Narrativity and Ethical Relativism

Mark Colby

My aim is to examine the relationship between Alasdair MacIntyres account of narratives and ethical relativism in After Virtue, his virtue-based critique of the liberal individualism of modernity, and to argue that this account is an unserviceable substitute for the strong teleological assumptions informing the neo-Aristotelian account of morality which MacIntyre seeks to rehabilitate. Since narrativity is only an ontological conception, it needs independent normative principles to play any role - whether liberal or illiberal - in moral or political theory, yet their source and justification are unclear. Moreover, contrary to MacIntyres aims, his account of practices, virtues, and moral traditions does not avoid ethical relativism.

1. MacIntyres Conception of Narratives

MacIntyre conceives of the virtues as providing our lives with an essential structure, continuity, and moral content. He elucidates a unitary core concept of the virtues in three stages. The first stage invokes an account of practices, the second of the narrative order of a human life, and the third of moral traditions (187).] The first stage provisionally defines a virtue as an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods (191). Acquired human qualities or virtues cannot comprise the entirety of a moral life. The good embodied in diverse practices and the demands that practices make on individuals may conflict; some practices are morally inadmissible (200); and there is a danger that virtues spring only from whatever choice of practices individuals arbitrarily make (203). Human life informed by the virtues alone would be pervaded by too many conflicts and too much arbitrariness (201), raising the possibility of ethical relativism and unsettleable conflicts among practices and conceptions of the good life (199-203): any practice or conception of the good life would be admissible, and there would be no discrimination between genuine and spurious virtues. Without an overriding conception of the telos of a whole human life, conceived as a unity, our conception of certain individual virtues has to remain partial and incomplete (202) and unconstrained.
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The second stage of the argument invokes the teleological idea of the unity of, or overarching good for, an entire human life. '[Ulnless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity . . . a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life' (203).Each life has or seeks its attendant good, and the virtues enable an individual to make of his life one kind of unity rather than another. The unity of a human life provides a basis to elucidate a formal conception of the good to be pursued by each individual. '[Tlhe unity of a virtue in someone's life is intelligible only as a characteristic of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole' (205). The teleological tradition also makes it possible to evaluate moral statements as true or false, thereby preserving a vital form of moral justification (59)lost to modern ethical reasoning. If the nature and role of moral concepts become unintelligible without some form of teleology (54-55), what form of teleology is adequate under modern conditions of thought and practice? MacIntyre resurrects the idea of an essential human purpose or function to provide the unity necessary to pursue the good, but in the form of a conception of narratives in place of Aristotelian metaphysical biology. He contends that human action is irreducible to causal explanations in terms of bodily motions or natural events, and can be grasped only by addressing the reasons agents give to themselves and to others for their acting as they do in pursuit of what they identify as their ends. No nomological and predictive account of human action is possible. What is needed is an intentionalist account of human life as embedded in a historical sequence. Every experience, action, utterance is intelligible only within a narrative. A narrative is the form that a human life takes (124,205):'an action is a moment in a possible or actual history . . . The notion of a history is as fundamental a notion as the notion of an action. Each requires the other' (214). The category of narrative history is fundamental for understanding human action (208, 211). '[Mlan is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal . . . I can only answer the question "What am I to do?" if I can answer the prior question "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?" '(216). Such a historically narrated sequence or story comprises a temporal framework in which the person's deliberations and actions are related to one another over time. 'There is no present which is not informed by some image of some future and an image of the future which always presents itself in the form of a telos - or a variety of ends or goals - toward which we are either moving or failing to move in the present' (215-16). The form human life takes is that of a narrative quest (218-19) which unifies each human life. Unpredictability in narratives is an ineliminable feature of human life (215-16) that also coexists with the teleological character of narratives in that 'our lives have a certain form which projects itself towards our future' (216). When this form, narrative unity, is imperiled the unity of the virtues is likewise imperiled: 'the unity of a virtue in someone's life is intelligible only as a characteristic of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole' (205).
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Withdrawing from social life the background concepts of the narrative unity of
a human life and of the internal goods of practices dispossesses the virtues. In the arguments third stage, the idea of a tradition provides a constraint on

narrative possibilities. All narratives are embedded in moral and rational traditions, living contexts that sustain the virtues; they overcome the errors of individualism (220) and provide the necessary historical context to enable US to achieve the goods internal to practices (223).

2. Narrativity as an Ontological Thesis

Although MacIntyre does not distinguish between ontological and normative aspects of narratives, this distinction is essential in understanding the nature and limits of the validity of that conception. To reconstruct the ontological thesis, as it may be named, that MacIntyre formulates without recognizing it as such, first the scope of his account must be elucidated. Although MacIntyre does not elucidate its status, his account of narrativity offers not just an empirical, sociological thesis regarding a particular set of societies and their contingent processes of socialization and identity formation, but also an ontological thesis regarding the universal, trans-communitarian, cross-traditional character of narratives as the medium in which all human identities develop.* Narrativity is a universal conceptual category, for through it identity and action are constituted both for oneself and for all others. It is because we all live our narratives in our own lives, he states, and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others (212; cf. 124,216-17). To understand who and what a person is requires an understanding of the multiplicity of interleaving narratives that one co-authors and of which one finds oneself a part. [Tlhe story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide [221; emphasis added]. Human actions in general are enacted narratives (211); all socialized human beings coauthor narratives to which they stand in unique reflexive relationships. For any culture and any recognizably human member of it, the relating to oneself o r others of a series o f unique temporal events, constituting a unified and meaningful sequence, is how the self is generated and comes to understand itself as a being possessing such a distinctive history. The possibility of a life having a narrative content, generated and related in this way, is the condition of

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possibility of that lifes possession of an identity: agents are such only if they can be considered to have and be able to relate a unique and continuous history of such events, which through narratives are thereby transmitted and integrated into meaningful experiences. Narrativity, history, and identity are, one may say, internally related: identity is not ontologically pregiven, but is the outcome of a process of constitution through the co-authorship of narratives in which that identity is embedded. The inescapable need for structure and continuity provided for ones life by a narrative that integrates past, present, and future into a unified whole represents nothing less than an ontological condition of mankind. A necessary condition of the intelligibility of human action is the identification of the appropriate narrative context. [Rlendering a particular sequence of actions intelligible always presupposes some degree of assumption about the narrative context of that sequence (MacIntyre (1982), 664; emphasis added). Human agents are identifiable as such only because their actions are intelligible against the background of a narrative history of reasons for actions as much as of causes of behaviour. Thus Aristotlesaccount of the practical syllogism can be construed as providing a statement of necessary conditions for intelligible human action and as doing so in a way that must hold for any recognizably human culture (161).

