Prof: Okay,
so let's pickup where we left off on Monday,
and we were starting to talk in more detail about MacIntyre's
argument. And one of the things I want to
zero in centrally on today is his account of human psychology,
or what used to be called human nature.
And that differs importantly
from every account of human psychology we've looked at thus
far for a number of reasons, and I'm going to spell them out
in a little bit more detail than we talked about on Monday.
Basically it is an Aristotelian
conception of the structure of human psychology,
and that has a number of features to it.
One is that I mentioned to you,
that we think of human beings as teleological creatures.
We are purposive creatures.
We always want to know what the
point of an activity is. Now if you go back to
Aristotle, Aristotle held the view that while we are purposive
creatures we only reason about the means to achieve our goals,
not the goals themselves. For Aristotle,
Aristotle's conception of virtue,
the virtues, the virtues were given for all
time, and he had his list of the
virtues which you can find if you go back and read the
Nicomachean Ethics.
They're things like,
courage, honesty, and various others,
perhaps debatable, perhaps not.
But in any event in Aristotle's
scheme of things, what we reason about is the
means to achieve the virtues, not the virtues themselves.
And I'm going to come back to
that because one of the respects in which MacIntyre differs from
Aristotle is that he wants to say the virtues--
he wants to at least go this far with the Enlightenment
thinkers, he wants to say that what
counts as a virtue is, to some extent, up for debate.
Just to what extent and how we
debate it are things that I'll come back to.
But the more important point is
that this as an account of the structure of human psychology we
need to know what the point is. We have goals.
We have purposes.
When those purposes are met
we're happy and fulfilled. When they're not met we're
frustrated and unsatisfied and discontented.
Just to give you a somewhat
different perspective on this approach to thinking about human
psychology I would say that the other influential Aristotelian
of our time, besides Alasdair MacIntyre,
is the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen who
develops the idea of human potentiality as the core notion.
That we're people who have
potential, and unless we realize our
potential we're going to be in some basic sense incomplete,
not fulfilled not happy human beings.
And so in Sen's account of
justice, which I wish we had time to
talk about in this course but we don't,
it's analogous that he's an economist,
not a philosopher, so he brings the considerations
of an economist to this question.
But it's the same question of
human beings who have a certain kind of potential that has to be
realized in order for them to be fulfilled in their teleological
capacity, that has to occur.
And so with MacIntyre,
too, it's this idea of the structure of human psychology
being goal-directed, and we'll get into the content
later. But so that's the first thing,
and then the second was that our behavior is,
in a very fundamental way, other-directed.
So just, again,
by way of comparison think back to the assumptions about
other-directedness in previous thinkers who we have considered
in this course. When we focused on the
utilitarian tradition we saw people as essentially
self-referential. Remember Ronald Reagan's famous
question in 1984, "Are you better off than
you were four years ago?" was a self-referential question.
"Are you better off than
you were four years ago?" All you have to look at is how
you were faring four years ago and how you're faring now,
and ask yourself that question. Other people don't enter into
it at all. Then when we considered Marxism
we came to think about other-directed conceptions of
human psychology in that Marx made our welfare critically
reliant on what others get. And so he said that your
perception of whether you're exploited turns upon what your
employer gets. Remember we talked about this
in some depth and concluded that Marx was half-right in that
people are often other-directed in that their sense of whether
what they get is legitimate is dependent on what others get,
but what he was wrong about was that people tend to compare
themselves to people who are similarly situated in the
socioeconomic order. So autoworkers compare
themselves maybe to steel workers, but not to auto
executives, and they don't make those kinds of global
comparisons. Nonetheless there is something
to this idea that people's conception of their welfare is
connected to what others get, and so relative inequalities
matter simply from the perspective of your feeling of
how well-off you are. And you can tell yourself any
number of stories to make this point.
The telling one,
quite often, I think is you give a child a
glass of orange juice that's half full and he's very happy,
and then you give his sister one that's completely full and
he immediately becomes unhappy because what matters to him is
the relative difference and not what he has in his glass.
So that's a notion of
other-directed. And of course you can take this
notion of other-directed further,
still, by linking your utility not just to what other people
get, but to actually what other
people experience. And this is the concept of
interdependent utility, as it gets referred to in the
literature. And the examples here are
things like a parent taking pleasure in their child's
success and feeling pain at their child's lack of success.
