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But that hasn’t happened yet. A study published March 10 by the U.N. Environment Program, in partnership with the University of Oxford, found that of the $14.6 trillion committed by governments of the world’s 50 largest economies in 2020, just 2.5% was on programs likely to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions, lower pollution or restoring degraded natural systems.

Based on proportion of GDP, Spain, South Korea, and the U.K. led on green spending during the pandemic—though that is partly because these countries have announced the allocations of greater shares of their recovery plans than most countries so far. But when considering green spending as a proportion of recovery funds so far announced, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Norway, and Poland led.

“Trillions in fiscal spending [still to be announced] provide the greatest opportunity in decades to reorient for the future,” it reads. “Citizens, businesses, policy makers, and politicians must hold each other to account to ensure that the opportunity is not wasted.”

But that blessed feeling evaporated in June of 2019, when I lost my daughter, Frankie, to suicide, three weeks before her high school graduation

Ever since that day, I have thought of little else except how I could help the next struggling teenager, the next Frankie.

Several days after her passing, we opened our home up to our community, including Frankie’s very large group of teenage friends

“What strength Frankie had. It must have taken enormous energy for her to do what she did each day.”

That was Frankie. She had the strength to engage in school and in theater, despite her anxiety and depression. She had an ability to connect — emotionally, profoundly — with others, even when she was struggling herself

“empathy personified, with quite the fabulous earring collection.”

Whether that strength came from her home or somewhere else, or both, Frankie just had a way of drawing out warmth wherever she went.

Just as my parents couldn’t predict in the 1980s what seatbelt safety would look like now, I am not sure what suicide prevention should look like in the future.

Suicidal thinking, whether it is the result of mental illness, stress, trauma or loss, is actually far more common and difficult to see than many of us realize

A June 2020 Centers for Disease Control survey found that one in four 18- to 24-year-olds reported that they had seriously thought about taking their lives in the past 30 days; prepandemic estimates found that just under one in five high schoolers had seriously considered suicide, and just under one in 10 had made at least one suicide attempt during the previous year.

Despite 50 years of research, predicting death by suicide is still nearly impossible

Like others who have lost a child to suicide, I have spent countless hours going over relentless “what ifs.”

Maybe what we need are seatbelts for suicide.

“Click it or Ticket” was born in part out of a concern in the 1980s about teenagers dying in car accidents. Just as with suicides today, adults couldn’t predict who would get into a car accident, and one of the best solutions we had — seatbelts — was used routinely, in some estimates, by only 15 percent of the population. Indeed, as children, my siblings and I used to make a game of rolling around in the back of our car, seatbelts ignored.

Three decades later, our world is unlike anything I could have imagined as a child. Putting on a seatbelt is the first lesson of driver’s education; cars get inspected annually for working seatbelts; car companies embed those annoying beeping sounds to remind you to buckle your seatbelt

But like many who struggle with suicidal thinking, she kept her own pain camouflaged for a long time, perhaps for too long.

Most of us (estimates range as high as 91 percent) now wear a seatbelt.

But I imagine a world in which every health worker, school professional, employer and religious leader can recognize the signs of suicidal thinking and know how to ask about it, respond to it and offer resources to someone who is struggling

When I told Frankie’s orthodontist about her suicide, his response surprised me: “We really don’t come across that in our practice.” Even though orthodontists don’t ask about it, they see children during their early teenage years, when suicidal thinking often begins to emerge. Can you imagine a world in which signs for the prevention hotline and text line are posted for kids to see as they get their braces adjusted?

What if the annual teenage pediatric checkup involved a discussion of one-at-a-time pill packaging and boxes to lock up lethal medications, the way there is a discussion of baby-proofing homes when children start to crawl? What if pediatricians handed each adolescent a card with the prevention hotline on it (or better yet, if companies preprogrammed that number into cellphones) and the pediatrician talked through what happens when a teenager calls? What if doctors coached parents on how to ask their teenager, “Are you thinking about suicide?”

What if we required and funded every school to put in place one of the existing programs that train teachers and other school professionals to be a resource for struggling students?

I recognize that despite progress identifying effective programs to combat suicidal thinking, their success rate and simplicity does not compare with what we see with seatbelts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more.

Part of doing more also includes making the world more just and caring. To give one example, state-level same-sex-marriage policies that were in place before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationally have been linked to reductions in suicide attempts among adolescents, especially among sexual minorities.

Just as safer highways and car models make seatbelts more effective, asking about and responding to suicidal thinking is only one part of a solution that also includes attention to societal injustices.

I understand, of course, that asking about suicidal thinking is scary. But if it is scary for you to ask about it, it is even scarier for the teenager who is thinking about it.

I will never forget sitting with Frankie in the waiting room in the pediatric psychiatric wing on the night I brought her to the inpatient unit, three months before she took her life

“You know, I am so glad you finally know.” I could hear the relief in her voice. I just nodded, understandingly, but it broke my heart that she held on to such a painful secret for so long.

I find myself inspired by Frankie’s teenage friends, who cared deeply for her and now support one another after her passing.

On good days, she would sit on the worn couch in that office, snuggle in a pile of teenagers and discuss plays, schoolwork and their lives.

And in that corner space, she would text a friend to help her get to class or, after she had opened up about her struggles, encourage others to open up as well.

The fall after Frankie left us, some students decided to remake that hidden corner, dotting the walls with colored Post-it notes. Scrawled on a pink Post-it were the words “you matter”; a yellow one read “it gets better”; an orange one shared a cellphone number to call for help. Tiny Post-it squares had transformed the corner into a space to comfort, heal and support the next struggling teenager.

I don’t know if a seatbelt approach would have saved Frankie. And I understand that all the details of such an approach aren’t fully worked out here. But I don’t want us to lose any more children because we weren’t brave enough to take on something that scares us, something we don’t fully understand, something that is much more prevalent than many of us realize.

If 17- and 18-year-olds who’ve lost a friend have the strength to imagine a world dotted with healing, then the least we can do as adults is design and build the structure to support them

The National Academies plan, if implemented, would at least double the total research funding for solar geoengineering to date, and would represent the largest government-led effort anywhere in the world.

The proposal calls for a federal research program initially funded with $100 million to $200 million over five years, earmarking roughly 20% for public outreach and ethical governance.

“The U.S. solar geoengineering research program should be all about helping society make more informed decisions,”

“Spending this money dangles this possibility that there’s this technology out there that might save us, so it diminishes the value of doing the real systemic changes that are needed to address the climate crisis,” said Jennie Stephens, the director of Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. “I don’t think the federal government should be doing this research.” 

