MacIntyre: Justice as Tradition-Dependent

Hello! Welcome back to our exploration of the critiques of liberalism.

In our last lesson, we examined the communitarian argument against the liberal "unencumbered self." We saw how thinkers like Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre propose an "encumbered self" — one whose identity is constituted by its community, history, and unchosen obligations. This idea of the self as a "storytelling creature" rooted in a narrative was a key takeaway.

Today, we drill deeper into the radical implications of this view, focusing entirely on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Our learning outcome is to describe Alasdair MacIntyre's argument that justice is a tradition-dependent concept, internal to specific practices and communities. We will see how his critique of modern moral philosophy leads to the conclusion that there isn't one universal concept of "Justice," but rather multiple, competing "justices," each intelligible only from within a particular historical tradition.

1. The Diagnosis: A Culture of Emotivism

MacIntyre begins his influential book, After Virtue, with a stark diagnosis of modern moral discourse. He argues that our moral debates, whether about abortion, taxation, or war, are fundamentally broken. The arguments are interminable, and participants talk past one another because, while we still use moral language ("right," "wrong," "just," "unjust"), we have lost the shared conceptual framework that once gave those words meaning.

He calls this state of affairs "emotivism"—the view that all moral judgments are nothing more than expressions of personal preference or feeling. To say "stealing is wrong" is, in an emotivist culture, simply to say "I don't like stealing" or "Boo, stealing!"

To understand MacIntyre's diagnosis and his historical explanation for it, please watch this introductory video.

This presents a serious problem. If emotivism is true, then rational argument about justice is impossible. Any appeal to justice is just a rhetorical move to assert one's own preferences.

2. The Cause: The Loss of Telos

Why did this happen? MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment project of trying to provide a rational foundation for morality, independent of history, tradition, or religion, was doomed to fail. It failed because it discarded the crucial piece of the puzzle: a teleological understanding of human nature.

In classical philosophy, particularly in Aristotle, every moral system had three parts:

1. Mankind-as-he-happens-to-be (untutored human nature).
2. Mankind-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature (our telos or purpose).
3. Ethics, as the set of precepts that enable the transition from (1) to (2).

The Enlightenment rejected part (2), the idea of a shared human telos, but tried to keep part (3), a rational system of ethics. For MacIntyre, this is like trying to use a map without a destination. The rules ("turn left," "go straight") become unintelligible without a goal.

This next video segment explains this core idea using a simple but powerful analogy.

Without a shared understanding of what a human being is for, we can no longer say factually that a certain action is "good" or "bad" for a person. Moral statements are severed from a factual basis and devolve into expressions of feeling—emotivism.

3. The Solution: Practices, Virtues, and Traditions

Having rejected the Enlightenment's approach, MacIntyre does not simply advocate a return to Aristotle. Instead, he reconstructs a modern conception of virtue ethics built on three pillars: practices, the narrative unity of a life, and moral tradition.

3.1. Practices and Internal Goods

MacIntyre grounds his account in the idea of a "practice." A practice is not just any activity; it's a complex, socially established cooperative activity through which certain "internal goods" are realized.

• External goods (like money, fame, power) can be achieved in many ways and are objects of competition.
• Internal goods (like the strategic insight of a great chess player, the diagnostic skill of a doctor, the creative expression of an architect) can only be achieved by submitting to the standards of excellence of that specific practice.

Virtues, then, get their first definition from this context:

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.

For example, honesty is a virtue for a scientist because without it, the internal good of scientific discovery is impossible. Courage is a virtue for a soldier because without it, the internal goods of protecting one's comrades and achieving tactical objectives cannot be realized.

3.2. Narrative and Tradition

Practices alone are not enough. A human life is more than a collection of disconnected practices. This is where the concept of the narrative self, which we encountered in the previous lesson, comes in. We understand our lives as a unified quest or story, and the practices we engage in are part of that story.

This individual story, in turn, is embedded in a much larger story: a moral tradition. A tradition provides the historical context that makes both our individual life-narratives and our practices intelligible.

