115:After Virtue

Hi everyone and welcome to classical stuff you should know we're a podcast about philosophy Theology old books and the classical world and trying to bring that to the audience in a way That is not boring or terrible and something that is you know half enjoyable to listen to half half enjoyable My name is AJ Hanenburg and I am joined by two of my colleagues mr. Graham Donaldson Hi, mr. Thomas Fletcher Maggie hello and all three of us work at a small classical school here in Austin, Texas named Veritas Academy We mostly teach English and then we have one fella that's you know in charge of games. That is accurate I do student life I do student life at Veritas Academy and he talks in chapel and stuff talking and today I think Graham is talking about that time of life when the sun starts to set And the arthritis starts to set in you know things starts to slow down and you can't eat as many pieces of pizza without your thighs Responding to it as you used to really when you're young you work hard at being a good person Mm-hmm.

And when you're old you might say it's after virtue after the virtue says after after the virtue I'm just kidding. Well done. Yeah, no today. We are talking about called after virtue It is written by I guess he's a moral philosopher.

He's a teacher historian philosopher named Alistair McIntyre Scottish But teaches at Notre Dame. I think we can do it. Yeah He started a lot of places. I think he was a Vanderbilt when he wrote this or at least Depending on what edition you have anyway, but he's a Notre Dame and is although I don't think he would say he is he's definitely a like Aristotle apologist the dude's Aristotelian But anyway, he wrote this book called after virtue that has become a pretty influential book It was written in the 80s and it kind of has had a resurgence of interest because A couple years ago the most the best-selling book in religion was Roger Ares the Benedict option Benedict option is a book about what the Christian Church should how the Christian Church should react to Basically the modern world where it is right now and it takes its launching off and at the name the Benedict option from the last paragraph of Alistair McIntyre's after virtue Alistair McIntyre concludes that we are living in a time of massive ethical and that massive ethical paradigm shift from Sort of the enlightenment to now we'll get into that And he concludes that we kind of have reached a place where we don't have coherence when it comes to talking about ethics That we don't have a framework just different.

Yeah, we don't have a framework for talking about the odds what we ought to do and And Alistair McIntyre likens that to the fall of Rome when we didn't have an institute We didn't have institutions institutions are be deal from out McIntyre And we eventually needed new institutions to be formed and the ones that happened were the monasteries from from Benedict for the Benedict teens But other monasteries and so at the end of his book after virtue he says that we are waiting for a new Benedict He's not really meaning a religious revival. He's talking more about people who are now doing something that are carrying the seeds of the next moral paradigm and Anyway, so Rodra takes the Benedict option from that the last paragraph of after virtue So after virtue was kind of had a little bit of a renaissance at least in these Benedict option e Christian circles People are rereading it and looking into it and my job today is to try to take this is very very difficult book And it is it demands a lot of its audience This is so academics when they write things they write books that are for the people in the trade and they're all very You know crammed with language that are specific to their job And then they try to write like popular books So see us Lewis his books that we know like mere Christianity is him writing books popular books Lewis has his academic books like the discarded image and Shoot what's one about ethics? The first two chapters about ethics something about flower or rose anyway, I can't remember the names of it Um, and those are his academic books apparently after virtue is supposed to be Alistair MacIntyre's book for regular people And it requires a pretty in-depth understanding of like the history of moral philosophy and moral philosophers and Everybody has that yeah, I've now read it twice and every time I've had to sit with my phone next to me open to Wikipedia So I can go and remind myself. Okay.

Okay. What did Conse again? What did Kierkegaard say again? I've never even heard of this guy who's this other person and then you've got to go and google these things But anyway, so I might attempt today is to try to sort of distill down what his argument is because it's really compelling And I think he's kind of spot on I believe mine was one other thing related to MacIntyre lease his birthday Yeah, January 12th.

Oh, what they are we recording this episode on a January 12th. Well, first of all happy birthday Man work to do your book today. I'm so confused right now because it seems you're saying happy 91st birthday. I'm like dude.

I'm only So MacIntyre sort of starts off this book by saying We in the modern world have a problem where when we talk about ethics when we talk about what things we ought to do There are lots of people who seem to be singing from different him books when people seem to be talking have different modes of filtration or have these different models of talking about what is right right and what is wrong and He is then writing this book to sort of ask the question. How did we get here? and Thomas you I remember you actually brought up one of his thought experiments the thought experiment that he begins this book with in One of the old podcast we're talking about you remember what that was there He opens with a series of different moral disagreements and then traces essentially a line of arguments that Like there was one about just war. Yeah, so I could literally read it to you if that's what you want But so there are three lines of argument a just war is one in which the good to be achieved outweighs the evils It's really the moment in increment not that I've ever seen that movie where run burgundy is saying that he's not prepared in the polls I'm literally I'm literally in that movie.

Oh, sorry. Never mind. You're a good Christian. Okay This is also never seen elf which every Christmas gets me in trouble.