Psychiatric patients were managed in the community, with short stay admissions to psychiatry wards if required. On average, patients had two to three weeks of hospitalisation in mixed-gender wards.

And the level of illicit drug and alcohol use in the inpatient population, both prior to and during hospitalisation, heightens the level of behavioural disinhibiton in this population.

In response to escalating assaults in inpatient units, the United Kingdom government adopted a strict policy of gender segregation on psychiatric wards in 2006.

The report does not detail how many incidents involved women, but comment is made that both men and women are vulnerable.

The latest plan to combat violence against women sets out important programs in primary prevention, white ribbon campaigns, work with Indigenous communities and employment-related policies. But has no mention of action to be taken to prevent violence against women in psychiatric wards.

For many decades, women with severe mental disorders were thought to be “too unreliable” to believe when they told their stories of harassment, assault and rape

Over the past years, we have seen improvement in the reporting systems implemented in mental health services and better management of violence against patients, with some shift in the culture of inpatient units; but it is still not good enough.

Investment in improved building designs of psychiatric wards is urgently needed, with special areas designated for women. Wards should be designed to be safe places of healing, with sensitivity for the traumatic backgrounds of many female patients.

Close monitoring of the situation by the general community and governments will ensure violence in psychiatry units is not tolerated.

But the truth is more nuanced, and, statistically at least, the question of how burdensome student debt is and the extent to which it is disrupting major life events depends on a number of factors, including when you graduated from college with debt.

For those who graduated with debt as the economy was crashing, it was a double-whammy, said Keys, “so you’re seeing delayed marriage, delayed child-bearing, which are at least in part a function of the ongoing damage from the Great Recession.

Before the Great Recession, student debt levels were below auto loans, credit card debt and home-equity lines of credit in the ranking of household debt. Since then, student loan debt has surpassed these other debts

A $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.5 percentage points for public four-year college-goers during their mid 20s, equivalent to an average delay of 2.5 months in attaining homeownership,

Individuals who attain higher education average higher salaries, which translates into a higher tax base. With higher levels of education attainment, there is also less reliance on social welfare programs, as individuals who attain higher education are more likely to be employed, less likely to be unemployed, and less likely to be in poverty. Higher levels of education are also associated with greater civic engagement, as well as lower crime.”

In 2014, the largest chunk of student debt — nearly 40% — belonged to people owing between $1 and $10,000.

The bigger problem, Webber said, comes when students take out loans and then don’t graduate from college

Nationally, 60% of people who start at a four-year institution wind up graduating within the next six years

There are other ways in which all debt is not created equal. “Many of the people who have the largest loans and are the most likely to default are also the people who got the worst credentials and poorest quality training when they graduated or potentially didn’t even graduate

But although $1.5 trillion is a big number, it may not be an unreasonable amount given the value it is creating

In 2002, a bachelor’s degree holder could expect to make 75% more than someone with just a high school diploma, and nearly a decade later that premium had risen to 84%

A bachelor’s degree is worth about $2.8 million over a lifetime, the study also found.

Australia has a system that links the repayment of loans with the tax system. “Income-driven repayment options have been created in the U.S.,” said Perna, “but these options are more cumbersome and administratively complex than in Australia and some other nations. By linking the amount of the monthly payment to an individual’s income, income-driven repayment options can help to protect borrowers against the risk of non-repayment. But a more seamless system wouldn’t require borrowers to annually report their income to the U.S. Department of Education

“Promise” or “free tuition” programs cropping up in some states are also worth examining

“Right now there is, frankly, very little accountability that schools have; they practically have no skin in the game. If students default on their loans, there is no bad effect for the school.”

Some opponents of critical race theory responded that these bans aren’t meant to prohibit teaching about critical race theory; that they are, rather, meant to protect individuals, especially children, from coerced speech and indoctrination.

“They also take issue with the way this theory is being imposed on schoolchildren, many of whom have been forced to denounce immutable parts of themselves, such as their skin color and sex, in C.R.T. struggle sessions.”

I don’t like struggle sessions; I think critical race theory as it developed in the academy is intellectually rich, but some of the ways it’s been adapted by workplace diversity trainers and education consultants seem risible.

Rosen referred to a Nevada lawsuit by a Black woman who accused a charter school of making life miserable for her mixed-race son because he rejected certain ideas about privilege and oppression; if the details in it are true, he was seriously mistreated.

right-wing caricature of progressive public schools as pampered re-education camps

This week, they were reinstated, but online only and “asynchronously,” without any live discussions.

The budget bill also banned state colleges and universities from using any appropriated funds to “support social justice ideology student activities, clubs, events and organizations on campus,”

The Idaho Statesman quoted one lawmaker saying of schools, “They’re going to get the message.”

“a series of concerns, culminating in allegations that a student or students have been humiliated and degraded in class on our campus for their beliefs and values.”

But it’s hard to see how whatever happened implicated 52 different classes, and the political pressure the university is under is undeniable.

this month called for millions of dollars in cuts to education funding targeting “social justice programming and critical race theory.”

“Many legislators, frustrated with B.S.U., want to defund the social justice agenda by reducing higher education spending.”

“We’ve seen a spate of these bills across the country, and some of them are more concerning than others,”

“It’s comparable, I think, to what happened in Hungary, where the government there cracked down on, or banished essentially, the teaching of gender studies.”

“Integral to almost all the attacks is the implication that gender studies itself is not an academic discipline, but something larger and more mendacious,”

Relatively powerless academics were demonized as dangerous subversives.

The right likes to pretend that social justice-inflected academic disciplines are full of ideological commissars browbeating conservative students.

in conservative places like Idaho, it’s the professors, many of them untenured, who feel intimidated.

“With the climate as it is, I wouldn’t doubt that folks are starting to look over their shoulder,”

When it comes to the campaign against critical race theory, the fear is part of the point.

Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a huge step forward for children and for working parents alike.

You drop a kid off at a high-quality prekindergarten program in the morning and pick the child up on the way home from work.

When my wife and I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, we sent our kids to one of these nurseries, and they were a dream.

But the United States never developed such a system, because for half a century as other countries were investing in children, the United States was stiffing them.

Today one of our saddest statistics is this: American children ages 1 to 19 are 57 percent more likely to die than children in other rich countries.

Some of those kids die because the United States doesn’t provide universal health care to children — only to senior citizens, who vote and thus are a priority.

