Alasdair MacIntyre

(1929 - 2025)

The political philosophy of recent American liberalism has been designed to answer three questions: how to justify egalitarian principles of distributive justice that should be compelling to any rational individual; how to defend a view of government according to which it is required to be neutral between rival conceptions of the human good, while guaranteeing the liberties of the adherents of each to pursue the achievement of their good, as they understand it; and how to elaborate an idea of public reason that restricts the kinds of argument that are permissible within the political sphere to those that appeal to principles shared by all reasonable citizens, so excluding appeal to comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines of the human good. John Rawls has of course made the single most important contribution to answering these questions and it is therefore unsurprising that Michael J. White’s book, which aims to undermine each of these projects, is a notable addition to the body of philosophical writing devoted to Rawls’ work. Yet it is a good deal more than this.

This paper compares the central theses of Edmund M. Pincoffs’s Quandaries and Virtues with those of F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies. Both Pincoffs and Bradley understand virtues and duties as functional in respect of the common good of the social order. Both reject the individualism of Kantian and utilitarian theories. Both believe that ordinary moral agents do not appeal to and do not need to appeal to the kinds of justification for action defended by such theories. It is argued that the importance of these resemblances is partly disguised by the differences between Pincoffs’s and Bradley’s view. Pincoffs and Bradley are among those who, in the debates of modern moral philosophy, have recurrently defended an antitheoretical account against a variety of theorists. It is claimed that this debate is and must be inconclusive.

A second way of obscuring the true relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy is to convert all philosophers into contemporaries who are offering competing solutions to perennial problems, either in the characteristically British way of treating the great philosophers of the past as though they were candidates for fellowships at Oxford colleges whose confusions were being laid bare at an interview; or in the characteristically French way of seeing existentialism in the most improbable places, such as the writings of Aquinas or Descartes, and thinking that in so seeing it one is paying a compliment.