That's a great movie I don't understand Okay, great Adjust Wars one in which the good to be achieved outweighs the evils involved in waging the war and in which a clear distinction can be made between combatants whose lives are at stake and innocent non-combatants but in a modern war calculation a future escalation is never reliable and no practically applicable distinction between combatants and non-combatants can be made therefore no modern war can be a just war and we all ought to be pacifists That's the first one part to partner be of just war if you wish for peace prepare for war the only way to achieve peace is to deter Potential aggressors therefore you must build up your armaments and make it clear that going to war on any particular scale is not necessarily ruled out by your policies An inescapable part of making this clear is being prepared both to fight limited wars and to go not only to but beyond the nuclear brink on certain types of occasions Otherwise you will not avoid war and you will be defeated in the third argument wars between the great powers are purely destructive But wars wage to liberate oppressed groups especially in the third world are necessary and therefore justified means for destroying the exploitative domination Which stands between mankind and happiness so three different views on just war No, it's just he and he's got other ones I think abortion is another one that he has in there and then there's a third one justice But his point is not to debate the merits of those views his point is to say that in the modern world We now have this sort of plurality of different ways of framing moral questions and there's no way for those three Viewpoints to talk to each other. Yes, that it's not like you can the three sort of paradigms of those views sat together They could hash out middle ground is that eventually there is an impasse that cannot be bridged through dialectic There's an impasse that cannot be bridged through through a back and forth and and so his he's sort of asking himself the question How do we get here and sort of what has happened in its history? If you go back into antiquity there seems to be a more solid understanding as to what constituted Ethical behavior whereas in the modern world there is more of a maybe a plurality of views. Um, and he eventually to start off his book says that We sort of landed at a ism of Sort of ethical framework that he calls a motivism This is this is the same thing that Lewis talks about in the abolition of man if you want to go back and listen to his abolition of man podcasts But this is the definition he gives to a motivism.

So motivism is the doctrine that not emotivism Emotivism like you like a moding okay to a moat. I couldn't tell it was a motivism sorry emotivism Yeah to like emotions emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are Nothing but expressions of preference expressions of attitude or feeling in so far as they are moral or evaluative in character So I don't you're saying the same stuff abolition is exactly. Okay, so what do you want? So how do we yeah, so he says that that that motivism is essentially just statements of preference?

Yeah, there there is no thing that is objectively good or objectively bad any Any more statement you can make about morals or evaluating morals or even like moral or ethical response is all a statement of personal feeling right? And preference rather than any sort of truth. There may be no truth said about right and wrong Yeah, um Alistair back in tires statement at the beginning of the book is that we have more or less arrived at this kind of paradigm for thinking about moral questions He says if you actually sit people down and ask them logically whether or not they think that a motivism is either Internally coherent or true most people would say now that's that's stupid But most people functionally act as if it is true, right? It's weird.

It doesn't do out like they speak as if it's true Yeah, but they don't act if it's as if it's true. Um, well, it's some do and this is kind of the thing So I mean some people probably still act under a paradigm of of what we would maybe call traditional morality traditional ethics Um, but they would say well, um, I feel like this is the right thing to do and if somebody else feels that it's the wrong thing to do Who am I to but that's what I'm saying they will they will act and do I mean they more or less act close to normal morality But then they would speak as though there it is merely their preference that they're doing exactly, right? Yeah, so most people will say or I mean it's kind of moral relativism is it very close to emotivism? I think yeah, you could you could probably use them interchangeably without too much friction too much friction.

Okay I'd have to look at that because something it is getting out of so in the war example someone who believes in only pacifism Wouldn't treat as equally valid other opinions, right or someone who says that we need to prepare for war wouldn't say pacifism is an equally valid option Right. I think so. Yeah, my point is that I can I can say all day long that My statements about right and wrong are simply my preference my preference But then when someone steals my sandwich and punches me in the mouth, right? I'm not gonna say well, he simply prefers to steal my sandwich Or take I'm going to live as though there is some sort of moral base there.

Yeah Yeah, I think so then most people have this idea of the uh, I frame things in terms of preference and But there are still this is a problem, but there are still these there are still these true things that that people Want yeah, they will live as though those morals are true. I won't be able to explain why yes Exactly. That's the problem and we'll be able to explain why and this is sort of jumping ahead a little bit but the modern answer for What is our foundational bedrock for what we how we should behave is something that we've called rights And we'll get there in a second that I've got my rights to these sorts of things and he says that's the modern man's Smuggling in an objective morality without having to make it objective. What do they say about the left?