Just as Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized conditions for the elderly by instituting Social Security, Biden may be able to do the same for children.

But still more important for America’s future, in my view, will be the elements focused on children.

Making his child allowances permanent.

Expanding home visitation programs that help at-risk moms and dads from pregnancy through early childhood

Working toward universal access to high-quality pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.

Ensuring high-quality affordable day care for parents

One model the White House is studying is the excellent day care system offered by the U.S. military,

For some of my middle-aged friends wrestling with homelessness, mental health crises and decades of addiction, with more of a criminal record than an educational record, it may not be possible to turn lives around. For their kids and grandkids, we have to try.

please, President Biden, push on. This is about America’s future. This is your chance to preside over a Rooseveltian revolution that sprinkles opportunity and averts tragedies for decades to come.

he question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in children and break cycles of poverty, educational failure and substance abuse. It’s whether we can afford not to.

Most university administrators don’t expect their athletics programs to make a lot of money. Only about 25 of the 1,100 NCAA member schools’ athletics departments generate a profit.

public universities with NCAA Division I football teams received about 6% more in state funding annually than other institutions.

Many colleges and universities depend on varsity sports – like rowing, track and swimming – to attract more students to attend.

Most students who play college sports – including all of those at Division III and Ivy League programs – are not on an athletic scholarship.

Playing sports can also help with the transition into college. An intercollegiate team provides a ready-made social group that can help the new team member adjust to their new school.

Research also shows that hiring managers value college sports experience

The financial savings for athletics departments are immediate and obvious. But a longer-term impact will be seen on enrollment, campus life and the communities where colleges are located.

He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall

societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.

Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk

even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.

Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.

that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems

All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”

Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”

Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.

Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.

Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.

This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”

haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?

Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.

Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.

A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse

The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.

Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.

The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?

Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations

The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study

Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.

We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”

In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,

Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd

Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.

Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.

Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”

In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”

The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.

A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.

If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”

Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit

Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”

He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.

It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.

The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.

And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.

“As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”

The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping

Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.

Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two

if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.

Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals

Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.

If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.

Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.

The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems

the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.

If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.

When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.

Ketamine has been used illegally as a club drug. The medication, which is used in hospitals primarily as an anesthetic, generates an intense high and dissociative effects.

McClain is heard in footage from an officer's body camera telling the officers, "I'm an introvert, please respect the boundaries that I am speaking."

Paramedics arrived and administered ketamine, the letter said. McClain was taken to a hospital but suffered a heart attack on the way, and he was declared brain dead three days later, the letter said.

The report noted McClain's history of asthma and the carotid hold, though the autopsy did not determine whether it contributed to McClain's death.

viewers are not only more likely to share humorously presented news but are also more likely to remember the content from these segments.

"We wanted to test whether humor might make news more socially relevant, and therefore motivate people to remember it and share it."

The researchers also asked participants to answer questions about how likely they would be to share the news clips with others.

Participants were more likely to remember information about politics and government policy when it was conveyed in a humorous rather than non-humorous manner and were more willing to share the information online.

"This is significant because entertainment-based media has become an important source of political news, especially for young adults. Our results suggest that humor can increase knowledge about politics."

Rationality is the collection of theories, beliefs, principles, and facts that the human subject uses to judge the world, and a person’s rationality is, to a large extent, the product of that person’s education and moral formation.

To the extent that a person accepts what is handed down from the moral and intellectual traditions of her or his community in learning to judge truth and falsity, good and evil, that person’s rationality is “tradition-constituted.” Tradition-constituted rationality provides the schemata by which we interpret, understand, and judge the world we live in

The apparent problem of relativism in MacIntyre’s theory of rationality is much like the problem of relativism in the philosophy of science. Scientific claims develop within larger theoretical frameworks, so that the apparent truth of a scientific claim depends on one’s judgment of the larger framework. The resolution of the problem of relativism therefore appears to hang on the possibility of judging frameworks or rationalities, or judging between frameworks or rationalities from a position that does not presuppose the truth of the framework or rationality, but no such theoretical standpoint is humanly possible.

MacIntyre finds that the world itself provides the criterion for the testing of rationalities, and he finds that there is no criterion except the world itself that can stand as the measure of the truth of any philosophical theory.

MacIntyre’s philosophy is indebted to the philosophy of science, which recognizes the historicism of scientific enquiry even as it seeks a truthful understanding of the world. MacIntyre’s philosophy does not offer a priori certainty about any theory or principle; it examines the ways in which reflection upon experience supports, challenges, or falsifies theories that have appeared to be the best theories so far to the people who have accepted them so far. MacIntyre’s ideal enquirers remain Hamlets, not Emmas.

history shows us that individuals, communities, and even whole nations may commit themselves militantly over long periods of their histories to doctrines that their ideological adversaries find irrational. This qualified relativism of appearances has troublesome implications for anyone who believes that philosophical enquiry can easily provide certain knowledge of the world

According to MacIntyre, theories govern the ways that we interpret the world and no theory is ever more than “the best standards so far” (3RV, p. 65). Our theories always remain open to improvement, and when our theories change, the appearances of our world—the apparent truths of claims judged within those theoretical frameworks—change with them.

From the subjective standpoint of the human enquirer, MacIntyre finds that theories, concepts, and facts all have histories, and they are all liable to change—for better or for worse.

MacIntyre holds that the rationality of individuals is not only tradition-constituted, it is also tradition constitutive, as individuals make their own contributions to their own rationality, and to the rationalities of their communities. Rationality is not fixed, within either the history of a community or the life of a person

The modern account of first principles justifies an approach to philosophy that rejects tradition. The modern liberal individualist approach is anti-traditional. It denies that our understanding is tradition-constituted and it denies that different cultures may differ in their standards of rationality and justice:

Modernity does not see tradition as the key that unlocks moral and political understanding, but as a superfluous accumulation of opinions that tend to prejudice moral and political reasoning.

Although modernity rejects tradition as a method of moral and political enquiry, MacIntyre finds that it nevertheless bears all the characteristics of a moral and political tradition.

