Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (1929— )

Two Books on Rationality: WJWR and 3RV

For MacIntyre, “rationality” comprises all the intellectual resources, both formal and substantive,
that we use to judge truth and falsity in propositions, and to determine choice-worthiness in
courses of action. Rationality in this sense is not universal; it differs from community to
community and from person to person, and may both develop and regress over the course of a
person’s life or a community’s history. MacIntyre describes this culturally relative, even
subjective characteristic of rationality in the first chapter of WJWR (1988):

So rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history: indeed, since
there are also a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out,
rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than
justice (WJWR, p. 9).

Rationality is the collection of theories, beliefs, principles, and facts that the human subject uses
to judge the world, and a person’s rationality is, to a large extent, the product of that person’s
education and moral formation.

To the extent that a person accepts what is handed down from the moral and intellectual
traditions of her or his community in learning to judge truth and falsity, good and evil, that
person’s rationality is “tradition-constituted.” Tradition-constituted rationality provides the
schemata by which we interpret, understand, and judge the world we live in. The apparent
reasonableness of mythical explanations, religious doctrines, scientific theories, and the
conflicting demands of the world’s moral codes all depend on the tradition-constituted
rationalities of those who judge them. For this reason, some of MacIntyre’s critics have argued
that tradition-constituted rationality entails an absolute relativism in philosophy.

The apparent problem of relativism in MacIntyre’s theory of rationality is much like the problem
of relativism in the philosophy of science. Scientific claims develop within larger theoretical
frameworks, so that the apparent truth of a scientific claim depends on one’s judgment of the
larger framework. The resolution of the problem of relativism therefore appears to hang on the
possibility of judging frameworks or rationalities, or judging between frameworks or rationalities
from a position that does not presuppose the truth of the framework or rationality, but no such
theoretical standpoint is humanly possible. Nonetheless, MacIntyre finds that the world itself
provides the criterion for the testing of rationalities, and he finds that there is no criterion except
the world itself that can stand as the measure of the truth of any philosophical theory. So
MacIntyre balances the relativity of rationality against the objectivity of the world that we
investigate. As Popper and Lakatos found in the philosophy of science, MacIntyre concludes that
experience can falsify theory, releasing people from the apparent authority of traditional
rationalities.

MacIntyre holds that the rationality of individuals is not only tradition-constituted, it is also
tradition constitutive, as individuals make their own contributions to their own rationality, and to
the rationalities of their communities. Rationality is not fixed, within either the history of a
community or the life of a person. Unexplainable events can occur that reveal shortcomings in a
person’s rational resources, like the anomalous data that precipitate scientific revolutions in
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or demand changes in research
programmes in Imre Lakatos’ The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. Problems
exposed by anomalous data or by conflicts with other traditions, other communities, or other
people may prove rationally insoluble under the constraints that a given tradition places on
rationality. Such events, when fully recognized, demand creative solutions, and it may happen
that some person or group will discover what appears to be a more adequate response to those
problems. To the extent that these new solutions are adopted by others and passed on to
subsequent generations (for better or for worse), the rationality of those responsible for the new
approach becomes “tradition-constitutive.”

The possibility that experience may falsify theory distinguishes MacIntyre’s theory of tradition-
constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality from forms of relativism that make rationality
entirely tradition-dependent or entirely subjective. Nonetheless, MacIntyre denies that such
falsification is common (WJWR, chs. 18 and 19), and history shows us that individuals,
communities, and even whole nations may commit themselves militantly over long periods of
their histories to doctrines that their ideological adversaries find irrational. This qualified
relativism of appearances has troublesome implications for anyone who believes that
philosophical enquiry can easily provide certain knowledge of the world. According to
MacIntyre, theories govern the ways that we interpret the world and no theory is ever more than
“the best standards so far” (3RV, p. 65). Our theories always remain open to improvement, and
when our theories change, the appearances of our world—the apparent truths of claims judged
within those theoretical frameworks—change with them.