So But there's no valid The big thing is that there's no valid rational justification for moral claims and then the key is a rational justification for it Can you rationally justify rights? So you can't know you can't rationally justify rights that you sort of have to You have to posit them as if they are self-evident But you because if we're simply evolved animals, why do we deserve anything specifically like is it that they can't base rights on anything specific? I mean you're getting to the the incoherence of the modern problem Yes, which is that we want to have Overarching odds that are before logic and reason but we don't want to say that they are that they exist in our binding Or even self-evident or even self-evident so we want to exist as it we want to live as if those things that everybody lives by them But we are sort of squeamish to say that they are Above the metaphysical or that they are not that they are beyond reason that they are a priority I guess he said so this is the modern incoherence of the modern person is that we want to claim an objectivity to action but then we also don't want to Accept the objectivity of that of those claims To yeah, we want to posit that any moral statement is simply a preference and then clamor for our rights Yes, yeah, which is why anyway, and so then the moral action ends up being like indignant indignation and protest. We'll get there in a second Um, so there's no valid rational justification for moral claims Now, Alistair MacIntyre's the main bulk of this book is him tracing the history of philosophical thought which is very interesting But very dense and we're not really gonna we're sort of talking about his beginning and his ending on this on the podcast And we're not really gonna follow his whole train of thought but he essentially says that there was a decoupling of moral Understanding that happened in the early enlightenment and we began this new project the enlightenment project and the enlightenment project was trying to get to moral claims of justification I ought to do this without having any pre-determined sort of first principle things We wanted to do it by reason alone, right?

This was Kant's Immanuel Kant. This was his big project Um, that Kant's ethic was that we can get to moral claims by pure reason by logic Um, and then the modern or you would say maybe the postmodern claim is that we no longer believe that we can get to it through reason But we get to but the the modern ethic is the importance of choice that we choose these things and having the ability to choose is the big sort of It's what's important. Yes, our ability to choose is what's important and this is in each of them. This is here I choose and therefore it is right So Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are as far as MacIntyre is concerned evidence and the fact that modern man is acting this way is evidence that this enlightenment Experiment has failed and in fact, he has a very delightful chapter called why the why the enlightenment experiment had to fail Which is very cool, you know, it's very fun.

Um, but so yeah, if we really wanted to dumb it down We had a way of existing Um in sort of the classical world in the medieval world and then there was this break I'll explain what that was in a second and then there was this break where we tried to have everything through reason without having to posit any Either objective morality or idea of a tell us first principle or any sort of first principles We've rejected all first principles and said no, we can get to those same conclusions that first principles gave you through reason alone What doesn't come to things he succeeded and haunt things he succeeded in this book But subsequent interpreters of Kant say no, you haven't succeeded so Kant's big His big conclusion was essentially the the do unto others. Yes, the golden rule the golden rule So he says Kant thinks that he comes through reason to the conclusion Act as if people are ends not means. Isn't that I think that's essentially it I was I didn't really prepare going into the history of this because I want to get the conclusion So I'm a little I can't really remember the cons conclusion on this He has different ways of phrasing it to the one I've always heard is that act in such a way as if everyone acted in the same way that it would Go well, essentially you should you should not steal because if everyone in the world stole it'd be a problem that That's the version of it I've heard but then people come back and I say go well What do you mean by that? What are you peeling and or yeah, what do you buy things would go well?

Yeah, yeah, or you have funny or um, you know, you shouldn't eat fish because you know the world would be better if no one official Tuesday So you can get you can get the weird conclusions by following that rule and the they make the same criticism Chesterton makes the same criticism of Nietzsche when he just says like something is higher But he uses that language a lot. This is a higher and but then doesn't say or he's appealing Oh, yeah, he's appealing to some sort of base base thing and Chesterton's like what he means is good It is good to do this, but he doesn't want to admit that there's a good So he's words like higher and like further, right? So in the 17th and 18th century, this was the moral paradigm Which was if you can use reason alone, we can get to the odds we can get to the this is what we should do statements McIntyre says that eventually when we got into the 19th and the 20th century That system couldn't carry water like that system actually didn't work And then you have these philosophers popping on the scene and saying no, it's not reason It is choice It is the very fact that I exist and I am and I am a decisive being that from which I derive meaning And my ability to stand up and make a choice about how I'm going to exist is the meaning And this is that sort of the postmodern cry so um and then from that it Doesn't take very long to get to the your truth is your truth is my truth is my truth We need to come up with each individual person needs to come up with their own ideas of what is true based on how they Strong how they strongly feel about something right so we now kind of live in a I don't know you could call like a soft Kierkegaard world Like I don't think Kierkegaard or nicho who would look at sort of the your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth and be happy with it Just but that's sort of what we live in now is we have this emotivism I really feel you guys as if this thing is true So we should act we should all just sort of do that yeah And that's not that's an argue that's not something you can argue with Because how am I to tell you how he feels right and there's no way of being proven wrong in that way So it's just whether I feel strongly or not And it's almost more of a game of influence more than a game of um conversation influence So this is this is strange because what what nicha advocated for was the revaluation of all values Is that quite a few times and if if we've actually done that if you sort of cut the feet out of the values If you sort of say okay, what value are they to me? Well, you are still sort of comparing them against something right and Valuing them against yeah exactly like if you are if you are going to revalue them Yeah, well, there still seems to be some sort of measurement and if the measurement is simply what I want Well, then it seems like we have succeeded right what nicha wanted is what we've done We are revaluating the values based on our personal preference and so this is where we end up in sort of a nebulous wishy-washy world where Nothing means anything.