If historical narratives are only projections of the interests of historians, then it is difficult to see how this historical narrative can claim to be truthful

For these post-modern theorists, “if the Enlightenment conceptions of truth and rationality cannot be sustained,” either relativism or perspectivism “is the only possible alternative” (p. 353). MacIntyre rejects both challenges by developing his theory of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality on pp. 354-369

How, then, is one to settle challenges between two traditions? It depends on whether the adherents of either take the challenges of the other tradition seriously. It depends on whether the adherents of either tradition, on seeing a failure in their own tradition are willing to consider an answer offered by their rival (p. 355)

how a person with no traditional affiliation is to deal with the conflicting claims of rival traditions: “The initial answer is: that will depend upon who you are and how you understand yourself. This is not the kind of answer which we have been educated to expect in philosophy”

MacIntyre focuses the critique of modernity on the question of rational justification. Modern epistemology stands or falls on the possibility of Cartesian epistemological first principles. MacIntyre’s history exposes that notion of first principle as a fiction, and at the same time demonstrates that rational enquiry advances (or declines) only through tradition

MacIntyre cites Foucault’s 1966 book, Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1970) as an example of the self-subverting character of Genealogical enquiry

Foucault’s book reduces history to a procession of “incommensurable ordered schemes of classification and representation” none of which has any greater claim to truth than any other, yet this book “is itself organized as a scheme of classification and representation.”

From MacIntyre’s perspective, there is no question of deciding whether or not to work within a tradition; everyone who struggles with practical, moral, and political questions simply does. “There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry . . . apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other”

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). The central idea of the Gifford Lectures is that philosophers make progress by addressing the shortcomings of traditional narratives about the world, shortcomings that become visible either through the failure of traditional narratives to make sense of experience, or through the introduction of contradictory narratives that prove impossible to dismiss

MacIntyre compares three traditions exemplified by three literary works published near the end of Adam Gifford’s life (1820–1887)

The Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875–1889) represents the modern tradition of trying to understand the world objectively without the influence of tradition.

The Genealogy of Morals (1887), by Friedrich Nietzsche embodies the post-modern tradition of interpreting all traditions as arbitrary impositions of power.

The encyclical letter Aeterni Patris (1879) of Pope Leo XIII exemplifies the approach of acknowledging one’s predecessors within one’s own tradition of enquiry and working to advance or improve that tradition in the pursuit of objective truth. 

Of the three versions of moral enquiry treated in 3RV, only tradition, exemplified in 3RV by the Aristotelian, Thomistic tradition, understands itself as a tradition that looks backward to predecessors in order to understand present questions and move forward

Encyclopaedia obscures the role of tradition by presenting the most current conclusions and convictions of a tradition as if they had no history, and as if they represented the final discovery of unalterable truth

Encyclopaedists focus on the present and ignore the past.

Genealogists, on the other hand, focus on the past in order to undermine the claims of the present.

In short, Genealogy denies the teleology of human enquiry by denying (1) that historical enquiry has been fruitful, (2) that the enquiring person has a real identity, and (3) that enquiry has a real goal. MacIntyre finds this mode of enquiry incoherent.

Genealogy is self-deceiving insofar as it ignores the traditional and teleological character of its enquiry.

Genealogical moral enquiry must make similar exceptions to its treatments of the unity of the enquiring subject and the teleology of moral enquiry; thus “it seems to be the case that the intelligibility of genealogy requires beliefs and allegiances of a kind precluded by the genealogical stance” (3RV, p. 54-55)

MacIntyre uses Thomism because it applies the traditional mode of enquiry in a self-conscious manner. Thomistic students learn the work of philosophical enquiry as apprentices in a craft (3RV, p. 61), and maintain the principles of the tradition in their work to extend the understanding of the tradition, even as they remain open to the criticism of those principles.

3RV uses Thomism as its example of tradition, but this use should not suggest that MacIntyre identifies “tradition” with Thomism or Thomism-as-a-name-for-the-Western-tradition. As noted above, WJWR distinguished four traditions of enquiry within the Western European world alone

MacIntyre’s emphasis on the temporality of rationality in traditional enquiry makes tradition incompatible with the epistemological projects of modern philosophy

Tradition is not merely conservative; it remains open to improvement,

Tradition differs from both encyclopaedia and genealogy in the way it understands the place of its theories in the history of human enquiry. The adherent of a tradition must understand that “the rationality of a craft is justified by its history so far,” thus it “is inseparable from the tradition through which it was achieved”

MacIntyre uses Thomas Aquinas to illustrate the revolutionary potential of traditional enquiry. Thomas was educated in Augustinian theology and Aristotelian philosophy, and through this education he began to see not only the contradictions between the two traditions, but also the strengths and weaknesses that each tradition revealed in the other. His education also helped him to discover a host of questions and problems that had to be answered and solved. Many of Thomas Aquinas’ responses to these concerns took the form of disputed questions. “Yet to each question the answer produced by Aquinas as a conclusion is no more than and, given Aquinas’s method, cannot but be no more than, the best answer reached so far. And hence derives the essential incompleteness”

argue that the virtues are essential to the practice of independent practical reason. The book is relentlessly practical; its arguments appeal only to experience and to purposes, and to the logic of practical reasoning.

Like other intelligent animals, human beings enter life vulnerable, weak, untrained, and unknowing, and face the likelihood of infirmity in sickness and in old age. Like other social animals, humans flourish in groups. We learn to regulate our passions, and to act effectively alone and in concert with others through an education provided within a community. MacIntyre’s position allows him to look to the animal world to find analogies to the role of social relationships in the moral formation of human beings

The task for the human child is to make “the transition from the infantile exercise of animal intelligence to the exercise of independent practical reasoning” (DRA, p. 87). For a child to make this transition is “to redirect and transform her or his desires, and subsequently to direct them consistently towards the goods of different stages of her or his life” (DRA, p. 87). The development of independent practical reason in the human agent requires the moral virtues in at least three ways.

DRA presents moral knowledge as a “knowing how,” rather than as a “knowing that.” Knowledge of moral rules is not sufficient for a moral life; prudence is required to enable the agent to apply the rules well.

“Knowing how to act virtuously always involves more than rule-following” (DRA, p. 93). The prudent person can judge what must be done in the absence of a rule and can also judge when general norms cannot be applied to particular cases.

Flourishing as an independent practical reasoner requires the virtues in a second way, simply because sometimes we need our friends to tell us who we really are. Independent practical reasoning also requires self-knowledge, but self-knowledge is impossible without the input of others whose judgment provides a reliable touchstone to test our beliefs about ourselves. Self-knowledge therefore requires the virtues that enable an agent to sustain formative relationships and to accept the criticism of trusted friends

Human flourishing requires the virtues in a third way, by making it possible to participate in social and political action. They enable us to “protect ourselves and others against neglect, defective sympathies, stupidity, acquisitiveness, and malice” (DRA, p. 98) by enabling us to form and sustain social relationships through which we may care for one another in our infirmities, and pursue common goods with and for the other members of our societies.

