A Short History of Ethics by Alasdair MacIntyre

Author:Alasdair MacIntyre
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Ethics, Philosophy, History
ISBN: 9780203131121
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1966-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

NEW VALUES

BOTH HOBBES and Spinoza struck their contemporaries as outrageous innovators; to both the label of “atheist”–which was used in seventeenth-century Europe with almost as much accuracy as the label “communist” is used in twentieth-century America–was attached. Spinoza was expelled from the synagogue; Hobbes was attacked by the Anglican clergy. And just because they stand so far from their contemporaries, it is only in a relatively indirect way that they give expression to the common and shared dilemmas of their society. But the questions which they ask, and the values which they embody–different as these are–soon become questions and values which inform a whole way of social life. And in a variety of ways philosophical questions and practical questions come into a closer relationship. In a variety of ways, for differing social circumstances provide relevantly different contexts for the relationship. In France, for example, philosophy in analyzing the concepts of the existing social and political order, those of sovereignty, law, property and the like, becomes critical of those concepts, and so an instrument for criticism of the established order. In England philosophy, in analyzing the concepts of the existing order, often provides a justification for these concepts. The differences between France and England are partly to be explained by the fact that the English social order provides many French writers in the eighteenth century with a model in terms of which to criticize their own society; whereas within England no such model as yet exists, although by the end of the century the French Revolution had enabled France to return the compliment.

Nonetheless, in England we can mark the stages by which one moral scheme was transformed into a largely different one. We can use this history to partially explain how philosophical criticism can have quite different relations to social change in different types of period. There may be forms of society in which a variety of criteria are employed to justify and explain moral, social, and political standards. Do we obey the current rules and seek the current ideals because God authorizes them? Or because they are prescribed by a sovereign with legitimate authority? Or because obeying them is in fact a means to the most satisfying forms of human life? Or because, if we do not, we shall be punished or otherwise harmed by those in power? At a practical level it may be unnecessary and irrelevant to decide between these alternatives. For if the standards which are in the end held to be justified seem to be equally justified no matter what criteria we employ in judging them, then the argument about the appropriate way of justifying our standards will seem to be of purely theoretical import, matter for sharpening wits in the schools, but irrelevant in the field or the market place.

Social change, however, may bring theory out of the schools and not only into the market place but even onto the battle field. For consider what may happen in a social order where sacred and secular, church and state, king and parliament, or rich and poor fall apart.

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