In three chapters of After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre describes what he terms ‘the Enlightenment Project’ whose breakdown underlies the chaos of moral values in contemporary culture.1 That project was in his view centrally concerned with providing universal standards by which to justify particular courses of action in every sphere of life, and although Enlightenment thinkers manifestly did not agree as to exactly which principles might be acceptable to rational persons, he claims they nevertheless collectively propagated the doctrine that such principles must exist, and that moral conduct must therefore be subject to intelligible vindication or criticism. Many post-Enlightenment philosophers have continued to pursue that aim, but in the absence of any prevalent framework of values within which moral judgements could be agreed, they have only shown, according to MacIntyre, that this ideal cannot be attained. The legacy of the Enlightenment has therefore been to render our morality confused—to divide our allegiances between different competing doctrines and to foster disagreement about what is right and good, even when we seek to make our standards plain. Without already settled moral beliefs, we have come to identify our principles only in terms of abstract notions of the self and individual choice, freed from the contingencies of social roles or historical tradition. In such a world every person may legislate his or her own code of conduct. Adrift in the democratic sea of modernity, we clutch at values which are incompatible, incommensurable and arbitrary.
A similar argument, albeit with different emphases, also informs both Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [WJ] and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry [TRV].2 Six chapters of Whose Justice? are devoted to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century themes, mainly concerned with the peculiar blend of Calvinist Augustinianism and Renaissance Aristotelianism deemed to be centrally distinctive of the background to the Scottish Enlightenment, and with Hutcheson’s and Hume’s conceptions of practical reason and justice, all in the context of an overarching image of the Enlightenment, whose ‘central aspiration’ is described there (WJ, p. 6) in much the same terms as in After Virtue [AV]. In Three Rival Versions MacIntyre offers a critical assessment of a universalist framework of moral discourse which he associates especially with the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, dating from 1873, inspired, in turn, by principles of science, reason and progress, and by an allegedly ‘unified secular vision of the world’ (TRV, p. 216) such as had already been infused in the Enlightenment Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.
If pride of place among moral philosophers seems to pass slowly from Aristotle to Aquinas in his three most canonical writings, MacIntyre’s Enlightenment Project, by contrast, remains largely unreconstructed, unredeemed and undiminished in its failure, even after substantial embellishment. His three principal works comprise an extraordinary indictment of the theoretical and practical legacy of eighteenth-century philosophy, as comprehensive as any among the numerous critiques produced over the past half-century, and among the most trenchant since Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Hippolyte Taine’s Origines de la France contemporaine. His account projects the Enlightenment’s implications and influence as they stem from its aims. He holds it to blame for some of the most sinister aspects of a morally vacuous civilization, cursed by the malediction of unlicenced Reason. His intellectual history of the period forms one of the mainsprings of his own philosophy.
Of course opposition to a putative Enlightenment Project figures conspicuously in many other doctrines, including perhaps all of the most prominent ideologies of the past two hundred years. Conservatives and Romantics have characteristically condemned the scepticism, atheism and generally critical temper of eighteenth-century speculative philosophy for bringing into question the very foundations of the ancien régime, thereby allegedly inspiring the French revolutionaries with their anti-authoritarian spirit and a zealous determination to transform the world, which culminated in the Jacobin Terror. Marxists, radicals and communitarians have judged its commitment either to utilitarianism or to natural rights as heralding the age of bourgeois liberties, appropriate to a world of independent producers engaged in maximizing their separate interests, under bureaucratic authorities following principles of instrumental reason. Modern liberals and libertarians have instead judged the Enlightenment’s espousal of at least some of the rights of man as conducive to institutions of popular sovereignty and democratic control which have prompted state interference in the private domain and have proved hostile to the interests of commercial society. Such images of the Enlightenment are of course scarcely compatible, and they ill accord with the substantial intellectual debt which the same ideologies are also said to owe to eighteenth-century philosophy. But MacIntyre’s account owes little to them. Although he seems to share certain misgivings about the loss of public engagement and the moral fragmentation of modern life with communitarian critics of the Enlightenment (like Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel), and although he may appear to have come to such views by a similar route, passing above all from Hegel, his objections in fact have a rather different focus and, by and large, as I hope to indicate, a strikingly distinct pedigree.
In retracing that pedigree and thus attempting, as it were, to reproject the steps of his own construal of the Enlightenment Project’s trajectory, I mean to show how his interpretation of an intellectual tradition depends above all on his assessment of its impact. And while most of my remarks here stem from a quite different understanding of the Enlightenment which leads me to take issue with MacIntyre’s claims, I should first like to give due weight to what I take to be the chief merits of his approach. In After Virtue and elsewhere he puts a compelling case for the integration of moral philosophy with moral behaviour and conduct, rejecting the demarcations of academic disciplines which, on the one hand, keep the metaphilosophy of morals uncontaminated by historical and sociological commentary, and, on the other, leave down-to-earth historical discourse uninformed by theoretical analysis. Overcoming the double barrenness of detached philosophy and mindless history has been an admirable aim promoted by MacIntyre throughout his career, and he has pursued it in this context by recounting how certain speculative presuppositions gave rise to consequences which have shaped the lives of persons and indeed the character of whole societies, even when their members are scarcely aware of their own fundamental moral uncertainties spawned by such beliefs. As the title of the fifth chapter of After Virtue makes plain, the Enlightenment Project of justifying morality which MacIntyre portrays not only failed, but ‘had to fail’. The chaos of values prevalent in democratic society is the negation in concrete form which springs from the negativity of its philosophy. Corresponding in the world of ideas to a defunct institution which fetters the development of a new productive force, it had to be annihilated, and it was.
