The Emergence of Morality

1. 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.

2. 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.”

3. 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.

4. The Teleological View of Ethics Divine Moral Law Secular Anti-Aristotelianism Protestantism andJansenism Rational Precepts Virtues Human-nature-as-it- happens-to-be Human-nature-as-it-could- be-if-it-realized-its-telos

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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 Catastrophe (16/17th centuries) Reformation & Jansenism (both 16th century) Scientific Revolution (16/17th centuries) Political Revolutions(17th century onwards) Stage 3A Enlightenment Project (c1630-c1850) A broad consensus over inherited moral beliefs. Philosophy is part of the culture of the educated public. 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