MacIntyre - Beyond Adam Smith and Karl Marx
Parse this if u can. It's worth re-reading it until you get it:
"Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local non-market relationships, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they often do, undermine and corrupt commercial ties."
MacIntyre hates sentences shorter than 20 or 30 words without lots of parenthetical thoughts thrown in. It makes him very hard to read. He's not a bumper sticker philosopher. However, as far as I know, he is the smartest philosopher of the 20th century, maybe any century.
What he's doing here is tossing out the entire moral philosophy that underlies both capitalism and socialism. Adam Smith had it wrong. Karl Marx had it wrong. To "flourish" (be human) we need to have certain virtues and exist within a network of mutual obligation. Commercial transactions make sense only when embedded in this larger human matrix of relationships. What's more, that larger network is the important one -- the commercial stuff is a side-show.
This is from Dependent Rational Animals. You go to the butcher to buy meat and he sells it to you for his benefit. So far so good. But suppose you find him on the floor with a heart attack? Why not just walk out and go to some other butcher? Why not just call 911 and leave? Conventional economic theory would be fine with leaving the guy to die on the floor. Why is it wrong?
The fact is that nobody, nor even a total stranger, would leave the guy on the floor. We don't have an ethical theory that adequately accounts for ordinary human virtue. MacIntyre's has been working to correct this problem for decades. If you want to have anything to say about justice, virtue or politics, you need to take the time to plow through his prose and understand what he has to say.
The example of the unfortunate butcher is just a start. MacIntyre's analysis sweeps from the deepest, innermost motives of the individual, through intimate friendship, to family, to community to the nation state. At every level, he asks, what sort of a person should I be? What virtues should I posses? What kind of friendship, community, nation would allow these virtues to flourish?
In many cases, his answers are "conventionally unconventional", for example, when he challenges the claims of a nation-state to spend the lives of its citizens for some kind of community value (dangerous fiction). Yet he clearly delineates the need for nations and the boundaries of our obligation to them.
An illustration of MacIntyre's radical departure from conventional thinking is his claim that anyone who asks why he should help the butcher -- who offers some kind of reason for such action -- is lacking in a crucial virtue. Such virtues are taught by communities and lead us to act in certain ways without calculating the benefit to ourselves or anybody else. This would seem strange if it were not exactly the kind of thinking - or acting without thinking - that we see again and again reported by real-life rescuers.
His book is grounded on the notion of dependence -- the idea that we are not, never have been and never will be totally independent. We are always part of a network of "giving and receiving". We always have obligations. Yet, to flourish, we must become rational and to become rational, we must reason together. This is more than a justification for democracy. It is a blueprint for a comprehensive world view that sheds light on all the sorts of human interaction that we are likely to experience, including those that are scarcely mentioned in conventional philosophy, such as those of caring for the disabled or being totally disabled.
Throughout, MacIntyre speaks of the human condition, describing a world view that makes perfect sense, yet challenges all the familiar philosophies, political ideology and economic theories. MacIntyre is standing up and saying the theories are wrong and it's time to think carefully about what sort of people we need to be to reach our full potential -- individually and as members of families, communities and societies.
"Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local non-market relationships, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they often do, undermine and corrupt commercial ties."
MacIntyre hates sentences shorter than 20 or 30 words without lots of parenthetical thoughts thrown in. It makes him very hard to read. He's not a bumper sticker philosopher. However, as far as I know, he is the smartest philosopher of the 20th century, maybe any century.
What he's doing here is tossing out the entire moral philosophy that underlies both capitalism and socialism. Adam Smith had it wrong. Karl Marx had it wrong. To "flourish" (be human) we need to have certain virtues and exist within a network of mutual obligation. Commercial transactions make sense only when embedded in this larger human matrix of relationships. What's more, that larger network is the important one -- the commercial stuff is a side-show.
This is from Dependent Rational Animals. You go to the butcher to buy meat and he sells it to you for his benefit. So far so good. But suppose you find him on the floor with a heart attack? Why not just walk out and go to some other butcher? Why not just call 911 and leave? Conventional economic theory would be fine with leaving the guy to die on the floor. Why is it wrong?
The fact is that nobody, nor even a total stranger, would leave the guy on the floor. We don't have an ethical theory that adequately accounts for ordinary human virtue. MacIntyre's has been working to correct this problem for decades. If you want to have anything to say about justice, virtue or politics, you need to take the time to plow through his prose and understand what he has to say.
The example of the unfortunate butcher is just a start. MacIntyre's analysis sweeps from the deepest, innermost motives of the individual, through intimate friendship, to family, to community to the nation state. At every level, he asks, what sort of a person should I be? What virtues should I posses? What kind of friendship, community, nation would allow these virtues to flourish?
In many cases, his answers are "conventionally unconventional", for example, when he challenges the claims of a nation-state to spend the lives of its citizens for some kind of community value (dangerous fiction). Yet he clearly delineates the need for nations and the boundaries of our obligation to them.
An illustration of MacIntyre's radical departure from conventional thinking is his claim that anyone who asks why he should help the butcher -- who offers some kind of reason for such action -- is lacking in a crucial virtue. Such virtues are taught by communities and lead us to act in certain ways without calculating the benefit to ourselves or anybody else. This would seem strange if it were not exactly the kind of thinking - or acting without thinking - that we see again and again reported by real-life rescuers.
His book is grounded on the notion of dependence -- the idea that we are not, never have been and never will be totally independent. We are always part of a network of "giving and receiving". We always have obligations. Yet, to flourish, we must become rational and to become rational, we must reason together. This is more than a justification for democracy. It is a blueprint for a comprehensive world view that sheds light on all the sorts of human interaction that we are likely to experience, including those that are scarcely mentioned in conventional philosophy, such as those of caring for the disabled or being totally disabled.
Throughout, MacIntyre speaks of the human condition, describing a world view that makes perfect sense, yet challenges all the familiar philosophies, political ideology and economic theories. MacIntyre is standing up and saying the theories are wrong and it's time to think carefully about what sort of people we need to be to reach our full potential -- individually and as members of families, communities and societies.
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