The Emergence of Morality

…the history of the word ‘moral’ cannot be told adequately apart from an
account of the attempts to provide a rational justification for morality in that
historical period – from say 1630 to 1850 – when it acquired a sense at once
general and specific. In that period ‘morality’ became the name for that
particular sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither theological nor
legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own. It is only in the
later seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, when this distinguishing
of the moral from the theological, the legal and the aesthetic has become a
received doctrine that the project of an independent rational justification of
morality becomes not merely the concern of the individual thinkers, but
central to Northern European culture.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 39.
 Meanwhile, back in the present…

The following is a widely accepted doctrine in modern moral philosophy:

No argument which has a conclusion concerning moral obligation and premises that are
purely factual can be valid.
Put another way: No amount of facts about the way the world can by themselves justify
any conclusions about how we ought to act.

This is sometimes known as the “No ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ principle” and sometimes as the
“fact/value distinction.”
Counterexamples to the “No ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ principle”

1. Artifacts (e.g. watch)

2. Occupations/roles (e.g. farmer or sea captain).
3. Man as the concept is understood in the Aristotelian tradition.

“…‘man’ stands to ‘good man’ as ‘watch’ stands to ‘good watch’ or

‘farmer’ to ‘good farmer’ within the classical tradition. Aristotle
takes it as a starting-point for ethical enquiry that the relationship of
‘man’ to ‘living well’ is analogous to that of ‘harpist’ to ‘playing the
harp well’.”

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 58.
 The Teleological View of Ethics

Rational Precepts Virtues

Human-nature-as- Human-nature-as-it-could-
it- happens-to-be be-if-it-realized-its-telos
 Why the Enlightenment Project Had to Fail

Since the moral injunctions were originally at home in a scheme in which their
purpose was to correct, improve and educate… human nature, they are clearly
not going to be such as could be deduced from true statements about human
nature or justified in some other way by appealing to its characteristics. The
injunctions of morality, thus understood, are likely to be ones that human nature,
thus understood, has strong tendencies to disobey. Hence the eighteenth-century
moral philosophers engaged in what was an inevitably unsuccessful project; for
they did indeed attempt to find a rational basis for their moral beliefs in a
particular understanding of human nature, while inheriting a set of moral
injunctions on the one hand and a conception of human nature on the other
which had been expressly designed to be discrepant with each other…

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 55.
 MacIntyre’s History of Modern Morality v2.0
Stage 1
Morality Flourishes
(13-15th centuries)
• A fusion of Aristotelian
philosophy and Christian
theology.
• Takes from Aristotle the
notion that human beings have
a telos (natural end) and that
the purpose of ethical rules is
to help us achieve that telos.
• Takes from Christianity the
notions of sin and divine law
and changes the understanding
of the human telos so that it
can no longer be completely
achieved in this world.
• Ethics is a factual matter; the
human telos is a matter of fact
and there are facts about
which rules best guide us to
our natural end.
Stage 2 Stage 3A
Catastrophe Enlightenment Project
(16/17th centuries) (c1630-c1850)
Reformation & Jansenism A broad consensus over
(both 16th century) inherited moral beliefs.
Scientific Revolution Philosophy is part of the
(16/17th centuries) culture of the educated
Political Revolutions public.
(17th century onwards) The Enlightenment project is
the attempt by philosophers to
provide rational foundation for
those beliefs.
Key figures:
David Hume (1711-1776)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-
1855)
Stage 3B
Emotivist Culture
(late 19th century to present)
Moral consensus replaced by
interminable moral
disagreement.
Emotivist culture obliterates
the distinction between
manipulative and non-
manipulative social relations.
Emotivist self lacks criteria for
rational evaluation.
Dominated by three
characters:
Manager
Therapist
Aesthete
Central concepts:
Rights
Protest
Unmasking
 Rationality as
Tradition-Constituted
• MacIntyre: Either reason is thus impersonal, universal,
and disinterested or it is the unwitting representative of
particular interests, masking their drive to power by its
false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness.
What this alternative conceals from view is a third
possibility, the possibility that reason can only move
towards being genuinely universal and impersonal
insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that
membership in a particular type of moral community,
one from which fundamental dissent has to be
excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational
enquiry and more especially for moral and
theological enquiry.
 Liberalism as THE
Established Religion
• “Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain
kind of unacknowledged domination, and one which in
the long run tends to dissolve traditional human ties and
to impoverish social and cultural relationships.
Liberalism, while imposing through state power regimes
that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take
to be their own good, deprives most people of the
possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for the
discovery and achievement of the good, especially by
the way in which it attempts to discredit those
traditional forms of human community within which
this project has to be embodied.”
 Defeating Relativism
The conclusion of the preceding chapter was that it is an illusion to
suppose that there is some neutral standing ground, some locus for
rationality as such, which can afford rational resources sufficient for
enquiry independent of all traditions. Those who have maintained
otherwise either have covertly been adopting the standpoint of a
tradition and deceiving themselves and perhaps others into supposing
that theirs was just such a neutral standing ground or else have simply
been in error. The person outside all traditions lacks sufficient rational
resources for enquiry and a fortiori for enquiry into what tradition is to
be rationally preferred. He or she has no adequate relevant means of
rational evaluation and hence can come to no well-grounded
conclusion, including the conclusion that no tradition can vindicate itself
against any other. To be outside all traditions is to be a stranger to
enquiry; it is to be in a state of intellectual and moral destitution, a
condition from which it is impossible to issue the relativist challenge.