One of the famous one-liners
that parents will resonate with is, "You can only be as
happy as your least happy child."
So if your kids are unhappy
then you are miserable. That's the notion of
interdependent utility. Your happiness is conditioned
on what others get, but not just in making us a
relative judgment with the orange juice kind of a case,
but your happiness becomes dependent on what people
actually themselves experience, hence interdependent utility.
The example of the child's
happiness making the parent-- or the child's success making
the parent happy is an interdependent positive utility,
but of course there are interdependent negative
utilities as well as when a sadist's or a rapist's utility
goes up as a byproduct of their victim's utility going down.
Again, that interdependent
negative utility, and it's the mirror image of
interdependent positive utility. The Aristotelian conception
that MacIntyre embraces takes interdependent utilities a step
further even than that, though, in that it's not just
that your happiness, or satisfaction,
or fulfillment is conditioned upon the experience of others,
but it's the experience of others as it relates to you.
It's the others' experience of
you, if you like. And so a good example of this
actually comes from Hegel's Phenomenology where he
talks about this dialectic between the master and the slave
as being inherently unstable. But it's not just unstable
because the slave is going to find it unsatisfactory.
It's unstable because the
master will find it unsatisfactory.
Hegel says, in The
Phenomenology, that what we want most
fundamentally is recognition from others,
but it can't be recognition from others that we don't
respect. So recognition of a slave
saying, "Yes, master.
No, master,"
is not going to be satisfactory or fulfilling to you.
What you want is recognition
from an equal or perhaps a superior, but you want
recognition from somebody whose recognition can be valuable to
you. It's a source of feeling valued
by somebody you value. So it takes this idea,
as I said, of interdependent utility even a step further
because it now goes to the reciprocal relationship between
you and the other person, and that is the idea of
practices. It's this sort of neo-Hegelian
idea in this particular sense that informs MacIntyre's notion
of a practice. When I gave you the example on
Monday I said, "If I build sheds and
write books, it's not enough for me to have
the carpenters say, 'Oh, you wrote a good book,'
and the academics say, 'That's a nice shed.'
I want the carpenter to say
that's a good shed, and the people who know about
writing books to say, 'This is a good book.'"
That's the notion of he's a pitchers' pitcher.
You want recognition from
people for whom you have esteem at the relevant activity.
So this is a different,
again, view of the structure of human psychology.
All of these different theories
are predicated on some account of the structure of human
psychology. And indeed, I think that one
thing you should be seeing as we move through and examine these
different arguments is that every political theory has an
account of human psychology, and an account of how the world
operates causally. And you need to sometimes dig
to get them out, but one of the ways in which
you should evaluate them is you should ask yourself,
"What is the theory of human psychology driving this?
Does it make sense?
Is it true to my own experience
or not, and if not why not?"
That's one question,
and then the second is, "What are the assumptions
about how the world works causally?"
and I'll come back to those in
relation to MacIntyre again. But you could go through all
the thinkers we've considered and find assumptions and
arguments about those two things,
and they provide a very good comparative reference point for
thinking about how they stack up against one another as we've
just seen as went from the utilitarian,
to the Marxian, to the different variance of
other-referential assumptions about human psychology.
So this is the MacIntyre
approach that what we really want out of life is esteem from
people who we esteem, and that operates through these
practices as he describes them. And this is just a summary
statement of what I've already told you, where he says,
virtues as he describes them are embedded in practices.
"It belongs to the concept
of a practice as I have outlined it--
and as we're all familiar with it in our actual lives,
whether we are painters or physicists or quarterbacks or
indeed just lovers of good painting,
or first rate experiments or a well-thrown pass--
that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating
ourselves within the practice in our relationships to other
practitioners. We have to learn to recognize
what is due to whom; we have to be prepared to take
whatever self-endangering risks are demanded along the way;
and we have to listen carefully to what we are told about our
own inadequacies and to reply with the same carefulness for
the facts." So this is the notion that I
translated into the proposition that when you walk into your
first Yale College course, you don't look around and say
to the people next to you, "How should we run this
course? What should we agree too?"
On the contrary what you do is
say, "What is the practice? What are the norms?
What are the rules?
