Replies to the Comments

A few responses, bearing in mind Anthony's comments below:

1. Rejection of predictive social sciences and acceptance of virtue ethics.

On reading Anthony's rebuttal, I briefly can't remember why we thought our objection worked, but I'll try one more time: doesn't virtue ethics require some claims about what human nature is like (i.e. virtues are virtues because they help us fulfill our destiny/nature/telos)?  I guess the laws of virtue that come from that are normative, not prescriptive, but this still seems awfully similar to what social sciences claim to know about us (and then know how to tell us how to act).

2. Roles in a virtue ethics society and democratic values.

I can see how MacIntyre seems like a Marxist, and I shall ruminate on that one for a while.  A side note though - I am really more concerned with our democratic values more than our democratic government, in this case.  I take MacIntyre to be rejecting the modern understanding of individualism in the strong sense, which he should given his proposal that (different, and hierarchical) societal roles made sense of virtue ethics in ancient Greece.  Currently strong individualism supports our idea or rights (which MacIntyre openly rejects) and our theories of the democratic worth of all people.  This is the very reason why, on a close inspection, Aristotle's Greece seems to us to be very oppressive.  I am worried that is we give up strong individualism, we won't have a basis for democratic worth, and I am not prepared to do that with MacIntyre. 

Having said that, I think there would be a reasonable argument for the successive fall of our theories of democratic government as well, but not necessarily to an authoritarian/totalitarian regime.

Comments on the Objections

Anthony gives the following replies:

A couple of quick comments on these objections: on the first one, MacIntyre is objecting to a social science that models itself on the natural sciences, and therefore thinks it can come up with straightforward predictions of what will happen in society.  MacIntyre certainly thinks his own Aristotelian approach (and his brand of philosophical history - though that is really more like Hegel than Aristotle!) enables us to better understand what is going on in society, but he doesn't claim to provide scientific-style predictions of what will happen.  Virtue theory is normative rather than attempting to be predictive (in the way most orthodox social science is); it aims to tell us what we should do, but (notoriously) it does not follow from the fact that we should do something that we will.  So I don't think MacIntyre is undermined by his own argument here.

As for how we should think about democracy, individualism etc if we are convinced by MacIntyre; in some ways he is an unreconstructed Marxist, and does I think, take modern liberal democratic theory as ideology in the Marxist sense - a nice disguise for the reality of an alienated society.  But he certainly does want any kind of authoritarian/totalitarian politics either.  Hence his recommendation that we withdraw from the whole spectrum of standard political options.  But it is very hard to work out what he ultimately wants to see, or how if at all he thinks it could happen.  But no doubt about it; it is a radical stance!

Anthony

Absolute Freedom and Terror

III. Absolute Freedom and Terror (§582-595)

As the individual self-consciousness identifies with the whole, it understands itself as the universal. The individual will becomes the universal will. The goal of will is utility. The universal will, however, uses its utility because to will an action the will-er must be singular, unique. Even the government discovers this problem, as it must become individual to will one definite thing. As the universal will constantly dirempts into individual representations of it, class and function differences again arise, throwing Spirit back to the beginning of the dilemma. Again, the Spirit runs into a paradox of intention and the impossibility of carrying it out.

The Spirit leaves this realm of paradox for a world in which it is free: the realm of absolute freedom. The Spirit leaves behind the essential negativity of the universal will / individual action dichotomy, and enters a world in which it is sure of its will, divorced from specificity (therefore consequences).

A note on this section: Hegel's comments on the government necessarily becoming "individual" does not apply well to the kind of democracy we have today. Would Hegel say anything different now, with more evidence of functioning democracies, or would he say that the arguing voices in our government is exactly why we, as a country, can't will one definite thing?