I think each of them very happy with it, right? We're all willing to our own it right because it's like reading the existentialists they Propose like a kind of despairing worldview, but then in very hopefully of you know, therefore we can go and Jews who we are and make something of our lives and make it worth something does that make sense like something to who? Yeah, I'm not saying it's coherent. It's romantic.

It's romantic. Yeah, it's romantic That's what I mean, and so they still kind of had that romantic flair But then that I don't know if you count what we're doing what we're wanting to and then we lose that kind of romanticism Like the world becomes hollowed out. Yeah I don't know how you trace these ideas, but that's a way of that world war one I mean that you sort of have those romanticism of a and you have this sort of hope for a bright shiny future But then the reality of a world that is Allow is sort of letting individuals choose their own morality. It's not going to lead to sort of this beautiful Schmorgas board of you know sort of progressive love It's going to actually end up being a war of will against will and power versus power And that's I think that's the history of the 20th century Is sort of the fruit being born out of this decouple of this thinking that ethics can be just can be concluded rationally McIntyre says at the end of that project is not is this um Emotivism the end of this project is this a motivation where we get to the point where people just sort of need to feel something strongly for it To be true because they don't have anything to point to to justify their behavior We said or we try to and the thing that we try to use to justify our behavior is some sort of statement of rights And the statement of rights, what's it even called in the UN?

It's called the human right? Yeah, but what what is the what is the verb? It's the declaration of human rights, right? We stand up and we declare this thing, right?

It's not the Um, you know, it's not the code. It's not the it's not the received thing. It's not an a priori thing It's a declaration as if a generation just said you know what we declared this and now it's now it's law, so um But there's no real reason for well The reason is that we declare it's a theory. Yes.

The reason is that we declare it Yeah, so we've all stood up and said these are the rights that we think we should have even though we all didn't stand up and do it It sure it was done. Yeah, um on our behalf on our brothers. Yes, thank heavens you guys I'm so glad they did something for you. But now we have this thing is like there's no there's no What's what's the test for what is a right and what's not a right?

How does something become a right? Um, um, we have the right to What privacy? We have the right to happiness. We have the right to health.

We have the right to education education, you know, so just Facebook You also have the right to unhappiness. Yeah, good. Um, do we have a right? You know, so the question is what actually ends up becoming this right and how do you appeal and what is the what is the test that something needs to pass?

I have a right to my own say I write to safety to my own mental safety to my own mental health health care health care, um free health care Yeah, exactly. So then how do you what what what what actually sort of trips the scales or what actually sort of makes it into being Yeah, when there's no right when there's no logical when there's no, you know, it's just a declaration of right to declare anything is right I can declare that but let me freak out the other side of the case Yeah, like so because there is no basis for those rights and there's no litmus test to say whether it should be a right instead They're determined democratically. So instead of it being said, you know, for however many thousands of years like these are the rights that have been written down The UN can say actually in 2020 this should be the list of rights. Yeah, uh, magintyre says that they're not declared democratically or they're declared democratically in so far as they are And moted the strongest.

That's what I mean or or in the United States that you know We are a nation of many different ideological strains And so it's whoever can elect people to congress then who can get laws passed that then make those things right? Sure, but then rights are below or above or how you want to say rights are before politics politics is downstream from rights Um or maybe it should be but if we've lost any type of basis I mean, this is isn't this why people care about politics so much that because there is nothing politics becomes an ultimate thing because politics establishes my rights Well, let me give you this one go for I was gonna say and isn't that what's dangerous if politics declares my rights in the positive They can also declare my rights in the negative in 2020. I had the right to free health care in 2021 Whatever coterie of oligarchs wants to get together. They can say Your rights are now no more health care ever and it's only available to those of us who are the elite and we are the elite and those are our rights And not yours because these are this is what we declare.

We have declared our rights, right? So if they can be given by democracy, they can also take it away So if rights so one way that I think rights are talked about or at least If we want to use a metaphor for it is like an undiscovered country or like a dark room that we're still discovering So take for a step. Let's say if we had a new technology that created a new environment for existing So let's say that VR technology existed and you It doesn't You know in a way that was sort of prevalent in our life and you Thomas wanted to exist in the VR world as a cat person Oh, hey, you can't tell me what to do and then outside of the virtual reality world You wanted to be you wanted your virtual reality self to be acknowledged in the meat world and you wanted to be acknowledged as a cat person the world the only way that you could say eventually You would get down to saying I have a right to be acknowledged as the cat person If you're like or if you're trying to make up some sort of law the people in the real world We're not treating you like a cat person and you said but I want to be treated as a cat person eventually the the Justification for that you would have for that mode of treatment would be having to fall back on saying that it is my right to be treated The way I want to be treated. Yeah, everyone.

Yeah, since we who are you to tell me? I think we're Cat person is extending it to a certain absurdity. Maybe not. I don't know but because we can't reach consensus I'm starting to now wait 30 years.

