Matthew Freytag

Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and others writing in a similar vein about ethics agree with Aristotle that good activity is good because of the relation it bears to a human life well-lived. This view leads them to reflect both on questions concerning the nature of value and on questions concerning the structure of personhood. They purport to reject Aristotle's static view of human nature; and they replace it, in otherwise roughly Aristotelian schemata, with their own notion of a value-creating and identity-constituting context--they allude variously to practices, projects, narrative unities, and structures of character. The formal nature of this context remains unclear, however, in their writings, and its role in deliberation problematic. I argue that their rejection of Aristotle's view is based on a misunderstanding of his biological metaphysics; the introduction of the core notion of organic unity, already implicit in Aristotle's ethics and more prominent in his metaphysical and biological works, can help Williams, MacIntyre, et al. resolve difficulties each of their theories faces as it stands.

Conservative communitarian Alasdair MacIntyre makes a fundamental claim about the formal conditions for rationality, personhood, and intelligible valuation, and a detachable, less fundamental empirical claim that these formal conditions can be met only in a hierarchically organized social tradition. Having suggested a formal account of narrative tradition which relies on the schematic notion of systematic complexity, MacIntyre retreats to an account in terms of canon and authority. He thus obscures the structures that underlie his own metaphysics of morals, the structures of the practices, narrative unities, and traditions which on his account are both identity-constituting and value-creating. Once these structures are discerned, the possibility of good lives will no longer seem linked to preservation of the forms of the existing polis.