Reviews for Groups and group rights

The average rating for Groups and group rights based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-04 00:00:00 Julimarie Gresham What if our contemporary moral discourse were a cargo cult in which we picked up fragments of a long lost, once-coherent moral philosophy, and ignorantly constructed a bunch of nonsense that didn’t work and could not work in principle? After Virtue argues that this indeed is what happened, and this explains why our moral discourse is such a mess. Why when we argue about moral issues do we make our case in a form that resembles rational argument, but the effect seems to be only like imperative statements or exclamations? Why do pro-life folks and pro-choice folks keep arguing when there is no resolution to their argument? MacIntyre believes we are reenacting forms of argument that once made sense, since people once did have a common ground of morality, but that we have since lost this in a Tower of Babel-like catastrophe. Our moral arguments today are interminable because the values they express are incommensurable. Though the claims of the emotivists are not necessarily true, they happen to be true for contemporary moral philosophy: when people make moral arguments today they really are just making exclamations of (dis)approval while disguising these as rational arguments about facts. Moral philosophy adopted the idea that moral systems must eventually descend on first principles that everyone must choose for themselves and for which there are no rational criteria: you cannot get an “ought” from an “is”. The only way to defend any moral framework is in a form that ultimately reduces to “my first principles are better than your first principles, nyaah nyaah.” Modern philosophy has not found a way out of this predicament. The emotivist explanation of moral argument makes the most sense, and so people who engage in moral arguments are essentially trying to manipulate others and at the same time to resist being manipulated, knowing on some level that there is no resolution, which leads to the perpetual histrionic impasse that keeps the news networks and political parties in business. Some philosophers suggest that there are no right answers in ethics or that the whole field of inquiry is bogus. MacIntyre says that this isn’t necessarily true but is just the result of the catastrophe that shattered a once-coherent ethics. Our concept of “the moral” was invented in the 17th–19th centuries to cover “rules of conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic.” The philosophical project of justifying these rules developed along with it. The classical world didn’t have this concept — moralis or etikos meant something more like our word “character.” The failure of this philosophical project is “the historical background against which the predicaments of our own culture can become intelligible.” MacIntyre works backwards through Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, and Hume, and says that they were unable to find a rational ground for morality in choice, in reason, or in passion and desire. Each was capable of decisively refuting some of these grounds, but each failed to show that their own best guess was right. The morality that these philosophers were trying to justify consisted of surviving remnants of the virtues like those Aristotle discussed in The Nicomachean Ethics, in which ethics is considered to be the science of how we govern our lives so as to best meet the ends of human living: the human telos. Aristotle’s ethics has this structure: 1) Humans are untutored; 2) Humans have a telos; 3) Ethics is the tutelage necessary for us to achieve our telos. Enlightenment philosophers abandoned the idea of a telos, and in so doing, lost the only way of making ethical statements statements of fact. To Aristotle, an ethical statement was true if the ethical rule it described did in fact help people achieve their telos. Without reference to a telos, ethical statements don’t mean anything at all. Enlightenment thinkers, who were okay with #1 (humans are untutored) and #3 (moral precepts correct human nature) stuck themselves with the impossible task of deriving #3 from #1. The insistence that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is” that so perplexed the moral philosophers is, MacIntyre insists, a bugbear that results from this same undeclared premise: that humans have no telos. For things with purposes, “is” may very well imply “ought” (this is a watch; it ought to tell the correct time). Good or bad for watches is embedded in the very concept of watch. Similarly, if a person has a telos, his or her actions will be more or less ethical, to the extent that they assist in achieving it. What actions are ethical is a factual inquiry: is implies ought. We still make moral arguments as if they were statements of fact, but we’ve lost the ability to articulate what makes them factual. To try to fill in the gap, we resort to fictions. To replace teleology we have “utility”; to replace God’s revealed laws, we have the categorical imperative or “inalienable human rights”. These are just phantasmagorical placeholders designed to