyre knows that. So it's kind of a tough road to hoe.

9:11 Speaker: Right.

9:11 Mark: And his elaboration, this is mostly in chapter seven, of exactly what's wrong with the science is very underdeveloped, I think. So chapter seven is where he gets right at the distinction between facts and values. And he thinks really the concept of fact as we consider it now, something that just really came up in the 17th, 18th century, and it assumes that the observer can confront a fact face to face without any theoretical interpretation interposing itself. So that beforehand, not that they would have thought of this, not the people before them, were all postmodernists and thought that the subjective is interminably bound up with the objective, but just the way that they use claims had this element. It did not have it sort of broken out in that way. And in fact, when I initially hear the examples you were giving about the farmer or the watch, the analytic part of me wants to say, okay, well, so there's a normative component and there's a descriptive component in there, and we can take them apart and so then say, yes, there is a normative premise there. At least he's going to want to say, I think that that's arbitrary for us to say, oh, well, the basic situation is really the normative component distinguished from the descriptive component. There's no actual justification for that. That this is sort of getting at another one of those things in our Saussure episode, that what we consider the basics of language, or this is in the Nelson Goodman one as well, is culturally dependent. That for them, man as something with a normative component built in. For the ancients, that was the basic. And to say that they really were using this complex thing that is a little historically ignorant is imposing our current schema upon the past.

10:46 Dylan: Well, in fact, I think he would argue, and says as much in several places that this is just factually wrong, that to understand that a human being is something absent the culture of human beings is just to misunderstand fundamentally what a human being is, to try to understand a person, a man, mankind, humankind, a human being, an individual, any of those things outside of the notion of culture as well, and by proxy the notion of the history that led to it. And that embeddedness, he says, is just wrong.

11:22 Mark: Well, how does that relate exactly to teleology? Because that's less clear that you can say, yeah, of course, human beings are in a culture and have a history and all this, but that doesn't mean there's an objective good that each human being is supposed to obtain or anything like that.

11:35 Wes: Well, we'll see later on that the culture and tradition and social role are meant to provide what the good is for the individual to some extent. Right.

11:44 Dylan: And I think we have to be really careful about layering too much on teleology as being a single univocal thing, because while he doesn't want to admit genuine plurality, his discussion of virtue has more to do with understanding what virtues are and also understanding that virtues provide guidance. But he's very clear that there is disagreements about what virtues are and therefore what constitutes a good person.

12:14 Wes: This is where he sees a difference between himself and Aristotle. And he goes into this in chapters 14 or 15. But yeah, right.

12:22 Dylan: The focus of the teleology is on the notion that we are individual actors that are goal oriented. And I think you can. And he does make the much softer claim that it's not a directedness, like being yanked around by a chain. And that's in some ways an Enlightenment misunderstanding of teleology, that the teleology is not mechanical. And so when you read it through Enlightenment language, then you just misunderstand even what Aristotle meant by a directedness. And that as individual actors, we have goals.

13:00 Wes: I don't think it's enough for an account to be teleological to say that we have goals.

13:05 Seth: I think it's around page 52 or in that section. He characterizes the Aristotelian moral schema as requiring man as he happens to be and then man as he could be if he realized his essential nature. And he says this requires three essential elements. The potentiality to act, an account of the essence of man as rational, because that's what's required to recognize what your essential nature is. And then a telos, which is the, I think, the essential nature itself. And that these three elements are the key parts to the Aristotelian moral philosophy, at least outlaid in Nicomachean ethics. And his claim is that this view of ethics, if you will, as the movement from the untutored state to the realized telos, which is uncovered through reason, persists through the Scholastics. I think he says it breaks with Protestantism and something called Jensenite or Jensenist Catholicism.

14:10 Wes: So what is the aristunge conception of teleology? Let's try and explain it. Because it's largely biological. Right.

14:16 Dylan: Which is something Aristotle for sure, which

14:18 Wes: is where MacIntyre will differ.

14:20 Mark: Yeah, it's biological, but also social because of Aristotle's unitary, layered view of the relationship between the individual and society, that not only do we as individual organisms have sort of an objective good, that we are growing toward just in the way that a plant does. And you can see, oh, that plant is growing strong and healthy. You can see that animal is vibrant and healthy and running fast and doing what it's supposed to do. Well, we have our own nature like that. But part of that nature is also being social, that we are a social animal. So that's a big break, according to MacIntyre, between Aristotle and modern liberalism, which would look at the same kind of thing. If you look at, say, Ayn Rand, who explicitly says, yes, Aristotle's great. That's what I want us to be. But she interprets that entirely as an individual, as a selfish individual, that the society is only going to suck you down. Whereas for Aristotle it's essential that friendships and these reciprocal relationships and all this is feeding into what the individual good is.

15:23 Wes: Let's focus on being a plant and then we'll have friends after that. I think the example of being a plant is good because the simpler example really helps to explain the concept of teleology here, which is that there's some function that's built in so that we can tell when a plant is unhealthy, for instance, because the way the organism is structured, it's striving to do certain things even if something fails. And the plant is, let's say, failing to take in nutrition from the soil or something like that, its roots are failing. Let's say we can look at the structure of the whole organism and see that that particular function is important to the tendency of the whole, which is to survive and to reproduce. So in a way we can establish what looks like an evaluative claim or normative claim by saying, yeah, something's wrong with the plant, there's something bad here because this part is not in accordance with the telos of the whole. Natural scientists might say, well, you can look at that in two ways. You can look at that as there being a telos built in, or you can just say, we're not going to make any claims about what's good or bad here. It's just either the thing tends to reproduce and survive or it doesn't. And there's a further normative. As Mark was trying to point out earlier, you might, in your analytic or modern science point of view, try and tease out the normative from the purely factual claims. But for Aristotle it looks like you want to combine those into a single fact about the plant.

16:47 Dylan: It seems to me that Aristotle probably would be not as fundamentally Darwinian as the way you put it.

16:54 Wes: No, he talks about survival and reproduction.

16:56 Dylan: I think he probably means more than

16:59 Wes: not for a plan. I mean, he builds up the plan example. There are certain functions to a plan and then you get to animals and there's a further. There's a social element to many animals and then you get to human beings and you add reason.

17:11 Mark: Are you saying that the well developed plant is green and beautiful and things like that, where that's not strictly a Darwinian, we might say from a point of view of reproduction, that's a secondary.

17:20 Wes: Well, you know, I'm going on very old memory here, but there's the nutritive function of the plant and then there's the. What's the other?

17:27 Mark: I Thought nutritive is the only one the plant had.

17:29 Wes: Maybe the point of that is to keep being. So we don't have to say survival if that sounds too Darwinian, but the plant is trying to continue being what it is, or it's working to be what it is. The idea is that there's a tremendous. When you look at an organism like that, it seems like it's not merely some sort of passive thing which just continues existing by virtue of some sort of inertia. There's actually a tremendous amount of work that goes into something sustaining its own existence, being what it is. And that work tends towards that goal of keeping it existing, let's say, and keeping its species existing, which is where the reproduction comes in. So the species level is also important here. For Aristotle, species was a little bit different, of course, than for Darwin.

18:08 Dylan: So that notion of having activity, intrinsic activity and potential, that that activity will both be constantly realizing and trying to actualize. This is all very Aristotelian language. Just saying that an entity like a plant has certain potentials that when they are fully actualized, will result in the plant as being most in its essence. And it's not that you couldn't have a plant that was stunted in some way. You could have a tree that was planted too close to a building and did not flourish. And it's still that oak tree. Right. But it's not the quintessential example of a fully flourishing oak tree.

18:51 Wes: It hasn't actualized its full potential. So, yeah, say it falls in bad soil and it's. Yes, but it's still striving to. There's a sense in which the work. You could examine the organism and look at what its functions are and what it's doing, and you would see what it's trying to be. Even if its actual form is not the full, nice, big oak tree, you could determine that that's what it's tending towards. That's the telos.

19:14 Dylan: This will become central to his notion of politics, of what the proper function of the state is regarding the good of individuals and the good of the community.

19:25 Wes: Yeah. As Mark was pointing out. So the plant is just where we begin. And then with human beings, we have to add on these different layers. And the social and the political and the rational are important parts of what constitutes the human telos.

19:38 Mark: I don't want to go too much into Aristotle here.

19:40 Seth: Too late.

19:41 Mark: In fact, we already had.

19:42 Wes: I think we just wrapped that up.

19:43 Mark: Episode 5. Go back and listen to that on our Nicole Ethics. And then we'll have some more in upcoming episodes.

19:49 Wes: No, but that was a good summary. We don't just want to throw around the word talos all day without.

19:53 Mark: No, no, that's true. And I think the important thing to get out of this is whether there's any way, even on Aristotle's account, to look at telos as a purely descriptive matter, that, look, I observe a lot of trees and I see that they 10 to grow in this way, and so therefore that is the normal. And then I could say that by comparison, can't we look at. So a lot of modern people that don't have this teleological take might still say, oh, look at human nature, that humans tend to do best under these sort of conditions. So let's do that. I mean, it seems like that is not out of our conceptual ability. Whereas MacIntyre seems to be saying something fundamental was lost, that the notion of telos here was not something that the modern scientists could really be down with, that it involved some metaphysical component that involves something that is not just reading off the data.

20:44 Wes: From the modern standpoint, you can say that a plan is healthy or unhealthy, but it's an added step to say that that's good or bad. So if you say, well, of course normativity is built in because being healthy is better with human beings in terms of psychological health and so on, you could say, it's obvious what's healthy and not healthy, and we just have to look at that and then we see what's good or bad for us. But the point Hume or a contemporary might want to make is that it's an added step to say that being healthy is good and many people will not choose that. And they'll say, why should I do it? And that's where someone objecting to teleology might say that that account begins to fall apart.

21:20 Dylan: Well, it doesn't seem to me that Aristotle would fall victim to the criticism that just because somebody misunderstands or does not go towards their own good, that means that teleology, or his version of teleology, is wrong.

