Beyond subsistence Book

This is a somewhat difficult book to “review” – it’s a collection of essays of academic philosophy by the neo-Aristotelian Thomas MacIntyre. Most of the criticism I read, regardless of the matter, tends to be written for a general audience – and therefore one can talk about issues such as writing style, accessibility, and humor in the text. With a book of pure theory, however, such discussions are superfluous (which is for the best, since most philosophers are not exactly dynamic writers) – the only thing that matters is the coherence of the philosophy.

MacIntyre is a virtue theorist – he seeks to rescue the words “good” and “evil” (particularly the former) from assaults of moral and cultural relativism. Much of his theory revolves around the idea of a “practice” – that while we may have some trouble defining the good in some abstract sense, we can define the good within a practice. Thus, the good for an artist is that which allows the practitioner to best fulfill the ends of being an artist. These ends may not be set in stone (indeed, they are constantly shifting) – but neither are they relative: they, ultimately, define the practice. When one calls oneself a teacher, artist, politician, skateboarder, or runner, one is implicitly accepting the set of rules and endpoints that define the practice.

While I find myself sympathetic with almost all of MacIntyre’s arguments, I feel he mostly fails to fully counter the advance of relativism – rather, he mainly succeeds in pushing the problem up a level. While I agree with his point that within any culture or practice the rules are not relative, he provides no ability to decide between to competing cultural value systems. As long as they are internally consistent, there’s no way, within his system, to claim that one system is truer or better than another – this is only possible when a certain system has run into a series of internal inconsistencies, from which an alternative system could provide an out.

However, these cultural-level conflicts are rare, at least with respect to the individual. As food for thought about how to conducts one own life, MacIntyre provides a lot of food for though, updating Aristotle for the modern world.