How do I do well here?
What's expected of me?
How will know if I'm doing
well?" It might occur to you much
later on to say, "That wasn't a very
well-run course. It could have been run better
if this, that and the other."
So you can criticize,
and I'll come back to that point later,
but you can only criticize on the basis of first having
internalized the norms governing the practice.
You don't criticize somebody's
pitching style in major league baseball until you've learned a
lot about pitching. Or maybe you do.
You sit there and throw your
beer can at the screen, "Err, he's terrible,"
but it's not the form of criticism he is going to care
about, and that's the point,
and it's not likely to be the criticism that makes any
difference. So rather than the voluntary
agent being at the center of things,
which is the workmanship story, this anti-Enlightenment story
subordinates the individual to the practice,
to the group, to the inherited system of
norms and values. And if you want a contemporary
reference point just, again, to sharpen the
comparison here, compare the Cartesian idea
which puts the willing agent at the center of the universe with
the Ubuntu, which is a kind of African
religion which does the contrarian thing.
Instead of, "I think
therefore I am," it's "I am because we are,
and since we are, therefore I am."
So it's this idea of
subordinating yourself to an inherited system of norms and
practices in which you find yourself,
not which you created or hypothetically might have
created, but rather in which you find
yourself. So this is a fundamental
difference. It doesn't get more fundamental
than this, I think, because as you've seen
in every variant of Enlightenment thinking,
it's the willing creative agent that is at the ultimate bottom
of the heap, and here it's not.
It's the subordinated
individual, and the community, or the practice,
or the tradition to which the person is subordinated that is
at the very bottom of the heap. So this is really a fundamental
difference. So, features of Aristotelian,
or we might call it neo-Aristotelian psychology;
one is we're teleological in the sense of being purposive.
We have potential to realize
and realizing that potential is essential to our happiness.
It's not just getting more of
what gives you utility. There's some developmental
dimension to this. Second, the individual is
subordinated to a practice, and that translates into this
idea of the community becoming before the individual in
politics. But third, and in some ways for
MacIntyre's story most important of all, is that on the
Aristotelian scheme human nature is malleable.
It's plastic.
It can be shaped in different
ways. And what is so deeply misguided
about the Enlightenment project from MacIntyre's point of view
is that it does not take account of this fact.
It does not take account of the
fact that human beings are malleable creatures.
Human psychology is shaped by
circumstances. And so when Rousseau says at
the start of The Social Contract,
"I'm going to reason about politics taking men as they are
and laws as they might be," that underscores the fact that
Rousseau is missing the developmental features of human
psychology and reasoning about politics.
And it's in missing that that
the Enlightenment project went off the rails.
So let's talk about Aristotle's
scheme. Let me just read this to you
and then I will explain it if you haven't understood it.
He says in his description,
"We thus have a threefold scheme in which human-nature-as-
it-happens-to-be (human nature in its untutored [or raw]
state) is initially discrepant and discordant with the precepts
of ethics and needs to be transformed by the instruction
of practical reason and experience into human-nature-as-
it-could-be-if-i t-realized-its-telos.
Each of the three elements of
the scheme-- the conception of untutored
human nature, the conception of the precepts
of rational ethics, and the conception of
human-nature-as- it-could-be-if-i
t-realized-its-telos-- requires reference to the other
two if its status and function are to be intelligible."
So his point here is,
if you go back and read Aristotle, he had a view of raw,
or untutored, or brute human nature,
how we are when we are born. Then he had an account of human
beings as they could be if they realized their telos,
their purposes, and then he had an account of
the rules that get you from the one to the other.
The rules, the norms that get
you from the one to the other, and those are the rules of
ethics. So what are the rules of ethics?
The rules of ethics are those
things that get you from untutored or raw human nature to
the kinds of beings who realize their telos or purposes.
And that's why,
if you look at ancient philosophers like Aristotle or
Plato, the two central features of
their political theories that are completely absent when you
read, say John Rawls,
are a theory of family life and a theory of education.
It would have been bizarre
beyond imagining for Aristotle or Plato to think you could have
a theory of politics that didn't put a huge amount of attention
to those two things. Think of how many people in
this room have read Plato's Republic,
at least a good number of you. That's a book about politics.