fill in the inconvenient gaps in moral theory, but that have no more real existence than things like the luminiferous aether, which once served a similar purpose in physics. But we continue to argue as though one of these gambits had succeeded, though we suspect that our moral discourse is just a machiavellian struggle to manipulate and deceive. This leads to petulant “protest,” a modern form of moral discourse, because rational argument has no hope of succeeding. The other dominant variety of moral discourse today is “unmasking,” in which foes discover each others’ moral pronouncements to be sham façades that mask selfish and arbitrary desires. This amounts to a parlor game, since everybody’s ethics have become incoherent and contradictory. Along with such fictional devices as “right” and “utility,” the modern age created “effectiveness” as a moral fetish. The bureaucratic manager uses the myth of managerial expertise to manipulate those being managed and to justify the managers’ power. The idea of managerial expertise implies a domain of real knowledge about social structures and their inputs and outputs of which the manager has specialized and true knowledge. This turns out to be a false claim. The enlightenment also caused the Aristotelian notion of ethics to split into the study of ethics (“what is good?”) and will (“how do intentions become actions?”). In the Aristotelian view, explanations of human actions only make sense in reference to a hierarchy of goods and to the telos, but in the mechanistic worldview, human action must be explained independently of any intentions, purposes, or telos. The social sciences of which managers are presumed to be experts are those in which human subjects are seen this way. People being manipulated by the practitioners of the social/managerial sciences are considered to have no intention or purpose or telos of their own worth respecting, but the same is implicitly not the case for the manipulators and social scientists themselves. Human affairs are systematically unpredictable, for several reasons: It is impossible to predict the effects of radically new conceptual innovations. People cannot confidently predict even their own actions. Chance trivialities can have large effects. Game-theory-like situations map poorly to real-life situations, and even so, they imply a necessary level of deceptiveness and recursive counter-plotting that makes real-world scientific observation and prediction difficult. (For example, during the Vietnam war, war-theorists working for the U.S. government cleverly created simulations and projections for victory using the best data they had at their disposal — data that was being systematically falsified by other elements of the government who were using their own game-theory-ish reasons for using deceit in the service of victory.) All we really should expect from social scientists are “usually”s. Managerial pretensions to expertise (and thereby to the power and money that come with positions like President of the United States or CEO) are based on unfounded claims for the precision and accuracy of the social sciences. When somebody claims to be doing something because of managerial expertise, you can be sure they are really disguising their own desire or arbitrary preference, just the same as if they claimed to be fulfilling the will of god, maximizing utility, or respecting inalienable human rights. Nonetheless, the contemporary vision of the world is bureaucratically Weberian — Max Weber mixed with Erving Goffman. MacIntyre says that we are like the Pacific islanders who had taboos they could not explain to the explorers who visited them. Whatever reasons originally led to the establishment of the taboos had vanished, so all they could do to explain their odd customs was to say, “but to do otherwise would be taboo.” MacIntyre says that Kamehameha II could abolish the taboo system abruptly and by fiat precisely because it had no foundation anymore. (I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt’s recollection of Nazi Germany: “…the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to judge or justify others and themselves, and whose validity were supposed to be self-evident to every sane person either as a part of divine or of natural law.… without much notice… collapsed almost overnight, and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.”) MacIntyre says that Nietzsche was our Kamehameha. Nietzsche thought he was abolishing morality, but in fact, MacIntyre says, he was only pointing out the futility of the enlightenment project of rationally justifying the fragmentary remnants of classical ethics — our taboos. If the classical ethical philosopher asked “what sort of person am I to become, and how?” the modern ethical philosopher asked “what taboos must I follow, and why?” It was a doomed project, because the taboos had become dislodged from their justifications, and the whole framework in which those justifications made sense had been abandoned. The virtues became nothing but tendencies to obey the taboos, with the taboos being somehow more fundamental. What’s the alternative? In the background of our moral philosophy, and