COMPORTAMIENTO ORGANIZACIONAL

Chapter 6 will begin by showing why MacIntyre thinks that the discipline of practical ethics rests on a fundamental epistemological mistake. The epistemic problem for practical ethics is that it is presented through the guise of impartial consideration on the basis of which a balanced evaluation of fundamental principles or rules can be achieved. MacIntyre argues that because no objective criterion exists on which this balancing can take place, the use of principles and rules is itself empty of application:

the metaphor of weighing claims that invoke rights against claims that invoke utility, or claims that invoke justice against claims that invoke freedom, in some sort of moral scale is empty of application. There are no moral scales … hence moral arguments terminate very quickly and in another way are interminable. Because no argument can be carried through to a victorious conclusion, argument characteristically gives way to the mere and increasingly shrill battle of assertion with counter assertion.⁵⁰

In another place he is even more dismissive of ―balancing‖ in practical ethics when he states: ―there are no scales—and the metaphor of balancing, if thought of as a rational process, is a misleading and disguising fiction… This is why these are not genuinely moral principles or rules.‖⁵¹ For MacIntyre, the epistemic

50 MacIntyre, ―Why is the search for the foundations of ethics so frustrating?‖, 16-17.

51 Alasdair MacIntyre, ―Does Applied Ethics Rest on a Mistake?‖, The Monist 67/4 (1984): 498-513 (510).

problems associated with decision making in ethics stem from a fundamental teleological mistake. Because a moral agent cannot be removed from his or her own personal history and sense of purpose, MacIntyre argues that moral enquiry is primarily a teleological account of what it means to be human. Acknowledgement of the telos of the whole human life is necessary, according to MacIntyre, because it mediates between those practices that promote human flourishing (e.g., medicine) and those practices that do not (e.g., slavery). MacIntyre says that moral enquiry from this perspective presupposes ―some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos.‖⁵²

According to MacIntyre, the success of a moral tradition depends on how well it distinguishes between those practices that inform and nourish the essential nature of a human being and those practices that are destructive of this end. For MacIntyre, the internal analysis of a practice is the first stage of moral enquiry because it provides the methodological framework for fair assessment and because it evaluates a moral tradition from the inside. Once this first stage is complete a moral agent can then advance to the second stage and compare one tradition with another. Over a twenty-year period, MacIntyre used this tradition-guided methodology to argue for a revised form of Aristotelian Thomism because, for him, this tradition succeeds on its own terms when other moral traditions fail.

52 MacIntyre, After Virtue (2007), 222.

MacIntyre asserts at the beginning of After Virtue that the language of morality is in a ―state of grave disorder,‖⁵³ but this assessment seems overly pessimistic at one level and overly optimistic at another. It is overly pessimistic because his first stage of moral evaluation, practice-guided enquiry, reveals a history of consensus over moral issues that he seems to ignore. At the same time the conclusion he draws from the tradition-guided comparison of rival moral traditions, that his tradition (Aristotelian Thomism) succeeds where others fail, seems overly optimistic.⁵⁴ A significant discrepancy within MacIntyre‘s tradition-guided account will be highlighted in this chapter. MacIntyre‘s concept of a practice is self-authenticating (because internal goods of a practice are derived from consensus) whereas his appeal to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition is not (because no consensus has been forthcoming that this tradition succeeds on its own terms when others do not). Many philosophers agree with MacIntyre‘s claim that rival moral arguments are conceptually incommensurable, but they do not see this as a major practical problem, particularly in a pluralist society. Bernard Williams, for instance, argues that the contingency of a moral life has to be perspectival and therefore disagreement is exactly what one should expect from a complex discipline like ethics:

[O]ur ethical ideas consist of a very complex historical deposit. When we consider this fact, and the relations that this deposit has to our public discourse and our private lives, there seems no reason at all to expect it to take, in any considerable measure, the shape of a theory.⁵⁵

53 MacIntyre, After Virtue (2007), 2.

54 MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 403.

55 Bernard Williams, Making sense of humanity and other philosophical papers 1982-1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 189.

Williams is more concerned that moral philosophers do not sufficiently acknowledge that the study of ethics, from an epistemic perspective, has limits, and therefore a rational moral agent ought to explore ways of transcending these epistemic limits. His preferred method, and here he agrees with MacIntyre, is to give serious recognition to the thick ethical concepts within a practice:

One thing that will make a difference is the extent to which ethical life can still rely on what I have called thick ethical concepts … a practice that uses them is more stable in face of the general, structural reflections about truth of ethical judgements than a practice that does not use them.⁵⁶