Think how much of that is about
how to rear children and the system of education that has to
prevail, an enormous amount of it,
probably half the book. There's nothing of that in
Rawls's Theory of Justice, or Mill's account
in On Liberty. So it's a big difference,
and the reason is--and the same is true of Aristotle's ethics
and his other writings about politics.
Lots of attention to education,
to the family, to these things that involve
shaping this malleable plastic human nature so that we have a
good outcome rather than a bad outcome.
And so what bugs MacIntyre is,
he's saying, "We want to derive the
rules of ethics from human nature as it is,
as we find it.
But that's never going to work
because the rules of ethics are designed to improve behavior,
not to simply aggregate behavior.
And so anything we design
that's just derived from people as they happen to be is going to
seem unsatisfying to us, unsatisfactory to us.
So to go back to the examples,
we discussed affirmative action,
the ones he mentions at the beginning of the book,
abortion, affirmative action and so on.
Yes, we're going to see people
have different values and therefore different views about
those questions, but they're not going to
ultimately be satisfied with just recognizing their
differences, because they have inherited a
whole language of talking about ethics that presumes these
things can be resolved. There is more to ethical
disagreement than just accepting the differences among us.
And that, at the end of the
day, is why the Enlightenment project was a fool's errand.
This is just MacIntyre's more
eloquent and lucid statement of what I've been saying to you for
the last five minutes, that I'm capable of.
He says, "Since the moral
injunctions were originally at home in a scheme in which their
purpose was to correct, improve and educate that human
nature, they are clearly not going to
be such as could be deduced from true statements about human
nature." Just think of Bentham.
He says, "We are driven by
pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding.
I'm going to derive a whole
system from that." MacIntyre is saying,
"That's crazy because these moral injunctions were
designed to be at odds with human nature."
"The injunctions of
morality, thus understood, are likely to be ones that
human nature...has strong tendencies to disobey.
Hence the eighteenth-century
moral philosophers engaged in what was an inevitably
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 the one hand and a conception of human nature on
the other, which had been expressly
designed to be discrepant with each other."
"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 self-appointed task."
Whether it's Bentham trying to
derive maxims of conduct from the postulative pleasure-seeking
and pain-avoidance, or Rousseau trying to come up
with a system of government taking men as they are and their
laws as they might be, or Kant trying to see what
principles human beings as they currently are would affirm from
every conceivable standpoint, it's never going to work.
The morality that comes out of
this kind of reasoning is going to seem, and actually will be,
unsatisfying to us. And so if you now go back and
look at some of the puzzles and conundrums we came up with when
we were considering those different theories,
MacIntyre would say, "Well, you shouldn't be
surprised. You shouldn't be surprised that
objective utilitarianism allows people to take advantage of one
another in appalling ways, and you shouldn't be surprised
that subject of utilitarianism allows people to ignore one
another in a morally appalling way.
Because what makes things seem
morally appalling to you, treat people with dignity,
don't lie, cheat and steal,
these are maxims that we know people have a tendency to
disobey, and so that's the point of them.
They're to make us behave
better, and you're not going to be able to derive them in this
sense from a completely empirically accurate description
of human beings as we find them in the world."
So it's a kind of secular
doctrine of the fall. In Christian thinking we have
the fall, and then we have inadequate
human beings, and the possibility of
redemption through internalizing and accepting Christ as your
savior. This is a secular version of
the fall;
the secular version of fallen
man, untutored, ill-formed human nature,
and then we have what we could be if we are properly formed,
and then the system of the rules of ethics that are going
to get us from the one to the other.
And it's the virtues within
practices that achieving them, or achieving lives lived in
accordance with them that enable us to realize our purposes in a
good way, and it's the rules and norms
governing those practices that get us from A to B.
And the big problem with the
Enlightenment philosophically is what I've just said to you,
that they try and engage in this quixotic task,
but in politics itself it's the creation of an emotivist world.
It's a creation of a world that
separates means from ends; that values instrumental
reasoning, the business school world at large.
The world in which we make
ourselves agnostic about people's purposes and just try
to set ourselves up as a most efficient executor of any
purpose. "Have skills,
will travel." "I'm a consultant."
"For what?"
"Well, whatever you
need." That's what he finds
politically shocking and appalling, but he thinks it's
underpinned by this whole philosophical scheme.
