Theological Ethics After MacIntyre The Significance of Alasdair MacIntyre's Moral Philosophy For ...

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Theological ethics after MacIntyre : the signi(cid:28)cance of
Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy for Lutheran
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Weber, David Karl
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Theological Ethics After MacIntyre
The Significance of
Alasdair MacIntyre's
Moral Philosophy For
Lutheran Ethics
The copyright of this thesis rests
with the author. No quotation
from it should be published
without the written consent of the
author and information derived
from it should be acknowledged.
David Karl Weber
University of Durham
Department of Theology
Ph.D. Thesis
1999
12 APR 2000
Theological Ethics After MacIntyre:
The Significance of Alasdair MacIntyre's
Moral Philosophy For Lutheran Ethics
Abstract
Three aspects of MacIntyre's writings are significant for Lutheran ethics.
These are his criticism of Enlightenment rationality, his constructive account of a
rational morality, and the relationship of his moral philosophy to theology. I first
discuss MacIntyre's critique of Enlightenment thinkers whose conception of
rationality follows a path that leads to the denial of rationality in emotivism.
Secondly, I consider MacIntyre's alternative account of rationality which entails the
recovery of the notions of the teleological framework of morality and the rationality
of tradition. Teleology and tradition provide the rational foundation whereby moral
judgements are substantiated by their ability to advance moral progress. Thirdly, I
argue that the incompleteness of MacIntyre's constructive account of rationality
moves his philosophy in a theistic direction. My discussion then turns to the writings
of Stanley Hauerwas whose appropriation of MacIntyre's writings demonstrates the
importance of MacIntyre's notion of rationality for theology. I then discuss the
significance of MacIntyre for Lutheran ethics by considering the writings of Gilbert
Meilaender who demonstrates how a rational Lutheran ethic is possible. The thesis
concludes with a discussion of the necessity for Lutheran theology to sustain rational
moral reflection in these postmodern times.
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Table of Contents
ACKN" OWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................... 5
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................. 7
CHAPTER 1
EMOTIVISM AND THE FAILURE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT ............................................. 12
1 . INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 12
2. EMOTIVISM: THE SIGN OF MORAL DECLINE ............................................................................. 15
2.1 . Three Stages to Emotivism .............................................................................................. 15
2.2. Emotivism in Theory and Practice .................................................................................. 18
3. THE GENEALOGY OF EMOTIVISM .............................................................................................. 23
3.1. From Kant to Emotivism ................................................................................................. 24
3.2. From Consequentialism to Emotivism ............................................................................ 33
4. NIETZSCHE AND THE BUREAUCRATIC ORDER ........................................................................... 37
4.1 . The Nietzschean Sequel .................................................................................................. 37
4.2. Questioning Bureaucratic Expertise ............................................................................... 40
4.3. Conclusion: Moral Inarticulacy ..................................................................................... 45
CHAPTER 2
TELEOLOGY, TRADITION AND RATIONALITy ....................................................................... 49
1. THE TELEOLOGICAL SHAPE OF RATIONALITY ........................................................................... 50
1.1. Intelligibility and Teleology ............................................................................................ 52
1.2. The Teleological Structure ofN arrative ......................................................................... 57
2. TRADITION AS AUTHORITY AND ARGUMENT ............................................................................ 61
2.1. The Relationship ofA uthority to Argument .................................................................... 62
2.2. The Deconstructive Function of Tradition ...................................................................... 66
2.3. The Positive Function ofA rgument ................................................................................ 70
3. PROGRESS AND RATIONALITy ............................ ·· ..... ········· ....................................................... 73
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3.1. Progress and Rational Evaluation ........................................... ······································· 7
3.2. Evaluation and Education in the Craft Tradition ........................................................... 76
3.3. Thomas Aquinas and the Dialectical Transformation ofa Tradition ............................ 79
3 . 4 . Conclusz'on . ...................... . .............................................................................................. 91
