Introductory
summary by Ted Honderich of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Royal Institute of Philosophy
Annual Lecture
SOCIAL
STRUCTURES AND THEIR THREATS TO MORAL AGENCY
Alasdair MacIntyre is a Scot whose
higher education was in the universities of London, Manchester, and Oxford. He
then taught in several English and in many American universities. His line of
publications, the first in his early 20's, includes the books After Virtue, Against the Self-Images of the
Age, Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, Dependent Rational Animals, and Whose Justice, Which Rationality? The
individuality of these books, their strength and their singular entry into the
history of moral philosophy and morality, have given him true distinction in
moral, social, and political philosophy. His line of commitments has had in it
Marxism, an Aristotelian ethics of the virtues, communitarianism, objection to
liberal and other capitalism, and Catholicism. He is now professor emeritus of
philosophy at Notre Dame University and a research fellow at London
Metropolitan University.
The lecture takes as one example a
man of whom it is said that in a sense he might be anybody, but he is a scheduler of German passenger and
freight trains. He resists a charge of moral failure having to do with whatever
was carried by the trains, including Jews to extermination camps. His defence
is that he did his duty, which was scheduling and the like, and he did not have
anything to do with what trains carried. He fulfilled his role as instructed,
did not fail in his responsibility, and so he bears no guilt. MacIntyre directs
us to subjects that must arise in consideration of such a defence, gives due
attention to many facets. He enriches moral philosophy by way of a kind of
sociology, what might be called moral sociology, and also by way of thought on
what might be called personhood in society.
His first consideration of moral
agency, of being a moral agent, of being responsible, includes reflection on
discriminating what is incidental in an action from what is not. This,
inevitably, has to do with standards of a social and cultural order in which
one exists. Being a moral agent, further, sometimes requires at least
questioning accepted social structures, structures which may in fact threaten
the possibility of being a moral agent.
There is much that needs to be added
about understanding a moral agent. One thing is that to know that that one is
such an agent is to know that one has a personal identity as well as a social
role. One must also be a practically rational individual, an accountable one,
and respect two demands, those of integrity and constancy. One has to ask in
particular what a social and cultural order needs its inhabitants not to know.
For someone to become and be such a moral agent, certain milieus of dialogue
and inquiry are necessary. These, of which more is said in what follows, are of
a prime importance. They may be missing.
Also given large importance is the
fact of what is called compartmentalization. Consideration of it begins from
some research having to do with the morality of decision-making in the electric
power industry in America. There is the example of a man who is both a company
executive and a parent, and consideration of norms within insulated spheres, of
the ethics of deception including lying, and of the divided self. In the case
of the railwayman, it is added that his existence is one that includes what in
fact are not lacks or absences but rather active refusals and denials by that
self, that co-author of its moral and social situation.
What is concluded by MacIntyre,
taking all into account, is that the railwayman is morally guilty.
That cannot be to suppose that such
persons as the scheduler are unique, let alone unique to such societies as the
Nazi one. MacIntyre does not concern himself explicitly with differences and
similarities between the culpable railwayman and the mentioned company
executive. There is to my mind the implication that there are facts of
individual moral guilt within our own societies, in our own social and cultural
orders. Further, as with Germany past, there are also guilts of other kinds on
the part of whole social and political orders. I myself take it that these may
include, although they are not mentioned, our own governments, political
classes, democracies, so-called democracies, so-called democracies that are
also racist, and so on.
The lecture and the rest of
MacIntyre's work raises hard questions, one being the way and extent to which a
verdict as to guilt or innocence can be judged, let alone demonstrated.
Another, very different, is whether it is reasonable to engage in reflective
morality without some decent knowlede of its history, conceivably going back to
Aristotle. The question can leave you not only envious of MacIntyre's work but
uneasy about your thinking or unthinking life in a society.