3. The Normative Content of Narratives

A strong teleological, metaphysical biology like Aristotles and a modernist, weakly teleological, post-metaphysical conception of narratives crucially differ. The former not only contains factual premises about human nature, but assimilates them to evaluate conclusions (for example, teleological injunctions about morality) so that practical reason may discern our true end and essence. The classical ages teleological scheme combines two elements (untutored human nature and a conception of human nature as it could and ought to be were its felos realized) with the precepts of rational ethics, which are the means for the transition from one to the other (53). By contrast, a teleological conception of narratives offers no comparable rational precepts for a transition from human nature as it happens to be to the attaining of the true end of man, nor any ultimate justification of any such precepts. As MacIntyre acknowledges, the disappearance of the essentialist, metaphysical teleology of the classical age entails that the connection between the precepts of morality and the facts of human nature likewise disappears (56), so moral judgments can no longer be seen as cognitive - as factual statements admitting of truth or falsity. They are instead instruments of will for modernitys emotivist self, for whom moral judgments are not objective matters of agreement but matters of subjective or arbitrary decisions closed to reason and justifications (60). Consider the normative question of MacIntyres specific affirmations and

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denials, such as his dismissal of liberalism as a coherent position. These are grounded not just in his conception of narrativity, but in a three-stage argument regarding the internal goods of practices, the virtues, and the embodiment of practices in moral traditions. This argumentative context gives the teleological conception of narrativity its meaning and plausibility under modern, postmetaphysical, conditions of understanding human nature. It would be invalid to infer directly from factual premises regarding the narrative condition of mankind to illiberal conclusions, for no longer are there any accepted precepts of rational ethics to proceed from factual premises to normative conclusions. To claim that normative conclusions follow from ontological conditions alone is a naturalistic fallacy. Although MacIntyres conception of the narrative structure of human life provides a quasi-transcendental account of necessary, structural conditions for any adequate understanding of action or the formation of identity, these conditions are insufficient to ground his substantive value positions on modernity without further normative assumptions.3 A conception of narrativity alone is not enough to provide normative content either positively (so as to provide criteria for affirming a particular set of practices, values, goods, or institutional arrangements) or negatively (so as to exclude liberalism as an adequate moral-political doctrine). Even if it is empirically true that various concrete conditions are necessary for an individual to acquire and exercise his capacity for human agency, their normative validity logically cannot follow. (MacIntyre himself argues (67) - against Alan Gewirths Reason and Morality - that, from the premise that rational agency requires the realization of particular conditions or necessary goods like freedom or well-being, it does not follow that others are obligated to provide them or that there are any grounds for entitlement to them.) So an ontological account of conditions of human agency provides no reason to consider whatever is necessary for the development and exercise of human agency to be normatively valid. It can neither prescribe any particular norm, claim, or action nor tell us whether it is right to criticize any particular value standpoint. Narrativity may well be a necessary ontological condition for the existence of human agency. But even if we assume that the capacity to achieve a narrative unity in ones life that makes possible ones quest for the good is essential to the formation and preservation of human identity and to understand whom and what one was, is, and may become, it is essential to notice eight matters of normative content about which this thesis logically is silent. First, the ontological thesis cannot tell us whether human beings should engage in the process of narrative co-authorship and thereby quest for their good. The thesis only states necessary ontological conditions for the existence and intelligibility of human agency. It cannot assign that existence any intrinsic or instrumental value, since narrativity has a dual status, as fact and as norm. Although moral and political thought begins with the assumption that the stories we construct by which to define ourselves and relate to others matter, why we claim this and how we justify our understandings of why and how they

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matter are separate normative projects. Only such projects can answer the attendant question of why narratives have any moral-political value. Second, the thesis does not entail that all actual or potential human beings have a claim to possess narratives; it cannot tell us which such beings should be permitted to engage in the process of narrative co-authorship. Even if each physically independent human organism is capable of becoming an individual person through socio-linguistically mediated interaction with others, as part of the creation of a narrative which integrates the history of that formation through interaction for that specific and unique individual, nothing follows regarding which such organisms become persons through narrative co-authorship or through what institutional means they do so. An independent normative standard is needed to identify the bearers of narratives. Third, a normative problem concerns the locus of authorship. Narrativity neither entails nor presupposes a locus in the autonomy of individual subjects; it can rest in institutions, collectivities, nature, fate, or with the gods. It is no part of the ontology or narratives alone that I am the subject of a history that is my own and no one elses (217). All human beings have life stories, but the degree to which they are the principal authors of their own stories, or to what extent principal authorship is determined by the exercise of their capacities for reflexive agency and autonomy rather than institutional forces, varies historically and socio-culturally. Whereas from the third person or objectifying standpoint, anything in time can have a story told about it, from the first-person standpoint, not all human beings ever were, are, or will be aware of themselves as possessing life stories at all - uniquely individuating or not. Fourth, the ontological thesis does not entail any particular normative relation between the bearers of narratives and the conditions of narrativity. Whether the social, cultural, historical, and other material conditions promoting narrative unity should be valued, and in what precise ways, cannot be derived from the ontological thesis. Nor does it entail that individuals have a claim to a voice in the determination of such specific conditions as would enable them to be cognizant of different specific narrative possibilities for themselves or even of the very idea of other narratives than those which they already live. The ontological thesis cannot differentially valorize such conditions of narrative coauthorship. Fifth, even given a normative principle to determine which organisms coauthor narratives and thereby become persons with unique moral and psychosocial identities, such a principle does not specify which narratives are allowed authorship in this developmental process. Possessing a narrative may be essential to human agency, but possessing any particular narrative content is not. Among the heterogeneous, indefinite plurality of possible narratives are narratives of evil, of self-destruction, of devaluation of communal attachments, the narratives of saints and scoundrels, narratives disempowering others from co-authoring their own narratives, and so on. It is always a question of comparing one possible narrative with another and valorizing one over another; no particular narrative is pre-given either from within or without. To avoid
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ethical relativism about narrative content (in which the existence of any narrative, regardless of content, is deemed valid) or about the bearer of narratives (in which only a subset of the total human population actively participates in narrative co-authorship), an independent normative criterion of narrative admissibility and exclusion is necessary. Moreover, even when admissible narrative content is determined, independent normative standards are needed to judge success and failure, authenticity and alienation, regarding the activity and products of narrative authorship. But since norms and ideals of narrative adequacy derive from substantive world-views, they may be incommensurable. Just as personhood cannot be hypostatized - since there is no single concept of personhood from which to derive substantive moral and political norms - equally there is no single concept of narrativity, but overlapping constructions within different forms of life, informed by their particular psychological, moral, political, epistemic, and other concepts, practices, and institutions and with their constitutive norms and ideals. Since these world-views determine the possibilities of narrative conception and construction, each form of lifes first-order moral and political understandings are crucial in determining the ability of subjects to co-author narratives or their ability to decide which narrative possibilities to affirm. Sixth, even if we possess principles to determine which narratives should be allowed authorship, the value of narratival plurality rather than singularity does not follow. Even if some organisms become persons, this does not entail that they must become distinct persons. The characteristics of plurality, uniqueness, and separateness are not necessarily essential to a conception of narratives and identity.4 Why have a unique narrative of ones own - a psycho-social norm particular to liberal modernity - rather than, for example, promote the normative ideal of one narrative for all? Why even tolerate or promote narrative differences? The normative basis remains unclear for the claim that I am the subject of a history that is my own and no one elses, one with its own unique meaning (cf. 217), whether that meaning is unique from any first-person standpoint or ascribed uniquely to me from a third-person standpoint. One privileged narrative content or summa narratio, analogous to the summum bonum, might command supremacy over all others as the single narrative ideal for all human beings. Which regulative ideal should be valued, the maximization of distinctness or plurality of narratives or their collapse into a unity? Seventh, how is narratival conflict managed or overcome? Human life is characterized by ineliminably conflicting claims (162433) regarding the associations, interests, and values that demarcate the identities of individuals and collectivities. It is precisely because a persons sense of identity is inseparable from his self-understanding as a member of a particular culture, tribe, family, nation, etc. (220), each with its own narrative, that his membership is heterogeneously distributed among such diverse super- and sub-collectivities and their interwoven narratives. Such conflicting memberships and social roles characteristically confer conflicting obligations, expectations, duties and entitlements and thus impose a corresponding heterogeneity on the individuals