From the subjective standpoint of the human enquirer, MacIntyre finds that theories, concepts,
and facts all have histories, and they are all liable to change—for better or for worse.
MacIntyre’s philosophy offers a decisive refutation of modern epistemology, even as it maintains
philosophy is a quest for truth. MacIntyre’s philosophy is indebted to the philosophy of science,
which recognizes the historicism of scientific enquiry even as it seeks a truthful understanding of
the world. MacIntyre’s philosophy does not offer a priori certainty about any theory or principle;
it examines the ways in which reflection upon experience supports, challenges, or falsifies
theories that have appeared to be the best theories so far to the people who have accepted them
so far. MacIntyre’s ideal enquirers remain Hamlets, not Emmas.

i. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

WJWR presents MacIntyre’s most thorough argument for his theory of rationality. He
summarizes the main points of his theory in chapter 1. In chapters 2 through 16, MacIntyre
follows the progress of the Western tradition through “three distinct traditions:” from Homer and
Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and from Augustine through
Calvin to Hume (WJWR, p. 326). The inhabitants of these traditions work to deepen, correct, and
extend the claims and theories of their predecessors. Chapter 17 examines the modern liberal
denial of tradition, and the ironic transformation of liberalism into the fourth tradition to be
treated in the book. Chapter 18 reviews MacIntyre’s claims and conclusions concerning the
tradition-constituted nature and tradition-constitutive power of human rationality. Chapters 19
and 20 explore the consequences of MacIntyre’s theory for conflicts between traditions.

WJWR fulfills a promise made at the end of AV: “I promised a book in which I should attempt to
say both what makes it rational to act in one way rather than another and what makes it rational
to advance and defend one conception of practical rationality rather than another. Here it is” (p.
9). To fulfill this promise, MacIntyre opens the book by arguing that “the Enlightenment made
us . . . blind to . . . a conception of rational enquiry as embodied in a tradition, a conception
according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of
a history.” From the standpoint of human enquiry, no group can arrogate to itself the authority to
guide everyone else toward the good. We can only struggle together in our quests for justice and
truth and each community consequently frames and revises its own standards of justice and
rationality. MacIntyre concludes that neither reason nor justice is universal: “since there are a
diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather
than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than justice” (p. 9).

The thesis that rationalities and justices arise from the histories and traditions of communities
sets MacIntyre squarely at odds with all modern philosophy, and particularly with the
unacknowledged imperialism of any form of metaethics that would offer a neutral, third-party
forum in which to adjudicate the practical differences between contending moral traditions by
the peculiar standards of modern liberal individualism. The same thesis also appears to set
MacIntyre at odds with the traditions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas—traditions he claims to
accept and defend—which make unambiguous claims about the universal nature, true reason,
and objective justice. The book therefore has two tasks. On the one hand, the book relates the
histories of particular rationalities and justices in a way that undermines the abstract universal
notions of reason and justice that provide the foundations for modern moral and political
thought. On the other hand, the book provides prima facie evidence
that those who have thought their way through the topics of justice and practical rationality, from
the standpoint constructed by and in the direction pointed out first by Aristotle and then by
Aquinas, have every reason at least so far to hold that the rationality of their tradition has been
confirmed by its encounters with other traditions (p. 403).

In short, the book offers an internal critique of modernity, arguing that it is incoherent by its own
standards, and it offers an internal justification of Thomism, holding that Thomism is rationally
justified, for Thomists, by Thomist standards. Contrary to initial expectations, MacIntyre’s
historicist, particularist critique of modernity is compatible with the historically situated Thomist
tradition.

MacIntyre holds that his historicist, particularist critique of modernity is consistent with
Thomism because of the way that he understands the acquisition of first principles. In chapter 10
(pp. 164-182), MacIntyre compares Thomas Aquinas’s account of the acquisition of first
principles with those of Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, and Kant. MacIntyre explains that
according to Thomas Aquinas, individuals reach first principles through “a work of dialectical
construction” (p. 174). For Thomas Aquinas, by questioning and examining one’s experience,
one may eventually arrive at first principles, which one may then apply to the understanding of
one’s questions and experience. Descartes and his successors, by contrast, along with certain
“notable Thomists of the last hundred years” (p. 175), have proposed that philosophy begins
from knowledge of some “set of necessarily true first principles which any truly rational person
is able to evaluate as true” (p. 175). Thus for the moderns, philosophy is a technical rather than
moral endeavor, while for the Thomist, whether one might recognize first principles or be able to
apply them depends in part on one’s moral development (pp. 186-182).