Claims of such magnitude are seldom made by philosophers, least of all by those whose analytical skills were sharpened as his were by the scalpels of post–World War II Oxford. MacIntyre’s philosophy of history is on a grand scale, scarcely attempted in this century since Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, and far more persuasive—not to mention intelligible—than either. In its attempt to thread the unity of theory and practice within the morals of modern civilization it is boldly conceived and splendidly incautious—indeed profoundly reminiscent in its nature of the Enlightenment Project he holds in such low esteem. In a sense, it might even be described as that Project turned upside down, or back to front, inspired as it is by a deep religious conviction and a profound sense of faith of a kind from which eighteenth-century sceptical philosophers, themselves missionaries in reverse, endeavoured to liberate peoples enthralled by them. MacIntyre’s philosophy of history, moreover, forms a richly textured tapestry drawn from an impressively wide range of reading, both of primary sources and modern authorities, most notably, perhaps, with regard to the Scottish Enlightenment, but also on Aristotle, medieval conceptions of morality, nineteenth-century ethics, and contemporary French and American philosophy. If After Virtue remains his principal work, because of its depth and scale, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions make more substantial contributions to the history of ideas on account of their scholarship, increasingly remarkable for its historical specificity and attention to detail. These works do not recapitulate the all too glaringly obvious errors so unfortunately evident in his Short History of Ethics; in taking stock of his philosophy of history as a whole, current readers must learn to grapple not only with the subtle turns of his argument but also with the both dense and delicate contextual treatments of the writings and authors he investigates. It is a formidable achievement, demanding close scrutiny. The Enlightenment Project portrayed at its heart is, nevertheless, profoundly misleading.
In After Virtue that Project is reconstructed from its nineteenth-century dénouement to its seventeenth-century source by the regression of a lineage of concepts not unlike Alex Haley’s search for his ancestral family in Roots. MacIntyre begins with the publication of Kierkegaard’s Enten–Eller (Either–Or) in 1842, a work which is found to herald the capriciousness of moral choice in contemporary culture, in that it provides an account of two contrasting ways of life—the ethical, or the realm of duty, and the aesthetic, or the realm of pleasure and satisfaction—without offering any grounds to justify one over the other. What makes the argument of Kierkegaard seem so disturbing is the apparent incommensurability of two distinct value systems, and the arbitrariness and irrationality of any moral choice between them. That perspective, according to MacIntyre, was largely inspired by Kant, whom Kierkegaard had read with care, and whose ethics provide the essential background for his own philosophy (AV, p. 42). Kant, that is, while making compliance with duty a morally binding principle, had provided no logical grounds for doing so, leaving the performance of duty for duty’s sake indefensible to anyone who elected to act in accordance with self-interested prudence rather than disinterested reason (AV, pp. 44–45). Kierkegaard merely appropriated Kant’s doctrine to show that the precepts of reason could not themselves be rationally vindicated. Kant, moreover, had put forward his own conception of duty as a universal law largely to overturn a hedonistic morality whose principles prescribed that duty stems from passion or interest. No moral code, he contended, could be based on the pursuit of happiness or personal benefit, since our duties would then hold only conditionally, overturned without contradiction when our advantage changed.
The two central Enlightenment figures whom MacIntyre identifies as subscribing to the sort of principles Kant deemed immoral are Diderot, on the one hand, and Hume, on the other. In Le Neveu de Rameau, Diderot, speaking in his own voice, propounds the view that the conservative rules of bourgeois morality conform to conscientious desire and passion, while speaking as the nephew of the dialogue, he acknowledges that such rules are just sophisticated disguises for our devious and predatory abuse of one another. The logic of any ethic of desire which corresponds with feelings obliges him, claims MacIntyre, to recognize that there are incompatible desires which may be ordered in rival ways (AV, pp. 45–46). Hume, independently and more philosophically, is deemed to have put forward much the same thesis. Convinced that morality must either be the work of reason or of the passions, he contended that it had to be attributable to the passions, since they alone form the springs of human action. Of course he allowed that moral judgements required the invocation of general rules, but, like Diderot, he sought to account for such rules by explaining ‘their utility in helping . . . to attain those ends which the passions set before us’ (AV, p. 46), and in both his Treatise of Human Nature and his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals he sought to explain how persons might feel bound to adhere unconditionally to certain rules by discriminating between desires and feelings according to normative criteria of a kind which could not themselves be feelings (AV, pp. 46–47). In this sense, Hume and Kant may be understood as exact philosophical counterparts within the Enlightenment Project, the one deriving his morality from reason, the other from passion—in one case, indeed, laying the groundwork for all subsequent rights-based deontological moral philosophies, in the other promoting the consequentialist and utilitarian ethics of the post-Enlightenment world.
