Philosophical Bits #5:
Vulnerability and Rationality
Alasdair MacIntyre influenced late 20th century analytic philosophy, especially moral philosophy, with three notable books: first, After Virtue; second, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and finally, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. He was a leading voice in what is often called the revival of virtue theory. MacIntyre’s historically informed analysis of moral philosophy in the modern period—his persuasive argument that what he called “the enlightenment project” could not succeed—greatly shaped my thinking and lecturing from the time I first read his books in the 1990s.
In 2004 I read another book by MacIntyre: Dependent Rational Animals. I’ve been thinking about themes and implications of that book for twenty years. MacIntyre invited philosophers to take seriously our nature as human beings.
We are all born dependent. Every human baby must receive care and nurture from adult human beings to live. Near the end of life, many or most of us will need nursing care from others. Between birth and death, we are never more than an accident or injury from needing emergency care from others. All this just to maintain bare physical life.
Our psychological well-being depends on receiving touch and attention from adults. We need other people to teach us how to dress ourselves, how to speak, and how to interact with family members, strangers, and persons of authority. We need other people to teach us how to read, to use tools and machines, and to calculate. Every vision of the good life for human beings requires other people to provide the individual with materials, ideas, skills, and training. Notice that even in fantasies like Robinson Crusoe and Castaway the isolated person takes with him, in his mind and memory, the benefits of his upbringing. As social creatures we are dependent creatures. If an isolated person can maintain his life, it is only because he holds within himself gifts of learning and training for which he was dependent on others.
Philosophers, even more than other people, ought to recognize our indebtedness and dependence on other people. I did not invent logic, or the clever systems of symbols philosophers use to analyze arguments. (In logic alone, consider concepts such as proposition, negation, implication, contraries, contradictories, validity, etc.) I did not investigate the history of thought, nor did I create the thousands of arguments and counter arguments by which philosophers provoke one another to pursue truth, beauty, and the good. Philosophy begins in wonder, said Plato, but wonder alone brings one only to the edge of the ocean of thought; swimming in that ocean is made possible only by engaging with the thinking of others. If philosophers today are able to advance our discipline or create any genuine wisdom, we do so as minds shaped by the conceptual gifts of others.
Dependency implies and creates vulnerability. We need other people, but other people have the power to threaten the good lives we want to live. Sometimes threats are near and obvious, as when others steal our possessions, assault us physically, or kill our loved ones. Other times the treat can be large scale, as when an authoritarian government stifles inquiry by enshrining some theological or ideological doctrine as “the truth” and compelling everyone to assent to it. At still other times, the threat comes not from criminals or a government, but from the latest social or philosophical fad. Group think can happen on a large scale.
Thus, even a little reflection on our dependent and vulnerable nature introduces questions of political philosophy. How can a society encourage adults to care for children? How can a polis discourage theft, fraud, violence, and threats of violence? How can society encourage open discussion and criticism of even popular ideas? How can a polis discourage such acts between citizens without endorsing/establishing some comprehensive account of the good life for human beings? Note: this last question owes its form to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice.
Rawls says we can understand our pursuit of justice—the first virtue of political philosophy—through social contract analysis. We do not have to agree on some comprehensive theory of the good life (Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Platonic, Marxist, Christian, etc.) in order to agree on basic rules of justice. Instead of a complete vision of the good life, we adopt those rules that everybody (from behind the “veil of ignorance”) would agree to for his or her mutual benefit. Rawls endorses religious freedom and a liberal political order: limited government, rule of law, and civil rights.
Will Rawls’ vision of a just society work? Maybe. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre introduces the concept of competing traditions of rationality. It is not enough to say that such and such a theory or argument is “rational,” because different traditions of rationality will endorse competing definitions of the terms, problems and decision procedures that make up rationality. But, MacIntyre says, this does not mean we are left with epistemic relativism. Every tradition of rationality has its own internal problems. (A tradition with no problem, a tradition that has an answer for every question, is a dead tradition.) If, in the competition between two traditions, one can show that it has the resources to solve the problems of the other tradition—as understood by that other tradition—it thereby demonstrates its superiority to the second tradition. In philosophy of science courses, I have pointed out the parallel between MacIntyre’s argument and Thomas Kuhn’s argument in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. MacIntyre’s rationality of traditions parallels the rationality of a scientific revolution.
How can/should we persuade each other in social and political debates? Is it possible to rationally persuade? Yes.
First, we must identify and describe the problem in a way that our interlocutor endorses. The other side needs to know that you understand the problem the way they do. Second, we must show that our “solution” (including the reasons we give and the implications we draw from them) will solve the problem as understood by the other side. The basic invitation is this: If we look at it this way, we can solve the problem; let’s do it together.