Now, MacIntyre wrote this
during the--this book came out in 1984, which was at the height
of the Cold War. One of the points he was making
was everybody thinks that the great battle of our time is the
confrontation between capitalism and communism,
but for MacIntyre these are two sides of the same coin because
they are both ways in which this Enlightenment project has been
played out in politics and they're both,
for him, appalling. I started out saying to you
MacIntyre thought of himself as a person on the political left,
at least when he was young when he wrote Marxism and
Christianity and Against the Self-Images of the Age
and those early books, but it's in a different sense.
It's not like Robert Bork said
at one point in his confirmation hearings,
you all are really too young to remember this,
but they questioned him about his changing ideological beliefs
and at one point he said, "Well, I've always thought
if you're not a socialist before the age of 30 you have no heart,
and if you are a socialist after the age of 30 you have no
head." This isn't MacIntyre.
He wants to say the whole
Enlightenment venture, whether it's in its capitalist
or its socialist form is a variant of this deeply muddled,
hopeless quest to develop a science of politics based on
human nature as we find it. And so his prescriptions are
rather different. He says, "What matters at
this stage is the construction of local forms of community
within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can
be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon
us." He's not a utopian;
he's a dystopian, almost.
"And if the tradition of
the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark
ages, we are not entirely without
grounds for hope. This time however,
the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some
time. And it is our lack of
consciousness of this that constitutes part of our
predicament. We are waiting not for Godot,
but for another--doubtless very different--St.
Benedict."
Now people criticized MacIntyre
for a variety of things, but one of the things they
criticized him for was that this seems to be sort of throwing up
your hands and saying, "The whole world is
terrible. We're about to enter the new
dark ages, and there's not much we can do about it except hunker
down and hope." And he wrote several books,
probably the most important of which is a book called,
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in an
attempt to respond to these criticisms.
I'll talk about some of that in
a minute. On the actual politics that
flow from this, he never had anything more to
say than this, so it is a diagnosis without a
cure. I said this was written at the
height of the Cold War. If you look at the post-Cold
War and you say, "What would MacIntyre say
today?" it's not at all clear because
he certainly would not be a fan of militant Islam,
but it's not clear what he
would, you know, he would probably find the
spread of globalization as just one more step in this appalling
triumph of instrumental reasoning and values.
So I think he would be no less
despondent, and I think his diagnosis--this
is pure speculation, I haven't had this conversation
with him-- but my guess is that his
diagnosis of militant Islam and Jihadism and all of that would
be, he would just say, "Well,
it's an inevitable undertow. It's an inevitable reaction by
the losers from globalization against the endless spread of
Enlightenment ideas." I think in some ways there
could be a more interesting MacIntyrian analysis of China in
that, in China, we see now the fusion
of communist politics and capitalist economics neither of
which shows any signs of going anywhere.
And so when in 1984 somebody
had said, "Well, capitalism and
communism are two sides of the same coin,"
people would have been quite dismissive.
When you think about China
today, it's quite thought provoking.
So that's MacIntyre in a
nutshell.
Lots of it's quite appealing.
This account of human beings,
how many people-- never mind the unrealism of the
politics, how many find this account of
human nature plausible, true to your own experience?
At least some. Not that many?
We do, you know we want--we've
sort of got lots of unrequited love.
We want to be liked.
We want to be wanted,
and we want to be wanted by cool people, or people we think
are cool. So that whole side of it seems
right, and the notion that political morality should
somehow be an improving thing seems right.
That you can't just derive it
from the-- as Rousseau said it,
"If you take all of our individual preferences,
and add them up, and get rid of the pluses and
minuses that cancel one another out," that's maybe the
general will, but MacIntyre would say,
"It's going to be the lowest common denominator.
It's going to cater to our base
instincts and we are malleable, shapeable, improvable creatures
and we're not happy unless that's actually happening."
So all of that seems right,
but on the other hand, as I mentioned to you,
MacIntyre makes one huge concession to the way of
thinking that at least motivated the Enlightenment,
which was that Aristotle was wrong to say we don't reason
about ends. Aristotle took ends as given
and said we only reason about means.
So the big challenge for
MacIntyre is to say, "Well, how do you say ends
can be put in question as subjects for debate,
but not then wind up with emotivism?"