Yeah, why that one but so if that uh Since we can't reach any type of consensus therefore we should respect people that they have different opinions on who they are and so We see that that's good. That's fine I think I agree with that MacIntyre at the end of his book says that is good in so far as now We have institutions of society that um need to be that help us to orient our lives But that's that's the end of his book. So he says that the sort of the justification that modern man has for Essentially replacing some sort of idea as what he means ought to do or some sort of teleology And I'll explain those are in a second is an appeal to rights and he says within a growth with a growth of an appeal to rights you've got You you've got this the modern sort of way of acting is through protest and is through indignation Um, I don't believe that Let's see if I can find it shoot. Oh, man.

I didn't write I didn't write the pages down But what he means by this is like um if you were going to have rights Um that are not provable or that there is no criteria of what can get added and what doesn't get added The only way that's something that that society can recognize that that a right has been violated is if People feel as if their rights have been violated because their right has been violated for somebody else's utility Right, and that's why someone would protest that they feel that my right to x has been violated because the person in power Doesn't see it as my right to x and is doing this for utility So my right to housing is being violated by the person in powers utility by saying oh this This district of Austin would be better if I could turn it into condominiums and not low income housing This might be zeroing in too much on the examples we said so far So taking this rights language so So, you know people need food and a place to sleep to live Why is it not a bin logical argument? Why not just follow that and say because those are requirements to like actually be alive Therefore, we should not have starving and homeless people in america. Therefore everyone should have a right to food and shelter If I take that as a um as a train of thought, maybe a day with your health care example, you know People will die if they can't get appropriate health care Why not then say therefore people have a right to that health care so I think his reaction would be You don't need to couch it in language of rights when you cannot when you should be couching it in the language of The good life that's essentially his conclusion is that is that um what we talk it when we when we talk about rights We are trying to take have a baseline justification for moral behavior that Um and we're trying to either say that it is something biological or that it is something or so within my person is right for health care It's either it's either a biological thing that we can say Um, which is an intellectual problem or it's just a declaration. It is a purely Uh existential declaration It's me just saying I want the thing saying I want and or you getting a group of people that all want the same thing and saying that that we have a Right to this right because we want it.

Um or it's giving the other side was giving some sort of biological justification for this it is And he would and he would say That by having it that he needs to go a step below that step lower than that and say no we need to appeal to some sort of um tell us that there is a vision of what the good man is and moral action is supposed to Enable that good is supposed to be enabled a good life for people and then the mode of that action is virtue That's his big conclusion Um, but he's saying that the modern world is trying to have the fruit of that without going back and having the belief in the a priori or the auntalot or the um the uh Help me out. What's the one I'm trying to say? the the code the ethic the The allegations are you so about the towel? Yeah.

Yeah exactly. Yeah, just let me mean by towel So it may not be familiar. Yeah, if you haven't listened to our previous podcast on the abolition of man It's a three-parter. It's pretty good because we all read it together.

Usually we have our episodes led by one of us This one was co-led right it was you two But you were part of that right? That was a part of it. I didn't leave one of them. Okay.

Um in any case It's it's yes Lewis's book called the abolition of man and the first chapter is about education partially about how we Educate first principles out of our kids by telling them that it's all opinion and then we expect them to be virtuous So by telling them that courage or warfare or all those things are just personal preferences and then expect them to be courageous Um and then the second chapter is about the tau. Now what he means by the tau is this set of first principles It's in every culture. It's been here since the beginning of mankind and it's the things like courage is good and cowardice is bad Right and while the tau can shift and some things can become exaggerated to extremes to the detriment of other principles Right and I'd say that in our our particular era It's you know rights and tolerance are and are sort of exaggerated to the detriment of the other virtues in other areas It's be it's been courage right so encouraged to the detriment of other virtues Um, but even if it shifts a little bit You are still seeing that the same principles express throughout pretty much every culture And that's what allows us to say things about cultures that are not our own like the nazis Right if the nazis preferred to kill jews and that was their preference if we maintain that Say it's about right and wrong are only preference then their preference was just as good as ours So the tau is that sort of set of first principles It is the way and if you are disagreeing that there is something like that then you are standing firmly within the tau because you are Admitting that there are things worth having and other things that truth in particular and that knowing untruth is bad Right, you can't even criticize the tau without standing in it. Everyone's in it all the time And then I guess the motive is and would be either The niche in trying to get out of the tau or just the the willful ignorance of of the tau around you and just picking and choosing the things you want I'd say if you can draw metaphor It's like taking picking the tau up off the ground and suspending it in the air Right the tau is there but you don't know what it's connected to and you can't really give any sort of basis for it When really the tau is the ground yeah, so then can I can you take this Just use an example like so instead of a right space language around I have a right to we just said food shelter health care or privacy or any of the examples you've said so far Can you compare what that would be in rights language compared as opposed to Deliology and imagine a good life.