21:32 Wes: It's an assumption to say that it is their own good, or even most of them.

21:36 Mark: Again, you can tell with plants, sort of which ones are the flourishing, because that's the norm most of them get that way. If they have the regular normal conditions and are not deprived of light and all that stuff, then they'll get that way. Whereas humans, he wants to say, virtue is something a little bit rare, and that could be just because the proper conditions for it are rare, that you have to have a proper state. And that's really hard to achieve. But still there's something, especially if we're going to then try to apply that ourselves in the modern age. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different problems that come up with that that we'll get into. Certainly this outline we've given of Aristotle doesn't sound that different than some of the other more modern moral philosophers we've talked about. Somebody like a utilitarian that looks at us, oh, there's pain and pleasure, and isn't pleasure better than pain? And so therefore we've established something about human nature and therefore what's good for us, et cetera. But there's supposedly, according to MacIntyre, it's not that Aristotle and the modern person are equally wrong in deriving ought from is that there was something just fundamentally different conceptually in the way Aristotle and his contemporaries looked at this that we're missing now that made it correct for later people to, as you say, say you can't get ought from is. That's just because the notion of is has evolved linguistically, conceptually, whatever, over time.

22:54 Wes: Well, MacIntyre's claim, right. Is that the good for an organism is a fact about it.

22:58 Mark: He acknowledges one of the reasons that you've brought up in some past podcasts, like in the Nietzsche one, why we would reject this idea, health being good, and therefore we know what the good is. And there is virtue. Right? There is that goods are heterogeneous. There are too many different ways to live a life that seem attractive to us in certain guises.

23:19 Wes: Right? But he's still going with the idea that the good is a fact which is essential to teleology. He doesn't want to give up teleology. He's going to give a non biological account of teleology later based on narrative and all that stuff. But I don't think he wants to get away from the idea that the good is factual.

23:35 Mark: Right? But it's not based on biology because you are a human being, period. For Aristotle, there is a certain kind of good for you. Now, Aristotle does hedge that and say, well, maybe you're just a slave, maybe you're just fucked up and that good is not going to be available to you. But for the good specimens, it's sort

23:53 Dylan: of circular, that's perfectly consistent, right? I mean, that's no different than what we just said about a tree that's planted too close to the building.

24:00 Wes: Right? Right.

24:01 Mark: I'm not objecting to that one of

24:03 Wes: the important things to note here is that the good for each organism, right, is specified in relationship to its natural kind. So if that kind changes, its good changes. And so you get all sorts of problems with, you know, a sociopath might say, and a serial killer might say, well, your good is just different from mine. I'm constituted differently. And then you say to him, well, human beings have a characteristic good. They're usually structured in a certain way. If they follow that good, they'll do these sorts of things and have these sorts of virtues. And the sociopath might come back and say, well, actually, I'm structured a different way. Yes, I'm different from everyone else, but in a way I'm a different kind. And my good is different. And my good happens to involve going around slicing people up. So there are all sorts of problems that you get with trying to give this sort of teleological account. Establishing what's the natural kind is extremely important to the whole account. And if you don't believe in natural kinds, you begin to have problems. So I think Mark's mentioning of slaves is apropos there.

25:03 Seth: This is a much more extensive of Aristotelian virtue ethics and his teleology and biology than MacIntyre gives in the book.

25:12 Wes: I wish he had explained more of it. I mean, the entire book is vague on the details of teleology. Not just Aristotle's, but his own.

25:20 Mark: What did you take then, Seth? What's his modern picture? Can you sum it up for us? What's his replacement?

25:26 Seth: Well, sum up his replacement. Jump straight there. I think we ought to at least say, why the Enlightenment? He's got a chapter called the Failure of the Enlightenment Project. How do we get from there to there? The short answer is, when you have the advent of Protestantism and this Jensenist Catholicism somehow gets a little bit denuded, the scope and the bounds and the reach of reason get limited. And so reason is no longer able to determine what the true end of mankind or of a human being is. So if you can't discover your telos via reason, then you don't have a telos, essentially. And so what happens is that our beliefs become founded on nature, habit and custom. And it's basically that break in the chain to just go back and say that ethics is about the movement from your as is or untutored state through to your realized telos and essential nature. That if you cannot discover your essential nature and you try to base morality on human nature as opposed to striving towards your essential nature, then the project will ultimately fail. So he essentially says that the Enlightenment project fails because we no longer accept the idea that we are able to uncover something towards which we should strive.

26:46 Mark: Right. And he gives a lot of examples of different philosophers and he really makes this interesting connection between what we might think is locked up, ivory tower philosophy in the public sphere, that the sort of conflicts that philosophers were arguing over in the 17th and 18th century are being played out writ large in politics and social life among regular people. Now that he really sees a. Because it's the same cultural shift, it's going to be reflected in all levels. It's not just these cloistered philosophers arguing esoteric things amongst themselves. As you're saying, we ran out of resources to be able to give this direct connection between an analysis of human nature and our essential end. Because we got rid of essences, we got rid of final cause talk. All this stuff was from Aristotle and from a scientific point of view. I don't know. MacIntyre doesn't give enough in the book for us to judge this either way. But certainly there was good justification at the time that if you're trying to do science talk of final causes, in other words, the built in purposes, the telos in things just was not judged to be that useful. Because Aristotle would apply it to things in physics too. Right. Why does the rock fall when you drop it? Because it has earth and it wants to go down. And that just, just was rightly seen as something to be overcome. And I think MacIntyre is saying that it was wrong, that, you know, that might be right when you're talking about physics. But for us to think then that we could give an account of human behavior only referring to mechanistic considerations is fundamentally screwed up. And we can see that actually in the way the social sciences have evolved that we think that the Marxists and lots of others thought that you could give these empirical generalizations. Really economics is founded upon this assumption of how individual people and masses of people are going to behave. And McIntyre makes the point that these are all just still pretensions, that the social sciences have not come up with generalizations of a sort comparable to what chemistry and physics and stuff have come up with. And it's not just because they haven't gotten there yet, they're not going to.

28:52 Wes: Yeah, I just wanted to back up a little bit. I think the critical point is that the connecting link between human nature and morality requires telos and that if you get rid of that and you still try and derive morality from human nature, you get all sorts of problems. And that's really where the Enlightenment predicament comes from. You have Hume and others trying to derive morality from facts about human desires and passions, for instance, and then Kant comes along and tries to ground it in reason. And then there's utilitarianism. All of these are different, according to MacIntyre. Flailing attempts to establish a link between morality and human nature when the critical linking thing between those has disappeared. And that's telos, or teleology.

29:37 Mark: Right. Specific. It gives the picture of the end point of that actually points out to Henry Sidgwick, which is a guy that I read as part of the preparation for last time, of course, but who is a utilitarian after the more famous utilitarians. But he was really critical of the foundations. You know, why do we think the utility principle is stronger than others? And really, he came to the conclusion that really we just have a heterogeneous set of intuitions, that we don't have this unitary principle like the principle of utility, which if we try to come up with a more rigorous version of common sense morality, which is what all these guys were doing, Kant and Mill and them, we don't end up coming up with a unified theory or not. And so Sidgwick, who, as well as being a utilitarian, is in this tradition of intuitionists, to say ultimately there is no justification. It's just that we just know these things. And so the way that MacIntyre presents it is that Moore pretty much stole Sidgwick's viewpoint completely. But instead of presenting it as a failure, that Sidgwick has had such length going through and trying to find this, Moore presented this as a great, wonderful discovery that, no, you don't need all these theories. Those are not going to be supported by intuition. Its intuition does reflect more on individual instances of right and wrong or sort of low grade principles and the kind of stuff that he does in his Principia Ethica. That's why he thinks that More is the culmination, you know, more's take on Sidgwick of all this stuff that came before, of the failures of Kant, the failures of Hume, the failures of mill, etc. And then as we discussed in the last podcast, he thinks that Moore fails as well.

31:12 Seth: Yeah, there's another key point about him bringing in Sidric into the conversation and what he brings up in that section of the book about how this moral agent, who's now freed from the telos, conceives of himself as sovereign in his moral authority. And this is essentially the beginning, not just of intuitionism that ends up resulting in more, but also it's the beginning of the development or the full realization of the concept of an autonomous self, which MacIntyre is not a fan of.

31:44 Mark: Right. Liberal individualism.

31:46 Seth: Liberal individualism. He numerous times talks about the Sartrean completely free self with a certain amount of disdain.

31:54 Wes: Right. So ultimately, we're left with just choice, having to make a radical choice once all of these different solutions fails. And he traces that from Kant's attempt to ground morality in the individual's own rationality. The fact that we give ourselves these laws and then that breaks down. And we get Kierkegaard saying, well, it's just radical choice, and it's not even dependent on the sort of self law giving that Kant described.

32:20 Dylan: Are you referring to the choice that he puts between Nietzsche vs Aristotle or Nietzsche as being the culmination of this direction in general, that it's a sort of superhuman act of will that results in our choosing, our lives and our ethics?

32:36 Wes: Yeah, Nietzsche is one version of that existentialist motif. But in chapter four, for instance, we first get it with Kierkegaard, and we also get it with. With Sartre. But yeah, the idea is that we. So Kant, just to talk about his criticism of Kant, because this kind of grounds it. Kant was sort of like the last attempt to really solve this problem once telos has disappeared to ground morality, when it's really ungroundable, according to MacIntyre, without teleology. And Kant comes up with an ingenious solution, which is to say, well, what is moral is just what lends itself to our autonomy. And our autonomy is only possible through these universal laws that we give ourselves, much like the law of nature. And that's because to be not morally autonomous is to be subject to what he calls heteronomy, or being beholden to one's desires, for instance, and desires for objects outside of us. Well, if we're giving ourselves these universal laws, in that sense, we can be autonomous by obeying our own laws. And these laws, for Kant, derive simply from the fact of our being rational beings. Which is why MacIntyre will say he's really trying to do a human nature trick here, even though Kant doesn't think he's doing that right.

