Abstract
The nineteenth century witnessed a change in how people think about morality. Rather than moral consensus, moral disparity became the focal point for reflection. Moral philosophers hitherto had no problem formulating actual moral judgements and treatises on required virtues. The controversies largely pertained to the issues moral judgements are based upon, but there was no questioning that they are unequivocal, or ought to be (Baier, 1989, pp. 229 ff.). The point of departure for today’s philosophical reflection on morality is pluralism; ethics embodies the study of logical or semiotic properties of moral terms and procedures for attaining agreement. But morally speaking, philosophy continues to be preferably neutral, or better yet sceptical as regards moral judgements. Philosophers rarely make statements about “ordinary vices” or, in more policy-oriented terms, the question of criminality.1
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The term ordinary vices was coined by Shklar (1984).
Ankersmit (1992) notes that in proportion to the size of his work, Rorty’s influence is immense, though Ankersmit did count 157 publications from 1949 to 1989.
Maclntyre categorically rejects the distinction between moral practice and moral theory; there are not two histories. Rorty similarly views philosophy that places itself outside the cultural discourse as categorically unfeasible. All he professes to do is philosophically put contemporary culture into words.
MacIntyre goes to a special effort in this connection to refute the work of G. E. Moore (Principia Ethica 1903), in whose view moral statements can solely be founded upon intuition. For the rest, a thinker like Spinoza already held that good and evil are no more than modalities of the imagination.
Bellah, Madsen et al. (1985, 1991) presents a comparable line of reasoning. A good society is not, as Locke thought, a by-product of autonomous individuals promoting their own interests, but the product of a morally inspired institutional life.
According to Maclntyre, the idiom of the therapist has successfully, perhaps too successfully, penetrated the realms of religion, education and upbringing.
Gewirth, a neo-Kantian, is a proponent of this.
He refers in this connection to Homer, Aristotle, Stoicism, Thomas Aquinas, the New Testament, Benjamin Franklin and Jane Austen. “They offer us different and incompatible lists of virtues, different ranking and different theories” (MacIntyre, 1983, p. 181 ).
A chess player strives for example to achieve a higher and higher level within the rules of the game. This is the kind of command that is inherent to the game, otherwise it loses its purpose. It is also possible however to want to earn money playing chess. Goods like these become individual property, but immanent goods are there for the entire community involved in the practice. Every serious chess player benefits from a new variation on a classic opening.
A practice always implies virtue, but in principle institutions and technical skills can function without it. Institutions distribute external goods such as money, status and power: “It is not part of the legitimate function of government to inculcate any one moral outlook” (p. 195).
Departing from the generally accepted view, Rorty feels that justification is a public matter and the explanation a private one.
It is clear that MacIntyre refutes Freud’s psychoanalysis, which takes the splitting of the subject as point of departure, and refers to it as a typical subject theory of emotivism. And it is equally understandable that Rorty’s concept of the subject has been based upon Freud.
Maclntyre feels the concept of tradition is too weighted down by conservatism. He is interested in a living tradition, not in traditionalism.
In his interpretation of Freud, Rorty is largely led by Rieff (1961).
The notion of contingency might be a better candidate for comprehending the problems of young adopted children than the usual explanation in terms of not knowing their biological roots. It is not the ignorance about their own background that creates a problem, but the awareness of the contingency of their identity.
In Maclntyre’s words: “There is no way of founding my identity — or lack of it — on the psychological continuity or discontinuity of the self. The self inhabits a character whose unity is given as the unity of a character” (Maclntyre, p. 217).
Rorty goes on from this observation to formulate an interesting conception of the task of the intellectual and its limitations: “Letting us see the narratives of our own lives as episodes within such larger historical narratives is, 1 think, as much as the intellectuals are able to do in aid of morality” (1986, p. 19).
Though this is suggested in Rawls’ main work, A Theory of Justice (1971). It is precisely on this point that an author like Sadurski (1991) criticizes Rawls’ work.
I elaborated upon this notion with respect to family therapy, which has the pretence of protecting the family but can be viewed de facto as its gravedigger (De Boer and Boutellier, 1982).
It is interesting to think back in this connection to the choice Durkheim (1906) presents. In his opinion, the position of God in morality has been replaced by society, and one has to choose between God and society.
Vega (1992) notes that René Girard referred to exactly the same ordinary vices, probably independently of Shklar. Unlike Shklar, Girard is a vehement opponent of the egalitarianism of liberalism.
In fact, Shklar views Foucault’s (1975) description of Bentham as a kind of trailblazer for a modern-day dictatorship as a “grotesque intellectual misunderstanding”.
According to Rorty, Mill had long since already more or less had the last word about the issue of public morality.
See e.g. Fraser (1988), Mouffe (1988), Ankersmit (1992), Bernstein (1991), Guignon and Hiley (1990) and Van Stokkom (1993) in this connection.
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Boutellier, H. (2000). Solidarity or Virtuousness Rorty Versus Macintyre. In: Crime and Morality. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0013-4_6
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