II - Alasdair MacIntyre

Summary

The expression “pragmatic liberalism” is likely to irritate particularly those who sympathize with the views of Alasdair MacIntyre. Correspondingly, those who defend positions of the sort I have put forward in Part I cannot ignore the shadow MacIntyre's critique of liberalism casts across their path. Like the pragmatic liberal, MacIntyre is particularly concerned with modern philosophy as an effort to replace the Aristotelian worldview, which had been successfully challenged by the new science of Galileo and Newton. Aristotle had seen the world as a system of natures, acting for ends defined by their essences. The new science showed that this teleological view was of no use for the prediction and control of natural phenomena and replaced it with a mechanistic picture of the world that allowed no role for natures or the goals they defined. MacIntyre has little to say about the significance of this development in its original domain of natural science. But he is fully convinced that extending the view to the moral domain was a terrible mistake. His Geistesgeschichte of modern philosophy is an account of the failure of efforts to develop an ethical view of human beings without a concept of human nature. This challeges the heart of the pragmatic liberal project.

The difference between MacIntyre and the pragmatic liberal can also be formulated in terms of the “Enlightenment project” of developing a secular liberal view of morality. They both agree that this project failed as an effort to provide philosophical foundations for liberalism.