21. Contemporary Communitarianism (II)

What this lecture covers

Continuing the treatment of Alasdair MacIntyre, this lecture works through his Aristotelian account of human psychology in detail and then explains MacIntyre's core historical argument: that the Enlightenment tried an impossible task by deriving ethical rules meant to improve human nature from a purportedly neutral description of human nature as it actually is. It closes with MacIntyre's account of how practices, traditions, and communities allow structured argument about goals, and his own pessimistic prescription.

After watching, you should be able to explain the three features of MacIntyre's Aristotelian psychology, state why he thinks the Enlightenment project of grounding ethics in human nature was doomed from the start, and describe how MacIntyre thinks debate about ends is possible only from within an inherited tradition.

Key ideas

• Teleological psychology: MacIntyre follows Aristotle in treating human beings as purposive creatures with potential that must be realized for genuine fulfillment, not merely creatures seeking more of whatever satisfies them.
• Other-directedness intensified: MacIntyre goes beyond earlier other-directed accounts, such as Marx's, and beyond interdependent utility, to argue we want recognition specifically from people we ourselves esteem, illustrated by Hegel's master-slave dialectic.
• Practices and internal goods: value comes from excelling within a practice by its own internal standards, which requires subordinating yourself to the practice's inherited norms rather than inventing your own.
• Human nature as malleable: unlike the Enlightenment's static picture of human nature, the Aristotelian view treats human nature as plastic, shaped through education and upbringing, which is why ancient political theory devotes so much attention to family and education.
• Ethics as designed to be disobeyed: moral injunctions were meant to correct untutored human nature, so deriving morality from an accurate description of that same untutored nature was always going to fail.
• A secular doctrine of the fall: MacIntyre's three-part scheme (raw human nature, rules of ethics, realized telos) mirrors Christian ideas of the fall and redemption in secular form.
• Capitalism and communism as one coin: MacIntyre treats both systems as variants of the same failed Enlightenment project rather than opposites, a claim written at the height of the Cold War.
• Reasoning about ends within traditions: MacIntyre grants, against Aristotle, that human beings can question their goals, but argues this questioning is always bounded and structured by the tradition or practice a person is born into, not conducted from a neutral standpoint outside it.

Walkthrough

Introduction: Aristotelian Conception of Human Psychology (0:00)

Shapiro lays out three features of MacIntyre's Aristotelian psychology. First, human beings are teleological, with unmet purposes producing frustration, a point compared to economist Amartya Sen's related idea of human potentiality. Second, human beings are deeply other-directed, going beyond the self-referential utilitarian view and beyond Marx's account of comparison with similarly situated others, to the idea of interdependent utility, where one's happiness depends on what others actually experience, illustrated with parents' happiness tracking their children's. MacIntyre pushes this further still, drawing on Hegel's master-slave dialectic, to argue that what we most want is recognition from people whose recognition we value, which underlies his concept of a practice: wanting a carpenter's approval for good carpentry and a writer's approval for good writing, not approval from people outside that field.

Aristotle's Teleological Scheme and the Hopelessness of the Enlightenment Project (20:26)

The third and most consequential feature is that human nature is malleable rather than fixed, which the Enlightenment ignored. Shapiro contrasts this with Rousseau's opening move in The Social Contract, "taking men as they are and laws as they might be," which MacIntyre sees as missing the developmental, educable side of human psychology, a gap visible in how little attention Rawls or Mill give to family and education compared with Aristotle or Plato. Shapiro then lays out MacIntyre's central historical claim: moral injunctions were designed to correct and improve untutored human nature, so eighteenth-century philosophers who tried to derive those same injunctions from an accurate description of human nature as it actually is were attempting something structurally impossible, since the rules and the raw material they came from were meant to conflict. Shapiro likens this three-part scheme, raw nature, rules of ethics, and realized telos, to a secularized version of the Christian fall and redemption, and applies it to figures already covered in the course, including Bentham's attempt to derive conduct from pleasure and pain, and Kant's search for principles any rational person would affirm. He also notes MacIntyre's Cold War-era claim that capitalism and communism are two variants of the same failed Enlightenment project, and closes with MacIntyre's bleak prescription of building local communities to preserve moral life through what he calls a coming "new dark age," a passage some criticize as offering diagnosis without a workable political cure.

MacIntyre's Prescription (32:04)

Shapiro turns to what he sees as MacIntyre's biggest concession to Enlightenment thinking: unlike Aristotle, who held that we only reason about means and take our ends as fixed, MacIntyre accepts that human beings can and do question their own goals. The challenge this creates is explaining how such questioning avoids collapsing into emotivism. MacIntyre's answer is that goals are never invented from scratch; they come from practices, such as the rules of chess, and we can debate and revise those goals only from within the practice and the tradition that sustains it, never from a neutral standpoint outside it. Shapiro connects this to Burke's idea of a contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn, and to Michael Walzer's related notion of immanent criticism: effective criticism of a tradition must appeal to values already inside that tradition, since criticism from outside it will not move anyone within it. The lecture ends noting that MacIntyre's account leaves us able to argue about ends, but always as bounded, structured argument shaped by inherited practices and traditions.

Before you watch

• Review the previous lecture's introduction to MacIntyre, emotivism, and the concepts of practice and virtue, since this lecture builds directly on them.
• Recall the course's earlier discussion of utilitarian self-referential psychology and Marx's account of comparison with similarly situated others.
• Be familiar with Burke's idea of the social contract as a partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn.

Check your understanding

1. What are the three features of MacIntyre's Aristotelian account of human psychology?
2. Why does MacIntyre think eighteenth-century moral philosophers were engaged in an "inevitably unsuccessful project"?
3. How does the concept of a practice help explain why the "social contract" metaphor feels misleading to MacIntyre?
4. In what sense does MacIntyre treat capitalism and communism as "two sides of the same coin"?
5. How does MacIntyre reconcile the claim that humans can question their ends with his rejection of unbounded, tradition-free reasoning?