Verificación

One of the significant contributions that Lutz (2004) makes to understanding

MacIntyre’s thought is to draw attention to the importance of the word ‘rationality’ in the title of MacIntyre’s book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. Lutz repeatedly points out that MacIntyre has developed a thesis which locates rationality within traditions, and which recognises that the standards of rationality available to any particular persons are dependent on the tradition or traditions in which they have learned to reason. There are thus no absolute standards of rationality. Rather there are a number of different systems of rationality, each with its own internal standards, so that it makes sense to speak not so much of rationality, as if it were one thing, but rather of rationalities: the rationality of heroic or Homeric society is not that of Aristotle and the Lyceum; the rationality of Roman Catholic theology is not that of secular liberalism; and so on.

Relativity and relativism

This leads to a position which could be misinterpreted as moral relativism, though that is clearly not MacIntyre’s intention. Lutz (2004, pp.66-69), following Krausz (1984), distinguishes two positions, one of which he calls ‘relativity’ and the other ‘relativism’.

‘Relativity’ is the idea that our means of rational enquiry including our standards of reasoning are always dependent on our particular cultural context; this is consistent with MacIntyre’s position. ‘Relativism’ is a wider term referring to a general view that moral values are relative to particular cultures including the claim that when two or more moral traditions clash, there is no rational basis for deciding between them. Lutz wishes to concede MacIntyre’s relativity, whilst defending him against accusations of relativism and he does this by drawing a line between truth and rationality.

MacIntyre (1998, p.214) understands truth as the adequacy of ‘the intellect to its objects’. He understands rationality as providing a shared stock of resources for determining the truth of judgements and choices which is always available in some particular form relative to some particular culture. This description of the status of rationality does not in itself imply anything about the status of truth¹⁸, and is compatible with either the idea that truth is relative or the idea that truth is absolute. This general position is equally at home in moral or in other areas of enquiry. If we say that Aristotle was mistaken in supporting the institution of slavery, we are not also committed to the view that his position was irrational.

This distinction is indispensable in understanding MacIntyre’s idea of

tradition-constituted enquiry. If one avoids interpreting MacIntyre as a moral relativist, it is still possible to interpret him as an authoritarian conservative, in the sense that he might be thought to be setting up the authority of tradition as an arbiter of truth. Again, Lutz’s distinction makes it clear that for MacIntyre traditions provide the basis for rationality

18 That rationality and truth are very different can be illustrated with the following simple

example. Let us say I believe there is a cat in my neighbour’s garden. This belief is true if there really is a cat in my neighbour’s garden, and rational if I have come to the belief in a reasonable way. These two are not necessarily equivalent. Let us say that I hold the unreasonable theory that a cat comes into my neighbour’s garden whenever a member of the British royal family appears on my television. If a member of that family appears today on the television, then I deduce that there is a cat in my neighbour’s garden. And if, coincidentally, there is in fact a cat in my garden, this belief turns out to be both irrational and true. Conversely, suppose I hold the more reasonable theory that, since my neighbour owns a cat and I have frequently seen the cat and heard it mewing in her garden, then if I hear the usual mewing in the usual garden, then there is a cat in my neighbour’s garden. Suppose that today I hear the usual mewing in the usual garden, and I therefore deduce that there is a cat in my neighbour’s garden, but that on this occasion I am wrong. (On this occasion the cat is in the cattery, my neighbour is away on holiday, and she has left an automatic recording of her cat’s meow running intermittently in the

rather than truth. An appeal to traditional authority as the justification for one’s claim to truth is simply to admit failure, and in crucial respects MacIntyre’s claims for rationality and for traditions as the basis of rationality are much more modest than his claims about truth. “Tradition is not the arbiter of truth; it is merely the bearer of the tools with which its adherents seek the truth, and those tools are subject to improvement.” (Lutz, 2004, p.84)

Truth

MacIntyre favours a perhaps surprising correspondence theory of truth, with the key distinction that the correspondence in question is not between statements and the world, but between mind and the world, or more accurately, between mind or intellect and its object. In the article, ‘Moral Relativism, Truth and Justification’ (MacIntyre, 1998) he makes his case mainly in the language of analytic philosophy for this

conception of truth which he terms adaequatio intellectus ad rem (adequacy of intellect to its object). Elsewhere he has it as the adequacy of mind to its objects. MacIntyre emphasises that ‘mind’ here is not a Cartesian quasi-entity, but is rather a kind of activity which thinking animals undertake in engaging with the natural and social world, such as:

