MacIntyre's Appeal

Through a conversation with a professor, I learned part of what it is that makes Alasdair MacIntyre so appealing to a particular sort of person (for example: me).

MacIntyre's view of human action rests on a view of human self-narration. Stanley Hauerwas has written that the core of MacIntyre's argument in After Virtue is the statement “the concept of an intelligible action is a more fundamental concept than that of an action.” We normally attempt to act in ways that make sense to us given the particular role we are trying to fill, or part we are trying to play, and we expect others to act in the same way. The concept of an action abstracted from all context is really a derived concept.

It seems clear enough that MacIntyre believes people are best able to function when they have stories large enough to consistently make their actions intelligible. And if we are to seek the good and the best through politics, or even in our own lives, we have to want a unitary story that makes sense of the different situations around us. The lack of such a story creates an epistemological crisis that cannot be resolved until we find a new story.

Now MacIntyre has arguments for this, arguments which are far beyond my level of competence to evaluate. But it seems clear enough to me that some readers will approach the work with a desire for a unitary story, and some will not. Some of us believe at the outset that purity of heart is to will one thing, and others, perhaps, believe that our selves will never be reducible to a single story. (I can't keep Whitman's lines about self-contradiction from coming into my head as I type, even though they aren't precisely relevant.)

For those of us who grew up with a certain definition of integrity, one which came to me via Presbyterianism, MacIntyre offers a philosophy that builds on what we bring to the table already. Integrity was defined as a sort of moral consistency: do what is right even if no one is looking, don't be a different person in different situations, don't say words you wouldn't want to say around your grandparents.

If this is your ideal, you want your life to be a single story, a continuous development of character, a nineteenth-century novel. But it's not immediately clear to me that this is a necessary feature of human life. And, again, I have not tried to evaluate MacIntyre's arguments or even to give a good summary of his arguments in After Virtue. It's just that there is a type of person that will be quite predisposed to agree with MacIntyre, and some sectors of Protestantism do a great job of creating this sort of person. Apparently, some branches of Catholicism do the same thing, but I couldn't say which ones.

I have little doubt that this point has appeared elsewhere, and better stated, but there's your attempted epiphany for the week.