MacIntyre argues that it is impossible to find an external standpoint, because rational enquiry is an essentially social work (DRA, p. 156-7). Because it is social, shared rational enquiry requires moral commitment to, and practice of, the virtues to prevent the more complacent members of communities from closing off critical reflection upon “shared politically effective beliefs and concepts”

MacIntyre finds himself compelled to answer what may be called the question of moral provincialism: If one is to seek the truth about morality and justice, it seems necessary to “find a standpoint that is sufficiently external to the evaluative attitudes and practices that are to be put to the question.” If it is impossible for the agent to take such an external standpoint, if the agent’s commitments preclude radical criticism of the virtues of the community, does that leave the agent “a prisoner of shared prejudices” (DRA, p. 154)?

The book moves from MacIntyre’s assessment of human needs for the virtues to the political implications of that assessment. Social and political institutions that form and enable independent practical reasoning must “satisfy three conditions.” (1) They must enable their members to participate in shared deliberations about the communities’ actions. (2) They must establish norms of justice “consistent with exercise of” the virtue of justice. (3) They must enable the strong “to stand proxy” as advocates for the needs of the weak and the disabled.

The social and political institutions that MacIntyre recommends cannot be identified with the modern nation state or the modern nuclear family

The political structures necessary for human flourishing are essentially local

Yet local communities support human flourishing only when they actively support “the virtues of just generosity and shared deliberation”

MacIntyre rejects individualism and insists that we view human beings as members of communities who bear specific debts and responsibilities because of our social identities. The responsibilities one may inherit as a member of a community include debts to one’s forbearers that one can only repay to people in the present and future

The constructive argument of the second half of the book begins with traditional accounts of the excellences or virtues of practical reasoning and practical rationality rather than virtues of moral reasoning or morality. These traditional accounts define virtue as arête, as excellence

Practices are supported by institutions like chess clubs, hospitals, universities, industrial corporations, sports leagues, and political organizations.

Practices exist in tension with these institutions, since the institutions tend to be oriented to goods external to practices. Universities, hospitals, and scholarly societies may value prestige, profitability, or relations with political interest groups above excellence in the practices they are said to support.

Personal desires and institutional pressures to pursue external goods may threaten to derail practitioners’ pursuits of the goods internal to practices. MacIntyre defines virtue initially as the quality of character that enables an agent to overcome these temptations:

“A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices

Excellence as a human agent cannot be reduced to excellence in a particular practice (See AV, pp. 204–

The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations, and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good (AV, p. 219).

The excellent human agent has the moral qualities to seek what is good and best both in practices and in life as a whole.

The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context (AV, p. 223)

Since “goods, and with them the only grounds for the authority of laws and virtues, can only be discovered by entering into those relationships which constitute communities whose central bond is a shared vision of and understanding of goods” (AV, p. 258), any hope for the transformation and renewal of society depends on the development and maintenance of such communities.

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian approach to ethics as a study of human action distinguishes him from post-Kantian moral philosophers who approach ethics as a means of determining the demands of objective, impersonal, universal morality

This modern approach may be described as moral epistemology. Modern moral philosophy pretends to free the individual to determine for her- or himself what she or he must do in a given situation, irrespective of her or his own desires; it pretends to give knowledge of universal moral laws

Aristotelian metaphysicians, particularly Thomists who define virtue in terms of the perfection of nature, rejected MacIntyre’s contention that an adequate Aristotelian account of virtue as excellence in practical reasoning and human action need not appeal to Aristotelian metaphysic

one group of critics rejects MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism because they hold that any Aristotelian account of the virtues must first account for the truth about virtue in terms of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, which MacIntyre had dismissed in AV as “metaphysical biology”

Many of those who rejected MacIntyre’s turn to Aristotle define “virtue” primarily along moral lines, as obedience to law or adherence to some kind of natural norm. For these critics, “virtuous” appears synonymous with “morally correct;” their resistance to MacIntyre’s appeal to virtue stems from their difficulties either with what they take to be the shortcomings of MacIntyre’s account of moral correctness or with the notion of moral correctness altogether

MacIntyre continues to argue from the experience of practical reasoning to the demands of moral education.

Descartes and his successors, by contrast, along with certain “notable Thomists of the last hundred years” (p. 175), have proposed that philosophy begins from knowledge of some “set of necessarily true first principles which any truly rational person is able to evaluate as true” (p. 175). Thus for the moderns, philosophy is a technical rather than moral endeavor

MacIntyre distinguishes two related challenges to his position, the “relativist challenge” and the “perspectivist challenge.” These two challenges both acknowledge that the goals of the Enlightenment cannot be met and that, “the only available standards of rationality are those made available by and within traditions” (p. 252); they conclude that nothing can be known to be true or false

MacIntyre follows the progress of the Western tradition through “three distinct traditions:” from Homer and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and from Augustine through Calvin to Hume

Chapter 17 examines the modern liberal denial of tradition, and the ironic transformation of liberalism into the fourth tradition to be treated in the book.

MacIntyre credits John Stuart Mill and Thomas Aquinas as “two philosophers of the kind who by their writing send us beyond philosophy into immediate encounter with the ends of life

First, both were engaged by questions about the ends of life as questioning human beings and not just as philosophers. . . .

Secondly, both Mill and Aquinas understood their speaking and writing as contributing to an ongoing philosophical conversation. . . .

Thirdly, it matters that both the end of the conversation and the good of those who participate in it is truth and that the nature of truth, of good, of rational justification, and of meaning therefore have to be central topics of that conversation (Tasks, pp. 130-1).

Without these three characteristics, philosophy is first reduced to “the exercise of a set of analytic and argumentative skills. . . . Secondly, philosophy may thereby become a diversion from asking questions about the ends of life with any seriousness”

Neither Rosenzweig nor Lukács made philosophical progress because both failed to relate “their questions about the ends of life to the ends of their philosophical writing”

First, any adequate philosophical history or biography must determine whether the authors studied remain engaged with the questions that philosophy studies, or set the questions aside in favor of the answers. Second, any adequate philosophical history or biography must determine whether the authors studied insulated themselves from contact with conflicting worldviews or remained open to learning from every available philosophical approach. Third, any adequate philosophical history or biography must place the authors studied into a broader context that shows what traditions they come from and “whose projects” they are “carrying forward

MacIntyre’s recognition of the connection between an author’s pursuit of the ends of life and the same author’s work as a philosophical writer prompts him to finish the essay by demanding three things of philosophical historians and biographers

Philosophy is not just a study; it is a practice. Excellence in this practice demands that an author bring her or his struggles with the questions of the ends of philosophy into dialogue with historic and contemporary texts and authors in the hope of making progress in answering those questions

MacIntyre defends Thomistic realism as rational enquiry directed to the discovery of truth.

