I, I referred to the title, in the title of this lecture I, the word Communitarianism. Wha, why Communitarianism? Why do you think, what does that conjure up for you, Communitarianism? >> It is established at a group level by the group level corporation. >> Yeah. It's basically that, it, it's just a summary term for what we've been saying all along so far today, that the group comes before the individual. So if you, if you think about, the, the Enlightenment, go back to Descartes, we talked long ago about Descartes's Cogito, I think, therefore I am. It's all about me, me, me. I think, therefore I am right, that the individual was the center of everything in the Enlightenment story. But look at this note, this Ubuntu notion here. He says, I am because we are, right? So, so, here you have a view in which the individual is subordinated to the group. So this traditional Ubuntu notion that you only can discover your identity by reference to the group into which you were born and see how that group perceives your identity. That's, that's the sense in which the group comes before the individual, the community comes before the individual. And even defines the individual. So it's a very stark difference, right? MacIntyre is really much closer to the Ubuntu view of things than to the, than to the enlightenment view of things and I mean he doesn't talk about Ubuntu but I think he were here he would say, well it's a great, it's a great. Blessing that Ubuntu wasn't corrupted by the Enlightenment project [LAUGH] because the Enlightenment project had to fail. Now I should say that MacIntyre is not an outlier, he's not somebody who is just some crank out there. You know, saying these things that he's a representative figure of a much bigger communitarian reaction to the Enlightenment project. So I'll just mention a few others in case you, you're interested. Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard has been very famous for communitarian views. Charles Taylor, a Canadian political philosopher as well, wrote a very rich book called Sources of the Self which is a much more Ubuntu-like. It's, it's, it's you know, we can even identify our selves, find our identities without grasping the communities that, from which we come. Richard Rorty wrote a very powerful book called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature about how the Enlightenment project in metaphysics had to fail. We're focusing on the Enlightenment project in Political theory. Michael Walzer another communitarian thinker wrote a book called Spheres of Justice. Which is in many ways, an interesting companion to McIntyre's book. And if we had more time I would urge you to read some of these works. But that, if, so to a certain extent we are, we're taking a representative figure. And what differentiates McIntyre from all of these is his particular leaning on Aristotle, and but in many of his other preoccupations, he's similar. So let's get back to MacIntyre and talk about why he thought the Enlightenment Project had to fail. The project for him is justifying morality. So Justifying morality, what he means to say, if, if you take the sorts of things we tend to think are morally right like, you know, treat people, things like that, that concord would have said are universalizable. Don't use people as means to your own ends. The golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated. Don't lie, cheat, and steal. Don't exploit people, these, these sorts of moral injunctions that we think of when, when we talk about morality. The Enlightenment project was about trying to justify them, to give cast iron justifications for them that couldn't be doubted. Remember the appeal to certainty and all that. And it was about deriving them from a scientific account of the human condition, right? That science is going to produce a morality that justifies individual rights. That's the Enlightenment project we talked about over and over again. So you know, think about Rousseau's famous line at the beginning of the social contract where he says he is going to come up with a theory of politics taking man as they are and laws as they might be. Taking men as they are. This would be a sort of paradigm case of a programmatic statement of the Enlightenment. You do the science right of men as they are, it's ironic because Rousseau had some misgivings about the Enlightenment project. But anyway in, in this phrase he certainly captures the aspiration. So you get the science of what human beings are like. And then you, you, come up with moral principles. So think about Bentham, you know, he starts at the beginning of the principles of morals and legislations]. He says pleasure seeking and pain avoidance guides human behavior, so let's come up with principles based on that, right? And of course, we saw utilitarianism can justify, if you take that seriously, many things that we're deeply uncomfortable with; from not feeding, disabled people to, you know, in the limiting case, genocide, right? Or think about other Enlightenment thinkers that we've discussed, whether it's Nozick or anybody else. The same problem tends to arise that if you, if you take human behavior as we find it it's, if you try to turn that into a principle. Because Enlightenment's thinking, say well, we want to bracket the goals. We, we don't agree about them, so we're just going to have instrumental reason. McIntyre wants to say, what you get out of the end, the other end of it is always going to be unsatisfying and it's going to be unsatisfying for a very good reason. And the reason is that we have inherited the precepts of ethics from this older tradition. This Aristotelian tradition. The Golden Rule, treat people well, be honorable, don't be cowardly. We've inherited those things from this older tradition, but in taking on the Enlightenment project, we've abandoned the intellectual framework within which it made sense. So he says Aristotle had a kind of Teleological Scheme which he sums up nicely