Yes, that is a great question. I think I don't really know how I feel about his criticism of rights because in many ways rights just sort of sounds like the same thing as Or it could be the same thing as just like tell us or a deligical language Because you're appealing to a standard that you can't prove it's just it's a given it's a axiom I think he's just saying that the axiom of rights is subpar to the axiom of virtue Mainly because the axiom of rights is something is or maybe requires Nothing of a person. It's just a status that you should get as opposed to virtue Which is an action that you can or cannot do and then the result of what you can or cannot do is is what you get Um, but let's see so um, but but a good life still involves food and shelter and health care and those things Um Yes, maybe let me read the section where he talks about protest and maybe this will give us some So he says but protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon Which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone's rights in the name of someone else's utility The self assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protesters can never win an argument The indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protesters can never lose an argument either Hence the utterance of protest is characterically Characteristically addressed to those who already share the protesters' premises The effects of incommensurability ensure that protesters rarely have anyone else to talk to about themselves This is not to say that protest cannot be effective It is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that it's dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious aware of this Awareness of this so he's saying that if someone is going in protesting a housing development under the basis that you're trampling the rights of let's say the poor neighborhood He's saying that you cannot win that argument by a rational argument to the legislators You can't say you guys are making a terrible logical mistake here You're essentially saying I have a right to x you have a utility for For this thing for building a housing project my right trumps your utility And there's there's no um he said he so he asserts that there's no reason why that would be so someone in power can just say like No tough, right? And that's why why do your rights trump the right of the developer?

Do you have a million dollars? He has a million dollars? He has the right to spend those not million and who you off is land and because there's Those legal um, you know sort of truths for the impoverished neighborhood um protest becomes the logical avenue because it is an attempt to move emotions as opposed to logically win an argument And so his point is is that if you're going to base a system of aughts on rights You're the only thing that you can do is move emotions as opposed to That's why it's emotivism, right? I can't get the developer shut down logically, but I sure can get on the news and make him really unpopular Now Thomas your question is okay, fine Then if we're with cetilians, how can you get the developer to not do it logically or how can you look convince him?

And I don't think and I would Um, I'm not sure what he would say. Uh, what would cetilians say in that situation? Uh, would he say that the developer is gree or what he looked at it and say that this is helping the policy as a whole? Um, this is because i'm tired you talked about this earlier that the end of the book is to Locate these moral arguments to communities that can agree on certain core values And so at that point your conversation is not power like you're saying it's an argument of what is right for this community based on The story of vision tradition that they live in what we should look like So then that's when you know, the developer is not some person from you know, a different state It's a person from three blocks down.

Do you know because that I think that's probably it So, I mean in some sense, maybe um, or is it telling ethics can only exist in small Small polis of where people know each other. That's why the benedict option is typically centered around a tight group a tight small group of people kind of living life Is it thick community is the term like where it means something to see that's not why you like this? You all are professionals who just put that on a recording. Sorry.

Everything. No, you're good. Um, these were one make sure that those things go there fragile That is unfortunate shattered. Yeah, so yeah, so that that's how you then get to benedict option communities Which are again small communities where there is some type of consensus on what is right for that community?

Yeah, um, yeah There's actually maybe an interesting book or an interesting thought experiment to go down and say when Yeah, what has it what has a nation something that's too big for you to know everybody What has that done to the history of ethical philosophy, right? I mean, you're sort of touching on it right now is now you've you've got to sort of get to a Totally yeah, or a bigger code or something a little bit more like generic as opposed to you know, like the ending of um, It's a wonderful life where I was like, I'll have her money. It's in french house. You know that you know that the white's a wonderful life But right there's like that movie is is a localism love story.

Yeah, um and in the face of sort of growing um A growing sort of not sort of hashtag capitalism, but sort of growing corporatism. Let's go that way Um, we're kind of getting off track a little bit, but this is this is interesting Yeah to answer your question I think he would say yeah, it would end up coming down to this or to a uh, I think a question of local As opposed to then also maybe those having developments are good because there's a benefit to that community for having new high-end Apartments or whatever the film is making it's again is it things get things not being black and white when it's not just these are the good protesters These are the bad developers corporations, whatever. Um, and so that's what yeah, that's what he's getting at here that The size of your community matters and how in the type of moral discourse you can have one other little helpful heuristic that he says is that moral paradigms Also end up creating what he calls characters and what he means by this is that every moral paradigm Um, or even like subculture in a moral paradigm ends up having a Story as to what is the good man in that moral paradigm? So the example that he gives is that in victorian england the example of the characters Those who are living virtuously according to that moral paradigm would be like the explorer going off and charting the north pole for science The engineer the man who is building you know, these amazing the new world and um, sorry the modern world or the headmaster You know the headmaster of the public school who is, you know, pushing back the forces of ignorance, right?