33:47 Mark: It's built into the structure of our will.

33:49 Wes: Yeah. Now MacIntyre says that fails. And once that fails, then it's get rid of the universal laws that we're legislating to ourselves and trying to conform with. Now we're Left with nothing. And so we simply have to make the choice without a grounds. And so that's where we get Kierkegaard and Sard and Nietzsche.

34:07 Mark: Well, I really liked his take on Kierkegaard. I think I agree with that, that he describes Kierkegaard as presenting this. You make this radical choice and Kierkegaard thinks you can choose the moral stance, you can choose to let something like Kantian maxims ground you. But for Kiergaard, it's such an individual thing. And this is where I connect MacIntyre to Wittgenstein. Think about Wittgenstein's private language argument, that if you by yourself are saying, now I'm going to obey the moral law, but you're just doing that by yourself, then, well, you could make that commitment in one second, but then if you contravene it the next second, what's the check on you doing that? It's not even clear that you're going to keep a consistent concept of the moral law in your head. As you say, I've submitted to the moral law. So according to MacIntyre, submitting to authority would have to be some kind of social act that you could say, I'm going to join a monastery and obey those laws. And that would make sense because then if you contravene, the other monks are going to say, nah, nah. But if you're truly doing it by yourself, then it's just like Wittgenstein's private language argument. Again, there's this shifting thing that undermines. You can't actually do that. It doesn't make any sense to have a solitary, complete choice dedicating yourself. That really Sartre's take on it, which is from moment to moment, you are making these choices and there's no check on it. That. That's much more accurate.

35:30 Wes: By the way, that's Mark's insight, not McIntyre for listeners. Right. He doesn't make that connection to Wittgenstein.

35:38 Dylan: He doesn't make that connection to Wittgenstein. But I think you're kind of.

35:40 Wes: I thought that was a great. That's a great point.

35:42 Mark: Philosophy bro said he was a Wittgenstinian. And so I was looking through this whole thing you were saying last time that he has no objection to more. And I actually looked up the quote where he gives his sort of non argument against more, which is on page 16. And he says of Moore, he tries to show that good is indefinable by relying on a bad dictionary definition of definition. And a great deal is asserted rather than argued. So you're right, Wes, that that's barely an argument. But it's very similar to my criticism of Moore at the beginning of last time, where he looks at the concepts, the way we use words, and derives a conclusion about the reality from that. So in the case of. More, it was once you say the good is pleasure or the good is what rationality tells you. Can't you still coherently ask the question, well, is what rationality tells you really good? So in other words, he's just looking at our conceptual intuitions and saying, well, they can't actually mean the same thing if our conceptual intuitions about them differ. In other words, the word, our notions about the concepts have to correspond to the truth about the reality. And that, according to Wittgenstein's take on what definitions are, that's not how they work at all. If you're going to talk about how we use the word good, you have to look at the particular language games in which that shows up, et cetera, et cetera. And I could read that exactly onto MacIntyre's take on this instead, that Moore is sort of trying to, like Mill and like the other philosophers, like Kant, trying to step outside time and look at our concepts and say, this is how reality is based that. Whereas MacIntyre is trying to teach us with this whole book, if nothing else, that we have to look at the history of the concepts. We have to look at how these have developed over time, what language games are implicit in them. Others, like the empiricists, like Hume, also give a genetic account. They say we have to look at sort of where we got the words, but they ignore the social aspect, that the contents of our heads are not our private things. These are public concepts that are floating around. So we need to look at their objective existence through time, apart from any particular subject.

37:47 Wes: Well, what MacIntyre is concerned about here, right, is where the ethical gets its authority from Mark, as you were just pointing out, he's going to say it gets its authority from the social. And so that's where Kierkegaard, getting back to the whole Kierkegaard and radical choice, where he's describing a character, make a choice between the ethical way of life and the aesthetic way of life. If you think morality comes down to that, you really undermined the authority of the ethical, which has to come from some external standard, which again for MacIntyre will be the social.

38:17 Dylan: The notion of an individual, moral person is a nonsensical notion. As far as Macintyre is concerned, whatever you mean by someone being moral involves their relationship to a culture or to other people. There's no way you could judge a person being moral just by themselves, even just by their actions, absent their culture and what they're embedded in.

38:43 Wes: So I guess that gets us to his positive account of the virtues. Right. So we're looking at later chapters now, 14 and onward, for MacIntyre's positive account of the virtues, where he gets into all this.

38:55 Dylan: Yeah. Have we said enough? We said why the Enlightenment fails. But if we said why that matters as far as MacIntyre is concerned, you know, if you say, well, it fails to give this grounding, you could say, well, so what? Big freaking deal. Aristotelian science is gone, right? Who cares?

39:13 Wes: Well, the idea is that it's like a testing ground for what happens when you get rid of teleology. Look at how these theorists flailed around trying to come up with an adequate moral theory. And so I think it's important in the sense that for MacIntyre, it gives you an example of how moral theory is inevitably going to be inadequate without the concept of teleology.

39:35 Dylan: For him, it's not just a philosophical argument like this. Right. For MacIntyre, he sees modernity as ill, and the reason is the Enlightenment. There are for him, genuine social problems that result from this in the way we understand ourselves and the way we relate to one another, and the persistent inability for us to resolve moral arguments. Not that we would have some kind of Eden where we have all moral arguments resolved, but the problems of overarching nihilism and anxiety about our existence and how that affects our relationships with each other and how it leads to a lack of flourishing of individuals. He lays at the feet of the Enlightenment.

40:22 Mark: Right. He says one of the outcomes of this is a loss of integrity of the self. We separate into roles and think, for instance, that morality is separable from bureaucratic effectiveness. Here's a quote, page 32. This democratized self, which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity, can then be anything, can assume any role or take on any point of view, because it is in and for itself, nothing. That's existentialism, Sartre's nausea and things. He thinks that if you do identify with your social roles, then you're in bad faith, that really, to be authentic, you need to somehow keep apart from that. But according to MacIntyre, that kind of existence, where you keep yourself apart from that leaves you groundless and sad.

41:05 Wes: Yeah. In the same chapter, he talks about. I think we talked about this last time, too, but the manipulative social relations that are implied by emotivism. So, for instance, his criticism of bureaucracy is that it's simply focused on effectiveness and the ends. You could have any ends. Right.

41:23 Mark: There's a conflict in that we're put in situations, like with our jobs, where we are supposed to use other people. That's kind of the way economics works, works. And our success at our jobs is kind of judged separately from ethical success, that we are just seeing. How many widgets did I sell? Whatever. The thing is, we're taking on these different roles. Well, now I'm a moral agent, but now I'm just doing my job. That that's part of what is ripping us apart. Since it's so essential to see ourselves, according to modern liberalism, as independent moral agents, then we really hate the fact when others try to manipulate us, yet our whole society is based on us manipulating each other through these economic relationships. Which is sort of where he's getting into the more Marxist strain in this book.

42:04 Dylan: And as a result of this, it becomes, step by step, more and more impossible for us to have conversations that lead to some kind of positive resolution about these things because of insisting on individual moral agents without there being an understanding and arguing about a cultural good. This is where he would get into his criticism of liberal individualism.

42:30 Mark: Yeah. You'd see a connection between that and the sort of philosophical politeness that many of our listeners would have with us and with each other of. Well, that's just. That's your opinion. This is my opinion. At best, we could be polite about it. But since these things sort of matter to us so much, in some ways, it's going to lead politically, say, to a horrible, irresolvable stalemate.

42:50 Wes: And the stalemate is typically between defenders of individual rights and liberties and then defenders of. I'm not going to use the phrase the communal good because I think even though it's typically seen as a conflict between liberalism and then something that's more communitarian, I think that MacIntyre sees this as a conflict within liberalism. So it's a conflict between rights and then the goods conferred by bureaucracies or entitlements, let's say redistributive justice versus libertarianism

43:21 Dylan: isn't liberty versus equality.

43:24 Mark: You're interpreting it as where the liberty would sort of be the conservative of our modern political wing and the equality would be the more liberal. Whereas I was reading it more as

43:32 Wes: the liberty and the equality go together. Actually, in this account, I think, yes,

43:35 Mark: it's arbitrary choices of individual or sovereign versus bureaucracy being sovereign. This is 1981 and he's looking at it as the hippie versus the system. And it doesn't quite map onto how things are now.

43:46 Wes: Well, later on, you know, he talks about Rawls and Nozick, and it's helpful just to think about it in terms of. Terms of redistributive justice, entitlements, and making sure everyone has the same sort of access to healthcare, let's say, or the same amount of wealth and so on and so forth versus an account where the individual rights are always respected. So the conflict there is that if you were redistributing wealth, for instance, you might think that that will end up violating someone's right to what they got.

44:14 Mark: Right. He gives that example at the beginning of the book and then at the end of the book to say both of these principles are fully rational. They come out of very reasonable premises, but yet they're totally incommensurable premises, one of which is this freedom that, you know, I should be able to do whatever I want with nobody stopping me as long as I don't hurt others or something. That sounds very reasonable. And, well, there should be fairness, you know, nobody should be screwed over by the system. Both of those sound very reasonable, but they're both because we don't have an underlying agreed upon moral framework. We have no way to rationally decide between the systems that that come out of those two disparate intuitions.

44:50 Wes: And often we're simply making compromises.

44:53 Dylan: Yeah, but that's the problem for MacIntyre. I mean, it's not a pissing contest between a bunch of philosophers about who is right and wrong for him. It's a real on the ground problem for our everyday lives and the kinds of society we live in and the kind of relations we have with one another.

45:12 Mark: So it's. Yes, it's directly related to this election. This is a current issue.

45:15 Wes: Yes.

45:17 Mark: Who would McIntyre vote for? How would he solve? How would he. He'd say the whole system is none of the above based on bullshit. Right. He says that if either side of these two.

