MacIntrye, Hauerwas, & Our Post-Virtue World

Alasdair MacIntyre's 1980 book 'After Virtue,' and Stanley Hauerwas' 1989 book 'Resident Aliens' have some common themes: virtue cannot be achieved outside of membership in a specific culture or community and the Enlightenment's liberal modern experiment has failed to provide a convincing moral ethic or concept of virtue. MacIntyre is often regarded as the most eminent living ethical philosopher, and Hauerwas is generally considered the most eminent living theologian of our time. 

Macintyre's main argument in 'After Virtue' is that contemporary society is incapable of forming any objective concept of morality. The Enlightenment project failed to produce a standard of morality grounded in the liberal subject of the individual person. The result is that we now live in a moral dark age in which people express their concepts of morality as if they believed them to be objective despite having no real grounding for them:

"We possess indeed simulacra of morality; we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have - very largely, if not entirely - lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality…. the language and the appearances of morality persist even though the integral substance of morality has to a large degree been fragmented and then in part destroyed."

What we have now are people saying things like "this is good" or "that's evil" without any substantial set of premises for why something is "good" or "evil." We have fragments of the idea of good and evil without any of the unifying logic that once made the words "good" and "evil" meaningful words. Most twenty-first century Christians will recognize in McIntyre's claim something close to what Christians have long asked about atheism: How can atheism explain why murder is wrong if God does not exist and nature is advanced by the survival of the fittest? However, when McIntyre wrote 'After Virtue,' he wasn't approaching these questions from a Christian perspective, he was approaching them as an Aristotelian.

In classical virtue ethics, best expressed in Aristotle's 'Nicomachian Ethics', virtues are only possible as things which arise out of one's relationship to a community of people. For example, you cannot know how to be generous unless you're able to differentiate generosity from wastefulness as practiced in a real community. A single individual cannot be generous or wasteful when he encounters a beggar unless he's already approaching the situation with certain understandings about how one should give to a beggar, how much is appropriate in relation to what one possesses, and how much one needs to fulfill other obligations. The boundaries between generosity and waste are also limited by what a certain amount of money amounts to in each society. $1 in 2023 America is not the same as $1 in 1900 Afghanistan. Virtue can only be defined and understood when it's part of a social context. 

One might be tempted to think that some virtues don't rely on society to be defined, but what example of this can be given? We can't really imagine courage, chastity, or honesty in ways that are unrelated to other people. If we try to think of goals that have nothing to do with other people, we might think of the aim of living to the age of 100, but we could not speak of "courage" as being a virtue if it simply meant the animal desire to preserve one's life. Chastity is impossible to imagine without other people, real or imagined, with whom to have sex. It's hard to imagine honesty without language, which derives from a social learning process. 

The social foundation of virtue is only possible because societies have communal purposes by which they define virtues. If you live in a Marxist communist society, for example, then personal virtue is defined by your relationship to the final endpoint of society: the perfectly equal worker's utopia. Courage means doing what's necessary for that utopian endpoint to be realized. If you live in a Christian society, then virtue means doing what God said to do for the community to embody the kingdom of Heaven. 

The ethical problem of modernity is that liberal democracies are dedicated to the concept of individualistic pluralism. Theoretically, a liberal democracy should be able to contain as many purposes and worldviews as there are individual people who live in that society. In practice, however, society would collapse long before that level of diversity came about. Why would it collapse? Because so many divergent purposes and worldviews would create just as many competing concepts of virtue which would then render the function of any society impossible. Imagine two people trying to communicate while one of them is dedicated to an ethic of absolute honesty and the other is dedicated to an ethic of absolute dishonesty? Obviously, nothing could be accomplished, and violence might ensue. 

McIntyre's point is that liberal society's obsession with the rights of an individual to embrace their own worldview and subsequent ethics is both impossible and destructive. It's impossible because nobody can exercise virtue as an individual alienated from society, and it's destructive because it undermines the intelligibility of any language about what is good and evil. An individual, in trying to respect another individual's right to choose their own ethic, should not assume that other people agree with their ethic; but in this refusal to assume, they also forfeit the possibility of openly speaking about good or evil. How can we speak publicly of virtue when it's a purely individual value decision? Thus, we live in an era "after virtue" in which the concept of virtue has been rendered illogical without social agreement on endpoints towards which ethics can be oriented. 

How can we escape from this ethical dark age? How can we bring intelligibility back to our morality? McIntyre suggests that we need to plunge ourselves into a community, and he ends his book prophetically hoping for the coming of a new St Benedict who can establish institutional forms within which virtue can be revived.

Nine years after MacIntyre's book, Hauerwas and William Willimon wrote 'Resident Aliens' in part to describe ways in which the Church can embody a community of virtue based on its own story. Like all communities, the Church is sustained across generations by people's investment in an inherited story. In the case of the Church, the story is about how God has already rescued the world and brought about the possibility of a better kind of life. We live out the ethics of the Church as realized eschatology. Christians are already living in the next age, we're a colony of heaven on earth living as citizens of God's perfect kingdom. 

If my reading is correct, Hauerwas doesn't want the Church to focus on improving the world so much as he wants the Church to begin replacing the world. Hauerwas would never use the following example, but I think it helps explain his point: Christians are supposed to be like the settlers who began colonizing North America in preparation for the coming of the United States. The settlers were not so much trying to improve the Amerindian tribes who lived around them, they were displacing the tribal civilization in preparation for something entirely new. The Amerindians could either choose to join the settlers' project or else watch themselves fade into irrelevance. In the same way, the Church is living towards the coming kingdom, and this present worldly civilization is dying (Hauerwas specifically refers to secular nation-states as "tribal"). The goal of the Church is to live according to our superior culture and watch our seed-colony displace the fallen world. 

I think these two books are helpfully paired because both emerged from the 1980s, deal with the ethical problems of liberal modernity, and point towards communal solutions that the Church might be able to implement.