in the virtues we sympathize with but don’t understand enough to be able to justify, is the ghost of an earlier and more coherent ethical system. The characteristics of “heroic” societies are revealed in the myths of antiquity. In these societies, everyone had a purpose just by virtue of being born into a particular station in society with relations to particular people. Nobody is defined by their “hidden depths” or their inner lives, but by their actions relative to their roles; a person is what a person does. Morality and social structure are the same thing. You can’t “step outside” your society and judge its moral system in comparison to some other system. A story like a saga isn’t just a story about a life, but is a representation of a life that is already understood to have the form of a story. Virtue is what enables you to fulfill the role you have and to conduct yourself in your story. This heroic background was refined by the Greeks in several ways: The tragedians (Sophocles in particular) focus on what happens when the moral system produces contradictions. A person has two contradictory ethical obligations that cannot be reconciled and the tragedy that results is just that there is no right way to proceed. The Sophists insist that virtues are relative, and the right way to proceed is whatever gets you what you’re after. Plato, and later Aristotle, hoped to show that the virtues don’t actually conflict and aren’t as flimsy as the Sophists would have it. MacIntyre next recaps The Nicomachean Ethics. But he points out problems with trying to bring Aristotle’s ethics into the modern era. For one thing, they require a telos for human beings, but Aristotle's idea of this was based on his now-ridiculous-seeming metaphysical biology. Also, if Aristotle’s virtues were closely tied to his particular society and to the roles available in it (as we have learned such virtues must be), how can these be relevant to us today? Furthermore, Aristotle views human life as perfectable — he thinks we can ultimately remove the conflicts from it; MacIntyre thinks it’s more likely that conflicts are more basic, and, like the tragidians concluded, are unavoidable. Healthy, undecayed accounts of virtue have three things in common: a concept of practice, an idea of the narrative order of human life, and a moral tradition that develops out of these. By “practice,” MacIntyre means some sort of occupation or activity that is deliberate and well-defined and traditional at least to the extent where it can involve internal goods — that is, rewards that exist only within the practice itself and not in terms of what the practice enables you to gain outside of it. For example, if you play chess well, the reward you get is the internal good of having played a good chess game. External goods are more zero-sum, more the objects of competition. Internal goods are more about personal excellence; when we succeed in attaining internal goods, this tends not to detract from the good of those around us but to enhance them. MacIntyre says that a virtue is that which enables us to achieve internal goods. This doesn’t mean that all practices are good. Nor does it mean that any practice and associated set of virtues is as good as any other (for that would lead us back to the same problem as our current catastrophe). When you see that life has a telos and therefore there is a practice of life, you see that life itself has its virtues — you can extrapolate from your idea of the internal rewards of a practice to the idea of The Good in life as a whole. In this way the idea of a practice and the understanding of the narrative nature of human life lead to the development of a coherent moral tradition. The modern view of life makes this difficult. Life is divided into stages and further into roles (“work-life” and “home-life” for instance), and we are encouraged to view behaviors atomistically rather than seeing our lives as unified and ourselves as engaged in large-scale narratives. But human activity is intelligible and our actions are within a narrative context. An action isn’t just part of a narrative but is part of many narratives from many points of view. These narratives are unpredictable (what happens next?) but that doesn’t mean they lack telos or that the telos is merely retrospectively assigned. The only way I can answer the question “what am I to do?” is if I can answer the question “what stories am I a part of?” When you ask yourself whether or not you are behaving ethically right, you are trying to justify yourself. You justify yourself by accounting for your behavior, that is to say, telling its story, putting it in a narrative context complete with its telos. By doing this you create a context in which the virtues will shine forth as the sort of excellences of character that advance you to your telos. The concept of virtue MacIntyre has described was destroyed, he says, by the cult of bureaucratic individualism that emerged from the enlightenment. Employees, for example, do not typically engage in a practice associated with internal goods (they are motivated by salary or other external goods); the typical modern person is not a practitioner but