45:27 Seth: Who's the Thomist candidate,

45:32 Mark: the consequences of a victory by one side or the other are, in the long run, intolerable.

45:39 Dylan: Okay.

45:40 Mark: All right. Any more about the fall? Seth, did you have any more fall sentiments that we didn't?

45:45 Seth: Okay, no, I just thought it was important to get that out before we went on to what I'm sure will be a highly contentious characterization of his positive point of view.

45:53 Dylan: Let's do it.

45:54 Wes: We should probably get to that.

45:55 Mark: Well, could I give the brief? So he continues, he says, again, to understand these things, you have to give the brief history. So I could give the very short version of the couple chapters that we didn't read, because I read them because I'm that cool.

46:07 Wes: All right, so Mark's Gonna Bridge chapters 8 or 9 to 13.

46:11 Dylan: 25 seconds.

46:13 Mark: We talked about Aristotle already, but where Aristotle is coming from was first of all, and again, eventually his take on the two kinds of virtue ethics that we talked about in this podcast, Aristotle vs. Nietzsche. The story starts with the Homeric heroes, right? Not Homer himself, but the people he's writing about in the Iliad, where for those folks, there was no difference at all between morality and the rest of society. He quotes the basic values of society were given predetermined and so were a man's place in the society and the privileges and duties that followed from his status. Morality and social structure are in fact one in the same in heroic society. So there is no moral conflict. There's not even the moral language to question social mores. And so he makes the point that the way the Iliad kind of concludes is with this moral that you can win and yet still lose. And that's Homer's conclusion, that you could win the Trojan War and still everything sucks. But for the people he's describing, the Homeric heroes of however many generations previous they're supposed to be, that actually is an inconceivable claim, like if you win, you win. So sort of it's based on the agon is the Greek word of the contest. It's a context for exercising virtues. And so there's no difference between virtues like intelligence and bravery and ones we consider more obviously moral. The non moral virtues and the moral virtues are all kind of the same thing. And if you listen to our Nietzsche episode, you're going to recognize this as this was kind of what the master morality was like.

47:40 Speaker: Like.

47:40 Mark: However, McIntyre thinks that Nietzsche sort of romanticized this, that he saw them as all these sort of rugged individualists that were choosing the strong thing, whereas in fact they're sort of blind beasts. I don't. This is probably. I think Nietzsche was quite aware of this. But anyway, they weren't making a choice. This is just what society gave them. McIntyre compares it to a game of chess where, you know, winning is winning. There's a set of rules in there and that's what you need to do. There's no question. So for chapter 11, where he's talking about more modern Athenian society.

48:09 Wes: Right.

48:10 Mark: Aristotle's immediate predecessors, like Plato and Sophocles, they've gotten to the point where they can see that there are conflicts between these virtues. So Sophocles is actually the one that MacIntyre focuses on a little more as doing these plays where you have one virtue, like the demands of your family, and another virtue like fulfilling the demands of your city state, where these can actually come in conflict with horrible results. There's actually something that Macintyre really wants to take away from that is that he thinks even now, this is mean. This is not Macintyre here, exactly this example. But if you're in an ethics class and you talk about, oh, if you have to kill one person to save five, would you do it? Okay, yes, I would do it. I'm justified. And you get the feeling like, I did the right thing, I was justified. But how it would actually work is, no, there's still a moral prescription that you shouldn't kill anybody ever, but there's also a moral prescription that you shouldn't let these five people die. So the fact that you do the lesser of two evils doesn't mean you've just done the right thing and have a happy day. And it's just like, you know, it still would wreck your life that you had to kill somebody. It's still horrible. And that's, I think, essential to Macintyre's ultimate position is that you can have these incommensurate moral duties that are. It's just tragic that they don't. The fact that you go with one of them doesn't make the hold that the second one has on you any less in terms of Plato, in that he sees Plato when he's ministering to the people who have all these confused ideas in his dialogues. That's because by the time you get to this point in Athenian culture, they have inherited this value system that has a bunch of internal contradictions in it. So even at the time of Aristotle, you're dealing with a pretty complex reflective situation, which is why Aristotle always starts his dialogue, let's consult the wise and the many. Let's go through all the different views that people have. And he really thinks that even though Aristotle is trying to channel what all the good citizens believe, he's trying to be the void of the sophisticated citizen of a well governed society, but still his account of virtue of the telos is not just like looking at the plants and most of them grow up straight. It's, well, it's maybe A kind of difficult thing to engineer. All right, so I think I've gotten us up to Aristotle, which we already covered.

50:22 Wes: Right. And one of the things here, he's gonna reject. Aristotle's what he calls metaphysical teleology or biological teleology. And he needs a new account, so we'll start getting that account in chapter 14.

50:34 Mark: So according to MacIntyre, the three things that we have to transcend about Aristotle is what you just mentioned, which is his biological basis for his teleology. But also the thing that I mentioned earlier about the heterogeneous character of virtue, that Aristotle thinks like the Homeric heroes, that virtues can't be in conflict. For Aristotle, they're unified. So if you say, had a very cunning thief, then you'd have to say that's not real cunning. Or you have to deny that cunning is a virtue or something like that. Just acknowledge that. Yeah, the cunning is. And so MacIntyre gives the example of how wrong this is, that if you had a very brave Nazi and then you want to rehabilitate him, so the things you would fix about him, it's not that you would just say the bravery because he's a Nazi makes him worse or something. Like, you wouldn't want to get rid of the bravery. You'd want the bravery to stick there. Do you just want to re channel it? So, no, those are fundamentally conceptually different, and we all know that, but Aristotle didn't. And then the third thing was that for Aristotle, virtue is restricted to dealing with others in the polis, in the city state. So it has to be based on this community, based on friendship, he says, which is really between a small group with an arrangement. So it's kind of. This is maybe the basis of social contract theory that we've talked about in other podcasts that you get together and you make this. But for him, it's literally you could get everybody in the same room and reflect on your common values. He's not going to have anything useful to say about a larger group. He really says you can't have a state governed well, that is larger than

52:04 Dylan: a certain size, which is smaller than your high school.

52:07 Mark: Right. So if you say you need that kind of state in order to have people that can drove virtuously, well, just give it up.

52:13 Seth: We're just.

52:14 Mark: You're done. So, no, MacIntyre doesn't want to be that negative. He thinks he can come up with a version that overcomes that apparent blockade. All right, so who wants to talk about chapter 14?

52:24 Wes: So he grounds virtues in this concept of practice. Right, and let's give the page where he gives a definition, since this is

52:31 Mark: one of the big 187. A practice is any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which good internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to and partially definitive of that form of activity,

52:53 Wes: with

52:53 Mark: the result that human powers to achieve excellence in human conceptions of the ends and good involved are systematically extended. Man, that's a mouthful. Should we break that down a little bit?

53:03 Wes: Yeah, I might have different page numbers than you, since I have a different edition.

53:07 Mark: Oh, I'm talking in the second edition here.

53:10 Dylan: I'm in the third edition. It's the same page.

53:12 Wes: Oh, it is, yep.

53:13 Dylan: Page 187, bottom right.

53:15 Mark: Biopractice, the coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity. Sounds like what for Wittgenstein is a game. And then the second part is through which good internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence. So he talks about the difference between internal goods, which are like enjoying the activity itself, and external goods like you're just doing it for money. So again, you could use chess, just like he brought up in analyzing the Homeric heroes that their argon, their struggle was like chess, where there's these rules and you're just trying to win according to the rules. Well, we still have those. It's just that that's not society as a whole. It's just that if I'm going to. I want to become a great chess

53:54 Wes: player, for instance, what is the internal good there? Because the enjoyment supervenes on the internal good. Right. It is one of the internal goods, but it's not the only one that's important.

54:05 Dylan: These examples are really, I think, make clear what he's talking about here. This is just following just what Mark read. Tic tac toe is not an example of a practice in this sense. Nor is throwing in a football with skill. But the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice. Architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice. Farming is. So are the inquirers of physics, chemistry and biology. And so is the work of the historian. And so are painting and music.

54:32 Wes: Yeah. The question for me isn't what a practice is, it's what we consider the internal goods of the practice to be.

54:38 Mark: I thought it was just a fulfillment through doing it. Well, it's not that that's an external Thing. It's not that I do it well and so I get some pleasure.

54:45 Wes: Yeah, but it's not just pleasure. I think it's critical that it's not simply the pleasure you get from the activity.

54:50 Mark: Right. It might not even be pleasure pleasurable, but might be a lot of hard work. He thinks we already have an understanding of this, that anybody who's really involved in a practice like becoming a really good chess player or getting astute at philosophy is going to understand that there are benefits that come out of that, or else you wouldn't bother to do it. And to analyze those and just say, well, I do this thing because it gives me pleasure is kind of a weird, modern, artificial take on it. That's not the way it is fulfilling.

55:17 Wes: So, for instance, in the learning to play guitar, for instance, there are times when it can be frustrating. There are times when it can be simply pleasurable, but it's not like the pleasure of eating food later on. He'll relate this to Mill's distinction between higher order and lower order pleasures, which he saw as a sort of defective way to try and capture some of this. But when I'm trying to master some sort of practice like playing guitar, the enjoyment that supervenes on the process of mastery, and this is my account, I think part of it is the fantasy of, let's say, giving pleasure to other people. Part of it's a fantasy of getting recognition from the community for being a master. You might say there's a feeling, if you wanted to give a Nietzsche account, this feeling of power that comes from mastery. So even if you're not a master and you're struggling to learn, you could be holding onto that idea as a goal to motivate you. But it's not simply, oh, the music's nice, or it feels good to be moving my fingers. It's just pleasurable.