The three Thomistic essays in this book challenge those caricatures by presenting Thomism in a way that people outside of contemporary Thomistic scholarship may find surprisingly flexible and open

To be a moral agent, (1) one must understand one’s individual identity as transcending all the roles that one fills; (2) one must see oneself as a practically rational individual who can judge and reject unjust social standards; and (3) one must understand oneself as “as accountable to others in respect of the human virtues and not just in respect of [one’s] role-performances

J is guilty because he complacently accepted social structures that he should have questioned, structures that undermined his moral agency. This essay shows that MacIntyre’s ethics of human agency is not just a descriptive narrative about the manner of moral education; it is a standard laden account of the demands of moral agency.

MacIntyre considers “the case of J” (J, for jemand, the German word for “someone”), a train controller who learned, as a standard for his social role, to take no interest in what his trains carried, even during war time when they carried “munitions and . . . Jews on their way to extermination camps”

J had learned to do his work for the railroad according to one set of standards and to live other parts of his life according to other standards, so that this compliant participant in “the final solution” could contend, “You cannot charge me with moral failure” (E&P, p. 187).

The epistemological theories of Modern moral philosophy were supposed to provide rational justification for rules, policies, and practical determinations according to abstract universal standards, but MacIntyre has dismissed those theorie

Modern metaethics is supposed to enable its practitioners to step away from the conflicting demands of contending moral traditions and to judge those conflicts from a neutral position, but MacIntyre has rejected this project as well

In his ethical writings, MacIntyre seeks only to understand how to liberate the human agent from blindness and stupidity, to prepare the human agent to recognize what is good and best to do in the concrete circumstances of that agent’s own life, and to strengthen the agent to follow through on that judgment.

In his political writings, MacIntyre investigates the role of communities in the formation of effective rational agents, and the impact of political institutions on the lives of communities. This kind of ethics and politics is appropriately named the ethics of human agency.

The purpose of the modern moral philosophy of authors like Kant and Mill was to determine, rationally and universally, what kinds of behavior ought to be performed—not in terms of the agent’s desires or goals, but in terms of universal, rational duties. Those theories purported to let agents know what they ought to do by providing knowledge of duties and obligations, thus they could be described as theories of moral epistemology.

Contemporary virtue ethics purports to let agents know what qualities human beings ought to have, and the reasons that we ought to have them, not in terms of our fitness for human agency, but in the same universal, disinterested, non-teleological terms that it inherits from Kant and Mill.

For MacIntyre, moral knowledge remains a “knowing how” rather than a “knowing that;” MacIntyre seeks to identify those moral and intellectual excellences that make human beings more effective in our pursuit of the human good.

MacIntyre’s purpose in his ethics of human agency is to consider what it means to seek one’s good, what it takes to pursue one’s good, and what kind of a person one must become if one wants to pursue that good effectively as a human agent.

As a philosophy of human agency, MacIntyre’s work belongs to the traditions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

in keeping with the insight of Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, it maintained the common condition of theorists and people as peers in the pursuit of the good life.

He holds that the human good plays a role in our practical reasoning whether we recognize it or not, so that some people may do well without understanding why (E&P, p. 25). He also reads Aristotle as teaching that knowledge of the good can make us better agents

AV defines virtue in terms of the practical requirements for excellence in human agency, in an agent’s participation in practices (AV, ch. 14), in an agent’s whole life, and in an agent’s involvement in the life of her or his community

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian concept of “human action” opposes the notion of “human behavior” that prevailed among mid-twentieth-century determinist social scientists. Human actions, as MacIntyre understands them, are acts freely chosen by human agents in order to accomplish goals that those agents pursue

Human behavior, according to mid-twentieth-century determinist social scientists, is the outward activity of a subject, which is said to be caused entirely by environmental influences beyond the control of the subject.

Rejecting crude determinism in social science, and approaches to government and public policy rooted in determinism, MacIntyre sees the renewal of human agency and the liberation of the human agent as central goals for ethics and politics.

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian account of “human action” examines the habits that an agent must develop in order to judge and act most effectively in the pursuit of truly choice-worthy ends

MacIntyre seeks to understand what it takes for the human person to become the kind of agent who has the practical wisdom to recognize what is good and best to do and the moral freedom to act on her or his best judgment.

MacIntyre rejected the determinism of modern social science early in his career (“Determinism,” 1957), yet he recognizes that the ability to judge well and act freely is not simply given; excellence in judgment and action must be developed, and it is the task of moral philosophy to discover how these excellences or virtues of the human agent are established, maintained, and strengthened

MacIntyre’s Aristotelian philosophy investigates the conditions that support free and deliberate human action in order to propose a path to the liberation of the human agent through participation in the life of a political community that seeks its common goods through the shared deliberation and action of its members

As a classics major at Queen Mary College in the University of London (1945-1949), MacIntyre read the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, but his studies were not limited to the grammars of ancient languages. He also examined the ethical theories of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. He attended the lectures of analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer and of philosopher of science Karl Popper. He read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s L'existentialisme est un humanisme, and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte (What happened, pp. 17-18). MacIntyre met the sociologist Franz Steiner, who helped direct him toward approaching moralities substantively

Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophy builds on an unusual foundation. His early life was shaped by two conflicting systems of values. One was “a Gaelic oral culture of farmers and fishermen, poets and storytellers.” The other was modernity, “The modern world was a culture of theories rather than stories” (MacIntyre Reader, p. 255). MacIntyre embraced both value systems

From Marxism, MacIntyre learned to see liberalism as a destructive ideology that undermines communities in the name of individual liberty and consequently undermines the moral formation of human agents

For MacIntyre, Marx’s way of seeing through the empty justifications of arbitrary choices to consider the real goals and consequences of political actions in economic and social terms would remain the principal insight of Marxism

After his retirement from teaching, MacIntyre has continued his work of promoting a renewal of human agency through an examination of the virtues demanded by practices, integrated human lives, and responsible engagement with community life. He is currently affiliated with the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University.

