Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (review)

47~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:3 JULY 199o Alasdair MacIntyre. WhoseJustice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Pp. xi + 41o. $~2.95. Although it is a sequel to After Virtue, WhoseJustice? Which Rationality? can be read and evaluated without any knowledge of After Virtue (x). Nonetheless, it is helpful to regard WhoseJustice? Which Rationality? in light of the two conclusions of After Virtue: first, that there is no coherent, rationally defensible statement of liberal individualism, and second , that the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that is meaningful for us today (ix). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? moves toward a complete explication of these conclusions. Its own conclusion is that now, on the basis of its arguments, a debate between liberalism and its rival traditions can begin. Until now there has been no debate because of liberalism's pretensions to a kind of rationality that is independent of tradition. In his most brilliant chapter, MacIntyre attacks the liberal position by showing that it does indeed have its own conception of the good and that its toleration of rival conceptions of the good is severely limited (336). He claims that "contemporary analytic philosophers.., often take themselves to be representing the timeless form of practical reasoning as such, when they are in fact representing the form of practical reasoning specific to their own liberal individualist culture" (34o). Liberalism has failed to provide rationally neutral and morally presuppositionless grounds for making moral judgments. But the fact that there seem to be no neutral tradition-independent grounds for making moral judgments does not, in MacIntyre's view, force one into either moral relativism or perspectivism. In his most important chapter, "The Rationality of Traditions ," MacIntyre presents a theory of rationality which is arrived at by considering the three traditions whose histories he writes here. The first tradition has its origin in the conflicts of the ancient polis. These conflicts can be traced in part to the place of Homer in the life and culture of Athens. Radical disagreements arise over whether "the goods of effectiveness" or "the goods of excellence " should define the goals of the polis (42). The rhetoric of Pericles, the historical account of Thucydides, and the teachings of the Sophists all support the primacy of the goods of effectiveness in the life of the city. Plato's Republic can be understood as the "first systematic theoretical vindication of the goods of excellence over the goods of effectiveness" (74)- Aristotle's Ethics and Politics are sequels to the necessarily incomplete Republic. For Aristotle, membership in a polls is essential for the capacity to reason practically: "There is no practical rationality.., without the virtues of character " (136) . And the fullness of the moral virtues is, in turn, impossible without practical rationality (97)" The polls exists primarily for the sake of the goods of excellence. This tradition, which reaches its ancient high point in Aristotle, proceeds to its culmination in Aquinas who develops the Aristotelian account of justice and practical rationality in a way "which escapes the limitations of the polis" 0o). Aquinas is also the culmination of the second tradition, the tradition that begins with Augustine and is developed by Gregory VII. For Augustine, the law of the c/v/tas Dei is a law which can BOOK REVIEWS 47 ~ be known by all men and which binds all men (163). The great achievement of Aquinas is that he "conceived it possible to bring together Aristotelian philosophy and Augustinian theology within a single scheme of thought" (163). The third tradition reaches its culmination in seventeenth-century Scotland. It too has its sources in Aristotle and Augustine and it finds one of its expressions in Hutcheson, who sees "perfect agreement between scripture, rightly understood, and the conclusions of reason concerning the system of nature, rightly understood" (26 l). Hutcheson's system is an amalgam that proved to be inherently unstable. This third tradition is subverted by Hume, who believed himself to be giving an account of universal human nature and society when in fact he was merely providing a justification for the way of life of the eighteenth-century English land-owning class. MacIntyre does...