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overarching narrative. Moreover, narratives themselves may conflict. Whether these conflicts are inter- or intra-narratival, they all require independ-ent normative principles to order narratives in terms of their worth, to whom, and under which conditions of legitimacy (e.g., divine decree or autonomy). Even the criterion for individuating narratives has normative import. Narratives themselves are complex structures that interleave in indeterminate wayss The narrative of any one life is part of an interlocking set of narratives (218), and so one may discover (or not discover) that he or she is a character in a number of narratives at the same time (213). One must therefore decide of which story or stories one finds oneself a part (216). Since a person lives and relates many stories about himself, not only are there sub- and super-narratives of oneself, but these narratives themselves are embedded in other sub- and supernarratives - for example, the super-narrative of the modern nation-state, containing the sub-narratives of individual citizens or that of the community (145). Each differentially individuating, descriptive category (e.g., individual, citizen, apostate, community, world history, or economic system) informs a different assemblage of possible narratives, and the narrative that is thus individuated and related shapes the consequences for the lives of human beings in different ways. The identification of criteria to individuate among heterogeneous and indeterminately plural, overlapping narratives cannot be norm- or value-free. The eighth and last problem concerns the generation and justification of normative constraints on permissible actions of co-authors of narratives. Nothing in the conception of narrativity mandates recognition o f the symmetry that others are also narrative-authoring beings; and even if it is recognized, this symmetry by itself entails no particular moral standpoint towards such other beings and their narratives, let alone the imperative to value them as formally equal in moral legitimacy to ones own. The ontological universality of narrativity does not entail reciprocal obligations or mutal respect among individual narrators. A narrative could be either inviolate or subject to countless substantive constraints that fragment or distort its unifying power. Normative criteria of narrative integrity are necessary to ensure the requisite degree of narrative inviolability and to determine the moral parameters of such inviolability. Any adequate affirmation or denial of the normative standpoint of liberal modernity must address these eight problematics. To avoid begging the normative questions, each of these problematics can be resolved only through an appeal to an independent normative framework, invoking value judgments about - for example - the uniqueness of each personal identity and each narrative and valorizing particular normative ideals such as that of selfdetermination. From the ontological truth that human beings are irreducibly story-telling animals, nothing follows about whether such beings should exist to tell them, which stories are told, what kinds of stories they are, how they are selected from the infinity of possible stories, who tells them, to whom they are told, the conditions of their telling, and the like. Any adequate normative

