Alasdair MacIntyre's politics

People in the modern liberal capitalist world talk as though we are engaged in moral reasoning, and act as though our actions are chosen as the result of such reasoning, but in fact neither of these things is true. Just as with the people working with "science" in the imaginary world that MacIntyre describes, philosophers and ordinary people are working today with bits and pieces of philosophies which are detached from their original pre-Enlightenment settings in which they were comprehensible and useful. Current moral and political philosophies are fragmented, incoherent, and conflicting, with no standards that can be appealed to in order to evaluate their truth or adjudicate the conflicts between them – or at least no standards that all those involved in the disputes will be willing to accept, since any standard will presuppose the truth of one of the contending positions. To use an analogy that MacIntyre does not use, one might say that it is as if we tore handfuls of pages from books by Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Danielle Steele, Mark Twain, and J.K. Rowling, threw half of them away, shuffled the rest, stapled them together, and then tried to read the "story" that resulted. It would be incoherent, and any attempt to describe the characters, plot, or meaning would be doomed to failure. On the other hand, because certain characters, settings, and bits of narrative would reappear throughout, it would seem as though the story could cohere, and much effort – ultimately futile – might be expended in trying to make it do so. This, according to MacIntyre, is the moral world in which we currently live.

One consequence of this situation is that we have endless and interminable debates within philosophy and, where philosophy influences politics, within politics as well (After Virtue 6-8, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry 7 and Chapter 1). MacIntyre demonstrates this with regard to philosophers by a comparison of the positions of John Rawls and Robert Nozick on what justice is, positions which are mutually exclusive, but internally coherent. Each conclusion follows reasonably from its premises (After Virtue Chapter 17). Each position has many adherents who can point out the flaws in the other but cannot successfully defend their own position against attack. In the political world, one of the examples MacIntyre uses is the abortion issue in the United States. One side of the debate, drawing largely on a particular interpretation of Christian ethics, asserts that abortion is murder and hence is both morally unacceptable and deserving of legal punishment; the other side, usually drawing either on a conception of privacy or of rights or both, asserts that women should have the right to make a private decision about terminating a pregnancy, and therefore abortion, while possibly morally problematic, deserves the protection of the law. In either case, the conclusion follows logically, that is, reasonably, from the premises. But the starting premises are incompatible, and there is no way to gain everyone's agreement to either set of premises, nor is there even any agreement on what kind of argument might be able to gain a consensus. (And a look at public opinion polls about abortion taken in the United States shows that the percentage of people for or against legal abortion in particular circumstances has basically remained unchanged since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973).

It is also the case, according to MacIntyre, that those involved in these philosophical and political debates claim to be using premises that are objective, based on reason, and universally applicable. Many of them even believe these claims, misunderstanding the nature of their particular inadequate modern philosophy, just as the people in MacIntyre's post-disaster world misunderstand what it means to be doing real science. But what they are really doing, whether they recognize it or not, is using the language of morality to try to gain their own preferences. They are not trying to persuade others by reasoned argument, because a reasoned argument about morality would require a shared agreement on the good for human beings in the same way that reasoned arguments in the sciences rely on shared agreement about what counts as a scientific definition and a scientific practice. This agreement about the good for human beings does not exist in the modern world (in fact, the modern world is in many ways defined by its absence) and so any attempt at reasoned argument about morality or moral issues is doomed to fail.

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MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the human good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another about what that common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist. What kind of politics can such a society have? "Politically the societies of advanced Western modernity are oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies. The large majority of those who inhabit them are excluded from membership in the elites that determine the range of alternatives between which voters are permitted to choose. And the most fundamental issues are excluded from that range of alternatives.” (The MacIntyre Reader 237; see also The MacIntyre Reader 248, 272). What MacIntyre means by "the most fundamental issues" are the issues of what the best way of life is for individual human beings and for human communities as a whole, and how each can be ordered so as to enable the other to flourish. Modern politics has no space for such issues. Prior to the 2004 election in the United States he published a short essay on the Internet arguing that in light of this lack of meaningful alternatives about the most fundamental issues the proper thing to do was refrain from voting. There are no meaningful alternatives on these issues because almost all citizens subscribe, consciously or not, to the modern idea that issues about the best way of life are not capable of political resolution or consensus and that they must be left to each individual to decide. MacIntyre and other critics of liberalism, which they see as the political manifestation of emotivism, argue that liberalism claims to be neutral about the best way of life and moves debates about it out of the public sphere and into the private, claiming that the state should take no position about what the good life or the good state is. This however has the effect of privileging a certain kind of life and a certain kind of state in the name of neutrality; it is another of the deceptions of the modern world. Because liberalism asserts that each individual has a right to pursue happiness in his or her own way, and because the versions of happiness individuals pursue are inevitably mutually incompatible (I wish to have prayer in schools, you do not; I wish to outlaw abortion, which you support; I wish to raise taxes on the wealthy to feed the poor, which you reject), and because we cannot persuade one another or agree on a common good, politics is, as MacIntyre says, "civil war carried on by other means" (After Virtue 253).

MacIntyre's famous comment, quoted earlier, about the new dark ages we are living in is followed by the observation that in contrast to the earlier dark ages, the barbarians are not at the gates but in fact have been governing us for some time (After Virtue 263). This conclusion is what we would expect if MacIntyre's view of the world is right. We would be ruled by people who are ruthlessly aggressive, ignorant of or actually hostile to the virtues required for civilized life, and destructive of social life. Since politics today is about using ideas and arguments not to search for truth but to manipulate others in the quest for power, we would expect the people with the most power to be the ones who are best at manipulating others for their own purposes and who have the greatest desire for power. The reasons they would give to justify their power would be false, but widely accepted, and they would use that power for their own selfish ends. Furthermore, they would pursue that power through whatever means they felt would be most effective, in the absence of any of the standards of right and wrong or success and failure that a practice would provide. In such a world, MacIntyre says, things that would appear to be vices would in fact be virtues.