The modern account of first principles justifies an approach to philosophy that rejects tradition.
The modern liberal individualist approach is anti-traditional. It denies that our understanding is
tradition-constituted and it denies that different cultures may differ in their standards of
rationality and justice:

The standpoint of traditions is necessarily at odds with one of the central characteristics of
cosmopolitan modernity: the confident belief that all cultural phenomena must be potentially
translucent to understanding, that all texts must be capable of being translated into the language
which the adherents of modernity speak to one another (p. 327)

Modernity does not see tradition as the key that unlocks moral and political understanding, but as
a superfluous accumulation of opinions that tend to prejudice moral and political reasoning.

Although modernity rejects tradition as a method of moral and political enquiry, MacIntyre finds
that it nevertheless bears all the characteristics of a moral and political tradition. MacIntyre
identifies the peculiar standards of the liberal tradition in the latter part of chapter 17, and
summarizes the story of the liberal tradition at the outset of chapter 18:
Liberalism, beginning as a repudiation of tradition in the name of abstract, universal principles of
reason, turned itself into a politically embodied power, whose inability to bring its debates on the
nature and context of those universal principles to a conclusion has had the unintended effect of
transforming liberalism into a tradition (p. 349).

From MacIntyre’s perspective, there is no question of deciding whether or not to work within a
tradition; everyone who struggles with practical, moral, and political questions simply does.
“There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry . . . apart from that which is provided by some
particular tradition or other” (p. 350). MacIntyre calls his position “the rationality of traditions.”

MacIntyre distinguishes two related challenges to his position, the “relativist challenge” and the
“perspectivist challenge.” These two challenges both acknowledge that the goals of the
Enlightenment cannot be met and that, “the only available standards of rationality are those made
available by and within traditions” (p. 252); they conclude that nothing can be known to be true
or false. For these post-modern theorists, “if the Enlightenment conceptions of truth and
rationality cannot be sustained,” either relativism or perspectivism “is the only possible
alternative” (p. 353). MacIntyre rejects both challenges by developing his theory of tradition-
constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality on pp. 354-369.

How, then, is one to settle challenges between two traditions? It depends on whether the
adherents of either take the challenges of the other tradition seriously. It depends on whether the
adherents of either tradition, on seeing a failure in their own tradition are willing to consider an
answer offered by their rival (p. 355). There is nothing in MacIntyre’s account of the rationality
of traditions that suggest that the superior traditions will vanquish inferior ones, or to provide any
analogue to the modern, enlightenment, or Cartesian epistemological first principles that he
rejected in his critique of the modern liberal individualist tradition.

MacIntyre emphasizes the role of tradition in the final chapter of the book by asking how a
person with no traditional affiliation is to deal with the conflicting claims of rival traditions:
“The initial answer is: that will depend upon who you are and how you understand yourself. This
is not the kind of answer which we have been educated to expect in philosophy” (p. 393). Such a
person might, through some process of reflection on experience and engagement with the claims
of one tradition or another, join a tradition whose claims and standards appear compelling, but
there is no guarantee of that. MacIntyre’s conclusion is that enquiry is situated within traditions.

WJWR is more than a restatement of the history from AV. AV had argued that an Aristotelian
view of moral philosophy as a study of human action could make sense of the failure of modern
moral philosophy while modern liberal individualism could not. Aristotelian and Thomist critics
complained, however, that MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism, which sought its foundation in
teleological activity rather than teleological metaphysics, remained open to the challenge that it
was relativistic. WJWR advances the argument of AV in two ways. First, MacIntyre focuses the
critique of modernity on the question of rational justification. Modern epistemology stands or
falls on the possibility of Cartesian epistemological first principles. MacIntyre’s history exposes
that notion of first principle as a fiction, and at the same time demonstrates that rational enquiry
advances (or declines) only through tradition. Second, MacIntyre trades the social teleology
of AV for a Thomist, metaphysical teleology. MacIntyre justifies this trade in terms acceptable
within the Thomist tradition, and acknowledges that those who find Thomism irrational will find
little reason to accept it (WJWR P. 403). This general conclusion remained troubling for
Aristotelians, and particularly for those Neo-Thomists whose Neo-Scholastic tradition bore debts
to the Cartesian tradition.