4. Conclusion: "Justices" rather than "Justice"

If MacIntyre is right, the consequences are profound. If standards of rationality and justification are internal to traditions, then the same must be true for justice. Each tradition, with its own history, its own set of core texts, its own authoritative figures, and its own narrative of the human good, will have its own conception of the virtues, including the virtue of justice.

This leads to the central argument of his next major book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?:

"[S]ince there are a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than justice."

This directly contradicts the universalist ambitions of thinkers like Plato, Kant, and Rawls, who believed they could define Justice (with a capital 'J') for all people at all times. For MacIntyre, to ask "What is just?" is an incomplete question. It must be followed by "...according to which tradition?" Are we asking about justice as understood in the Homeric tradition of warrior-heroes, the Aristotelian tradition of the Athenian polis, the biblical tradition, or the modern liberal tradition? Each provides a different, and often incompatible, answer.

Test your understanding!

Based on what you've learned, how would MacIntyre critique Rawls's "original position" as a method for discovering the principles of justice?

Show answer

MacIntyre would argue that the "original position" is a quintessential example of the Enlightenment's failed project. It attempts to derive principles of justice from a standpoint that is explicitly ahistorical, asocial, and outside of any tradition. The individuals behind the "veil of ignorance" are precisely the "unencumbered selves" that MacIntyre believes are a fiction.

He would contend that it's impossible for such beings to reason meaningfully about justice at all. Their choices would be arbitrary because they are stripped of the very context—the practices, narratives, and tradition—that gives concepts like "justice," "fairness," and "the good" their meaning. From MacIntyre's perspective, Rawls isn't discovering universal principles; he is simply presenting the conception of justice that is internal to the modern liberal tradition, while mistakenly believing it to be universal and tradition-independent.

5. But Is This Just Relativism?

A major objection immediately arises: If justice is internal to traditions, doesn't this just mean that any tradition's view is as good as any other? Are we left with a hopeless relativism where a liberal tradition and a fascist tradition have equally valid claims, with no way to rationally decide between them?

MacIntyre argues no. His view is historicist, not relativist. He provides a mechanism for rational progress and comparison. Traditions are not static; they are living arguments that can encounter "epistemological crises"—moments when their own established methods of inquiry fail to solve new, pressing problems and incoherencies.

A tradition can demonstrate its rational superiority over a rival in one of two ways:

1. By successfully resolving its own epistemological crises over time.
2. Crucially, by being able to both identify and solve the crisis of a rival tradition in terms that the rival tradition itself can recognize.

This complex but powerful idea provides a way to make rational judgments between traditions without resorting to a nonexistent, neutral "view from nowhere."

Conclusion

We have traced MacIntyre's intricate argument, from his diagnosis of modern moral chaos to his radical re-grounding of ethics in the life of communities. His work represents one of the most significant challenges to the liberal project, forcing us to question whether universal, abstract principles can ever capture the deep, particular, and historically-rooted nature of our moral lives.

Key Takeaways:

• MacIntyre diagnoses modern moral argument as "emotivism," where moral statements are mere expressions of preference, due to the failure of the Enlightenment project.
• The root cause of this failure was the rejection of a teleological view of human nature—a shared concept of the human purpose or good.
• He rebuilds ethics on three concepts: practices (activities with internal goods), the narrative unity of a life, and moral traditions.
• Virtues are the qualities needed to excel in practices, sustain a life quest, and uphold a tradition.
• Because rational justification is internal to traditions, this leads to the conclusion that there are "justices rather than justice." The meaning of justice is tradition-dependent.
• This view avoids simple relativism by proposing that traditions can be rationally compared through their ability to navigate and resolve "epistemological crises."

Preview of the Next Lesson:

MacIntyre's argument that justice is tied to a community's conception of the good leads us directly to our next topic. We will analyze perfectionist theories that ground justice in the state's role in promoting human excellence or a specific conception of the good life. While MacIntyre focuses on the role of communities and traditions, perfectionists make a bolder claim about the proper role of the state itself, directly challenging the liberal ideal of state neutrality.