here where he says Aristotle has a threefold scheme in which human nature as it happens to be. Human nature in its untutored state, human beings as we find them in the world is initially discrepant and discordant with the precepts of ethic and needs to be transformed by the instruction of practical reason and ex, and experience into human nature as it could be if it realized its telos. We are malleable creatures, we are plastic creatures, we are shaped. And ethics is about how to shape us. It's not derived from how we start out, right? Each of the three elements in the scheme, the conception of untutored human nature, the conception of the precepts of irrational ethics and the conception of human nature as it could be if it realized its telos. Requires reference to the other two if its status and function are to be intelligible, right? So the precepts of ethics are about how to create people who can realize the, the potential for virtue. So of course you're not going to be able to derive it from statements about how people start out, because they by definition, lack the virtues, right? So ethics is a kind of educative, it's how to get you from A to B, and you're never going to just derive it from A, right? So I, I think another way to think about this is to say that, that he. Or, or to just, to notice that if you look at a thinker like Aristotle or Plato for that matter or many, many Enlightenment thinkers, they write books about ethics and politics but their books are filled with accounts of child rearing, of education, of political education. That's a huge part of Plato's Republic, of Aristotle's ethics, a discussion of these topics. Think about Rawls, or Nozick, or Bentham, what do they, any of them have to say about education? Nothing. >> Nothing. >> Nothing. Because they're taking human beings as they are. We're just assuming we're utility maximizers whatever it is they assumed. Beginning and end of story about human psychology, right? So, Aristotle has what we might call a teleological picture of human psychology. We are purpose of creatures. We have, we have, when we're born, potential that's unrealized, right? So, that's a, what I would call an, a, a view of the structure of human psychology. And it's probably worth pausing for a minute here. To just note since we've used this word teleological so many times in the course that actually it has three different meanings in this course and we, they're often closely related. And embraced by the same thinkers but they're very different, right? So oneis the idea, teleological view of history, the idea that history has a direction and an end point. Hegel had a version of this view, Marx did, Kant did. That history is going somewhere to some end point, to some end of history, right? That's the teleological view of history. Then there's a teleological views of ethics, Utilitarianism is one. The good is to maximize the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and then we, we want to rearrange society to achieve that result. That's a teleological view of ethics. Well the Communitarians don't like it. I think Michael Sandel famously said, Utilitarianism gave the good a bad name. So they don't like that particular view but they like other views. And the view we're talking about now, Aristotelianism, is an, is a teleological view in that sense. You pause at the virtues and then you arrange human organization in order to achieve them. But under girding that is what I'm talking about now is that. MacIntyre also has a teleological view of the structure of human psychology that we are, we are these people who are sort of like raw clay when we are born. Before it's been fired, you know, it can be shaped, it can be malleable. And we, we do well when it's shaped in ways that best realize our potential which include getting recognition from others within practices and realizing the virtues that it defined within those practices. So with this other regarding people who can only achieve our potential within these kinds of practices. So Macintosh not a proponent of the first view of teleological data, he doesn't think history is going anywhere in particular. But he embraces the teleological ethics and the teleological psychology, and so he. Now having done all of that, he wants to convince you that, that the Enlightenment project was completely hopeless. Because it was trying to derive the precepts of ethics from statements about human nature as it is discovered by science. So he says, since the moral injunctions were originally at home in a scheme in which their purpose was to correct, improve and educate human nature, they're clearly not going to be such as could be deduced from true statements about human nature. They were there to change human nature, right? Or justified in some other way by appealing to its characteristics. The injunctions of morality thus understood, are likely to be ones that human nature, thus understood, has strong tendencies to disobey, right? So things we're not going to be inclined to do, contra benta, right? Hence the 18th century moral philosophists engaged what was, in what was inevitably an unsuccessful project. For they did, indeed, attempt to find a rational basis for their moral beliefs in a particular understanding of human nature, while inheriting a set of moral injunctions on one hand and a conception of human nature of the other which had been expressly designed to be discrepant with one another. Discrepant with one another. They inherited incoherent fragments of a once coherent scheme of thought and action and, since they did not recognize their own peculiar historical and cultural situation, they could not recognize the impossible and quixotic character of their own self-appointed task. So that is his story, it's that the Enlightenment was just a quick quest from the beginning because it was trying to derive moral injunctions that we find satisfying from a scientific cocoon of the condition and it can't be done and that's why.