a spectator/consumer, engaged in what MacIntyre calls “institutional acquisitiveness” or “aesthetic consumption”. Today, people in our culture are unable to weigh conflicting claims of justice because they are inherently incommensurable. John Rawls and Robert Nozick represent sophisticated philosophical justifications of something akin to popular quasi-socialist liberal and property-rights libertarian perspectives, respectively. MacIntyre notes that even if you accept either or both of their arguments as valid, this resolves nothing, since it is their premises that are incompatible. (Interestingly, neither Rawls nor Nozick relies on the concept of desert, which is central in the popular versions of justice they are trying to provide philosophical support for. MacIntyre says that this is because desert requires a social context in order to make sense, and the thought experiments that Rawls and Nozick rely on assume atomistic individuals without preexisting communities or cultures. The popular notion of desert, MacIntyre says, is yet another remnant of premodern justice that shines through the cracks left after the catastrophe.) Because there is no common ground on which disagreements can be argued, “modern politics is civil war carried on by other means” — nothing but power masked by rhetoric. But this is not because Nietzsche disproved morality. He successfully defeated the various enlightenment projects of justifying morality, but he left the Aristotelian ethical framework unscathed. What to do about it? Our task in this post-catastrophe world, MacIntyre says, is to construct “local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-22 00:00:00 Jacques Quinn I began this book around September 2015, then reviewed the first half in January of 2016 in advance of a hiatus in reading. I resumed in April, but this time I wasn't alone. It had looked like such fun that Dennis wanted to study with me. First we backtracked and did some review, and then we forged ahead, reading out loud, mostly me. I read over half the book out loud. And then I took notes on every paragraph, since that's the only way I could digest it. My notes constitute, in effect, a condensed and semi-digested version. We also discussed and argued as we went--as I've done with some of you, as well--and it's still not any easier to review! It's like math or a foreign language. The author keeps building his edifice. If you don't keep track of where you are you'll get lost, and despite everything you can lose track of where you've been. In my review of the first half of the book, I wrote how farfetched it was that MacIntyre could ever convince me we're in a new dark age. That was hyperbole to me: as Steven Pinker would say, those were the words of believers in some lost cause they are trying to keep alive. Then, in Chapter 18, MacIntyre is explicating Nietzsche's Übermensch, via whom post-Enlightenment society is to escape pseudo-concepts such as utility and natural rights but instead brings forth something far worse: this man who, in his will to power bursts all constraints, wears a mask, is beholden to no one but himself, lies rather than tell the truth. And so, he writes, we may expect society to breed these "great men" from time to time, "Alas!" Those words have a kick to them. It's what we were reading when the election happened. I've left the review of the first half as-is, other than a few corrections. Then I'll touch on high points from the remaining chapters, and on to conclusions and closing thoughts. Thoughts at (Near) the Halfway Point (from January 2016) The Enlightenment Project--that is, the attempt to establish a secular and rational basis for morality--is a failure. All attempts to do that are mere masks for what you want. The society we have is a reflection of that basic fact. So says Alasdair MacIntyre. This is the new dark ages. Even if the first part were true, that morality as we know it today is a sham, I don't know how he could convince me of the second part about the dark ages or of the seeming implication that past times before the paradigm shifted was better. Another consequence of the failure of morality are our interminable arguments. Our lived reality, which always reflects the philosophical paradigm that is in effect, is deeply emotivist, emotivism being "the doctrine that all evaluative judgment, and, particularly, all moral judgment is nothing but an expression of preference." That being the case there is no moral basis on which to settle any argument. Each society is represented by characters for whom personality merges with social role, for example, that of the headmaster in Victorian England or the Prussian officer. Other societal roles don't require that synthesis: think of a clergy person who could go through the motions even if he has lost his faith. The character, in Alasdair MacIntyre's sense, can't do that; "Characters are the moral representations of their culture." The three characters we have today are the manager, the therapist, and the rich aesthete. Organizations have aims assumed to be value-neutral, yet unavailable for conscious scrutiny; the personal is the realm for debate over values--but no resolution