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account of institutional arrangements under modern conditions of normative inquiry must begin with an understanding of the ontological conditions that characterize collective human existence as rational, social, and moral beings. It must proceed to identify normative principles to act as necessary complements to such ontological conditions, specifying for whom these principles are applicable, and articulating procedures and criteria of adequacy for their justification. To all this MacIntyre objects that he dismisses the is-ought disjunction that informs these considerations and, with it, the criticism that an ontological argument regarding the narrative structure of human life cannot also be a normative argument. His first reason is that modern moral philosophers incorrectly characterize the claim that a valid argument cannot proceed from factual premises to normative conclusions as derivable from a more general principle that in a valid argument nothing can appear in the conclusion which was not already in the premises. And [they suggest] in an argument in which any attempt is made to derive a moral or evaluative conclusion from factual premises something which is not in the premises, namely the moral or evaluative element, will appear in the conclusion. Hence any such argument must fail. Yet in fact the allegedly unrestrictedly general logical principle on which everything is being made to depend is bogus . . . There are several types of valid argument in which some element may appear in a conclusion which is not in the premises. A. N. Priors counter-example to this alleged principle illustrates its break-down adequately; from the premise He is a sea-captain, the conclusion may be validly inferred that He ought to do whatever a seacaptain ought to do. This counter-example not only shows that there is no general principle of the type alleged; but it itself shows what is at least a grammatical truth - an is premise can on occasion entail an ought conclusion [56-571. But grammatical truth is not normative validity. From the premise He is a sea captain the conclusion He ought to do whatever a sea captain ought to do does not follow without further premises, some of which must embody facttranscending moral judgments, for example, about the institution of seamanship, how sea captains ought to act in particular circumstances, and how these circumstances are to be understood. Would a sea captain follow orders and sink the Lusitania? It is likewise an unsettled, evaluative question whether a good doctor or hospital performs abortions or whether a good teacher teaches creationism as well as evolutionary theory. Here, where there is no uncontested, characteristic and, above all, determinate and unitary or overarching function or purpose to be served, factual statements alone cannot yield evaluative conclusions and moral dispute is rightly interminable. The factual statement itself - what characteristic function or purpose is served - can be articulated in
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terms of rival, partial, and evaluatively incompatible ascriptions and descriptions and is thus contestable. Even if conclusions with normative content can be derived from factual premises in some instances, and MacIntyre thus successfully dismisses the is-ought distinction in general, nonetheless he does not establish, or even argue for, the claim that his own particular conception of narrativity is exempt from the naturalist fallacy.6 MacIntyres second reason to suspect the force of the naturalistic fallacy derives from an appeal to the idea of a functional concept. Such concepts have a special character: [W]e define both watch and farmer in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or farmer are characteristically expected to serve. It follows that the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch nor the concept of a farmer independently of a good farmer; and that the criterion of somethings being a watch and the criterion of somethings being a good watch - and so also f o r . . . all other function concepts - are not independent of each other. Now clearly both sets of criteria . . . are factual. Hence any argument which moves from premises which assert that the appropriate criteria are satisfied to a conclusion which asserts that That is a good such-and-such, where such-and-such picks out an item specified by a functional concept, will be a valid argument which moves from factual premises to an evaluative conclusion 1581. The problem is that narrativity is not a functional concept, for two interrelated reasons. First, a genuinely functional concept possesses internal criteria of evaluation which are inseparable from it: we can say nothing about examples of it without also discussing what makes an example a good example. If this is the test of a functional concept, the concept of a narrative fails it: since we may speak of narratives without necessarily distinguishing good examples of them, the concept of a narrative can be understood independently of the concept of a good narrative. Narratives of suffering or evil are still narratives even if undesirable ones. If MacIntyre were correct, one could never experience ones life as an aimless or discontinuous narrative, yet in the phenomenology of narratives people experience moments when the merely factual ordering of the events of ones life into a unified whole nevertheless lacks meaning. Possessing a story about oneself is not necessarily also to find it meaningful or to value it, for any linguistically mediated relating of an historical connection among events yields a narrative in some sense; MacIntyre does not distinguish sufficiently between historical sequences and meaningful sequences, perhaps because he does not distinguish among linguistic meaning, psychological meaning, and first-person or experiential meaning. In any case, functionality entails an internal relation between description and prescription; since no normative consequence follows just from describing a narrative, narrativity cannot be a functional concept.
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Whether the predicate good applies to the possession of a narrative or to the particular content of a narrative is irrelevant: it may be good to possess a narrative a t all (if one values co-authorship of the story of ones life and identity), and certain narratives have a good content, but these are both fact-transcending judgments. A description of a narratives properties does not exclude dispute regarding how a narrative ought to function for the concept correctly to apply to it in particular and problematic instances; it is an essentially contested concept. Second, MacIntyre claims that to call x good . . . is to say that it is the kind of x which someone would choose who wanted an x for the purpose for which xs are characteristically wanted (59). But a narratives characteristic purpose is underdetermined by factual statements describing the narrative, such as whose it is, when it begins and ends, and what thoughts, deeds, and experiences are its content. The narrative that uniquely individuates Attila the Hun is a good narrative if the criterion of goodness is no more than that the narrative confer intelligibility, and his narrative is no less intelligible than that of any other; its moral desirability is an independent matter. How a narrative is assessed as good or bad, desirable or undesirable, is inseparable from contextually variable, normatively contestable value judgments precisely about such matters as a narratives purpose and from genuine conflicts over what human flourishing and well-being consist in. What the purpose or function of a narrative consists in may be answered in many ways, ranging from conceptual answers (such as providing intelligibility to oneself and others) to theological answers (such as enabling one to obey Gods will) that are narrative-specific constructions of the person deciding what the purpose is; many of these answers are morally incompatible. Both the content and the description of narratival purpose are shaped by interests, values, ends, and other weakly teleological considerations. MacIntyre himself suggests that the characterization of their purpose or function is not a normatively neutral matter of descriptively accurate factual statements: man without culture is a myth . . . man who has nothing but a biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing because it is only man with intelligence informed by the virtues whom we actively meet in history (161). If human nature has no essence (159) or function, why should narratives have any essential function? Ongoing philosophical dispute regarding the nature and properties of a narrative, its normative implications, and how the concept ought to function in correct applications is unavoidable. To support his neo-functionalism further, MacIntyre could argue for a form of historical and socio-cultural relativization of moral language. Moral concepts, arguments, and judgments change their character and meaning when detached from the original contexts of thought and practice in which they flourished (5960). But even if the modernist suspicion of functionalist concepts arises because the tradition that alone confers intelligibility upon such concepts has vanished, replaced by fragmented and heterogeneous, hence inadequate survivals of classicism (58), nonetheless without a philosophically adequate rehabilitation of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics, there is no reason to think that either man or narrative has an essential nature or function awaiting moral cliscovery, a set ol

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determinate purposes or functions which they characteristically serve. Even if nature were understood counterfactually, as if teleological laws govern it (perhaps in analogy with Kants Critique of Judgment), this does not entail any rational and normatively legitimate procedure for settling disputes about natures supposed ends or purposes or about what function a natural object possesses, if any. A strong - that is, metaphysical - teleology, prescribing ontologically pre-given ends based on a presumed essence of man which defines his true end (54) is no longer tenable, as MacIntyre concedes (162). Although he seems to hold that a weak, non-metaphysical teleology - according to which humans are purposeful beings (215-16) because their lives embody narratival order - suffices for his functionalist aims (58-59), a weak teleology commits the naturalistic fallacy. Suppose that the ontological thesis is correct that human agency is irreducibly teleological in the weak sense as purposive or narratival in form. This does not entail that functional concepts can be rehabilitated within the context of forms of social life and social roles, which are the prerequisite for a sound, antimetaphysical teleology, since this does not establish any particular conception of what such a social teleology - as it were - consists in, or assign any particular value to it. Any appeal to the idea of a social role to delimit virtues or conceptions of the good is radically weaker than that to a metaphysically grounded essential function; it leaves unclear the normative conditions of role admissibility or legitimacy, and their content undetermined (e.g., which roles are in question, who occupies those roles, under what circumstances they do, and whether any reflective distance between self and role is possible to enable people to challenge and change roles, for whom, and under what circumstances). The relationship between roles and goods is multiform, not unitary. Substituting a teleology of social roles for a classical, metaphysical teleology just raises its own normative problems. Even if moral judgments could be treated as factual statements, as in the classical tradition, agreement on the form and content of such roles also is necessary. Once a social role (or narrativity) becomes the scene of contestability - contrary to the classical view, with its hierarchy of fixed goods and objective criteria for role satisfaction - the strongly teleological view becomes unserviceable, since there are no longer incontrovertible facts about what is valuable (cf. 84) to serve as the basis of practical reasoning regarding the obligations, expectations, and duties that enable one to fill the role. (MacIntyre himself remarks that Antigone demonstrates the Greek ability to question social roles and hence the awareness of the possibility of tragic conflicts among them.) Conflicts regarding criteria for satisfying the social role of being a good farmer, sea captain, doctor, or teacher or, for that matter, the institutional role of being a good hospital reinforce this. If a moral philosophy characteristicallypresupposes a sociology (23),and the sociology of stable, uncontentious social roles is a basis for the classical view of teleology, then by parity of reasoning the sociology of modernity - in particular its own understanding of social roles as chosen, not ascribed - ought to be the basis for an immanent determination of our own