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CHAPTER 3
TRA.GEDY, RA.TIONALITY AND THEOLOGY ............................................................................ 96
1 . FROM 'TRAGEDY TO THEOLOGy ................................................................................................ 97
1.1. Tragedy as an Epistemological Crisis .......................................................................... 102
1.2. Revelation as a Rational Resolution ............................................................................. 105
2. THE RA. TIONALITY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS ............................................................................... 114
2.1 . Why Christian Ethics Escapes the Epistemological Crisis ........................................... 114
2.2. Scripture as Narrative .................................................................................................. 118
2.3. The Community of Character ....................................................................................... 131
CHAPTER 4
SIMULTANEITIES IN GILBERT MEILAENDER'S ETHICS ................................................... 146
1 . FROM REFORMATION TO EMOTIVISM? .................................................................................... 147
2 . SIMULTANEITIES AND FURIOUS OpPOSITES ............................................................................. 153
3. THE SELF AS BODY AND SOUL ................................................................................................ 165
4. SAINTS AND SINNERS - JOURNEY AND DIALOGUE .................................................................. 178
CHAPTERS
LUTHERAN ETHICS AFTER MACINTYRE ............................................................................... 200
1. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 200
2. NIHILISM AND THE NECESSITY OF LUTHERAN ETHICS ............................................................ 201
3. COMMANDS, FREEDOM AND THE TELEOLOGICAL SHAPE OF LUTHERAN ETHICS .................... 21 0
4. SCRIPTURE AND MORAL FORMATION ..................................................................................... 225
5. TEACHING GOODNESS ............................................................................................................. 237
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 250
BIBLI OGRAPHY. .............................................................................................................................. 255
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to express my gratitude to the following people whose care allowed me
to experience how the poor discover blessing in poverty. I wish to thank my wife,
Dana Weber, who provided the family (Parker, Matthew, Margaret and Regan) with
stability during the unstable times of my postgraduate work.
Moreover, I am indebted to Colin Crowder - a supervisor who embodies the
intellectual and moral virtues - as he is chiefly responsible for the coherence and the
completion of this thesis. Likewise, I am grateful to my fellow postgraduates and
friends at Durham, especially Paul, Daniel, Chris and Tim, who were as willing as
they were skilled to serve as insightful interlocutors. And to Margaret Parkinson
whose practical advice is a bulwark against the creeping dark forces which stand
between a thesis and its completion. I am grateful for my colleagues at Valparaiso
University, especially Gilbert Meilaender and Thomas Kennedy who continually
remind me that prolixity without clarity is not a sign of brilliance.
Finally, I should like to dedicate this thesis to my parents, the Reverend and Mrs.
Eugene Weber, whose love and financial support made the improbable a reality. My
one regret is that my father did not live to see the completion of this work.
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DECLARATION
I confirm that no part of this thesis has been submitted for a degree in this or any other
university. I also confirm that the thesis conforms to the word limit set out in the
Degree Regulation.
The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be
published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be
aclmow ledged.
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INTRODUCTION
The widespread impact and general importance of Alasdair MacIntyre's moral
philosophy is incontestable. This thesis pays tribute to the importance of MacIntyre's
work by considering its significance for Lutheran ethics. Before entering into the
heart of the argument, it is important to offer a general reflection on the current moral
situation to which MacIntyre's writings are addressed. The past two decades have
witnessed a growing consensus that American culture and the church in America are
in the process of moral decline. Ironically, this growing consensus regarding our
moral decline results from the perception that we are increasing unable to sustain
certain co-operative relationships and activities. Insofar as we are unable to agree on
some standard of the good, we are increasingly incapable of ordering our lives
through a common vision or of finding rational resolutions to our moral
disagreements. Signs of this decline within the Christian community include the rise
of divorce and contentious divisions within the church. In culture, this moral decline
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is captured in the characterisation of American public life as a culture war. Let us
briefly consider the culture war phenomenon as a sign of moral decline.