is to be had. Modernity celebrates the individual's release from the confines of social identities and telos, while leaving us stripped of telos and identity. A breakthrough? Not so fast, according to Alasdair MacIntyre. Picture from Münchhausen's Pigtail, or Psychotherapy & "Reality" by Paul Watzlawick With me so far? The philosophers of the Enlightenment sought to find rational bases for morality, for example, Kierkegaard and radical choice, and Kant, reason. But each attempt involved a first cause beyond which reason couldn't go. And Hume saw Kant had failed, so he used the passions as his basis for morality. We thus have the various philosophers debunking each others' theories--which reminds me of religions critiquing and defaming each other, thus doing the work of atheists for them. The only reason their moral theories worked at all was that their bits and pieces had a previous life in a prior social system and philosophical paradigm from which the philosophers had unwittingly retrieved them. The picture I get here is of the cartoon figure zooming along so fast that, when he runs off the precipice, he is suspended in the air momentarily--before dropping like a rock. In other words the moral theories can still seem to make sense even though they have lost their foundation. We still talk as though they are true, even while living the emotivist lifestyle that reflects our actual philosophy. It is that philosophy Alasdair MacIntyre claims has let us down. So, the Enlightenment Project only worked, according to him, because its philosophers were coming out of a shared Christian moral tradition, part of a more sweeping classical tradition in which people had a purpose (an end; a telos): good was anything that contributed to that purpose, while bad detracted from it. Thus, in the classical tradition, a role did carry moral weight, and unlike within our present system, you could derive "ought" from "is" (that is, values from facts). By rejecting everything but reason, the modernist philosophers could deal only with means, not ends. Thus it is that thought reflects practice, and the modern self requires a new social setting: the individual in his emotivist culture, within which meaning has fallen out from under him. One of the implications is that, in the culture we have, rights cannot be established; rights require a socially established set of rules. The author asserts that claiming rights without the requisite social order is like presenting a check for payment in a society without money. Thus it is that rights, like utility, is a fiction. We're taught to see ourselves as agents but become engaged by modes of practice (aesthetic or bureaucratic) that are manipulative (in other words, treating others as means, not ends). He goes so far as to say that, like witches and unicorns, there are no such things as rights. Without any rational way to decide, we have protest, which used to be a positive, a la Protestants, or protesting the truth, but now we have protest against. Given its predicament, protest is reduced to preaching to the choir and has acquired its quality of shrillness. Since what passes as morality reduces to preference and predilection, the function of protest is unmasking, to which everyone is vulnerable, with defensive unmasking as doing unto others before they can do unto you (he credits Freud for that insight). He uses these issues to further elaborate the stock characters of our society, the aesthete, the therapist, and the manager. The aesthete, he says, is the least likely to be deceived by our societal fictions (utility, rights, etc.). The therapist is most likely to be deceived, and not only by moral fictions, yet to keep on keeping on despite being unmasked (as with psychoanalysis). Lastly are bureaucratic managers of all kinds (government and in the business world), the coin of whose realm is manipulation (that is, means, not ends). It is in MacIntyre's discussion of the fiction of managerial effectiveness that he shows his kinship with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's thought, management science being an oxymoron and Fortuna his black swan. The game is not the real thing, nor the map the actual geography. We all want predictability so our own plans will prevail, so we aim to keep ourselves unpredictable to others ("play our cards close to our chests") while making others predictable. In bureaucracies, predictability and effectiveness are mutually exclusive, since achieving the former would entail total control, while the latter requires flexibility and spontaneity. The fiction of managerial effectiveness functions as the belief in God functions (for those for whom that is a fiction): It is one more illusion and a peculiarly modern one, the illusion of a power not ourselves that claims to make for righteousness. Hence the manager as character is other than he at first sight seems to be: the social world of everyday hard-headed practical pragmatic no-nonsense realism which is the environment of management is one which depends for its sustained existence on the systematic perpetuation of misunderstanding and of belief in fictions. The fetishism of commodities has been