“identification, reidentification, collecting, separating, classifying, and naming and all this by touching, grasping, pointing, breaking down, building up, calling to, answering to, and so on. The mind is adequate to its objects insofar as the expectations which it frames on the basis of these activities are not liable to disappointment and the remembering which it engages in enables it to return to and recover what it encountered previously, whether the objects themselves are still present or not.” (MacIntyre, 1988, p.356)

This description would be self-defeating if it purported to provide a definition of truth which rests outside of any tradition. It should be understood as being a partial description of what it means for someone to hold a true belief formed through some tradition based rationality, but the description nevertheless characterises a notion of what it means for belief to be true which goes beyond the question of the internal coherence of one tradition or another. In other words, MacIntyre, from the perspective of his own Aristotelian and Thomist tradition, sees an external reality which is beyond tradition, and a particular correspondence between people and the objects of their beliefs as providing limits to truth which are also beyond tradition. Other traditions (genealogy for instance) may of course see this differently, and this will be part of their standards of rationality, just as this particular view of truth is part of MacIntyre’s

standards of rationality.

This notion of the adequacy of mind to its objects given here is primarily an

instrumental one and, as MacIntyre observes, a primitive one. It is also one which is not presented as a means of arbitrating between the competing theories of one

tradition or another – it cannot fulfil that function on a MacIntyrean account since it may not itself be recognised as valid by those particular traditions – but rather as an

account of the way that people (and traditions) learn. Although this characterisation of truth is useful, it is important to remember that MacIntyre has not set out to give an account of a theory of truth, and that he also characterises truth, following Aristotle, as the telos of rational enquiry (MacIntyre 1998). This appears at first to be a rather different kind of object from the res mentioned earlier, which is Thomist and concrete -

“for example, actual specimens of sodium or chlorine, about which the chemist enquires, or the actual strata about which the geologist enquires, (MacIntyre 1998, p.214). The Aristotelian telos includes such objects of enquiry as “the nature and status of human goods, duties, virtues and rights” (MacIntyre 1998, p.214).

Perspectivism and emotivism

Lutz (2004, pp. 69-71) emphasises that, where relativism can be thought of as a general view that there is no rational basis for deciding between two conflicting moral traditions, perspectivism is the stronger and more precise claim that moral theses should not be thought of as true or false in an ordinary sense.

This undermining of the truth status of all moral values is a primary target for MacIntyre. It is directly named as perspectivism (MacIntyre, 1988 p.352), but very often in After Virtue and elsewhere is equated with emotivism, wrongly according to Wachbroit (Lutz 2004, p.82), and in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry with

genealogy. Wachbroit’s criticism is that MacIntyre’s target is misplaced, that emotivism was the ‘boo hurray’ theory of moral expression which “enjoyed some popularity in England and America in the 1930’s and 1940’s” but today “is accepted by few philosophers” (Wachbroit, 1983). Wachbroit may have a point about the term emotivism. However, MacIntyre has not attacked a straw man; ‘perspectivism’ or

‘emotivism’, by whatever name, as a post-Nietzschean viewpoint and in the sense MacIntyre describes it, was at least still alive and well in the 1970s and 1980s in the writings of John Mackie (1977) and Simon Blackburn (1984). Blackburn (1984) describes his own position as ‘quasi-realism’ and distinguishes it from ‘projectivism’

(which he also supports) in the following note:

“It is important to be clear about the distinction between projectivism and quasi-realism. Projectivism is the philosophy of evaluation which says that evaluative properties are projections of our own sentiments (emotions,

explaining why our discourse has the shape it does, in particular by way of treating evaluative predicates like others, if projectivism is true. It thus seeks to explain, and justify, the realistic seeming nature of our talk of evaluations - the way we think we can be wrong about them, that there is a truth to be found, and so on.” (Blackburn, 1984, p. 180)

A root difference, then, in Blackburn’s account, compared to MacIntyre’s, is that Blackburn (and Mackie before him) thinks that our usage of ‘truth’ in evaluative

predicates is in some way metaphorical or analogous in comparison to truth in ordinary predicates. We might say: ‘When it comes to moral utterances, there is no reality out there, but we talk as if there is.’ MacIntyre believes that there is a reality out there, and that our thinking (and our speaking) might be more or less adequate to it.