56:16 Seth: I thought his talk about practices was intended to be the entry point into a solution for reconciling all the different kinds of virtue that he enumerates. He's trying to use this notion of a practice to do an end run around getting caught up in, you know, the Homeric virtues are tied to a Homeric conception of what constitutes a good life or what are the ends of human beings and the limitations of the Aristotelian model and all that. The concept of the practice is intended to contain all of the relevant elements for how somebody would need to excel and to create a framework for the idea of an internal and an external good, but still have a flexible enough framework that these practices could kind of come and go culturally and historically.

57:04 Mark: And does the practice have to be social? Like, I'm not sure that Wes example works, because even though there's a social aspect in that, it's not like you invented playing guitar or something, but the words you were using Wes about. It's the fantasy of making people. I would think that the kind of examples are where your actual practice doesn't

57:20 Wes: have to be social. There's an implied social element.

57:23 Seth: He uses the example of an artist and he says the artist has to be in dialogue with, like, the history of art before him and what's going on with artists around him. But even if he creates an individual work of art alone in a studio, that he's still in dialogue with practices and he still has to train. For MacIntyre, it's really critical. He wants to retain the developmental aspect that Aristotle introduces into ethics, or at least virtuous training.

57:48 Dylan: It's social, broadly understood.

57:50 Seth: Right.

57:50 Dylan: You could have a hermit who lived in the woods for decades and would be understood to be engaging in a variety of practices, even though he never saw a human being for 25 years. Because of his embeddedness in social practice beforehand, his history.

58:08 Seth: Yeah.

58:09 Wes: He would have had to have been exposed to human beings at some point. But yet. Yeah, I think you're right, Dylan.

58:13 Seth: Or even if he had the books,

58:14 Wes: as long as he's internalized that. Yeah, Books, then he's good. Yeah.

58:17 Mark: I would just want to put a sort of Wittgenstein private language, like proviso on that. That you could just picture somebody entirely isolated that then is getting into different new realms of art or something. And, you know, now I've added a part to my art where I do something with my nasal passages while I'm doing the art, and that makes the art cooler. If you're creating these products that in principle could not be shared with other people, then you're not in a practice anymore.

58:46 Wes: That's a good point. In principle, shareability, Just the limit of hermitdom.

58:50 Seth: Interesting. Okay.

58:51 Wes: And he calls any practice a complex social activity. But it doesn't mean that to practice guitar you go out into public to do it. You do it in a band, necessarily. That's not what social means there.

59:02 Mark: It's just. Can't you see, McIntyre being of the nature of. If you were that kind of hermit of him, really disapproving of you.

59:09 Seth: Yeah, of course.

59:10 Mark: That whatever's going on, it does not add up to a fulfilling life. So you could excel in this practice in this way. Which, as he says, is a fundamental first step to understanding what the good life is, understanding what excelling in a practice is. But yet you've not made it.

59:25 Dylan: Yes, but that's a separate judgment. I thought we were just talking about the notion of practice itself.

59:29 Mark: All right, is there anything else to say about that or do we want to add the second piece?

59:33 Dylan: You see right here where he's going to get teleology in there? Because all of these practices involve judgments about what it means to do them well. And there might be disagreements, in fact, socially, about what that is, but there always will be criteria for it. So being a farmer, there will be a criteria for saying someone is a farmer, and there will be criteria for saying somebody's any good at it. And there might be even disagreements about that. But this place of practice is where he's getting that teleological flavor in there.

1:00:10 Wes: And he says that the standards of excellence are partly definitive of the form of activity. Right. So once you cease to be beholden to those standards, you wouldn't be even engaging in that practice anymore. I can't just go and start bashing my guitar into the wall and say, I'm playing guitar.

1:00:26 Mark: But Pete Sounddead has established that standard.

1:00:28 Wes: You can say, I'm a rock and roll star with that practice.

1:00:31 Dylan: Yeah, but you're not playing.

1:00:32 Mark: I trashed my hot.

1:00:34 Dylan: Yeah, you're not playing guitar anymore. I really like this because it preserves this notion of activity both for individuals as well as the activities themselves that their actions. This is why I was backpedaling myself from just going whole hog onto teleology. Because I think by going into it with this notion of practice, he's really emphasizing this metaphysics of potentiality and actuality and internal activity that's in Aristotle, that, yeah, it leads to, or is part and parcel in Aristotle to teleology. But there's a kind of weaker form of it that MacIntyre is grabbing hold of.

1:01:16 Mark: We could probably pull something like this out of Aristotle as well, that not all teleological directives are biological. For him, Right. If it goes right up to the social, then once you have a well constituted state and it has laws, then that itself sets some things that you're supposed to do. So, same way you have a practice that has been set up over time. And he does admit the fact that maybe some practices could just be evil. But for the most part, he says what sustains a practice is that there are people in it exercising the virtues appropriate to that practice. That's the only way it Keeps going. If everybody stopped playing guitar and turned to synthesizers, then rock and roll would not continue to be a practice in such a way.

1:01:55 Wes: Then this notion that there are goods internal to the form of the activity is also important. Right. And they're not necessarily commensurable. The mastery. Well, let's say the enjoyment of the practice of guitar and the enjoyment of chess are not simply the same sort of pleasure that I can simply measure against each other. If I were a utilitarian. And then the enjoyment. I think for him, the enjoyment isn't the whole account of this. We can't simply say that I'm playing guitar because I enjoy playing guitar. I'm involved in the practice of guitar. Guitar. And that's the good, the enjoyment of it. The good is the end of being a master of guitar, which is not something I. Because I'm corrupted by the post enlightenment conception of things. That is hard for me to grasp a good that's independent of enjoyment. Even though he says that enjoyment characteristically. What is it called Enjoyment characteristically comes with supervenes of mastery. But it's not the entire good of the.

1:02:56 Mark: It's a byproduct. This might be a point from. From G.E. moore's intuitions that he's okay with that. One of G.E. moore's big points in his conclusion why he thought his intuitionism was superior to which of course he didn't want to call intuitionism because it was apprehension of a simple quality in the universe. But in case part of it was to say, for instance, that it would be better. It would be just objectively more good for a beautiful landscape to exist than an ugly landscape, even if no one on earth was there to appreciate. So that's just supposed to be playing on our intuitions that it's not. Yes, the human enjoyment adds something. Human enjoyment is a good, but it does not constitute the good of things that it is attached to that according to when we really reflect on these things, it would just be good. And enjoyment is sort of an after effect. That intuition that Moore has about aesthetics is similar to the intuition that we as practicers, say in the arts. We get the feeling that this thing I'm creating is just good. If nobody ever hears it, it's good. Even if I'm about to die and I'm in great pain while I'm writing it, this thing is good. Maybe he wants to generalize. It's not just a matter of fanatical artists that might be thinking about that, but any sort of practice that the telos, the End of the practice posits itself in the right. You work to win at chess. You're not thinking about, I want to win because of pleasure. It just. That's the goal.

1:04:16 Wes: Yeah, but I think if you ask people why they play chess, most people would say, because I enjoy it. And then I enjoy becoming a master of it. I enjoy winning. I enjoy. Or with guitar, it could be I enjoy giving pleasure to other people. And even if that doesn't happen, like I said, I think the fantasy of. Even if you never. You know, I practice a lot of guitar and I almost never play for other people, but I think part of the enjoyment of it is the fantasy of the potential to give others pleasure and the potential to get recognition for being a master of the practice. I think, man, yeah, I've gotten good at this. Which is to say, others would recognize that if I were to. I think it's a little bit. For a corrupted, post Enlightenment person, I think it's a little bit counterintuitive to start thinking of goods that are not related to happiness or pleasure or enjoyment or some subjective feeling.

1:05:05 Dylan: He would say you are corrupted if you think that goods have to be there without being pleasurable. That distinction between something is good all by itself without being pleasurable, and in fact, fact, something that's good if it is pleasurable, somehow that is a black mark against it. He said that is a post Enlightenment corruption of the notion of good.

1:05:26 Mark: Okay, so the whole distinction. Maybe he would not make that distinction that Moore was making.

1:05:31 Dylan: You say, of course you take pleasure in things that are good.

1:05:34 Wes: Well, not always. For aristotle. I think MacIntyre acknowledges this. Too often, pleasure and enjoyment will come with it, but that's not always the case. It's not a guarantee. Guarantee.

1:05:44 Dylan: I'm sorry if I overstepped.

1:05:45 Mark: If my.

1:05:46 Dylan: Of course, meant to be universal.

1:05:49 Wes: No, I think it's important. We got this in the Flanagan episode as well. Right. The idea is that eudaimonia typically accompanies virtue, but not necessarily.

1:05:59 Mark: So the telos in these practices is part of the notion of virtue. You're saying that we're not getting all the way to happiness here.

1:06:07 Wes: Right.

1:06:07 Mark: All right, can we do the second part now?

1:06:10 Wes: The narrative?

1:06:10 Mark: The second part is. The narrative is how these things fit together. So it's a separate chapter. Chapter 15. He's set these up. Yes, we're in these individual practices, but that by itself would not make you a whole person.

1:06:22 Wes: I think we should just say one thing in this. Chapter 14. It's important that he thinks that one of the primary functions of virtues is that they make practices in general possible. Right practices require cooperation between practitioners, and so virtues like justice, courage and honor, honesty become important. So virtue is tied to practice in general as its grounds.

1:06:41 Mark: Actually, I might as well read the quote where he defines virtue out of this, that he thinks this is on 191. In my version, a virtue is an acquired human quality, the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices, and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.

1:07:00 Wes: Yeah, that's his definition of virtue in terms of practice instead of in terms of biology or something else.

1:07:05 Seth: Else.

1:07:05 Dylan: It's probably worth noting, and he mentions this earlier on, but he's using virtue much closer to the notion of excellence or excellences. The way the Greek term gets translated, arete, gets translated as virtue, as opposed to the way the word virtue is often colloquially used as

1:07:27 Wes: just complying with the rules in general, which is the way it's used today.