The second half of AV proposes a conception of practice and practical reasoning and the notion of excellence as a human agent as an alternative to modern moral philosophy

AV rejects the view of “modern liberal individualism” in which autonomous individuals use abstract moral principles to determine what they ought to do. The critique of modern normative ethics in the first half of AV rejects modern moral reasoning for its failure to justify its premises, and criticizes the frequent use of the rhetoric of objective morality and scientific necessity to manipulate people to accept arbitrary decisions

MacIntyre uses “modern liberal individualism” to name a much broader category that includes both liberals and conservatives in contemporary American political parlance, as well as some Marxists and anarchists (See ASIA, pp. 280-284). Conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism all present the autonomous individual as the unit of civil society

The sources of modern liberal individualism—Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—assert that human life is solitary by nature and social by habituation and convention. MacIntyre’s Aristotelian tradition holds, on the contrary, that human life is social by nature.

MacIntyre identifies moral excellence with effective human agency, and seeks a political environment that will help to liberate human agents to recognize and seek their own goods, as components of the common goods of their communities, more effectively. For MacIntyre therefore, ethics and politics are bound together.

For MacIntyre ethics is not an application of principles to facts, but a study of moral action. Moral action, free human action, involves decisions to do things in pursuit of goals, and it involves the understanding of the implications of one’s actions for the whole variety of goals that human agents seek

In this sense, “To act morally is to know how to act” (SMJ, p. 56). “Morality is not a ‘knowing that’ but a ‘knowing how’”

If human action is a ‘knowing how,’ then ethics must also consider how one learns ‘how.’ Like other forms of ‘knowing how,’ MacIntyre finds that one learns how to act morally within a community whose language and shared standards shape our judgment

MacIntyre had concluded that ethics is not an abstract exercise in the assessment of facts; it is a study of free human action and of the conditions that enable rational human agency.

MacIntyre gives Marx credit for concluding in the third of the Theses on Feuerbach, that the only way to change society is to change ourselves, and that “The coincidence of the changing of human activity or self-changing can only be comprehended and rationally understood as revolutionary practice”

MacIntyre distinguishes “religion which is an opiate for the people from religion which is not” (MI, p. 83). He condemns forms of religion that justify social inequities and encourage passivity. He argues that authentic Christian teaching criticizes social structures and encourages action

Where “moral philosophy textbooks” discuss the kinds of maxims that should guide “promise-keeping, truth-telling, and the like,” moral maxims do not guide real agents in real life at all. “They do not guide us because we do not need to be guided. We know what to do” (ASIA, p. 106). Sometimes we do this without any maxims at all, or even against all the maxims we know. MacIntyre Illustrates his point with Huckleberry Finn’s decision to help Jim, Miss Watson’s escaped slave, to make his way to freedom

MacIntyre develops the ideas that morality emerges from history, and that morality organizes the common life of a community

The book concludes that the concepts of morality are neither timeless nor ahistorical, and that understanding the historical development of ethical concepts can liberate us “from any false absolutist claims” (SHE, p. 269). Yet this conclusion need not imply that morality is essentially arbitrary or that one could achieve freedom by liberating oneself from the morality of one’s society.

From this “Aristotelian point of view,” “modern morality” begins to go awry when moral norms are separated from the pursuit of human goods and moral behavior is treated as an end in itself. This separation characterizes Christian divine command ethics since the fourteenth century and has remained essential to secularized modern morality since the eighteenth century

From MacIntyre’s “Aristotelian point of view,” the autonomy granted to the human agent by modern moral philosophy breaks down natural human communities and isolates the individual from the kinds of formative relationships that are necessary to shape the agent into an independent practical reasoner.

the 1977 essay “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science” (Hereafter EC). This essay, MacIntyre reports, “marks a major turning-point in my thought in the 1970s” (The Tasks of Philosophy, p. vii) EC may be described fairly as MacIntyre’s discourse on method

First, Philosophy makes progress through the resolution of problems. These problems arise when the theories, histories, doctrines and other narratives that help us to organize our experience of the world fail us, leaving us in “epistemological crises.” Epistemological crises are the aftermath of events that undermine the ways that we interpret our world

it presents three general points on the method for philosophy.

To live in an epistemological crisis is to be aware that one does not know what one thought one knew about some particular subject and to be anxious to recover certainty about that subject.

To resolve an epistemological crisis it is not enough to impose some new way of interpreting our experience, we also need to understand why we were wrong before: “When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them

MacIntyre notes, “Philosophers have customarily been Emmas and not Hamlets” (p. 6); that is, philosophers have treated their conclusions as accomplished truths, rather than as “more adequate narratives” (p. 7) that remain open to further improvement.

To illustrate his position on the open-endedness of enquiry, MacIntyre compares the title characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jane Austen’s Emma. When Emma finds that she is deeply misled in her beliefs about the other characters in her story, Mr. Knightly helps her to learn the truth and the story comes to a happy ending (p. 6). Hamlet, by contrast, finds no pat answers to his questions; rival interpretations remain throughout the play, so that directors who would stage the play have to impose their own interpretations on the script

Another approach to education is the method of Descartes, who begins by rejecting everything that is not clearly and distinctly true as unreliable and false in order to rebuild his understanding of the world on a foundation of undeniable truth.

Descartes presents himself as willfully rejecting everything he had believed, and ignores his obvious debts to the Scholastic tradition, even as he argues his case in French and Latin. For MacIntyre, seeking epistemological certainty through universal doubt as a precondition for enquiry is a mistake: “it is an invitation not to philosophy but to mental breakdown, or rather to philosophy as a means of mental breakdown.

MacIntyre contrasts Descartes’ descent into mythical isolation with Galileo, who was able to make progress in astronomy and physics by struggling with the apparently insoluble questions of late medieval astronomy and physics, and radically reinterpreting the issues that constituted those questions

To make progress in philosophy one must sort through the narratives that inform one’s understanding, struggle with the questions that those narratives raise, and on occasion, reject, replace, or reinterpret portions of those narratives and propose those changes to the rest of one’s community for assessment. Human enquiry is always situated within the history and life of a community.

The third point of EC is that we can learn about progress in philosophy from the philosophy of science

Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts,” however, are unlike MacIntyre’s resolutions of epistemological crises in two ways.