supplemented by another just as important fetishism, that of bureaucratic skills. For it follows from my whole argument that the realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively-grounded claims function in fact as expressions of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference. (p. 107) The example that comes to mind is our manager-in-chief, the US President (the role, not the current inhabitant of the White House [who was Barack Obama at the time of this part of the review]). In the final chapter that I have read, the author says Nietzsche's role is to have shot down our societal roadrunner who had found himself unsupported and out over open space. Nietzsche demolished the moral fictions (British emotivism and French existentialism) to reveal our true state, that is, unless Aristotle's telos, or something like it, can be supported. That touches on Jonathan Haidt's Westerners who found themselves tongue-tied when trying to express moral intuitions other than those involving fairness or harm (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion). It also is consistent with Steven Pinker's description of the function of "political correctness" in guarding against resumption of past moral failures (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined), and how it is that PC is showing failure in its function. For Aristotle, honor is secondary to that for which it is deserved, but in emotivist society, success is only what passes for success. Honor in pre-modern societies was due to position in the social order. Today, an insult is considered a private matter. How this all contrasts with Pinker's value system, in which honor systems are the source of evil and modernity the wellspring of "the better angels of our nature!" Yet it is not of course just that Nietzsche's moral philosophy is false if Aristotle's is true and vice versa. In a much stronger sense Nietzsche's moral philosophy is matched specifically against Aristotle's by virtue of the historical role which each plays. For, as I argued earlier, it was because a moral tradition of which Aristotle's thought was the intellectual core was repudiated during the transitions of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that the Enlightenment project of discovering new rational secular foundations for morality had to be undertaken. And it was because tha project failed, because the views advanced by its most intellectually powerful protagonists, and more especially Kant, could not be sustained in the face of rational criticism that Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors were able to mount their apparently successful critique of all previous morality. Hence the defensibility of the Nietzschean position turns in the end on the answer to the question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle? For if Aristotle's position in ethics and politics--or something very like it--could be sustained, the whole Nietzschean enterprise would be pointless. This is because the power of Nietzsche's position depends upon the truth of one central thesis: that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail and that therefore belief in the tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set of rationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will. (p. 117) If a premodern view of morals and politics is to be vindicated against modernity, it will be in something like Aristotelian terms or not at all. (p. 118) There you go. What about all the killing over whose system of the good would be enforced? What about people outside the going system and therefore unavailable for honor, or people who don't care for their position in the system? MacIntyre does some initial talking about philosophers whose claims have been refuted but who don't accept that they've been refuted. Might not his proposed system suffer from the charge that it embodies his preferences? He is not writing for the masses here. He uses terms he doesn't translate and concepts he doesn't deign to explain. There is a degree of esotericism in the formal sense. We could call this modernity he condemns "Protestantdom;" I flashed on that just before the last chapter I've read. But at least he carries his arguments to their logical conclusions and comes out and says what they are. No hypocritical half-assedness here! This book was referenced in both Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? and The Sacredness of Human Life: Why an Ancient Biblical Vision Is Key to the World's Future, although for two different aspects. I got curious. At any rate, I want to review what I've read so far--also because I'm studying it alone, have had to pause to accommodate other reading commitments, and have reached something of a turning point in the book. Oh, yeah--the title. My husband is taking Greek, and he says Aristotle's Metaphysics didn't originally mean transcendent. It just meant it was written After Physics. And Alasdair MacIntyre is an Aristotelian, among other things. Disclaimer: the unread portion could make me change any overarching conclusions. The Rest of the Book (from February, 2017) Chapter 10, "The Virtues in Heroic Societies:" This