MacIntyre's argument is that our ethics have become, in his words, "incoherent" because we have tried to escape teleology. There is certainly no conflict with Heidegger's framework in that.Robert Tulip wrote: I wrote a paper on MacIntyre’s After Virtue in my undergraduate degree back in about 1983, but found it a totally confusing book. I found Heidegger’s axiology more congenial, interpreting his main idea that care is the meaning of being as a fundamental ethical axiom for a systematic existential philosophy. That generates the idea that our purpose is to care for each other.
I fear that the book can be quite confusing, because it is more of a critique than a construction. However, the reason it is confusing could be as simple as the breakdown in teleological language, in which "our purpose" is no longer a suitable topic for discussion by major philosophers such as Richard Rorty, for a variety of reasons intrinsic to modernity. We have, for example, the excellent ethical analysis of John Rawls still lacking a rich discussion of why we want to be ethical people. Why is that a vital part of living excellent lives? We are better at adjudicating than at persuading, let alone leading, because our material capabilities have so far outstripped our sense of who we are as social beings. It almost seems that analytical discussion is the only kind that highly educated people can engage in without throwing up our hands in despair.
The good news is that a humbler discourse about living well has emerged from the margins, out of the void into which so many lives have fallen. Instead of a systematic existential theology, which still rings of adjudication to me, we have a vocabulary of resilience, of relation, of accountability, of loneliness and emptiness and companionship and joy. And lo and behold, from the marginalized has come the essential truth that ordinary people are not looking to leaders for final answers as to how life is to be lived, but rather are seeking examples to show that living well is possible in a life embedded in mutual obligation and caring.Robert Tulip wrote:Your points from MacIntyre raise the question of which priorities are our purpose for religion. Is it to give glory to God? Is it to maximise human flourishing? Is it to promote the values of faith, hope and love? My view is that in some sense it is all of these, but the challenge of integrating faith and reason is to put these goals into a systematic existential theology that entirely coheres with scientific knowledge.
When you know people who really care about giving glory to God, not in a shallow, cheerleading sense but in their considered inner core, who, day by day and year by year seek to reassure and accompany and appreciate other people, then you see that it is possible and worth the effort. It does not require any heroic or superhuman effort but just a continual willingness to turn one's face to the Good.
Well, obviously I do not disagree, but I am shifting my thinking to a dissatisfaction with "worldview", in which the values are not the problem but rather the path envisioned for realizing our common values. The means, in other words, not the ends. To be as blunt as possible, I think the traditionalists still believe in imposed values. They are not satisfied with the path of persuasion, viewing it as an effete and empty pipe dream that is not capable of dealing with the turmoil of the world's fight for resources and status. They have not seen, as many of us have, the system of persuasion working quite effectively and satisfactorily. Mesmerized by the periodic eruption of conflict, they do not realize how much of the perpetuation of morality has always depended on merciful deeds and words, on caring and connection and cultivation. The research demonstrates it, but of course that is just science.Robert Tulip wrote:Choice of values also happens through unconsidered inheritance of past values. Prevailing answers have a social inertia, which can be questioned in a systematic ontology. That problem of debate over values is a big part of the motivation for ex-Christians, to see how the social inertia of Christian values is often highly irrational and damaging.
More than that, to be human is to be internally relational. Trinitarian theology drinks deeply from the waters of id, ego and superego, and sees caring as the element that enables these three internal (but also social) processes to dialogue rather than just struggling amongst themselves.Robert Tulip wrote: To say care is the meaning of being means that human identity is intrinsically relational, standing in conscious relation to our familiar world and in unconscious relation to the entire fate of the earth. Our unconscious relationships are often where we participate in eternity.
Well said. The American Transcendentalists talked sometimes about an Oversoul. Same idea. With our recent intimate experience with tribalism, we may long for a cool, individualized rationalism to slay the dragon, but there are reasons to think that is a futile quest. In teaching we talk about cognitive regulation, by which a person learns to recognize consequences for foolish behavior and to reason their way to moderation of their own emotional excesses. However, the opioid crisis and other revelations are showing us that this is a path that works best with the economic security of the college educated, while the path out of emotional chaos really depends more on a social system capable of offering material security and relational accompaniment to most of society.Robert Tulip wrote:It is true that soul is generally seen as individual, and yet soul is also imagined at the level of the world – Yeats speaks of the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet. You are right that our personal soul is intrinsically social, in the sense that no man is an island, so there is something highly damaging and perverse in imagining the soul as separate from our connectedness.