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fefeofogy.li7 modernity, unlike ancient heroic societies (if at all), morality and social structure cannot be assimilated; evaluative questions, for us, are not merely questions of social fact (cf. 123) but are normatively permeated. Even an anti-metaphysical, functionalist teleology must be acceptable under modern conditions of moral-political argumentation, in which the reflective choice of social roles is central to the expression of individual autonomy and controversy regarding their satisfaction is an irreversible and binding feature of our modern world-view. MacIntyre further augments his attempted ethical anti-relativism by invoking a quasi-objectivist understanding of teleology. On his view of the human telos,
although there is not one kind of life the living out of which is the telos for all human beings in all times and places, nonetheless for each individual and community in each time and place what the human telos consists in for them is a matter of discovery, not of choice. The objectivity of the moral order is a necessary presupposition both of our understanding of the virtues and of our understanding of the human telos. But this objectivity is not in the least incompatible with the need to make choices between the claims of incommensurable goods which at particular points in history are contingently incompatible, for the authority of these claims does not derive from my choices [MacIntyre (1984), 38; cf. MacIntyre (1990), 197, 2001. This prompts four criticisms. First, the phrase 'objectivity of the moral order' is ambiguous as among a continuum of ontological and epistemic claims. It may contrast just with subjectivism or decisionism in ethics (e.g., where arbitrary personal preference or taste are the supreme criterion of acceptability) at one extreme or, at the other extreme, it may embrace a pre-given, metaphysical biology. Epistemologically, how do we determine whether there is any such objective moral order or establish in what this objectivity consists? Given MacIntyre's argument, scepticism about any such objective order entails scepticism about the virtues and the human telos. The normative question is more fundamental: even if any objectivity is established, this alone does not entail that we possess any shared, determinate, and - most important of all normatively justifiable method for deciding what it dictates in particular moral circumstances (e.g., human sacrifices enjoined by the objective moral order). Moral-political argument under modern conditions of reflexivity and justification requires that any allegedly objective moral order meet an independent test of normative admissibility (informed by criteria, e.g., of fairness, legitimacy, impartiality, justice, and so on) or it risks violating the rational-moral judgments of the addressees of that order. After all, the objective moral order of Greek antiquity satisfies MacIntyre's conditions, yet it sanctions an objective and pre-given telos that renders social roles for women inferior to those of men, and he deems it normatively inadmissible since it dismisses 'non-Greeks, barbarians
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and slaves, as not merely not possessing political relationships, but as incapable of them (159). The principled basis for this dismissal seems universalist. Second, the purported contrast between moral discovery and choice, and emphasis on the former, is problematic. The term discovery suggests the acknowledgement of a pre-given and independent truth, state of affairs, or condition. A telos purportedly constitutes the good of an entire human life to provide the objectivity that excludes relativism and moral arbitrariness. But autonomy is negated if the content of the human telos is discovered, not chosen: the objectively given, antecedently existing telos - whatever its normative content - and not the principled exercise of mans rational and moral powers, ultimately determines the normative content of the goods, ends, and selfunderstanding of human agents. This metaphysical repression collapses the vital distinction between moral validity and the mere claim to validity; it lapses into heteronomy and eradicates plurality in favour of anti-m~rality.~ Moreover, appeal to the supposedly objectively given, antecedently existing telos is circular since independent moral criteria are needed by which to determine whether the telos is indeed good. If there is such a telos for individuals and communities, for example, providing criteria for satisfying a social role, how can there be any morally legitimate rebellion against ones identity as fixed by such social roles in the course of the search for the good life (221) or assessment of the unavoidable moral starting point of inherited identity (220)? If choices are necessary among incommensurable goods, why do they not extend to whether or not to accept the moral content of any such teleology? Third, even if morality is teleological in any sense, it does not determine which content to accept from the set of all possible teleologies, the epistemic and moralpolitical procedures by which to do so, whether the teleology is monistic or pluralistic, or which subjects are to accept it as a necessary presupposition. The same normative questions regarding the objectivity of the moral order arise for teleology. So reinstating teleology is normatively insufficient for ethical antirelativism. Indeed, since there are rival teleologies and rival normative criteria for their adjudication, the same interminability of moral disputation that MacIntyre finds so problematic in the post-teleological moral theories of modernity may arise even on his own model. Finally, even if an objective moral order in the requisite sense does exist, this does not necessarily entail that anyone knows what it is, let alone that one identifiable person, community, or tradition demonstrably understands it better than another. And if all moral traditions are historically situated and cannot be detached from their original historical and social contexts of genesis, as MacIntyre contends, then our moral order in liberal modernity is emotivist, subjectivist, and individualistic as he describes. This is what the objective moral order is for us. Its normative status is left undecided, even obscured, by spurious appeals to objectivity. If objectivity is no epistemic constraint on the questionability of the modernist moral order, then that of the ancients should be as questionable. If so, a criterion neutral between both moral orders is necessary and surely impossible.8
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4. The Exclusion of Ethical Relativism from Normative Content