Every culture and time period has their exemplars and has their what he calls characters for modern motorism the characters that he says are um one that's kind of dying out as as we move on and that was like the wealthy aesthetic the person who cares about Um, the aesthetics of life and curating a beautiful life Um, and there's lots to be said to be about instagram with that. Um, the the second No, seriously like if you think about the amount of effort and energy that people say the good life is and then it's a visual Representation of what the good life is. Um, and the second character of the modern motorism is the therapist the therapist Had the goal of the therapist is that you are happy and that you achieve your happiness And then the therapist needs to learn tricks and tools to be able to get you to live your best life There's no appeal to what to a good. There's no appeal to the good life There's there's a an attempt of getting you to your best life and sort of working you through your problems to get to your happiness So the therapist and the last one is the manager Managers very similar except instead of doing it in the spiritual sense with the therapist.

He's doing almost in a uh, material sense The best thing to do is I don't really care what this company does I don't really care what goods they're doing I need to hear the best practices to make this the most efficient and to get us where we're trying to go growth growth growth Um, and um, so he says that yes that the the idea of manager therapists and as feet Which is a word I can never pronounce end up being the uh, the modern characters of the of the motorist world I think he's right on this I think he's kind of dead on in saying that the people that we hold up as the modern Guru's or the the people who have sort of modern life figured out Fall into one of those three categories. We see those as modern exemplars You know the as theses as the influencer on the therapist is the the self-help book person You live your best life by like, I don't eat and pie or whatever I would like to read that about that like if you think of most TED talks most TED talks fall into the category of therapy or man or how to better manage Uh, let's all cool in on fungus ones. Yeah, yeah, I don't think that's that's the fourth category These are then in opposition to so these are three modern visions. What is a superior one or Yeah, or is there some alternative?

I'm trying to think of, yeah, what was our name for what? He doesn't name the, he actually leaves it at the end and says, the aesthete, the therapist and the manager, all don't have a goal, they don't have an end, they don't have a telos, that is unified. It's sort of their own telos. And if that ends up being what the citizenry is made up of, our institutions that we have cannot sustain that if that is the goal of human life is either chasing after personal aesthetic preferences, the therapist who's trying to manage emotions and the manager who's trying to optimize whatever it is.

He doesn't give an example as to what the characters ought to be. He gives examples of what they were in the past, we talked about what the Greek hero, what they're, he talks about in the ancient Greek world, when it really was a virtue ethic purely. He says what their characters were and I can't remember what they're, it's essentially like the Greek hero, either the, something like an Achilles or like an Odysseus or like a wise elder, the Middle Ages have theirs, but he never really gets into what he thinks the characters of a more sustainable or healthy ethic should be. I think that's kind of what he's leaving it up to.

There are, yeah, and so this is kind of what Rod Rare is essentially talking about when he's talking about the Benedict adoption is creating a thick community wherein people can have not only institutions that can sustain community, so the uninstitution like church and also giving people an understanding of the traditions that they are part of. And then I guess characters will come out of that. Based on your tradition. Based on your tradition.

But then, yeah, so then McIntyre sort of ends it by saying, I find it kind of unsatisfying. He essentially just sort of says, we need to get back to an idea, a vision of talking about the good life and creating cultures, not creating cultures, almost like rediscovering traditions and maintaining institutions to foster traditions and to give people not only catechizing into their tradition but also understanding other tradition so that they can live a life and community because the modern world has sort of everybody sort of spun off into their own, into their own almost like Alacard identity. So that's the problem. So it seems like he's just saying that personally, Motivism is bad, but I think you were hitting the actual, the real central critique of McIntyre is that he says, oh, so doing this all alone is bad, but.

Having a group is better? Yeah, I think that's it. But then we run into the same problem when communities, these lines of beliefs still can't talk to each other. Yeah, I can't critique anybody else's group.

And not only that, but we do away with progress. I can't control, I can't do someone else's group, but how can I even evaluate my father's ethos, right? We can't even criticize my dad. You would do that within the stories of the community.

Yeah, but my community is different now. The community has changed. Generation and generation. And I will say that I've not read these books, but everything we're saying is the critique of after virtue, McIntyre then followed up after virtue with whose justice, which rationality, and then a third book, Three Visions of Moral Inquiry, I think it's the name of the book.

So even McIntyre acknowledges he hasn't fully answered the question here, but he's very clearly identified a problem. Yes. Is he a Christian? Non-Christian?

He wrote this to fill out the moral problems that Mark does in his tone. So he liked Thomas Aquinas, but was not Christian. I believe he has a cat now. Is he really?

He finally found a team. I mean, right, he found that, tell us then. Can you be Marxist and Catholic? Sure, you can't.

I don't know. There are parts of it. That's a whole lot of communism nations, whatever. Usually they are opposed to religion, but could someone hold Marxist views him?

Say which was Willable Marxism, they have a teleology. I think that's what he was attracted to. It's a material teleology, and it's an impractical teleology, and it's never to get there, you do enact a whole heck of a lot of violence, or is this how it's played out? But it has a vision of the future, which I think Magtire found attractive, and I think a lot of people find attractive based in opposed to kind of a visionless, ateliological existence that a lot of Western liberalism has.