1:07:30 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

1:07:31 Wes: Yeah. So for Aristotle, a virtue was like, we might call it a psychological state involving dispositions to act in certain ways and to feel certain ways. But, yeah, the idea is one of excellence. Where to be a virtuous horse, for instance, might be to run fast, and that's an excellent horse or a virtuous horse to do its characteristic thing well. And the idea is that it extends to human beings. To be virtuous is to do the characteristic things of human beings. Well. Well, all right. Shall we do the narrative?

1:08:00 Mark: All right.

1:08:01 Seth: Well, another requisite to if you're going to have a telos or you're going to have some kind of essential nature that you're going to drive towards over the long span of a human life, that life better have some continuity to it. And so he spent some time in the next section talking about how we weave the fabric of our lives into a narrative. And that's what allows us to view ourselves as moving continuously and coherently and consistently. I don't know if you want to say towards something, but as opposed to being selves that have discrete, independent actions, experiences, beliefs. So human life is subject to a narrative unity that binds it all together that will make possible this position that he wants to lay out of engaging in these practices and demonstrating these virtues in the service of something larger.

1:08:59 Wes: Yeah, we've defined virtue in terms of practice, but now we need to kind of free it from practice. Genuine virtues manifest themselves in situations that go beyond practice.

1:09:08 Seth: Well, we need to have something that ties the practices together. So that.

1:09:12 Wes: I mean, I'm almost quoting there.

1:09:13 Seth: Yeah.

1:09:14 Wes: And that's where we get this evaluation of a person's life conceived of as a whole, as a way of thinking about virtual. Why do we need a whole unified life?

1:09:23 Seth: Because you can't hearken back to some sort of structure where you're striving towards an end if you don't have a unified life.

1:09:30 Dylan: Integrity in the sense of the character of that person going through their life is fundamental to the way he's understanding virtues being manifest.

1:09:38 Mark: Do we want to say that's one of the points of the telos of what's good for man, that he retains that there are some objective bits of psychological health. And maybe it's not so restrictive unless we're overly restrictive on how consistent you have to be. You have to somehow have integrity. Maybe there are many ways you could do that, and you could still be a shifting, changing, evolving person. But it has to be describable in terms of a sensible story, I think is what he. Right.

1:10:02 Wes: A narrative, an intelligible story.

1:10:05 Mark: Could you still have integrity even though you have. Seems there's a lot of room there. You could have multiple interlocking stories. And he fully acknowledges that we're engaged in lots of different practices. You could have these roles of myself as a parent, of myself as somebody who's working at my job and my philosophy reading or whatever. But yet somehow that has to have integrity in the way that it wouldn't if you were to give his example a bureaucrat that is separating organizational efficiency as one sort of telos to pursue completely separate from overall ethical behavior. So why is that bad? Whereas engagement in multiple different practices and roles is.

1:10:45 Wes: Okay, good question.

1:10:47 Mark: I mean, it seems like it would just come down to the individual case, but all these forms of ethics that he criticizes come down to, you know, he thinks that even if you're deciding on the categorical imperative, how to apply it, that you're making some subjective call, you're using some sort of faculty of judgment, but yet there's a place that's appropriate for that. And he gets that right from. What is it? Phronesis. Is that the Greek, I believe, yes. So it's an intellectual virtue, someone who knows how to exercise judgment in particular cases. We hadn't used that word, but that's exactly what we're talking about in the Churchland episode and the Owen Flanagan episode and these others that are sort of roughly in the modern descendants of the Aristotelian tradition that if you think you can come up with a rule that means you don't have to be smart and decide cases. That's never going to work. You always have to figure out how to apply the rule to the individual case. At least.

1:11:38 Speaker: Least.

1:11:38 Mark: So phronesis is going to be required, whatever sort of framework you're taking. But it seems like MacIntyre wants to be shouting down. I mean, in some places he's calling emotivism what you might call phronesis. Again, that maybe the way we presented when we actually did the Kant morality episode wasn't that the categorical imperative is so shoddily created that you could just make any old moral decision go any old way, depending on how you choose to phrase the maxim. And that's I think MacIntyre's uncharitable take on this. But our take on it at the time was no, you phrase it in a way that doesn't come out stupid, that Kant was thinking that you would reflect on your intuitions so that you're applying it in a way that actually makes sense. Now maybe there's still something wrong with that. We can put that aside. But the fact is this faculty of judgment is going to come in whatever sort of system you put forward. And I want to know why MacIntyre's is so, so superior when you end up having to do the same thing when choosing right, you have these two practices that you're involved in. I am a parent, but I am also. I want to be a really good soccer player. Well, maybe I will go and play soccer all day and ignore my kids. That would be going with one of the telos of the becoming the best damn soccer player in the world. But that would be neglecting the other one.

1:12:55 Wes: So it seems to come down to choice in that instance, which is the precisely the thing he's objecting to, to the idea it's merely a matter of my personal preference or choice.

1:13:03 Mark: Right. And the way he ends the book or ends that chapter at least, is to say, but there still can be a better or worse choice. In that case, it's not an ungrounded choice, which we all would agree with. You know, in that particular situation, wouldn't our intuitions mostly go with, well, you have to pay attention to at least all the projects that you're involved with and not be a terrible father. Maybe there's some wiggle room. You don't have to give up soccer entirely, but you got to do something.

1:13:29 Dylan: Wouldn't he say that this goes towards the notion of an integral character and that in being the father that you. That's part of your telos. Then having those multiple hats, say the hat of the soccer player as well, that to the extent that you did one of them really badly, then you're failing. Right. I mean, that's another thing about teleology and this Aristotelian concept that you have to be a little careful about is that it's not prescriptive in that way, that it just tells you that you can be bad at it, you can totally fuck it up, you can fail in your virtue.

1:14:05 Seth: Right, right.

1:14:06 Mark: And it has that tragic character that maybe you just can't be a good father and the most awesome soccer player ever at the same time. That's just too bad. And if you go with one of them, you're sacrificing the other. And bad things all round.

1:14:21 Seth: That's what McIntyre wants. He wants to paint the picture of human existence as constantly being faced with these situations where you have to make a choice between two things that maybe both produce goods.

1:14:35 Dylan: Exactly.

1:14:35 Seth: He thinks that that's what he calls the tragic protagonist as opposed. I think that he thinks that's an antidote to the post Enlightenment moral philosophy that believes there's a right choice in every situation. And I couldn't agree with him more.

1:14:50 Wes: Well, that begins to sound like Kierkegaard again, though. Ok. Sorts of choices have to be. He talks in the end of or in page 219. The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life of man. And the virtues necessary for seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is. We get this notion of a good that's larger than the good that's internal to any one practice. And we're trying to figure that out as we go along. We're in quest mode because we don't know our whole narrative going into this. As we're living the narrative, we don't entirely know what this overall good is for us. The one thing that we do know is that trying to figure out what that good is is. Good is what the good life for man is.

1:15:39 Mark: You know, one thing we haven't talked about is the role of tradition in here either, which is one of his major points. That it's not that we've said that practices are inherited. They have a history. We don't just make them up individually. But we're still acting like we're just looking at our own lives as an individual narrative, as if we're reflecting on which is the most artistic or practical or desirable for me in which one I'm going to choose. But he really thinks all these things are imposed on us. I don't choose what the duties of a father are. Say the fact that I'm in that situation. It comes. So, you know, a lot of what's maybe going to make one choice better than another.

1:16:14 Wes: Objectively, he says we're not entirely beholden to tradition, though.

1:16:19 Mark: Well, part of that is because he doesn't think a tradition is a static thing. So we could be entirely beholden to a tradition which is itself a dynamic thing, and also.

1:16:28 Wes: Yeah. To conflicting traditions or conflicting elements of the tradition, in which case we do have to make a choice. And of course, there are some traditions which are going to be worse than others.

1:16:37 Dylan: He says on page 222. A living tradition, then, is a historically extended, socially embodied argument and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.

1:16:48 Wes: Yeah. So I can come from a tradition which is not in accord with the good life for man in some ways, let's say slaveholding tradition. And even though we're beholden to our social roles and our tradition, we still have choices to make. And then one wonders, on what grounds do we make those choices?

1:17:05 Mark: Well, so let's look at an actual. I mean, similar to the soccer one. We came from a tradition where. I've been watching mad men where 30 years ago or 40 years ago, where men were expected to sort of be consumed by their job and neglect their families, at least in some sections of the economy. And so that would be sort of what's expected. But yet the lesson of that show, at least, is that's a bad tradition. That even if the women and the kids are supposed to go along with that and say, yay, my dad is being the bread maker. That's not the way love and families actually work. And so by making the choice that is contrary to the tradition, you would be fulfilling some very real aspect of. Of one of the projects, being a parent that you're engaged in that the tradition as a whole is neglecting. But again, it's not a completely isolated. It's not something you made up. If you just decided, I am right now gonna drop all this, quit my job, desert my family, and join a religious cult. Well, I guess the only way that would be in any way justifiable, in any way even makes Sense, according to MacIntyre, is if you also have a tradition of people doing that. If you were the first one to do that, then you're just an insane person doing Something irrational. It does happen that every once in a while. Or if you talk to people that are in cults or monasteries or whatever, maybe they'll say, you could just get a calling from God. And then you have to throw everything else down and go. So you would at the very least be appealing. If you're going to make your life intelligible, if you're going to explain to your family, explain to your employer why you're doing this, you'd have to appeal to these other traditional aspects.

1:18:41 Dylan: Isn't the avenue for this the way in which we are actors ourselves, that there is self movement in us, there is possibility of changing and defining one's own character, and you partake in your own narrative. And so in addition to being in a narrative, you are part of a narrative and you are an actor in that narrative.

1:19:02 Mark: Many of them, yeah.

1:19:03 Dylan: And so the fact that we are actors, not merely cogs, is central to this notion. And it's one of the avenues in which. Which we would go about changing and deviating from tradition or forming a new tradition.