One might hope that, by eliminating emotivist, decisionist, and individualist theories of the modern self through his progressively more restrictive threestage argument regarding practices, virtues, and traditions, MacIntyre thereby also eliminates ethical relativism. I want to show why the three-stage argument fails to exclude ethical relativism regarding the normative content that is necessary to complement the ontological thesis. In defending his argument against ethical relativism, MacIntyre emphasizes that the account of the virtues in terms of practices is only a first stage in my account of the virtues; . . . restrictions upon what can count as a virtue are imposed by the second stage of that account in terms of the way relationships are embodied in the narrative form of a single human life, and by the third stage in terms of participation in those traditioninformed communities whose history provides individual lives with their context. So that even if qualities which are not in fact virtues satisfy the conditions of the first stage, they will be excluded by the later stages of the account [MacIntyre (1984), 36371. Determinate and anti-relativistic normative content is to be fixed by the criterion that no human quality is to be accounted a virtue unless it satisfies the conditions specified at each of the three stages (275). For example, ruthlessness is not a virtue because it fails to meet the requirement that a virtue contribute to the good of that kind of whole human life in which the goods of particular practices are integrated into an overall pattern of goals which provides an answer to the question: What is the best kind of life for a human being like me to lead? Qualities which satisfy the second requirement may fail to satisfy the third requirement, namely, that the goods of particular lives have to be integrated into the overall patterns of a tradition informed by a quest for the good and the best (275). The good and the best are implicit regulative ideals in MacIntyres account: the unity of a life is the unity of a narrative quest for that which is the good of ones life, and a quest has certain preconditions which these regulative ideals capture. [Wlithout some at least partly determinate conception of the final telos there could not be any beginning to a quest. Some conception of the good for man is required. Whence is such a conception to be drawn? Precisely from those questions which led us to attempt to transcend that limited conception of the virtues, which is available in and through practices. It is in looking for a conception of the good which will enable us to order other goods, for a conception of the good which will enable us to extend our understanding of the purpose and content of the virtues, for
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a conception of the good which will enable us to understand the place of integrity and constancy in life, that we initially define the kind of life which is a quest for the good [219].

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This three-stage model fails to dispel ethical relativism because MacIntyres considerations regarding the good for man and the idea of a unitary human life are formalistic, not substantive. Since he shifts the question of normative content from each consideration to the other without answering it, he is vulnerable to the same criticism of contentlessness that Hegel made against Kantian ethical formalism. This problem arises because MacIntyre misconceives the agent-independent nature o f the good and our agreement about the good. [M]y good as a man is one and the same as the good of those others with whom I am bound up in human community. There is no way of my pursuing my good which is necessarily antagonistic to you pursuing yours because the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours peculiarly goods are not private property [228]. The problem is not about whether we ought to pursue the good; that we are purposive beings who can act only for the sake of what we consider good is surely an Aristotelian truth. It is about how the good is to be understood by each individual, through which goods each individual finds satisfaction or realization, and how their acceptability is collectively determined and recognized. MacIntyre shifts from the formal level of the human good as such to the substantive level of heterogeneous and particular internal goods (especially where he states (218) that to ask What is the good for man? is to ask what all answers to the question What is the good for me? must share). The possible validity of a weak teleology - that the universal form of human life is that all human beings quest for the good of a unified life by pursuing some set of internal goods - must be distinguished from the heterogeneous and particular content of the good. In particular, the possibility of disagreement regarding which practices constitute the good for a man or for mankind is central to modern normative thought, and that there are rival and incommensurable conceptions or valuations of the good either for mankind or for an individual is precisely the modern normative dilemma that MacIntyre otherwise acknowledges. There is not only a plurality of pluralisms - about internal goods, the good life, practices, and traditions - but also conflicts over what human flourishing and well-being do consist in so that rival and incompatible beliefs on that topic beget rival and incompatible tables of the virtues (162-63). Although MacIntyre criticizes Aristotle for failing to grasp the conflicts of tragedy, the conflict o f good with good and the centrality of opposition and conflict in human life (163), he does not adequately acknowledge that the heterogeneity of and contestedness regarding the substance of the good make it impossible to reconcile mutually
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antagonistic yet equally legitimate conceptions and valuations of the good and thus overcome ethical relativism (cf. 224). The normative formalism of MacIntyres argument is the problem. Virtues may be essential for narrative selfhood; perhaps we cannot characterize the good for man adequately without already having made reference to the virtues (184). To say this is, however, only to say that virtues are objective qualities of character necessary for the satisfaction of determinate roles within some social structure. This does not determine which qualities are virtues or which virtues to embody in pursuing the good. All it says is that, if I want to understand my life as a quest, I must understand all the goods I may pursue as having an order imposed on them by an overarching but still formal conception of the good itself for my life. This means only that I am a purposive being who must acknowledge a two-level structure of local goods and the overarching good which informs my choice of local goods: if I want to pursue the former, I must have a conception of the latter and integrate it into my life plan. But the good for my life may be nothing but whatever ultimate goal I set for my life; as long as the goal enables me to order my various goods in its pursuit, it functions regulatively as the good for me. What makes it a good is simply that I assign that normative status to it by pursuing it regardless of its normative content. Moreover, the conception of the good a s overarching does not entail that others must recognize what is necessary for me to conceive or pursue the various goods or the good itself: no normative content has been fixed regarding the intersubjective relationship that obtains among individual, goods-pursuing rational agents, each of whom quests for the good for his life. Either the good which orders my goods, or the local goods themselves for which my life is a quest, may derive from my rational self-determination or instead be imposed by external agencies. Indeed, MacIntyres provisional conclusion that the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man (219) is importantly and distinctively neo-liberal in its implicit understanding of how the conditions of identification and pursuit of the good impose a particular structure on the identification and pursuit of local goods. As is often noted, this formal definition is not only compatible with a plurality of rival and incommensurable substantive conceptions of the good, but also explicitly makes the good for man an undetermined object of a quest rather than manifest. Given that MacIntyre acknowledges the central Weberian theme of an irreducible plurality of incommensurable values and also affirms the existence of conflicts regarding human flourishing and well-being, he equivocates in asserting that the Weberian vision of the world cannot be rationally sustained (109). The second reason for the criticism of contentlessness concerns the claim that the answer to the question, What is the best kind of life for a human being like me to lead? may serve as a criterion for adjudicating the goods of particular practices by an integration into an overall pattern of life goals or unitary human life (218). This just shifts the problem of relativism about normative content from the level of practices to that of the narrative unity of a whole human life. The idea of the narrative unity of life is only formal, not substantive; it is silent, not
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just about which qualities are virtues, but more importantly about what kind of unitary, complete life is good and worthy of a quest, and about the normative conditions under which unitary lives questing for their good are possible. For MacIntyre, whatever qualities that enable one to seek ones good and to render ones life an integrated whole in its quest must be counted among the virtues. This fixes no normative content regarding the intersubjective relationships that obtain among individual, goods-pursuing rational agents, each of whom quests for the good for his life. The content of each unitary life is ineliminably particular; how this particularity is normatively related to the particularity of content of other lives is unspecified. How are the virtues that contribute to the quest for the good of one persons life related to those of anothers? MacIntyre claims that the virtues are 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 harm, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good [219]. But the life of Attila the Hun reveals this as a formalistic conception, admitting any ethical content. His life satisfies MacIntyres conditions for an integrated life, but from the perspective o f his victims the qualities that might appear to be virtues in sustaining it (such as the virtues of honesty, courage, and truthfulness, which MacIntyre appears to construe (194) as among the minimally necessary virtues for sustaining any practices whatsoever) are also vices. Their exercise by the Hun in pursuit of his conceptions of his lifes good, through the attaining of excellence in those practices which provide his life with its teleological content, impede the abilities of others to pursue their own good. This is not just an instance of vices contingently flourishing where virtues are also required (cf. 193), but of a set of qualities acquiring moral significance relative to the perspective of each agent and his own, perhaps egoistically understood good for his unitarily conceived life. Indeed, in rejecting Aristotles thesis of the unity of the virtues, MacIntyre allows that a Nazi may possess the virtue of courage (180). Virtues may be traits necessary for human flourishing, but because flourishing is not a context-free good but itself a merely formal criterion, it cannot distinguish between genuine and spurious virtues or delimit any particular form of moral life or telos. Independent, possibly universalizing, moral content is necessary for that. The same formalistic problem of contentlessness arises from MacIntyres claim that the types of activity that [Richard Bernstein] claims fall under my account - spying, smuggling, the art of the executioner, and torturing are examples -just do not, so it seems clearly to me, involve systematic
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extension of our conceptions of the ends and goals which excellence may serve - one central characteristic of practices [MacIntyre (1984), 361.