In drawing this group portrait to its close, MacIntyre concludes that Hume may even have found inspiration in the Jansenism of Pascal, whose conception of reason as a merely calculative faculty which cannot inspire action or belief anticipated his own view that it could serve as a means but never prescribe the ends of human endeavour. According to MacIntyre, Pascal stands at a seminally important point in the history of the Enlightenment Project (AV, p. 52), since his account of reason, so attuned to the innovations of seventeenth-century philosophy and science, excluded the Scholastic essences conceived as potentialities to act which had been inherited from Aristotle. At the heart of the Enlightenment Project, as he describes it in After Virtue, lay a rejection of teleology so central to Aristotle’s developmental notion of man’s perfection. In abandoning that idea of self-fulfilment, philosophers of the Enlightenment left no place for the classical ethics of virtue, which articulated qualities that promoted the excellence of character. They regarded the nature of humanity as uniform and constant, thus dismembering the moral consciousness of man by cutting off the contingent and unfolding truths of his experience from the realm of duty and obligation. Whether rooting morality in reason or passion, their diremption of one from the other entailed the loss of reason’s capacity to control what the passions pursued. It divorced the precepts of morality from the facts of human nature, leaving individuals as sovereign masters of their own conduct. In this sense Pascal’s conception of reason as incapable of prescription heralds Kierkegaard’s notion of the irrationality of moral choice. The Enlightenment Project can be seen to have cast moral philosophy adrift by its rejection of the classical ethics of virtue and the entelechies of Aristotle and Scholasticism.
In Whose Justice? MacIntyre’s portrait of the Scottish Enlightenment takes shape by contrast in the opposite direction—that is, forward, from the mid-seventeenth century, by reconstituting the deconstructed tradition described in After Virtue with much fuller embellishment and greater elaboration within a particular tradition, now inaugurated rather than consummated by the rejection of Aristotle. His refashioned and refocused argument, of substantially greater length than in After Virtue, proceeds in the following way. As a result of the 1707 Treaty of Union with England, Scotland lost her sovereignty but not her identity, sustained against Anglican cultural forces by the Presbyterian order of its Calvinist Church, by the institutions and practitioners of Scots law, and by its unique and relatively homogenous educational system which promoted a peculiarly Scottish ethos of Protestant civility (WJ, p. 220). In this closely knit nexus of legal, theological and educational systems, the five national universities (at a time when England had just two) filled a central role, both spiritual and practical, in the articulation of a Scottish identity, and MacIntyre devotes most of his attention to that role, and especially to the contribution made within it by professors of moral philosophy, as ‘one of the most important bearers of a distinctly Scottish tradition’ (WJ, p. 251).
The co-existence of Augustinian theology with the revived study of Aristotelianism had been sustained in seventeenth-century Scottish universities through the influence of men like Robert Baillie, Principal of Glasgow University after the Restoration, and Viscount Stair, Lord President of the Scottish Court of Session, but the political settlement with England, and the need perceived by Scottish educationalists to contend with the pretensions of the new sciences and metaphysics of their day, put the adherents to what is termed ‘the central Scottish intellectual tradition’ (WJ, p. 254) under strain to reaffirm both their faith and their principles. According to MacIntyre, Francis Hutcheson, appointed to the Glasgow Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1730, felt a special responsibility to meet such needs because he assumed himself entrusted with the task of secular instruction in Christian theology as well. In his lectures and publications based upon them he attempted to refine the philosophical principles of morality he had inherited partly from Aristotelian Scholasticism and partly from Calvinism, mainly in the light of Shaftesbury’s psychological account of the passions. From Shaftesbury he developed an idea of the moral sense as a kind of inward rationale for principles which could no longer be shown to be true in the light of either Reason or Revelation, but which corresponded closely with the religious feelings of his contemporaries, who had grown both politically and spiritually vulnerable to moral conflict. Hutcheson’s doctrine was thus espoused with enthusiasm by his students, and ministers, merchants, advocates and the gentry all rushed to subscribe to his posthumously published System of Moral Philosophy. As MacIntyre observes, it had been his remarkable achievement to provide ‘new foundations both for moral theology and for the philosophy of law and justice, and in doing so preserving the distinctive characteristics of the Scottish presbyterian and intellectual tradition’ (WJ, pp. 278–79).
That achievement, however, proved short-lived and unstable, for on the subversive road leading from the lowlands of Perfidious Albion there soon appeared Hume. Cosmopolitan philosopher and historian of England Hume, says MacIntyre, writes of his native Scotland ‘as if it were a foreign country’ (WJ, p. 320), uncultivated, uncivilized, barbarous. Although he was in certain respects indebted to Hutcheson—partly for his own account of the passions in his Treatise of Human Nature and above all in his acceptance of the claim that reason is practically inert (WJ, p. 285)—he shared none of Hutcheson’s attachment to a Scottish Presbyterian social and intellectual tradition. He spoke for himself, in the first person, and turned to Hutcheson, together with Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville and others, only to provide an account of the complex intentionality of human passions which was superior to theirs (WJ, p. 293). That account imputes to the self a social identity shaped in reciprocal relations with and expectations of other persons, and it provides the framework of a moral philosophy whose evaluative principles accord with human passions and not with any standards of right reason independent of men’s judgement.
