The Retrieval of Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre starts After Virtue with a parable, taken from a post-Second Word War science fiction novel, where a catastrophe has befallen the world and science has disappeared, leaving only a few scraps of text books strewn around, which are carefully collected and preserved. No-one, however, can bring the bits together and restart science.

The point MacIntyre is making is that something similar has happened to ethical thinking and moral philosophy. There is no such thing as doing the right thing for the sake of it being right anymore. Morality, such as it is, is based on rights and they are, at heart, related to power and holding resources, and therefore, ultimately, to the threat of the use of violence.

It was not ever thus, the argument suggests. In previous centuries morality was related to virtue and vices. Since, perhaps, the late Nineteenth Century, moral philosophy had moved away from doing the right thing to arguments which, basically, suggest that the only approach is to choose your precepts, state them and try to stick by them consistently. There is no ground for morals; there are only choices.

This sort of approach can be found in logical positivism. The Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic it is at least strongly implied that moral philosophy (along with other things like theology) is meaningless. Logical positivism insists that statements, to be meaningful, should be verifiable or tautologies. ‘All single men are bachelors’ is acceptable as a tautology. ‘The far side of the Moon has impact craters’ is also acceptable, even though we cannot see the far side of the Moon, because it is verifiable in principle.

However, ‘Murder is wrong’ or ‘Mass killing of Jews is evil’ are not acceptable statements under logical positivism. They are formally meaningless, at best only saying ‘I don’t like murder’. Ayer’s book was published in the 1930s and rapidly took hold in academic circles; few people could manage an argument against it. The problem was that it has nothing to say about, say, the Holocaust. We can only not like it, according to this account.

Most people would think that response inadequate. The interesting question is ‘what can be put in its place?’ And here we have a problem because the framework of logical positivism is an all-encompassing one. A statement such as ‘Herding people onto cattle trucks to take them to extermination is evil’ has no grip on the world, according to logical positivism.

A different response is called for, and this was suggested by four women educated at Oxford before and just after World War Two: Phillipa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, and Irish Murdoch. The choice theory of moral philosophy was widespread and follows from logical positivism. If all a statement about moral right and wrong is a statement about how I feel, then all I need to do is choose the right things that I feel good about (or bad about) and state them. There can be no argument about them, at the end of the day, because they are my free choice.

The attitude regarding your moral outlook as a free choice is, at heart, the view of the individual as a romantic hero, as Murdoch observed. The universe is meaningless, just a collection of scientific facts and tautologous statements. The individual chooses to imbue their lives with meaning and morality. The hero stands alone against the facts of the universe, the empty pointlessness of life and the fact that it will soon be extinguished whatever choices are made. This attitude is still widespread; Lipscombe quotes Richard Dawkins as holding it (he calls it the ‘Dawkins Sublime’).

If morality is simply a matter of choice, then there can be no arguments about who is right and wrong. For example, if I choose to think that abortion is always wrong, but that executing criminals guilty of heinous crimes is right, then no-one can argue that my views are inconsistent. I could come back and say my views are not inconsistent – one regards the unborn and therefore innocent, the other adults who carried out, say, a premeditated murder. But that indicates that moral argument is possible. I can claim my views are not inconsistent; you can argue that as both actions take a life, to be consistent I must oppose the death penalty as well as abortion. My free choice of my morality is not quite as free as I thought.

Therefore, there are other constraints regarding how we construct our moral universes. It is not just a free for all, a free choice. Society, for example, constrains what I can and cannot do. Most people think that stealing something is wrong. There is little argument about that; only exceptions for cases of extreme need – a loving parent might be excused for stealing food for their starving child. Morality and meaning are not just matters of our choosing. We are not the romantic heroes of the Dawkins Subline.

In fact, quite a lot of the things we know and believe to be the case are not verifiable or tautologies. Science, while it does proceed by a principle of verification, does not really do so by stating hypotheses and then testing them. It is a nice simple way of viewing science and progress, but the reality is a lot messier than that. If logical positivism does not work for science, then we really cannot posit that it works for anything else. How could a child verify that their parents love them? How can I verify that you will meet me at St Pancras station, under the clock, at five PM tomorrow?

In essence, we do not stand alone against a meaningless universe, and we do not determine our own moral views. People who do tend to get found out, one way or another. Although the moral code of humanity, or a nation or society might not be spelt out, and there are always grey areas, those who transgress undefined but specific boundaries often land up paying some sort of price for that. They might have chosen their own rules, but they have to be close enough to everyone else’s for them to count as ethical.