Transcript Human-nature-as-it

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
Divine Moral Law
Secular AntiAristotelianism
Protestantism and
Jansenism
Rational Precepts Virtues
Human-nature-asit- happens-to-be
Human-nature-as-it-couldbe-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.
Kant is closest to recognizing the need for teleology
[Kant] does indeed look for a foundation of morality in the universalizable prescriptions of
that reason which manifests itself both in arithmetic and in morality; and in spite of his
strictures against founding morality on human nature, his analysis of the nature of human
reason is the basis for his own rational account of morality. Yet in the second book of the
second Critique he does acknowledge that without a teleological framework the whole project
of morality becomes unintelligible. This teleological framework is presented as a
‘presupposition of pure practical reason’. Its appearance in Kant’s moral philosophy seemed
to his nineteenth-century readers, such as Heine and later the Neo-Kantians, an arbitrary and
unjustifiable concession to positions which he had already rejected. Yet, if my thesis is
correct, Kant was right; morality did in the eighteenth century, as a matter of historical fact,
presuppose something very like the teleological scheme of God, freedom and happiness as
the final crown of virtue which Kant propounds. Detach morality from that framework and
you will no longer have morality; or, at the very least, you will have radically transformed its
character.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 55-56.
MacIntyre’s History of Modern Morality v2.0
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3A
Stage 3B
Morality Flourishes
Catastrophe
Enlightenment Project
Emotivist Culture
(13-15th centuries)
(16/17th centuries)
(c1630-c1850)
(late 19th century to present)
• 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.
Reformation & Jansenism
(both 16th century)
A broad consensus over
inherited moral beliefs.
Scientific Revolution
(16/17th centuries)
Philosophy is part of the
culture of the educated
public.
Political Revolutions
(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)
Moral consensus replaced by
interminable moral
disagreement.
Emotivist culture obliterates
the distinction between
manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations.
Emotivist self lacks criteria for
rational evaluation.
Dominated by three characters:
Manager
Therapist
Aesthete
Central concepts:
Rights
Protest
Unmasking