We don't have a vision of the future. We just have a, let's try to manage what we have more optimally, but we don't have a strong sense of where we're going. I think that's what you could maybe, probably something you could have criticized if we're gonna talk political, both parties. Like we actually, back maybe 20 years ago.

So AJ, we teach in our rhetoric class, we teach, we watch Presidential Fout, we brought Presidential Bingo, our Presidential debates to play logical fallacy Bingo, and we watched a Bush Gore debate, and I was, I didn't mention this to the class, but as I was watching, I was singing to myself, A, how incredibly similar both of their platforms were, like just almost indistinguishable, and B, it was all language of managing and optimizing, as opposed to a strong vision of a goal. And I think it is unsurprising that that kind of, that has now kind of fractured a little bit, that sort of, anyway, that's a whole other podcast, I guess. Is that still the debate that you all want? No, we go back, we watch a bunch of different ones.

We're trying to mix it up. We used to do the Obama-Rami one, which was a pretty entertaining one, for sure, but you know, it's nice to be able to connect it to what's currently happening. Yeah, the frustrating thing is, and after Richie McIntyre doesn't want to say there's a one size fits all good life, he wants to say that it's subject to times, and specifically your times in your context. So if you were born at this time in this place, you have a tradition, whether you like it or not, and your good life is gonna sort of conform to that tradition, and you need virtue in order to go on the quest to understand what a good life is.

This is how we sort of- You need the good life, so you can get to the good life. You need virtue, so you can get to the good life. Virtue is needed in order to understand what the good life is. Then probably at the end, like it was the journey all along.

Sure. So that nonsense. The whole point of the journey is the road. Yeah, that kind of thing.

He will say one point in the book that you need excellence to achieve that good life, and he breaks it down into both a moral excellence, but then also like a technical. It's a technique, technique is for a technical excellence, and RTA is for kind of a moral excellence. He punts the vision of the life in the book, but he is, I think, dead on identifying the modern problems, which is that everybody is an isolated allocard identity, and everybody is trying to create their own thing. And as people are sort of getting further and further and further and further apart socially, everybody is clamoring in and crying for rights based to their allocard identity, and our social institutions do not have the structural ability to keep up with all of those demands of new rights.

And so you can see this in sexual ethics, you can see this in all sorts of things. I find it very fascinating that you can see it in, so let's talk very briefly, feminism in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, wanting to carve out equality for women in the modern world. But very strongly saying that this is a woman. And now you have a gender identity movement going on right now that's trying to carve out equality for gender fluidity or what is being described as a sort of new class of people.

And they're playing the same playbook that feminism had played in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. But now you've got the feminists who won those new rights saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we've got people, you're trying to redefine gender, we're not cool with that because we fought so hard to keep, to have our gender have power at the table. And so you're not having, it's not that everybody is coming and getting a seat at the table. You're actually seeing a lot more jockeying for power amongst all of these, I guess you could call them, not subcultures, but all of these mimetic tribes.

Let's call it that. So we're now living in the world of all of these mimetic tribes who are popping up and clamoring for rights. And we don't have the institutions to be able to give those rights without stripping rights from other tribes. And it's actually getting to be a little chaotic in terms of kind of institutions give what this group wants, but to do that, you'll have to take away philosophical underpinnings of this group's identity and say, well, no, actually, there's no gender feminists, or it can be whatever you want because this is what this group needs in order to have their right.

Then it gets really messy. And I'm not coming down and saying what I think about any of those philosophical positions. I'm just pointing out that the apparatus that we have, or not sense making, the apparatus that we have of consensus is falling apart and rights is not going to give us the answers, falling back on the question of rights. Whether or not falling back to a question of the teleological good life can, my gut is to say that it does.

MacIntyre, I think, has gut is to say that it does, although I disagree with him saying that it's, yeah, I don't even know who it is. I mean, I'm not from a Christian to say that there's a kingdom, right? And that everybody is regenerated into the kingdom that you have new life and that you have the spirit within. So I mean, but somebody else will look at me and say, ah, it's a wacky group you're a part of.

So anyway, that is, I guess, after virtue, that's sort of the outline of his introduction, and then the outline of his conclusion. We skipped the whole middle where he traces the history of basically philosophical ethics. And I'm sure that we could go through piece by piece and see the lines that he draws. I found it fascinating.

I don't think it, I think getting to the conclusion is helpful than just going through everything beat by beat. Yeah, if you disagree with us, audience, unfortunately, there's no framework for us to disagree about. So you've got to feel a real strong. If you want to protest us, you can protest by sending us an email at classicalstuffatveritasacademy.net.

You can check out our website at classical stuff. There's a lot of passion and indignation in that. The more emotion, the better you can tweet at us at the twits at C-L-S-S-C-A-L, C-L-S-S-C-A-L stuff. And if you want to call us, Graham's phone number.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm good. Anyway, we're glad to have you listening. And we will see you next time.

And I'm really working hard on getting Genghis Khan ready for next week. And so look forward to that if I actually do the work I'm supposed to do. Alright, this is the boys with glassable stuff. Starting off.

Bye.