1:19:19 Mark: You know, I like that because some of the way that my rant before that was just going sounded like the Nietzschean conception of making your life into an art, which is not really considering how you're also acting as a supporting role in other people's lives.

1:19:35 Seth: Yes.

1:19:35 Mark: Macintyre really stresses that these are all going on at the same time. And it's not. If you're thinking in terms of your. This individualist, that's just a symptom of the modern age. And you really gotta get over that and get back with Aristotle's key insight that what is going to count as a fulfilling life for you is gonna be very interrelated to not just I will make other people happy, but that I am engaged in other people's projects, that I am an actor in their narrative as well, which is not reducible to, you know, I will be nice to everybody or something. You actually have to listen to the other people and see what they want you to do. So maybe it'd be okay to go off and be a soccer player if your family really doesn't give a crap about you or whatever. I don't know. I don't feel like we've still settled this existentialist problem other than saying that Macintyre is going to say that existentialism is starting from this bogus individualist starting point. Do you guys buy that? Or anything else to say about that?

1:20:30 Dylan: I think that that's basically MacIntyre's criticism is that they're just starting from a bogus. He has something of an analysis of it, but in the end it's just saying that they're wrong about their understanding of this radically separate individual within the context of the world, and they don't understand that it's a relationship enough. But part of the way for me that I get access to it is the notion of fittingness and also of practical wisdom in general. That is a kind of just observation that the activity of judging whether something fits or not or works or not, and I'd be willing to be very broad in that notion, whether it be ethical or physical, and that that judgment and that notion of fittingness has to do with what those parts that are coming together, what they're supposed to be doing, what their role is in that relationship.

1:21:21 Seth: I get what MacIntyre is trying to drive at on page 224. It says one way in which the tragic situation differs from the modern choice between incommensurable moral premises is that both of the alternative courses of action which confront the individual have to be recognized as leading to some authentic and substantial good. And then he references Sartre and he's basically back to the Everybody who believes in moral agency falls into that camp of aligning with moral principles as opposed to choosing between competing goods or competing practices with external and internal goods. But the irony here is that while MacIntyre is criticizing both the existentialist and the analytic moral philosophers of utilizing terms in their ahistorical context and losing sight of the intellectual evolution of the terms, he does exactly the same thing to Sartre. I think it's unfair to existentialism at least, and I'm not going to defend the analytic guys in this particular context. But existentialism as a movement arises as a response in the 20th century to two horrific world wars. And it's not some kind of isolated theoretical movement that has no socio political context or socioeconomic context in which it's evolving. So to simply say that, well, you know, Sartre's moral agent is just choosing between one moral principle or another, I think is a bit reductive. And like I said, I think it's a bit hypocritical, given that he's complaining about how people avoid looking at the historical context in ways of a value system gets developed.

1:23:07 Mark: Yeah, that's a great point, when Sartre is chiefly concerned with the kind of things that were going on that eventually led to fascism. So no, I don't want to accept what my tradition and my government says, which is not actually what MacIntyre is advocating. He fully accepts that you could have a corrupt government or something that you shouldn't be going along with.

1:23:28 Wes: Yeah. But ultimately he wanted to establish where moral authority comes from. And ultimately it has to come from social roles, traditions, historical identity. I understand that he acknowledges it can be bad traditions, but still, I'm not sure how much guidance we're left with. Again, we're making choices about practices and traditions. It's kind of similar to Kant in some ways. Right. The moral authority comes from giving ourselves these sorts of laws as individuals. But here the moral authority comes from practices and traditions, basically from their form, because they set their own sort of internal goals, and then we take on those goals.

1:24:05 Dylan: We haven't made a distinction that's important for MacIntyre, which is the difference between traditions and institutions. So he makes a big distinction between the kind of traditional virtues that are embodied, and you can see many of them continue on and what a given institution or a ruling authority institution says. So to say that the institutional authority of any given historical period is the same thing as the authoritative virtue of that society is not true. Just because Nazis ruled in Germany, that's not necessarily the same thing as what was authoritative virtue at that time.

1:24:49 Wes: Where does someone get their bearings if they live in a society like that? Because with the practice, it's obvious. The internal goods to a given practice are obvious that once we enter into the practice, those simply become our standards. And once we enter into a given tradition or social role, the goods internal to that tradition or social role become our standards. And you can step outside of them and question them, according to MacIntyre, only by entering into some other tradition or some other social role. Right.

1:25:17 Mark: And then, well, why not just look even farther back? Historically, he makes that point somewhere. Definitely that part of this unrootedness of the modern age is. Is ignoring the things that happen in your parents generation. So if you're a new kid in Germany right now and you just. I don't care that the Holocaust was terrible, but it had nothing to do with me. Well, no, it did have something to do with the tradition that you are direct heir of. And so is it part of your intellectual burden, just like in America with slavery, to sort of deal with how. Or at least in this American South.

1:25:49 Wes: Wow.

1:25:49 Mark: Okay. Prejudice in general, that you have to deal.

1:25:53 Wes: You do remember I'm from Georgia, right?

1:25:55 Dylan: You remember there were slaves in the North.

1:25:57 Seth: Oh, my God. That might be the funniest thing that's ever happened on this podcast.

1:26:02 Mark: Oh, come now you get my point. You're supposed to have to deal with these things. So you're supposed to, you know, just like he's saying, here's what the modern age is, it's screwed up. I'm not just going to do what the modern age is. I'm going to look back historically to see how the modern age got screwed up. And then, hey, those Aristotelian elements that underlie the modern age, those are still kind of lurking there. Those are still things I could pull out of my own intellectual cabinet of tricks because they have been passed down, even if they're not dominant now. So you could do the same thing. You could say, wow, Germany under the Nazis here has really gone to hell. But wasn't it awesome before that? You know, they had Goethe, they had all these great things. So the solution is not to become a cosmopolitan unrooted. I'm just going to become a Taoist or something from a completely unrelated culture. It should be, I'm going to reach back farther and get a hold of what went wrong. And you could use these other Taoist or whatever influences to inform the future evolution of the tradition through you, but you are still acting out that tradition. You can't fool yourself. That's why, for instance, it's so easy for if Americans do do something like Taoism or Buddhism, for them just to be goofuses, because they don't have necessarily an authentic connection to that, you know, unless they are going and studying with a lama or something. You know, they've got all these things that are in fact straight in the face of that. So maybe the reason that they're doing it is for some more New Age hippie kind kind of reason. That is an underlying element of a reaction to exactly the thing that they're rebelling against, rather than authentically getting hold of a foreign tradition.

1:27:28 Wes: The question is how we. We're on a quest for the good, right? That ends up being the good life for man. This quest in seeking what the good life for man is, because part of his answer is that we don't really, you know, this whole chapter with the practices chapter, it's clear what the telos is. The goods are internal to the practice, and it's relatively clear what they are. But when the practice becomes living in general for a human being, what the good is is unclear. And really the only good that we firmly know is that seeking out what that good is is our good. That's again the page 219 definition. It's still unclear to me how we Go about evaluating the goods internal to different practices and traditions, how we go about making that choice. To some extent we're beholden to tradition, and to some extent we're not. But to the extent that we're not, we're back to the emotion motivist position. We're back to the existentialist choice position. It seems to me maybe he's going

1:28:21 Mark: to say you can't give a general answer to that question, but it would be a matter of that phronesis again, that when you actually get into the individual decisions, it's. If you're paying attention and doing an evaluation of tradition, then you're not going to be making a.

1:28:34 Wes: The only general answer is the thing from page 219, the answer to what the good life for man is seeking what the good life for man is

1:28:41 Seth: Good life is seeking the good life,

1:28:43 Wes: which I'm highly sympathetic to that, by the way. And it's kind of a reminiscent of Socrates, right, The examined life.

1:28:49 Mark: So a philosopher decides that the best life is a philosopher.

1:28:53 Speaker: Amazing.

1:28:54 Wes: Exactly. Exactly. We could treat MacIntyre as he's treated other philosophers in the tradition and deconstruct his opinions according to, you know, him being a philosopher and having certain interests as a philosopher and so on.

1:29:07 Mark: Dylan was going to smack me down. Go. Go ahead.

1:29:09 Dylan: Well, he doesn't say that contemplation is the best form of life. MacIntyre doesn't.

1:29:15 Wes: I think he implies that.

1:29:16 Dylan: Yeah, that contemplation is.

1:29:18 Mark: No, isn't it through action. I mean, it's the very Seeking, the good in all of your.

1:29:22 Wes: Let's look at page 219.

1:29:24 Mark: It's still action is involved. It's not just thinking about things, it's doing things. And the way you figure out part of the action of figuring out these things is actually to try and do

1:29:34 Wes: things, whatever you think. Seeking for the good life of man. Yeah, I think you're right. It's not just contemplation.

1:29:40 Mark: Seeking is like a quest. You're outgoing and doing things. That's from that chapter that we didn't talk about yet from the Middle Ages. That he thinks that's what Christianity added to this, is that they didn't have maybe the Aristotelian biological thing, but they had the seeking, the spiritual quest, like the Knights of Camelot kind of trying to get at something that will then redeem the rest of your life.

1:30:00 Wes: We do know that for Aristotle, right, contemplation was the highest good for men. And yeah, this is reminiscent of that. So I think contemplation would be involved.

1:30:09 Dylan: It's a very similar problem that comes up right at the beginning with Aristotle that virtues in some sense are. You become excellent at something by doing the thing, and then you do it well by doing it well. And there is a sense, and I think that MacIntyre would call it a sense, that's born out of a post Enlightenment misunderstanding of the relationship between is and all that. We think that that's confusing, that somehow we should be able to say, well, what is the thing that is grounding that, that action? And it has to do with its own activity as internal to it, and its embeddedness within the activity of the being that gives it its own constraints.

1:30:56 Seth: Yeah.

1:30:57 Wes: There are vicious practices, Right. Like going back to the serial killing example, and there is a good internal to that. It establishes its own telos.