is my favorite chapter in the whole book. MacIntyre says heroic societies (read Homeric society, his main case) may or may not be historical, but for his purposes it doesn't matter. Traditional societies treat heroic societies as what came before. Here, and in the next chapters, he broadened my understanding of a number of the Greek virtue words. I was expecting he'd treat bible stories as outgrowths of heroic societies, too, but the author exhibited hands-off of scripture. Chapters 11 and 12, on classical society, i.e., Athens, and then Aristotle. In Homeric society, there are only the kinship group and friends, and their roles. What you see is what you get. "Owe" = "ought." In classical society there is more complexity, as now there's the added ingredient of the polis. There still is no existence outside social role, but the catalogs of the virtues are different. And there's the "false turning" (to which MacIntyre alludes but never explains) that Socrates made. I think MacIntyre is referring to Socrates' making himself an arbiter of what to do over and above the good decreed by the city--a fatal early turn in a direction MacIntyre decries. Yet MacIntyre acknowledges that no society may ever have actually conformed to Aristotelian ideals. For MacIntyre, as I wrote in the first half of my review, liberal, modernist, individualist society, that is, post-Enlightenment society, is what's bad. Dedication to pluralism signals departure from the tradition of the virtues. By the end of the book, he repeats those three words or their stand-ins so often that reading them is like cuing the silent-movie villain-music that plays whenever the guy with black hat and twirling mustache appears. As with Marx, for MacIntyre there are no better or worse forms of modern society. It's all bad, lacking any foundation and mirroring defective philosophy, and with political conservatism being merely the conservation of a slightly earlier form of liberal individualism. Remember, from the first half of the book, the emphasis on emotivism and the insolubility of our social dilemmas. If this whole book seems easy to dismiss as so much BS, there are our current dire straits to remind you otherwise. By Chapter 13, "Medieval Aspects and Occasions," Christianity has made its entrance along with various new virtues. The known world has just emerged from more recent forms of heroic society (e.g., Arthurian), with thinkers and theologians trying to deal with their own inner paganism while creating institutions to bring forth civilization from chaos. What has yet to be invented in the twelfth century is an institutional order in which the demands of divine law can more easily be heard and lived out in a secular society outside the monasteries. In subsequent chapters we have MacIntyre forging his concept of a virtue out of the multiple and contradictory catalogs of the virtues across the ages. First, virtues are what enable one to seek the inner goods deriving from a dedication to practices in sort of an apprenticeship in which one acknowledges the need to learn and develop one's skills and capability--inner goods being human capital, so to speak, in contrast to outer goods such as wealth and fame. Virtues exist via traditions, virtues being the dispositions that sustain practices and quests for the good, and a tradition being a living argument about what a given community or enterprise ought to be. And the crux of the matter: We connect with our history and with the future through the stories we tell. We have been drafted into a certain role or roles that we must come to understand if we are to figure out why others respond to us as they do. And we have to know what stories we're in to know what's the right thing to do. The above entails a telos, that no-no of science and modernity. (I knew that so I've tried to cover it up when writing about it--but what else is it when one claims to have discovered "one's purpose" or to feel he or she is carrying out one's intended role?) MacIntyre's picture is the mirror image of the existentialism on which I cut my teeth, i.e., radical freedom and the artificiality of all social roles. There is the appearance of circularity at times, with the good defined in terms of the pursuit of the good. There is the fact MacIntyre sees all the good aspects and none of the ill of the tradition he supports, and the reverse for the one he abhors. There is his making of distinctions without differences between the path to which he commends us* and the one he considers a dead end. *That being that we should invest no more energy in liberal pluralistic modernity (cue that villain-music!) but should repair forthwith to some monastic stand-in for the duration. There is his comparison of noisy, messy present-day reality, not with the reality of other times but with the ideals of those times. There is the possibility that the foundational order for which he yearns comes not from right thinking but from power. And, there are conflicting story lines, but there is no sheer chance, or luck. Yet the thesis of this book cannot be summarily dismissed. Look at the fix we're in! Even so, it's liberal democracy for me. With all its warts.