This merely shifts the problem of ethical relativism from the level of goods to that of ends. Excellence is a criteria1conception, devoid of normative content; to acquire mastery of a practice and thereby to secure its internal goods, or to possess a goal or end at all, it is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, that an independent standard of achievement be available to measure excellence. Excellence alone is silent regarding which ends and goals it serves. Another consideration regarding normative contentlessness springs from MacIntyre's acknowledgement of the existence of conflict regarding goods, the content of virtues, traditions, practices, and conceptions of human flourishing and well-being (e.g., 162, 196-97, 222). This raises the issue of norms of participation: MacIntyre is silent about the normative and institutional framework that identifies the subjects or bearers of such conflicts and in which those who disagree about these matters seek mutual accommodation. The recognition of conflict does not tell us which are the relevant practices, how conflicts among them are appropriately resolved, how criteria of inclusion and exclusion for participants are chosen, and under what conditions of legitimacy. Defining a virtue as an acquired human quality whose possession and exercise enables us to achieve the internal goods of practices leaves unspecified the 'we' who belong to the relevant moral traditions in which social identity and practices acquire their content and continuity. If social practices are co-operative human activities, who co-operates and in what differential respects? In which practices, and institutions which embody them, is participation allowed - especially if some practices may be evil (200)?Who acquires and exercises practical rationality or the virtues at all? Although MacIntyre shares the liberal assumption that individuals ought to be able to develop and exercise their own, unique conceptions of the good, are all individuals equally entitled to participate in this activity and why? Another question is methodological: at a justificatory meta-level, under what normative conditions of admissibility or legitimacy are such first-level normative questions answered? It is crucial to have an antecedent normative determination of both the moral-political subject who participates in these substantive disputes, and of the socio-cultural conditions under which such subjects coexist. For these a doctrine of constraints, duties, obligations, and entitlements on the exercise of their powers of agency is necessary (e.g., the substantive doctrine of rights for autonomous subjects formulated by some forms of liberalism).'* The issue of differential participation raises the question of whether the possibility of ethical relativism is eliminated by the formalist appeal to moral communities and their constitutive goods and practices. " '10 quality is to be accounted a virtue except in respect of its being such as to enable the achievements of three distinct kinds of good: those internal to practices, those which are the goods of an individual life and those which are the goods of community' (MacIntyre (1994), 284). An individual can answer the question of what is his particular good only
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in company with those others who participate with them and with each other in various practices, and who also participate with them in the common life of their whole community. So the ordering of goods within the activities of individual lives, so that the good of each life may be achieved, is . . . inseparable from the ordering of those goods in achieving the common good [MacIntyre (1994), 2881.

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However, the communities themselves remain contentless and their normative conditions of admissibility unclear. What norms of community are acceptable, e.g., to justify Maclntyres own advocacy of quasi-Benedictine communities especially when the community is itself a dramatic character enacting the narrative of its own history (145)and only certain forms of community affirm the autonomy of individuals and allow them to conceive, pursue, and realize their own conceptions o f the good or ordering of local goods? Would the antebellum South, with its constitutive and unjust goods based on hierarchy and inequality, count a s a genuine community? Here the virtues were differentially distributed between slaveholders and slaves and the common good was a mask for oppression. Communities by their nature are inclusivist and exclusivist. Even if they embody arguments and conflicts about their own good (222), they do not necessarily embody all relevant virtues or embody them sufficiently to overcome an ethical relativism in the form of differential virtues based on race, gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic status. So Maclntyres argument alone does not exclude forms of community that are otherwise - presumably - normatively inadmissible. What of the final element in Maclntyres argument, the embedding of narratives in moral and rational traditions of inquiry? A living tradition is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition (222); he claims that it provides the necessary historical context to achieve the goods internal to practices and to evaluate the different, rival goods pursued in the course of the quest for the good. Yet the KKK is racist, Christianity hierarchical and patriarchal, and both traditions possess their own normative content of internal goods and affirmations of the good life. On what basis could these be judged morally illegitimate traditions? Anti-universalist, anti-egalitarian moral traditions not only do not object to systematic exclusions of entire classes of people from participation or equal participation, but prescribe such exclusions. Traditions, like communities, are inclusivist and exclusivist, and the fact that they embody arguments and conflicts about their own good does not mean that they avoid either a relativistic embodiment of virtues or differentially embody them in unjust ways. Although a tradition in good order shares internal goods and a commitment to the virtues that sustain these goods and the quest for the good life itself, this sustenance is consistent with ethical relativism. Furthermore, if the concept of a tradition, together with the criteria for its use and application, is itself one developed from within one particular traditionbased standpoint (MacIntyre (1994), 295), then a fortiori what counts as a