Yet on inspection it transpires that the conservative principles of justice, property, order and rank which Hume in fact endorses are most distinctive of the social order, embracing landowning classes and their clients, which he inhabited himself and of which he approved, so that what his philosophy presents as human nature turns out to be eighteenth-century English human nature and, indeed, only the dominant variant of that (WJ, p. 295). Whereas Hutcheson’s moral philosophy had sought to renew as well as preserve a Scottish inheritance in religion, law and education in the face of new challenges, Hume had grasped that Scottish theology and law could not survive such change. He therefore undertook to refute the conceptual foundations of Scotland’s past. Its unphilosophical culture, he came to believe, stood in the way of philosophical enquiry and a general science of human nature. Together with other thinkers of the Enlightenment, as was once remarked, although not about Hume,3 he thus threw dust in our eyes even while pointing in the direction he wished us to follow. He has made those persuaded by him blind to what we in fact need to recover, that is, ‘a conception of rational enquiry . . . embodied in a tradition’, whose standards of justification emerge from and are vindicated within it (WJ, p. 7).
What are we to make of this? To my mind, it is all wonderfully confused, both in method and substance, generally and in detail. An Enlightenment Project shaped by a mid-seventeenth-century Jansenist (Pascal) and a mid-nineteenth-century Christian existentialist (Kierkegaard), with an encyclopaedic romantic (Diderot) and a motley crew of Scots and Germans between them, needs more justification to pass muster than MacIntyre provides. It may be thought that the diversity of thinkers linked with that whole assemblage is too great, or the tensions between them too profound, to allow any ascription of a generic identity or common purpose to them, and eighteenth-century scholars who have failed to uncover any such ‘project’ or ‘movement’ or even ‘the Enlightenment’ after a lifetime’s research devoted to the subject could be forgiven their exasperation when confronted by so great a leap and quick fix.
But let us grant that the idea of an ‘Enlightenment Project’ is credible. Even if our terminology was not employed by eighteenth-century thinkers themselves (the expression ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, for instance, was apparently invented in 1900), what we have in mind may indeed have formed part of the self-image of that age. The literary salons and academies, the moral weeklies and journals, the Encyclopédie and other dictionaries of the arts and sciences, the association of philosophy with kingship which in the eighteenth century was already described as ‘enlightened despotism’, all lend warrant to the notion of shared principles, a campaign, an international society of the republic of letters, a party of humanity. Its friends and critics would not perhaps have been surprised to hear its name, but they would have been entitled, as are MacIntyre’s readers, to learn what the Project was about. What was its political economy, its anthropology, its conjectural history or philosophy of science? Allowing that it failed, and perhaps even had to fail, would it not have been appropriate first to explain what it set out to achieve? And would it not also have been sensible to identify its central figures? Montesquieu is nowhere mentioned in After Virtue or Whose Justice?, while Rousseau receives only the most scanty attention and Smith hardly much more. How is it possible that Voltaire—the godfather of the Enlightenment Project on any plausible interpretation of its meaning—is altogether missing from MacIntyre’s cast? Readers anticipating that after the Scots he must address the French may be disheartened to discover from Whose Justice? (p. 11) that the only tradition of practical reasoning in the Enlightenment which MacIntyre deems worthy of similar attention is that of Kant, Prussian public law and Lutheran theology.
At least part of the explanation of his neglect of French thinkers is that he regards them as relatively insignificant by comparison with the intellectual range and variety of the Scots, contending, furthermore, that their general lack of a secularized Protestant background and the absence from their country of a politically influential intelligentsia which might have read their works, or progressive universities that might have been attentive to them, left them alienated from their own society, as Scottish, English, Dutch, Danish and Prussian intellectuals were not (AV, p. 36). I confess my failure to comprehend the significance of their lack of Protestantism, but put baldly in this way each of these points is in fact false. The philosophes of the Enlightenment characteristically exercised a great deal more influence in France, and over the political life of their nation, than did intellectuals in other European countries, not least because France enjoyed by far the most substantial reading public in the eighteenth century, outside the universities which resisted their ideas, though they also had allies among scholars and scientists within universities and in the academies, as well as among liberal theologians, of whom several contributed to the Encyclopédie.
Yet supposing that MacIntyre’s inaccurate claims about the institutional marginality of French Enlightenment thinkers were true, his premise about the depth and range of their influence would still be false. In so far as the philosophes of the French Enlightenment were self-employed writers, they were often more free to speak their mind, unconstrained by the obligations of office or the duties of teaching a prescribed syllabus. Their apparent licence to comment on topical issues of the day made their influence all the greater, not only in France but in French-reading circles throughout Europe and even America. When, as often happened, they were judged to have abused their freedom, they were not just excluded from university appointments but imprisoned or exiled, which enhanced their reputations still more. MacIntyre appears to subscribe to the view that only holders of public positions, with socially rooted responsibilities, can exercise any real impact on their followers. But that is surely absurd. To the extent that the Enlightenment was indeed a critically subversive movement, as MacIntyre portrays it, its estrangement from the settled institutions of its day, in France and elsewhere, enhanced its power. By deliberately excluding a French focus from his study, MacIntyre offers his readers an account of peripheries without a core. His Enlightenment Project has been shorn of its projectionist.