Father Richard John Neuhaus, whose book The Naked Public Square did
much to bring the term culture war to the American political lexicon, argues that
America has become dangerously divided along apparently irreconcilable moral fault
lines.2 'It is no exaggeration to say', states Neuhaus, 'that our society is embroiled in a
Kulturkampf, a war over the meaning of American culture. The sociologist James
'3
Hunter presents systematic studies of the culture war phenomenon in his books Culture
Wars: The Struggle to Define America and Before the Shooting Begins: Searching/or
Cf. Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition ofM arriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love (Washington,
I
D.C.: Regnery, 1996). Gallagher's argument, simply stated, is that the American therapeutic culture has
advanced the destruction of the family by elevating selfishness over moral commitment to the co
operative good of the family. In terms of division within the. church: Gilb.ert Meilaender notes how it
was the inability of Missouri Synod Lutherans to resolve theIr doctnnal dIsputes that led to the
catastrophic schism in 1974. Gilbert Meilaend~r,. 'How Ch~c~es C~ack Up: ~e Case of the Lutheran
Church-Missouri Synod', review of John H. TIetjen, MemOirs in EXile: ConfesslOnal Hope and
Institutional Conflict (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), in First Things 14 (June/July, 1991), pp. 38-
:~chard
John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1984), pp. 21,36--37.. . ' .
3 Richard John Neuhaus, America Against Itself: Moral V,SlOn and the PubliC Order (Notre Dame, IN.
University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), p. 14.
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Democracy in America's Culture War.4 Hunter and Neuhaus see the culture war as , in
MacIntyre's words, a 'civil war carried on by other means.'s Furthermore, as the title
of Hunter's second book indicates, the culture war increasingly threatens to become
an all out civil war. To a significant degree, MacIntyre's analysis of our cultural
situation has provided a historical and philosophical foundation for the work of
Hunter, Neuhaus and others chronicling the cultural decline.
MacIntyre spells out the nature of the decline in a historical and philosophical
narrative. The central feature of this story is that once a culture is rendered incapable
of rationally sustaining its moral commitments and resolving its moral conflicts, order
will be established by other means. In particular, MacIntyre argues that modernity is
displacing moral order with manipulative therapeutic and bureaucratic techniques.
Exemplifying the extent of this displacement, the Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas
notes the ill effects of bureaucratisation on the public ministry. He observes that we
have now come to
expect our ministers to exemplify the same kind of bureaucratic mentality so
characteristic of modem organizational behavior and politics. I sometimes think
that there is a conspiracy afoot to make Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the
manager in After Virtue empirically verifiable. That the manager has become
characteristic of liberal politics should not be surprising, but I continue to be taken
aback by the preponderance of such character types in the ministry.6
As is evident in Hauerwas' criticism, the influence of the therapeutic and bureaucratic
is ubiquitous. MacIntyre is troubled by the cultural acceptance of and dependence on
bureaucratic and therapeutic technique not for what it presently is but for what it
threatens to become. Hence what may presently appear to be a benign or even
beneficial use of manipulative techniques develops into coercive control. David
Toole (a former Ph.D. student of Stanley Hauerwas at Duke University) catches this
feature of MacIntyre's argument when he writes:
[A]ccording to MacIntyre, Nietzsche gives to the twentieth ... century one of its
possible courses: an increasingly conflictual and violent world in which either truth
is relative and we carry guns to settle inevitable disputes, or truth has left the world
James D. Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991) and
4
Before the Shooting Begins: Searchingfor Democracy in America's Culture War (New York: The Free
Press, 1994). . . f N
S Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: Umversity 0 otre
Dame Press 2nd ed. 1984) p. 253. (Hereafter: After Virtue.)
Stanley H~uerwas, 'Prea~hing As Though We Had Enemies', First Things 53 (May, 1995), p. 46.
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