How do you structure?
How do you put limits,
if you like, on debates about ends which
recognizes that people do, in fact, you know--a difference
between human beings and dogs, let say, or lions is that dogs
and lions can't think critically about their own ends.
They just think instrumentally
about how--their ends really are given.
Dog wants to sit on a warm
couch. A lion wants to kill a buck,
and there's no question about that for a dog or a lion.
How you get on a warm couch
without being kicked off it by some nasty human,
that's a question for a dog, but not whether you want to be
on it. Human beings aren't like that.
Human beings are capable of
thinking critically about purposes and goals.
What MacIntyre wants to say is
we have the structure of an Aristotelian psyche but not the
content. We are not, in the end,
dogs and lions in that sense. We can critically appraise our
goals, but then we can argue about
them, and then we can disagree about them,
and we can even have civil wars about them when it really gets
down to it. So what do you do with the fact
that we reason about goals? That's why he introduces the
concept of a practice. He says, "Well,
it's true we reason about goals, but we don't pluck them
from nowhere. We're born into practices where
the goals are defined, where the goal of chess is to
get the person checkmate with as many of their pieces on the
board as possible. You don't say,
"Let's invent a board game."
You say, "What are the
goals of chess?" And so they're given by
practices or communities, and if we think about what is a
practice or a community over time, it's a tradition.
And so what he wants to say is
we're born into practices and communities and we reproduce
them into the future simply by living in them.
We inherit, we live,
and we reproduce into the future,
so it's a little reminiscent, or perhaps even more than a
little reminiscent of Burke's line about,
yes, we are part of a social contract,
but it's a contract among those who are dead,
those who are living, and those who are yet to be
born. And so, yes, we do question.
You might play chess for a time
and say, "Well, should it really be
the goal of chess to beat the person with as many of their
pieces on the board as possible? Why?
Maybe getting their subordinate
pieces on the way to before the checkmate should be a goal of
chess." You could have a debate.
Does it take more skill to
knock off the knights, and the bishops and so on in
order and then get the checkmate,
or does it take more skill to get the person checkmate with
their knights and bishops on the board.
And that could be a debate you
could have, but it's a contained debate.
It's a structured debate.
And he wants to say our debates
about ends are always like that.
Think about debates,
getting closer to home for MacIntyre, think about debates
within with Catholic Church. The next generation of
Catholics doesn't say, "Should we have a church?
Should it be organized?
Should the bishop of Rome have
a special status? Should there be papal
infallibility?" No, you're born into a
structure that's already there, and then maybe you say,
"Well, why is there papal infallibility?
It's only a relatively recent
creation. It doesn't make sense."
So your questioning of ends is
always from the vantage point of somebody who's born into an
inherited tradition. And it doesn't make sense to
criticize it from the perspective of outer space.
It doesn't make sense to any of
the participants, and it won't ultimately give
you any answers that'll be in any sense meaningful to you.
And so he sees traditions as
the mechanisms through which practices are reproduced over
time, and he wants to say,
yes, there is argument about ends within traditions,
but it's always this kind of structured argument that is
shaped by the way in which questions come up within
traditions. He says somewhere,
"Of course, part of what it means to be a
Jew is to argue about what it means to be a Jew,
that within the Jewish tradition that is one of the
things that people argue about and disagree about,
but it's always going to be this bounded,
structured disagreement that brings to bear other ideas
within the tradition on some particular traditional claim.
For those of you who like
philosophical jargon Michael Walzer wrote a book along
comparable lines where he talked about the idea that the only
effective criticism is imminent criticism which is a bit like--
imminent for Walzer, is a bit like internal for
MacIntyre. If you want to influence
Catholics to change their behavior you're not going to
influence them unless you appeal to values they embrace,
to norms they embrace, to elements of the tradition
they accept and show them how they are undermined by the
particular thing that you are criticizing.
So internal criticism,
imminent criticism, not ex cathedra criticism made
from outside a whole system of norms, and values,
practices, institutions. You might think you're right,
but it'll never have an effect on the people you're trying to
influence. So MacIntyre's very much in
that spirit. We can argue and reason about
ends, but only from inside traditions and practices.
Okay, we're out of time,
and I will finish up with this and then start talking about
democracy on Monday.