Only two French eighteenth-century figures attain any prominence in his work—Diderot and the Chevalier de Jaucourt. Three Rival Versions contains several paragraphs devoted to Jaucourt’s articles ‘Morale’ and ‘Moralité’ for the Encyclopédie, which embrace the proposition that morality is a matter of general rules independent of religious faith, inviting MacIntyre’s comment that ‘it is striking how far other thinkers of the Enlightenment agree’ with him (TRV, p. 175). If he had added that Jaucourt was of Huguenot background he might have judged his influence even greater, but what in fact is most striking about the judgement of Jaucourt’s contemporaries was their agreement that he was just an indefatigable compiler of the views of others. Diderot himself, who had cause to be grateful to him for completing more than one-quarter of the Encyclopédie single-handed, wrote precisely this. Jaucourt of course drew most of his material from other encyclopaedias, including those of Moréri, Chambers and Brucker, and in the case of ‘Morale’ and ‘Moralité’ he may have relied most of all upon Bayle. It was not at all difficult to be persuaded by a man who spoke on behalf of so many others.
Diderot is introduced by MacIntyre not as a contributor to his own Encyclopédie but as the author of the Neveu de Rameau. The main point MacIntyre elicits from that work, as we have seen, is that the older Diderot, the bourgeois moralist in the dialogue, cannot legislate between his own moral preferences and those of the bohemian nephew, thus admitting that there are irredeemably incompatible orderings of desire (AV, p. 46; see also WJ, p. 346). This thesis is contrasted by MacIntyre with the proposition advanced in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, where Diderot instead acknowledges the superiority of natural desires (such as exercise free rein in Polynesia) over the corrupted desires characteristic of Western civilization. That distinction, states MacIntyre, cannot survive the proposition—in short, that we have no grounds for discriminating between desires—which in Le Neveu de Rameau Diderot at last forces himself to recognize (AV, p. 46). But this is a misreading of the Supplément, whose central claim is that a morality in accordance with nature is preferable to one that combats it. Western civilization is found to repress natural desires rather than to espouse different ones. The Supplément does not discriminate between desires but between moralities, and it commends only what is compatible with the promptings of nature. There are, moreover, reasons to doubt whether the unresolved dramatic tensions between the two fictional protagonists of Le Neveu de Rameau express the fundamental moral scepticism of their author’s own philosophy. In any case, the Supplément was drafted more than ten years after Le Neveu and, in conjunction with several other writings, it appears to reflect Diderot’s considered judgement that moral principles should accord with both public utility and physiology, which he does not see as giving rise to a conflict of desires. MacIntyre’s forays into eighteenth-century French moral philosophy, in short, do not carry sufficient conviction.
Neither, regrettably, do his comments about Scotland. The six Scottish chapters of Whose Justice? shed much illumination on a society whose legal and religious institutions, buttressed by its educational curriculum, reinforced a sense of national identity which was and remains among the most remarkable in Europe. If MacIntyre’s elegiac tribute to a noble and indigenous tradition of practical reasoning seems sometimes to approximate a Scottish Nationalist Party broadcast of the songs of Ossian, I do not wish to quarrel with him for that, even though the civic culture and ethics of virtue which he portrays before the Union of 1707 strike me as unduly uniform and unlikely to have been quite so prevalent as he suggests. What I cannot detect is any evidence that Hutcheson assumed the responsibilities for sustaining that tradition which MacIntyre entrusts to him after his appointment to the Glasgow Professorship of Moral Philosophy. For one thing, his principal writings, including those which Hutcheson himself judged most original, had already been completed and published before he took up his Chair. His theory of the moral sense was thus fully articulated prior to the ascribed occasion of its composition.
In so far as his philosophical works reflect a specifically national focus, moreover, they appear less Scottish than Irish, not only on account of their having been drafted in Ireland by a native Ulsterman, but more notably because they were intended principally for the Presbyterian students of the private academy he had established in Dublin in 1718, and they figure in a campaign waged out of that city in the 1720s by the circle of Viscount Molesworth to inculcate among Irish youth a respect for liberty and virtue, which it was thought were inadequately embraced in Scottish universities. Hutcheson was to take up his Glasgow appointment not as a conservative adherent to a Scottish tradition of higher education but as a vigorously critical reformer. His widely attested popularity as a lecturer in Glasgow, partly due to his casual style of delivery in English rather than by way of Latin readings, was even more attributable to the zealotry of his preaching a joyously uplifting moral philosophy in accordance with benign nature and providence, that contrasted with the gloomy precepts around original sin of Augustinian Scholasticism. The Scottish theological tradition which MacIntyre claims Hutcheson reaffirmed was actually rejected by him, and indeed rejected with as much determination as, for other reasons, still in the same period of his life, he opposed the jurisprudence of Pufendorf and the epistemology of Locke. If in apparently espousing Christian Stoicism Hutcheson eventually proved more morally conservative than he might have wished, this was not because of his resolve, as a professor, to keep alive a peculiarly Scottish intellectual inheritance, but almost the opposite—that is, because the pedagogical demands of his office required him to teach by way of textbooks and compendia in accordance with a prescribed syllabus which, by and large, was not of his choosing. The two major works he produced after 1730, the Synopsis metaphysicae and the System of Moral Philosophy, were deemed by him, in the first case, ‘a trifle . . . foolishly printed’, and, in the second, ‘a confused book . . . a farrago’. This distinguished university professor, according to MacIntyre a bearer of a great Scottish tradition, could in fact prove a bore, even to himself, when weighed down by the burdens of his office.