1:31:04 Dylan: So, I mean, what's the problem with that?

1:31:05 Wes: Because practices are a simple case. And even vicious practices establish their own good. But the harder case is for the life of the human being in general and what it means to live a good life. In which case we'd have to have a way of saying that the practice of serial killing doesn't cut it.

1:31:22 Mark: Sure.

1:31:22 Wes: We have to have a reason for doing that. And that reason can't, for MacIntyre, come down to unanalyzable properties of goodness, and it can't come down to the rational universal laws that we've given ourselves. It seems it has to come down to some extent to. Well, it's unclear to me what it comes down to. Obviously, the unity of narrative history comes into it and tradition and social role comes into it, but it really is unclear to me how we rule that practice out.

1:31:49 Mark: Right. It seems like he wants to keep some elements of the original Aristotelian telos and just say, that's just not a

1:31:55 Seth: good way to be.

1:31:56 Mark: Come on.

1:31:57 Wes: Yeah. For Aristotle, you could say it's not in accord with human nature. You know, if the sociopath comes to you and say, hey, I. I'm constituted this way. I'm my own natural kind, and this is my good. You say, actually, no, you're predominantly still human. And that has a good built into it, which conflicts with your deviant serial killer good. And so we can rule that out. It's unclear to me in MacIntyre's case how we do that.

1:32:17 Dylan: Well, you would certainly be able to Macintyre, to say that it's deviant with respect to some kind of roughly normative human behavior. Right.

1:32:25 Wes: But we're trying to ground the normative we're trying to say where moral authority comes from.

1:32:28 Mark: Do you mean normative, as in actually coming from the norm? That is, we are inheritors of the norms of our society.

1:32:35 Wes: Oh, tradition, yeah.

1:32:36 Mark: Yes. This has come up before that. The whole Hegelian. Like if you ever read anything by our guest blogger, Tom McDonald, the Hegel fan who recommended this to us, like when he uses the term normative, he's not using it in that analytic philosophy term. He's using it as an actual referring to the norm, as Aristotle might define it. The typical human being or the inherited human. Something like that. That, yes, yeah.

1:33:01 Dylan: Which is exactly how you make all these kinds of practical judgments. Right. It's based upon repeated experience with something and seeing how it behaves over time and making conclusions and having candidate possibilities and finding that they fit or they don't fit and making judgments about whether they fit or don't fit. And out of that you generate some kind of typical and some kind of extreme and some kind of. Of lacking. And a one off isn't going to do it.

1:33:29 Mark: We can wrap up soon.

1:33:31 Dylan: This is a good place to sort

1:33:33 Seth: of wrap up the wrap.

1:33:35 Dylan: There's a lot about this that I'm very sympathetic with. I enjoyed learning a lot about his kind of erudition. It gets a little bit fast and loose at times. And I most wanted to hear more about the quine kind of link and the relationship between kind of an empiricist point of view, but that's not really on his.

1:33:54 Mark: So how facts, the concept of fact evolved and that kind of thing.

1:33:58 Dylan: Yeah, I'd like to hear more about facts and I'd like to hear the relationship between is and ought more. I mean, he spends some amount of time in there, but not a lot. That said, this focus on activity and both individual beings having an activity, but even extrapolating to all sorts of things and processes in the world, having their characteristic activities to themselves, is very fruitful. This goal of internally and coherently talking about limits and boundaries that arise out of processes and activities and potentialities seems to me to be very right, whether it be in moral philosophy or whether it be in fact in physics. And I think that there's a lot in common here with a kind of pragmatism. Though he doesn't have very nice things to say about pragmatism, that there's this kind of sussing out going on and that it holds within itself its own internal structures and boundaries that change and evolve. But that's what you got. It's not that Those things don't exist as boundaries that they do exist, since

1:35:04 Mark: you're pointing at one direction. There's so many directions in here because he covers so many figures. One of the directions that I want to learn more about is, in some ways, this was the introduction of talking about the social science sciences. So I said, and this is part of a chapter that we didn't read as a group. I think a lot of it is in there, although it is brought up, at least in the ones we did read of him dissing social science's pretension to be natural science. But he says, actually, instead of that, you know, social science actually has a very good role, and it's exactly what Machiavelli thought it was. And Aristotle is in the same line of that. It gives you good generalizations. It's not law like generalizations, because you can't eliminate fortuna value is Machiavelli's term. You'll always have luck involved in these things, but it gives you good tips. So Aristotle goes on and on in the politics about how to prevent revolutions and how to construct a state. Well, and that's the kind of thing that you get out of social sciences. And you have to refer to people's opinions, and you can't do anything that looks like behaviorism. It's just a completely different enterprise than the natural sciences. And. And so philosophy is all safe, I guess. So I'm looking forward to reading some actual sociologists, you know, Durkheim or folks like that, and seeing to what extent this insight of MacIntyre's is actually embodied in them and to what extent that they try to do what he's objecting to.

1:36:22 Wes: Well, the classical sociology is a lot different than the contemporary stuff. Right. It's more theoretical and philosophical, like Durkheim. All right, my take on this. There's a lot in this book that rubs me the wrong way, even though I'm sympathetic to virtuous ethics and have a strong interest in it, the historicism included. Maybe I'd become too corrupted by analytic philosophy, but there's not a lot of argument. And then his using history to say why arguments failed and to dismiss them just annoys me. It doesn't tell me that the arguments have actually failed or why. And I don't think he shows that necessarily they've failed. There are ongoing debates, obviously, about deontology and utilitarianism, and I'm not a fan of utilitarianism, but just outright dismissing it. So that's one problem. And then towards the end, I think It's a very intriguing account towards the end of this attempt to ground morality in teleology, which is a very ambitious aim. So I wish he'd spent more time on his positive account. And it's intriguing to attempt to do that, using this idea of narrative and social role and tradition to go beyond the traditional Aristotelian account. But it's unclear to me what it all means in the end. I still find it vague and maybe if I had been able to spend more time thinking about it I would understand it better. But I'm left with those questions about choosing between practices and traditions and so on and so forth.

1:37:40 Mark: He's giving little very abbreviated secondary literature on so many figures here. I don't even know much about a lot of them. And some of the ones I do know a lot about, like he's not particularly fair to Nietzsche. Yeah, I think the thing that he ends up arguing for is very similar to the versions of Nietzsche that I've been spoon fed in my studies.

1:37:59 Speaker: Studies.

1:37:59 Mark: However, this was 1981 and the scholarship on Nietzsche was not as good. So his characterization is Nietzsche is just reacting to this post corruption thing. And so his is a sensible reaction to that. But that if we go before the corruption, he has nothing to say to improve upon Aristotle. And in fact his insistence on this individuality is all confused in much the same way we already said about Sartre. And Kierkegaard, I think is pretty off base.

1:38:25 Seth: Well, I have to say I was actually sucked in by the premise early on. I'm kind of always sympathetic to somebody who puts forward such a bold thesis. All of the 20th century was wrong. Oh, okay. Well, bring it. But you're right. Much of the work of the book is you can't just assert things without doing at least a fair bit of detailed work on some of the key figures to prove your point. Point. And when I was reading through the section where it was sort of like, well, here's how Hume, Kant and Kierkegaard all missed the boat on this, I thought, well, it's interesting and it's thought provoking, but at the same time a little tough to swallow. Getting into his positive account, I think I'm kind of in the same space as Dylan. I'm sympathetic. Ultimately what I think he's driving is at even if he'd established his criticism, the positive construction, I didn't follow the reasoning and he didn't convince me that the new structure that he was trying to lay out did what he wanted it to do. But at the same time. I love this idea of our repositioning the moral discourse to get away from right action and talk about virtuous action in tough circumstances where there might be multiple goods to be achieved and that we end up having to make these kinds of very, very difficult moral choices all the time. And that's what it means to be a human being.

1:39:56 Mark: All right, next time we're going to talk about Aristotle, some of his politics. Book 1, sections 1 and 2, book 3, book 4, sections 1 through 3, book 6, sections 1 through 6, and book 7, sections 1 through 3 and 13 through 15. You're not going to remember all that. So go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to see see that particular selection and read all about follow up issues on this episode, on the past episodes, completely irrelevant philosophical things that we post on a nearly daily basis for your entertainment and enlightenment. There is a suggested $1 donation for all those who enjoyed this episode. And from those who did not enjoy this episode, there's a $2 suggested donation. I want to thank all those that contributed since last time, including these people that contributed more than just a few dollars. That would be Justin Rogers, Joni Davis, Janet Alvarado, Taylor Mitchell, Rafik Moosa, and Ryan Chai. Go to itunes and give us a nice rating. Join our Facebook group. Follow us on Twitter. Spread the word and enjoy life. Good night.

1:41:03 Seth: Good night.

1:41:04 Dylan: Good night.

1:41:04 Wes: Good night.

1:41:05 Mark: What does Stan Lee say? Excelsior.

1:41:19 Speaker: Well your life's indefensible I hope you could guess you deny what's forthcoming but your actions say yes well, we'll see how cool you are then when it comes yes, we'll see how hard you bite when you're all gone when you start to discover that you can't keep this up as you start to reflect more as you learn to shut up well, we'll see how cool you are then what we know yes, we'll see how much disgrace you will. When your stain has been lifted and your lies are exposed when you feel suicidal for the ones that you host well, we'll see how cool you are then won't we now? Yes, we'll see how much disgrace you will allow when you bleed from your nostrils till you lie on the floor when you can't stand the feel of being you anymore well, we'll see how cool you are then hold me down yes, we'll see how much disgrace you. When you've sold out your infamy to some other guy when your few years have tickled up and left you to die well, we'll see how cool you are and won't renown yes, we'll see how much disgrace you will allow when your mind has deceived and your heart has gone home when the worms eat your fetid flesh and gnaw at your bones well, we'll see how cool you

1:44:03 Mark: are then Won't we know?

1:44:07 Speaker: We'll see how many insect homes your carcass will allow.