First they are not rational responses to specific problems. Kuhn compares paradigm shifts to religious conversions (pp. 150, 151, 158), stressing that they are not guided by rational norms and he claims that the “mopping up” phase of a paradigm shift is a matter of convention in the training of new scientists and attrition among the holdouts of the previous paradigm

Second, the new paradigm is treated as a closed system of belief that regulates a new period of “normal science”; Kuhn’s revolutionary scientists are Emmas, not Hamlets

MacIntyre proposes elements of Imre Lakatos’ philosophy of science as correctives to Kuhn’s. While Lakatos has his own shortcomings, his general account of the methodologies of scientific research programs recognizes the role of reason in the transitions between theories and between research programs (Lakatos’ analog to Kuhn’s paradigms or disciplinary matrices). Lakatos presents science as an open ended enquiry, in which every theory may eventually be replaced by more adequate theories. For Lakatos, unlike Kuhn, rational scientific progress occurs when a new theory can account both for the apparent promise and for the actual failure of the theory it replaces.

The third conclusion of MacIntyre’s essay is that decisions to support some theories over others may be justified rationally to the extent that those theories allow us to understand our experience and our history, including the history of the failures of inadequate theories

For Aristotle, moral philosophy is a study of practical reasoning, and the excellences or virtues that Aristotle recommends in the Nicomachean Ethics are the intellectual and moral excellences that make a moral agent effective as an independent practical reasoner.

MacIntyre also finds that the contending parties have little interest in the rational justification of the principles they use. The language of moral philosophy has become a kind of moral rhetoric to be used to manipulate others in defense of the arbitrary choices of its users

examining the current condition of secular moral and political discourse. MacIntyre finds contending parties defending their decisions by appealing to abstract moral principles, but he finds their appeals eclectic, inconsistent, and incoherent.

The secular moral philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shared strong and extensive agreements about the content of morality (AV, p. 51) and believed that their moral philosophy could justify the demands of their morality rationally, free from religious authority.

MacIntyre traces the lineage of the culture of emotivism to the secularized Protestant cultures of northern Europe

Modern moral philosophy had thus set for itself an incoherent goal. It was to vindicate both the moral autonomy of the individual and the objectivity, necessity, and categorical character of the rules of morality

MacIntyre turns to an apparent alternative, the pragmatic expertise of professional managers. Managers are expected to appeal to the facts to make their decisions on the objective basis of effectiveness, and their authority to do this is based on their knowledge of the social sciences

An examination of the social sciences reveals, however, that many of the facts to which managers appeal depend on sociological theories that lack scientific status. Thus, the predictions and demands of bureaucratic managers are no less liable to ideological manipulation than the determinations of modern moral philosophers.

Modern moral philosophy separates moral reasoning about duties and obligations from practical reasoning about ends and practical deliberation about the means to one’s ends, and in doing so it separates morality from practice.

Many Europeans also lost the practical justifications for their moral norms as they approached modernity; for these Europeans, claiming that certain practices are “immoral,” and invoking Kant’s categorical imperative or Mill’s principle of utility to explain why those practices are immoral, seems no more adequate than the Polynesian appeal to taboo.

MacIntyre sifts these definitions and then gives his own definition of virtue, as excellence in human agency, in terms of practices, whole human lives, and traditions in chapters 14 and 15 of AV.

In the most often quoted sentence of AV, MacIntyre defines a practice as (1) a complex social activity that (2) enables participants to gain goods internal to the practice. (3) Participants achieve excellence in practices by gaining the internal goods. When participants achieve excellence, (4) the social understandings of excellence in the practice, of the goods of the practice, and of the possibility of achieving excellence in the practice “are systematically extended”

Practices, like chess, medicine, architecture, mechanical engineering, football, or politics, offer their practitioners a variety of goods both internal and external to these practices. The goods internal to practices include forms of understanding or physical abilities that can be acquired only by pursuing excellence in the associated practice

Goods external to practices include wealth, fame, prestige, and power; there are many ways to gain these external goods. They can be earned or purchased, either honestly or through deception; thus the pursuit of these external goods may conflict with the pursuit of the goods internal to practices.

An intelligent child is given the opportunity to win candy by learning to play chess. As long as the child plays chess only to win candy, he has every reason to cheat if by doing so he can win more candy. If the child begins to desire and pursue the goods internal to chess, however, cheating becomes irrational, because it is impossible to gain the goods internal to chess or any other practice except through an honest pursuit of excellence. Goods external to practices may nevertheless remain tempting to the practitioner.

Since MacIntyre finds social identity necessary for the individual, MacIntyre’s definition of the excellence or virtue of the human agent needs a social dimension:

These responsibilities also include debts incurred by the unjust actions of ones’ predecessors.

The enslavement and oppression of black Americans, the subjugation of Ireland, and the genocide of the Jews in Europe remained quite relevant to the responsibilities of citizens of the United States, England, and Germany in 1981, as they still do today.

Thus an American who said “I never owned any slaves,” “the Englishman who says ‘I never did any wrong to Ireland,’” or “the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries” all exhibit a kind of intellectual and moral failure.

“I am born with a past, and to cut myself off from that past in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships” (p. 221).  For MacIntyre, there is no moral identity for the abstract individual; “The self has to find its moral identity in and through its membership in communities” (p. 221).

Fifth, people don’t like to be told what to think, and may rebel if they feel that they’re being pressured to think a certain way.

our training model of “teaching people to be good” is based on the illusion that you can change people’s minds and behaviors by presenting them with new information and new thoughts.

If this were generally so, moral philosophers would behave better than the rest of us

People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan

doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds.

This points to a more fundamental vision of social change, but it is a hard-won lesson from a bitterly divisive year.

It turns out that if you tell someone their facts are wrong, you don’t usually win them over; you just entrench false belief.

Our current model of social change isn’t working.

impervious to evidence, willing to believe the most outlandish things if it suited their biases

this was the year that showed that our models for how we change minds or change behavior are deeply flawed.

The courses teach people about bias, they combat stereotypes and they encourage people to assume the perspectives of others in disadvantaged groups.

One of the most studied examples of this flawed model is racial diversity training

this was the year that called into question the very processes by which our society supposedly makes progress.

but the bulk of the evidence, though not all of it, suggests they don’t reduce discrimination.

One meta-analysis of 985 studies of anti-bias interventions found little evidence that these programs reduced bias. Other studies sometimes do find a short-term change in attitudes, but very few find a widespread change in actual behavior.

First, “short-term educational interventions in general do not change people.”

Third, training can make people complacent, thinking that because they went through the program they’ve solved the problem

Patterns that didn’t change one generation to the next, Dr. Conway called still lifes — such as the four-celled block, the six-celled beehive or the eight-celled pond. Patterns that took a long time to stabilize, he called methuselahs.