[Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative by Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge University Press, 2016; 322 pp.)]

The death of Alasdair MacIntyre on May 22 has occasioned many tributes to this remarkable philosopher who—in the later decades of his very long life—embraced Thomistic Aristotelianism, albeit of an idiosyncratic sort. His best-known book was After Virtue, which appeared in 1981, but he altered his position after it appeared; and for that reason, I’m going to comment this week on his last full-length book, Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity.

The book is well-worth reading, and no one can fail to be impressed by MacIntyre’s extensive learning in a wide variety of fields. I have to say, however, that it suffers from a fatal flaw. From his early youth, MacIntyre accepted Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism, and he never altered that position, ending up with an odd amalgam of Marx, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas.

We can best see what he is up to by looking at the book’s starting point. Most contemporary philosophers are not Aristotelians, and the proponents of the various positions are unable to convince each other that their own standpoint is correct. Emotivists, deontologists, Kantians, and contractarians battle against virtue ethicists, and though continued exchanges produce more subtle and elaborated responses to critical objections, none commands consensus.

To escape from this impasse requires rejecting an underlying assumption that all of the competing philosophers accept, namely, that individuals need to choose which position to adopt. This may seem obviously true, but it is only because we live in capitalist “modernity” that we think so. Marx showed that the demands of the capitalist economy tear people away from their traditional communities, forcing them into the “dark Satanic mills” of industrial capitalism. (As an aside, I have long been convinced by A.E. Taylor’s argument that Blake meant that phrase to refer to churches, not factories). The ideological expression of this capitalist demand, MacIntyre holds, is the rational choice theory of modern economics, which tells individuals how to maximize their preference satisfaction, regardless of the content of those preferences.

Before this capitalist deformation, people realized that choice takes places within families and communities and is not made by desiccated individuals, bereft of social ties. Aristotle and Aquinas knew that ethics is not a matter of the fixed rules of the “morality system” but is rather a quest for eudaimonia (i.e., a flourishing life) in which virtuous people seek narrative coherence in their lives.

It has to be said that MacIntyre does not give us a genuine Aristotelianism, and we can see this by attention to an elementary point. The quest for eudaimonia seeks an answer to the question “How can I attain a flourishing life?” not “How can we, as members of a historically-situated community, flourish?” Aristotle indeed held views—some of them inconsistent with libertarianism—about the need for individuals to live within a political community in order to flourish; but, to reiterate, it is individuals who strive for flourishing lives. The “individualistic perfectionism” defended by the “two Dougs”—Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl—in numerous books and articles is the best defense of an Aristotelian ethics that is consistent with libertarianism.

There is another respect in which MacIntyre departs from Aristotle, a departure he shared with Marx and helps account for the affinity he saw between the two thinkers. Aristotle thought his philosophy was true, in the straightforward sense that it corresponds to reality. MacIntyre, by contrast, like Marx professes a relativized historicism and decries universally valid truth as an Enlightenment myth. Aristotle was certainly interested in the views of philosophers who disagreed with him, but the fact of disagreement itself would not for him infirm the claim of his own account to be true. He would not have said, as MacIntyre does, that in present conditions, we cannot show conclusively whether one should accept Aristotle or Nietzsche. A detailed account of the way in which MacIntyre replaces the epistemology and realism of Aristotle and Aquinas with Marxist relativism may be found in Chapter 5, “MacIntyre, Rights, and Tradition,” of the outstanding book by Rasmussen and Den Uyl, The Realist Turn, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), which I have reviewed in The Philosophical Quarterly for October 2021.

For MacIntyre, it is Marx, not Aristotle, who is the decisive thinker, and he disguises this by claiming that Marx himself was an Aristotelian. (He is not alone in this view: other Aristotelian Marxists include Scott Meikle, Terry Eagleton, Herbert McCabe—a close friend of MacIntyre—and Michael Thompson.) He says:

Moreover, for a long time both sympathetic and unsympathetic commentators on Marx understandably focused on Marx’s problematic and changing relationship to Hegel, so that it is only later that the full importance of Marx’s relationship to Aristotle began to be understood and the Marx from whom we need to learn is the Marx who had learned from Aristotle. . . For Marx as for Aristotle, to have understood something is to have grasped its essential properties, i.e., a prerequisite for understanding its causal relationships.

His example of Marx’s Aristotelian grasp of teleology is a remark that human anatomy is the key to understanding the anatomy of the ape. This does not inspire much confidence in Marx’s understanding of Aristotle.

What are we supposed to learn from MacIntyre’s Aristotelian Marx? The main point seems to be that Marx drew from Aristotle’s account of economics in concocting his theory of surplus value, the key to understanding how capitalism works. It is ironic—given his stress on the theory of surplus value and his life-long commitment to it, a constant star throughout his ideological peregrinations—that he misunderstood the theory. He does not realize that “surplus value” is a concept defined within the labor theory of value and does not apply outside that theory.

There is much to be said for Aristotelian ethics, but I prefer the genuine article, to be found, for example, in the work of Philippa Foot, the “two Dougs”—Rasmussen and Den Uyl—and Murray Rothbard. If you look at the bibliography of Foot’s Natural Goodness—the major statement of her account an Aristotelian ethics—you will find no reference to MacIntyre, and I can tell you from my conversations with her that she held him in little regard, laughing at his pretentious displays of erudition to disguise the weaknesses in his arguments.