While he portrays Hutcheson as having deliberately aimed at reaffirming the values of a beleaguered past, MacIntyre sometimes depicts Enlightenment thinkers as instead unwitting adherents of circumscribed social practices, advocating ideals which really serve only particular interests as if they were of universal validity. Hume, whose favourite principles are found to be specially well-suited to the interests of the landed gentry, is represented in just this way, and so too are both Diderot and Kant. Each of these figures is depicted as ostensibly radical in his philosophy but in fact conservative as a moralist—Diderot mainly on account of his concern with the responsibilities of parenthood, Hume and Kant largely because of their uncompromising views on the need to keep promises. But do such moral standpoints really reflect the settled social institutions by which philosophers of a certain disposition feel bound? Diderot’s anxieties about his daughter, to whom MacIntyre refers, were largely inspired by his rage and frustration at the morally reprobate conventions of a system of marriage which required intricate negotiations to ensure her dowry, while the fastidious respect for promises shown by Hume and Kant may just exemplify the awesome esteem for marriage vows felt by two shy bachelors psychologically incapable of undertaking them.
The connections between normative principles and social institutions which MacIntyre seeks to draw seem to me elusive and inconsistent. Why, for instance, did the Enlightenment Project issue in the moral disorder of contemporary culture but not noticeably in the chaos of the French Revolution? MacIntyre makes a point of challenging certain writers, among whom he names J. L. Talmon, Isaiah Berlin and Daniel Bell, who have traced the origins of totalitarianism and the Jacobin Terror to the Enlightenment. Jacobinism, he claims, was inspired not only by the virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity, but also by patriotism, productive labour and a simplicity of manners which owed much to the influence of Rousseau and, more distantly, to Aristotle. Such benign communitarian sources manifestly could not have been responsible for violence. Indeed, MacIntyre doubts whether any commitment to virtue could have been ‘so powerful as to be able to produce of itself such stupendous effects’ as the Terror, which he ascribes instead to the political institutionalization of virtue through desperate means employed by men such as Saint-Just (AV, p. 221).
But how is it that the institutionalization of virtue during the French Revolution exculpates the moral philosophy which Saint-Just and others sought to implement, whereas in the post-revolutionary world that philosophy may be deemed responsible for the conduct of persons unaware that they were endeavouring to put Enlightenment moral ideas into practice? Allowing, with MacIntyre, that the abstractions of philosophy may be dangerous, why should his treatment of the insidious influence of Enlightenment principles carry greater conviction than Burke’s or Hegel’s accounts of how such principles unfolded into revolutionary violence? Why should eighteenth-century doctrines have had greater impact on the remoter march of modernity than on the more proximate course of the French Revolution? Can the influence of ideas, like the putative progression of certain historical epochs, actually skip stages? Readers of MacIntyre’s philosophy of history are too often tempted with richly appetizing food for thought, but then denied the required sustenance. If the Enlightenment Project had to conclude in failure, was its inception equally necessary?, they are entitled to ask. How, indeed, according to MacIntyre, did the Enlightenment Project come to arise at all? And if abstract ideas are generally so deeply intertwined with social conventions as he claims, how has it come to pass that the contemporary practice of history remains, on his own testimony, so little contaminated by philosophical issues as to be almost mindless, and the practice of philosophy so similarly insular as to lack any pertinent social focus?
At least some of these issues, it seems to me, can be best understood in terms of the Enlightenment’s more strictly philosophical legacy, as MacIntyre explains it, and against the background of his own intellectual biography. In the second and third chapters of After Virtue—that is, the chapters immediately preceding his discussion of the Enlightenment Project—MacIntyre asserts that the lack of rational criteria for securing moral agreement in contemporary culture is largely attributable to a prevalent philosophical doctrine, according to which all evaluative judgements are at bottom nothing but statements of preference which by their nature cannot be shown to be either true or false (AV, pp. 11–12). This doctrine he calls ‘emotivism’, following the terminology of its principal exponent, C. L. Stevenson. It is in confrontation with emotivism in its various philosophical guises, MacIntyre contends, that his own thesis must be defined (AV, p. 21). That confrontation, already evident from the final chapter on modern moral philosophy in his Short History of Ethics, dating from 1966, was indeed elaborated even earlier in a course of lectures he gave at Oxford entitled ‘What was morality?’, and it forms part of a very wide debate with numerous contributors among mainly British moral philosophers of the post–World War II period. Much of the material in that debate was first published in Mind or in the proceedings of or supplementary volumes to the Aristotelian Society in the late 1940s and 1950s, and some of it has since been reassembled in such collections as The Is–Ought Question edited by W. D. Hudson in 1964 or Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy edited by Stanley Hauerwas and MacIntyre himself in 1983.
Among its heroes or heroines from the professedly anti-emotivist point of view adopted by MacIntyre are Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Stuart Hampshire—the first because she attempted to show that it was impossible to extract from the meaning of moral terms such as ‘good’ some evaluative significance that was externally related to the object so defined; the second because she placed particular emphasis on the Christian tradition in which our moral discourse and values were once embedded; and the third because he drew special attention to Aristotle’s ethics and to the extraordinary gulf that had arisen between classical moral philosophy, concerned with moral choice and judgement, on the one hand, and modern meta-ethics, divorced from evaluative claims and devoted only to problems of language and meaning, on the other.
