After The Inauguration with After Virtue

MacIntyre Goes to Washington

Four observations on the beginning of the second Trump term, occasioned by last night’s After Virtue reading group.

My policy is almost always to treat this newsletter as if there is no such thing as the news. It’s a balancing act, as ethics is not just moral theory, but prudential moral action, and to act, you have to pay attention. So, a better way to characterize what I do here is to not center the news.

With that caveat, four quick observations from the start of the Trump term, with assistance from our ongoing reading group of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (AV). I’ll focus on how AV helps us to see the broader stakes of how moral discourse has degraded. For why After Virtue is essential reading, both to understand the moral life, and to diagnose why our current world is so morally discombobulated, this and this aren’t terrible places to begin¹.

1. Government By Proclamation. The basic thesis of AV is that we live in a world of moral fragments, or at the minimum, competing narratives about what it means to be moral. We don’t mean the same thing when people talk about “truth” or “justice” or “goodness”. For the most part, MacIntyre thinks that a kind of theory called emotivism has won out, in which all moral judgments are similar to taste. When I say, “this is good”, that’s akin to saying “I like it”, not that goodness has a relation to objective realities binding on all persons, or indicative of what kind of trajectories are appropriate for humans to have. The payoff here is that morals become things which can’t be talked about, because they’re rooted and governed by individual intuitions of taste.

When we don’t have a common grammar, he writes, then all we have is force², conforming another person to our intuitive vision that can’t be communicated. It’s a bit of an overstatement, but when you consider the way in which Congress has been deadlocked in the 21st century, and the way that the last two presidents have thus started their terms with a flurry of hundreds of executive orders which bypass the ordinary form of deliberation, you see that MacIntyre’s on to something. Trump is symptomatic of something that the Democrats did a bit less ominously, but nonetheless par for the course.

Last night’s discussion group.

2. Morality as Fiat. In the situation that MacIntyre describes, where force is the way that intuitions take place in public³, we should not be surprised that moral deliberations are replaced by moral fiat. Consider the executive orders over gender and DEI: these are exactly the kinds of questions that should be done with discourse, the giving and taking of reasons, and critical inquiry. But to issue an executive order over gender policy and human diversity is to, once again, replace the ordinary process of deliberation—made possible by a common grammar—with intuitions writ large through the mechanism of government.

There is a place for command in the moral life to be sure. But it’s not all there is, and it’s a doorway to wisdom about the hows, wheres, and toward what ends of the command. Again, making this fiat move is not unique to Trump. My intent here is to say that MacIntyre helps us to see what these things mean and why they happen.

3. There is No Person, Only the Rule. Modern moral philosophy is, for MacIntyre, an eclipse of the acting person and an obsession with finding the single moral principle that explains everything. Whether that rule is one articulated by intuitionism and emotivism, or conversely, by objective bureaucratic calculations⁴, or by finding a transcendental rule like “Do that which you would wish all persons to do” or “Don’t treat people as means”: the story is the same. All of these attempts since the 1700s have been one version or another of binding people together under a single moral principle, because there’s no common culture and moral thought world that we all broadly cohere to⁵.

In this situation, where there is no common grammar, there is only the rule, not attention to what people are, and more importantly, what it means for people to grow into the fullness of the creatures they are meant to be. And so, the kinds of rules you get function as an either/or: an “open border⁶” or a fully closed border, fully citizen in territory or not at all. The immigration executive orders, which I’ll be paying attention to, are of this kind, in the sense that they are not about applications of law with a certain kind of direction in mind for human flourishing. They function purely as an off/on switch for categorization. They are a rule for actions, but not fit for people.

4. Moral Discourse Without Attention to Conditions. For MacIntyre, what is needed is not just a coherent grammar, but for this grammar to be nested within coherent communities of moral discourse. There’s a very real material dimension which makes possible moral discourse, or which enables moral deformation. Consider, for example, how schools should work: there is a common culture within the school which comes packaged together with certain codes of behavior, certain educational content, and certain outcomes. It all hangs together. Absent that, just read a book, and hope for the best, but that’s just leaning hard into the prior point: moral discourse as a rule to be learned, not a trajectory of life to be inhabited.

With this in view, it’s telling that the inauguration was populated by billionaires and governing authorities, persons capable of creating their own insulated worlds in which material conditions for moral actions are very malleable. Moral discourse has to attend to what makes possible moral flourishing: not just good ideas, but practices, habits, and the conditions of the world which undergird them.

In some ways, the temperature of the American moral project has changed, and changed dramatically overnight. But in some ways, what we’re seeing is more symptoms of the problems that MacIntyre diagnosed nearly fifty years ago.

1. If you’d like to join in the discussion, become a supporting subscriber, and join us next month for part two of our discussion!

2. The jury is out on the degree to which this is true, and whether it’s an overstatement, but just go with me here.

3. Exhibit A-ZZZ: every social media thread in which there is an immediate breakdown over terms, a lack of curiosity, discourse laden with tropes, and an immediate recourse to force or rhetorical shaming to overcome speakers.

4. For MacIntyre, bureaucracies are effectively just extensions of one person’s intuitions. A different way to read the presence of bureaucracy in the modern world is that they exist to put all the fragments into one coherent picture. What do all Americans have in common? We all get our licenses through the DMV, pay taxes to the IRS, etc—not that we all have a common love, common history, singular language, singular religion, etc.

5. A very good objection raised by Garth Greenwell last night was that this may never have been the case: there was a reason why Socrates was killed, after all, or that the Socratic dialogues are in search of common definitions.

6. There was never an open border in the way that critics define it. This is a much longer discussion.