MacIntyre’s opposition to what he calls perspectivism is theoretical in the sense that it is an opposition to a particular type of thesis. Relativism can similarly be expressed in the form of a theory, for instance as a position that moral truths are always relative to some particular culture or other, so that some general precept, “Φ-ing is bad”, uttered at one time and place is not necessarily incompatible with an apparently opposite precept, “Φ-ing is good”, uttered in a different cultural context. And in this form relativism can be opposed as theory. However, MacIntyre is more interested in opposing relativism as practice. He thinks relativism is lazy (Lutz, 2004, p.67).

In terms of rational argument, the assumptions of relativism encourage the parties to a debate to agree to disagree, where MacIntyre’s assumptions encourage both parties to persist in their quest for ‘the truth’, whether that means one tradition abandoning its former belief in favour of the other tradition, or both traditions modifying their beliefs in the light of the other. For MacIntyre, there can be no ‘giving up’ on this, because the coexistence of two contradictory beliefs, “Φ-ing is bad and Φ-ing is good”, cannot express an adequate relationship of mind to its objects. Hence, MacIntyre

characterises objectivity in social science as openness to conflict or we might say a sensitivity to and a refusal to ignore fundamental disagreement.

MacIntyre offers a succinct characterisation of this in his article Relativism, Power and Philosophy in which he seeks not to refute relativism, but to learn what truths it has to offer and to move beyond it. “Relativism after all turns out to be so far immune to refutation… It does not follow that relativism cannot be transcended.” (MacIntyre, 1989) In this argument, relativism is a natural stage for anyone to move through when they encounter conflicting beliefs at the border between two traditions or cultures.

Anyone who has to live with two conflicting cultures may be in the position for a time of being unable to make a rational choice between either. MacIntyre’s concern is that this is not where the story should end. If relativism has the last word, then two possible

futures present themselves. One possibility is that one culture will ultimately impose its beliefs on the other through the exercise of will and power (imperialism in Lutz’s

analysis). The other possibility is an indefinite state of intractable dispute, as MacIntyre characterises the current state of moral philosophy. In other words, for MacIntyre, thoroughgoing relativism is an expression of pessimism, a way of giving up on rational engagement with another tradition because no hope of rational resolution is held up for such an engagement. MacIntyre’s core project is to propose an alternative procedure of rational engagement between traditions so that neither intractable dispute nor imperialism win the day. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry are then full articulations of how that procedure should be attempted.

The standards of truth

In recognising the difficulties that are implied by this process of confrontation and learning, MacIntyre (1988, p.358) draws attention to the important roles that discrepancy, failure and correction have in the journey towards truth. It is only by looking back and identifying the ‘previous intellectual inadequacy’ of ourselves or our predecessors in comparison with what we now judge to be how things really are, that we have some measure of our progress towards truth. This leads him to set the standard of truth extremely high:

‘To claim truth for one’s present mindset and the judgements which are its expression is to claim that this kind of inadequacy, this kind of discrepancy, will never appear in any possible future situation, no matter how searching the enquiry, no matter how much evidence is provided, no matter what developments in rational enquiry may occur.’ (MacIntyre, 1988, p.358)

In distinguishing between the achievements of rational argument and the truth, MacIntyre appears to set un unbridgeable gap between the best available theory and the truth, so that we cannot in practice claim to have discovered the truth, only to have moved towards it. MacIntyre’s characterisation of a truth claim as not liable to

inadequacy to or discrepancy from reality seems to Lutz (2004, p.72) ‘entirely unattainable’.

Gadamer here provides an important point of caution for MacIntyrean enquiry which is explored further in the next two sections. The researcher engaged in qualitative research involving the interpretation of speech or text is primarily engaged in a task of hermeneutic understanding. As such, a claim to truth as characterised by MacIntyre, above, will be beyond the findings of that research, and concomitantly the findings will be provisional, not only in the sense of always being open to re-interpretation, but also in the sense that the goals of such research are always subject to revision (MacIntyre,

1977c). However, it is important to emphasise that this does not mean that truth is not then the goal of enquiry, only that in acts of interpretation, analysis or understanding of others within social science, the researcher may only claim to make progress towards the truth, rather than to have ‘discovered’ it, and even then such a claim must be provisional.