MacIntyre’s villainous doctrines, moreover, are by and large the same as those which Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Stuart Hampshire had in mind. They embrace the prescriptivism of R. M. Hare and his divorce of the language of moral imperatives from that of description, as well as the logical positivism of A. J. Ayer, which divided judgements into a threefold classification of logical, factual and emotive, relegating moral principles, together with theology, to the emotive category. From both Ayer’s sceptical Humean perspective and Hare’s reformulated Kantian doctrine, it thus transpired that moral judgements were of necessity distinct from matters of fact. Ayer and Hare appear to have been condemned, each by the logic of his philosophy, to fall victim to the irreconcilable conflict between the morality of passions and the morality of reason which had been characteristic of their eighteenth-century forbears, described by MacIntyre in After Virtue. As he furthermore makes plain in his Short History of Ethics (pp. 249–65), both of their doctrines may be understood in connection with C. L. Stevenson’s emotivism, dating from his seminal work of 1944, Ethics and Language. According to Stevenson, the proposition ‘this is good’ means little else than ‘I approve of it’—a claim which in yet another idiom reinforced the positivist and prescriptivist disjunction of facts from values. Stevenson, for his part, apparently developed his moral philosophy out of the intuitionism of H. A. Prichard and especially G. E. Moore, who in his Principia Ethica had portrayed all attempts to define the attributes of goodness as a naturalistic fallacy, on the grounds that goodness was a simple and indefinable property of which nothing could be rationally predicated as true or false. Following both Henry Sidgwick and William Whewell, Moore supposed that goodness could only be intuited, never justified, a view which Whewell in turn drew essentially from the younger Mill, who had decoupled the moral injunctions of utilitarianism from their unconvincing psychological foundations devised by Bentham, while Bentham’s mistake had been due to the general failure of the Enlightenment Project, for the reasons I have already advanced. As MacIntyre remarks in After Virtue, ‘The history of utilitarianism thus links historically the eighteenth-century project of justifying morality and the twentieth century’s decline into emotivism’ (AV, p. 63).
The is–ought distinction of modern moral philosophy is in this fashion explained as emanating, through intuitionism and emotivism, from Moore’s criticism of the naturalistic fallacy, in its turn heralded by the passage from Book III, part 1, section 1 of the Treatise of Human Nature in which Hume had challenged the erroneous deduction of propositions with the word ‘ought’ from statements containing the word ‘is’ in all the systems of morality known to him. In a notable commentary on that passage first published in The Philosophical Review in 1959, MacIntyre contends that Hume did not himself believe in the autonomy of morals, as so many of his interpreters have alleged, and that he in fact derived ‘ought’ from ‘is’ in his own theory of justice. Moore’s intuitionism, moreover, was only indirectly indebted to Hume, who is unmentioned anywhere in the Principia Ethica. But Hume, Moore and the other moral philosophers whom MacIntyre names as proponents of the fact–value distinction are nevertheless collectively deemed responsible for the Enlightenment Project and its legacy. That Project failed in its unwarranted bifurcation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’, in cutting off moral principles from their moorings in human nature, thereby releasing them to drift, with every passing current of philosophical fashion, into arbitrariness and irresolution.
MacIntyre is not the first interpreter of ethical naturalism to have reconstructed the history of objections to that alleged fallacy and to have traced them to the Enlightenment. Among others, both David Raphael, in The Moral Sense, dating from 1947, and Arthur Prior, in his Logic and the Basis of Ethics of 1949, had addressed this subject long before MacIntyre and had each chronicled its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prefigurations in the works of Hutcheson and Hume, but also Ralph Cud-worth, Samuel Clarke, Thomas Reid, Richard Price and others, through their contrasting accounts of the place of feelings and reason in morals. The various texts which invite such treatments of ethics and of the fitful appearance of a certain principle within a speculative tradition had already been assembled even earlier by L. A. Selby-Bigge in his British Moralists at the end of the nineteenth century and are now available in a new format, with a somewhat different cast, in the collection compiled under the same title by Raphael. Yet in his initial reflections on emotivism, MacIntyre turned his attention, not to its Enlightenment origins, but to its philosophical underpinnings and influence. Readers hard-pressed to keep up with the permutations of his faith may therefore be comforted to learn that the principles of his clash with emotivism, as explained in After Virtue, have always informed his outlook on the world. They constitute the moral bedrock of his philosophy, unaffected by the great or subtle modulations of his views on Christianity, Hegelianism, Marxism or irrationalism.
His critique of the emotivist theory of ethics is substantially prefigured in the M.A. dissertation he completed at the University of Manchester, under the title The Significance of Moral Judgements. Already then, in 1951, he challenged the presuppositions of the intuitionist and emotivist ethics of Moore and Stevenson. Already then, he found fault with the logic of contemporary moral discourse in its misconceived appeal to categorical truths and universal standards. Already then, in commenting on Hume’s distinction between ‘ought’ and ‘is’, he stressed that our notions of what is right and good, shaped by concrete and conditional circumstances, must fill a place within the structure of socially prescribed behaviour. ‘Moral judgements’, he claimed—still as a young man of twenty-two—form ‘part of a pattern of language and action, continually to be adjusted and criticised’. The arguments we employ ‘are not just about the applications of . . . principles, but also about which principles to apply . . . not just about the relation of the facts to . . . judgements, but also about which facts are relevant to our decisions’.4 It is salutary to find such durable and enduring precepts at the dawn of his career. They provide a solid foundation to his life-long censure of emotivism. But only with an almighty, unfounded and uncalled for leap of the imagination can MacIntyre bring that censure to bear upon his projection of the Enlightenment. His comments on the legacy of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, portrayed as if it were a peripatetic long day’s journey into night, only render it obscure.
The Enlightenment did not confront the entelechies of Aristotelian Scholasticism with a new metaphysics and epistemology drawn from Descartes and Locke. Aristotelianism had been largely discredited in most European universities—especially the progressive institutions accorded popular significance by MacIntyre—long before the eighteenth century, and the curriculum which Hutcheson and other professors of moral philosophy and related subjects felt obliged to offer included a great deal more Stoicism and rather more civic humanism, more natural jurisprudence in the tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf as explained by Carmichael, Barbeyrac or Brucker, than MacIntyre allows. The ethics which serious eighteenth-century academic commentators thought it most essential to refute—in Germany and Scotland as well as France—was first that of Hobbes, then Spinoza’s and then perhaps Mandeville’s. After around 1750, the figure who began to command the greatest attention and praise was Montesquieu, rather like John Stuart Mill in British universities of the late nineteenth century. To the extent that Jansenist doctrines were prevalent in secular studies, it was less because of the continued irradiation of Augustinian theology than because of the still intellectually fashionable standing of Antoine Arnauld’s and Pierre Nicole’s Logique, ou l’art de penser and of the Port-Royal Grammaire générale.
Neither is MacIntyre correct to claim that Enlightenment thinkers characteristically believed in the uniformity of human nature and of the moral laws that govern it. Many eighteenth-century moral philosophers, including Helvétius and Kant, did subscribe to such views, but those that did generally agreed with Hume that men might change their situations and circumstances and thereby improve or worsen their conduct. Others, like Turgot or Smith, adopted more manifestly developmental notions of human nature and character, deemed to pass through stages, like the epochs of civilization. Still others endorsed biological models of mankind’s perfection or corruption, along lines intimated by the natural historians of humanity, most notably Buffon. Rousseau not only adopted yet another evolutionary perspective, but in fact invented the term perfectibilité to encapsulate his understanding of the malleability of human nature, in a potentially benign but in fact humanly blighted providential framework somewhat akin to that of Pelagius. Teleological conceptions of man’s moral metamorphosis such as Aristotle had put forward are not absent from eighteenth-century philosophy, even if Aristotle himself was no longer widely acclaimed for such notions. MacIntyre’s account of the Enlightenment Project is on this point far too blunt and shallow.
In need of most substantial revision is his disregard of one principle which lies at the heart of that Project, however else it may be conceived—that is, the principle of toleration. Eighteenth-century thinkers, a few of whom became globetrotters themselves, had greater access than ever before in European history to reports by explorers, merchants and missionaries on primitive and un-Christian societies. They recognized the sophistication and utility of moral traditions different from their own, and sometimes, as with Diderot, called for anti-colonial policies to preserve the integrity of other cultures. If the Christian moral tradition predominant in Europe did not win their universal approbation, that was because, with Voltaire, they deemed so many of its principles hypocritical, bigoted or intolerant, and the practices of its political and priestly powers despotic. For the philosophes of the eighteenth century it did not follow from the moral specificity of our disparate cultures that persons from one community were unable to grasp the values of another, still less that their differences must render them enemies. Religious and moral diversity, they believed, did not entail dreadful crusades against infidels. Rather, they thought it possible for the whole of humanity to engage in peaceable assembly, like the traders at the London Stock Exchange, each a faithful follower of his church, but also capable of dealing with other men as if they were of the same religion. In such circumstances, remarked Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques, the Presbyterians trust the Anabaptists, but in Scotland, where they are supreme, they affect a solemn bearing, behave as pedants and preach through their nose.
Having summoned St. Benedict to return in After Virtue (p. 245), MacIntyre concludes his Three Rival Versions with an appeal for the reconstitution of the Thomistic university as a place of ‘constrained disagreement’ following the failed experiment of unconstrained agreement in contemporary liberal universities (TRV, pp. 230–33). It is difficult to imagine that, under such constraint Hume would have fared any better than he did in his candidacy for the Edinburgh Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1745 (WJ, pp. 286–87). Whatever Hutcheson’s actual reasons for opposing Hume’s appointment, there can be little doubt that, both in the interests of the Scottish intellectual tradition as described by MacIntyre and on behalf of a Thomistic principle of constrained disagreement, he ought to have found Hume unfit for that post and to have stood in his way. Hutcheson, after all, had trained as a minister. Indeed, on the ‘enforced exclusion’ principle which MacIntyre himself expressly commends, the successful candidate (Cleghorn, also trained for the ministry) had been ‘rightly preferred to Hume’ (TRV, p. 224). But would not natural reason, common sense or justice suggest otherwise? Was the Enlightenment Project’s attachment to the translatability of foreign languages and the intelligibility of other cultures not more compelling than MacIntyre’s own portrayal of such languages and cultures as ‘alien’? (TRV, pp. 171–72). The merest hint of theological correctness, like political correctness, is a potentially most dangerous thing. It may kindle the fires of orthodoxy, and eventually fan the flames of heresy and persecution, even while observing the pieties of confraternity. A cosmopolitan spirit of tolerance and goodwill would be a welcome antidote to the fractious fundamentalism of many contemporary religious movements and the all-too-persistent ravages of ethnic and civil wars. The moral chaos of the modern world stems not from the failure of the Enlightenment Project but from its neglect and abandonment.