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morally acceptable tradition is itself one more tradition-based judgment. So the appeal to the mere fact of the embeddedness of all reasoning in traditions does not provide such criteria of acceptability. Appeals to the good, narrative unity, virtues, or communities leave unspecified the normative principles of inclusion and exclusion that hold for evaluating their embodying moral traditions themselves. Traditions are themselves further bearers of ethical relativism; even if all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought (222), the genesis of moral traditions as providing necessary historical contexts (223) to embody virtues and goods internal to practices must be distinguished from the justification of such traditions. And if vital traditions embody continuities of conflict (222) about, among other things, the goods which constitute them, then we may expect ongoing arguments, possibly systematic unsettleability, about their normative content and affirmations. Distinguishing between virtues that sustain a tradition and those which are affirmed within a tradition is likewise unserviceable. One reason is that the very idea of a set of virtues sustaining any and all moral traditions lapses into the same transcendental form of argumentation that MacIntyre dismisses (e.g., 266, 277). Those instrumental virtues which enable some particular individual, community, or tradition to flourish - whatever its normative content - are not necessarily also anti-relativistic, genuine virtues. And virtues are themselves tradition-constituted, which either arbitrarily privileges those traditions which constitute and distribute the virtues in a desired (e.g., universalist and egalitarian) manner, or provides no ethical adjudication among rival traditions of virtues. Neither does an epistemoIogicu1 adjudication seem viable. Since traditions necessarily are informed by both ethical and epistemological components, epistemological anti-relativism must be distinguished from ethical antirelativism. Even if the tradition-based account of theoretical and practical reason introduced in After Virtue overcomes the peril of epistemological relativism, it does not necessarily do the same with ethical relativism, particularly if the traditions in question understand values and norms non-cognitivistically. l 3 In conclusion, the problem of ethical relativism, which originally arises regarding admissible narrative content, arises equally for the other elements in MacIntyres three-stage argument. Its later stages neither necessarily exclude qualities which are not virtues nor include those which are. The argument fails not just to yield any particular conception of the internal goods that any narrative may legitimately contain but, more importantly, fails to provide criteria for adjudicating among rival normative content as a whole: there are no determinate moral-political inclusions or exclusions from the canon of admissible narratives, practices, goods, virtues, communities, or moral traditions to inform the moral life; the criteria1 basis for choosing among them when they clash is unclear. The mere existence of a plurality of tables of virtues, bodies of social practices, and conceptions of the good and their embodiment in particular communities and moral traditions concerns only the contextual genesis of normative content. It is not yet the testing or justification of that content, without which the perils of ethical relativism, dogmatism, and quietism arise. MacIntyre
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is arguing within a normative circle because he presupposes that the question of normative content either already has been answered by the three-stage argument or can be answered without the introduction of any external norms particularly those which are liberal, egalitarian, or universalist. It is therefore untrue that [tlhe conception of justice as a virtue which is required if the goods internal to practices are to be achieved, let alone the goods of individual lives and of communities, is itself sufficient to provide a standard for identifying and condemning the deformations and distortions to which practices may be subjected (MacIntyre (1994), 290; emphasis added). Although the eight problematics regarding normative content are not addressed by MacIntyres argument, they must be addressed for his account as a whole to have the necessary force to displace rival normative accounts, particularly that of liberalism, which has the advantage of addressing those problematics in its explicit and distinctive manner. His account leaves unexplicated the source and justification of the normative content informing his dismissal of liberal modernity in the name of a rehabilitated and reformulated tradition of the virtues. To doubt his claims regarding the anti-relativism of his three-stage argument is to doubt not just his particular conception of narratives, the virtues, or the role of an overarching conception of the good in conferring a teleological structure on human endeavour, but also the supposed critical ramifications of these claims about the entire normative content of practices, traditions, and institutions constitutive of liberal modernity.14

Mark Colby Balliol College, Oxford

NOTES
All references are to MacIntyre (1985) unless noted otherwise. Charles Taylors account of narratives is more perspicuous than Maclntyres regarding its ontological character: My underlying thesis is that there is a close connection between the different conditions of identity, or of ones life making sense . . . [Blecause we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a quest. But one could perhaps start from another point: because we have to determine our place in relation to the good, therefore w e cannot be without an orientation to it, and hence must see our life in story. From whichever direction, I see these conditions as connected facts of the same reality, inescapable structural requirements of human agency [Taylor (1990), 51-52; emphasis added].

As Charles Taylor observes, purely ontological theses dont amount to an advocacy of anything. What they d o purport to do, like any good ontological thesis, is to structure the field of possibilities in a more perspicuous way. But this precisely leaves u s with

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choices, which we need some normative, deliberative arguments to resolve . . . Taking an ontological position does not amount to advocating something; but at the same time, the ontological does help to define the options which it is meaningful to support by advocacy. This latter connection explains how ontological theses can be far from innocent (Taylor (1989), 161). cf. Hannah Arendts claim that speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness, and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals (Arendt (1973), 178). For Arendt, the property of spontaneity means that, as with MacIntyre, human action always is irreducibly novel and unpredictable. Arendts uncited ontological account of human spontaneity (243 ff.) is an essential precursor of his analysis. This indeterminacy is also manifest in MacIntyres own conception of narratives and his argument in general. For example, does he connate the idea of a history with that of a story? Relating facts about oneself or an object in correct historical sequence or chronicle is one thing, telling a story embedding those facts is another. If we need not always narrate our lives to ourselves to understand who we are at an everyday level of continuous and meaningful existence, is narrativity a retrospective interpretation of already experienced events? Bernard Williams informs me that the form of MacIntyres argument is problematic: the phrase a sea captain in the conclusion is unquantified. It is invalid to universalize an unquantified proposition. cf. Arendt (1973), 175, 220, 234. The problem here already began at the very outset, with MacIntyres account of the alleged decline of moral language as the breakdown of teleologically informed contexts in which moral theory and practice embody genuine objective and impersonal standards which provide rational justification for particular policies, actions and judgments and which themselves in turn are susceptible of rational justification (18-19; emphasis added). The sections of Hegels Phenomenology entitled Reason as Lawgiver and Reason as Testing Laws formulate his procedural criticism of Kants claim that the criterion of universalizability is the test of whether the maxim of an individuals actions can be a moral law for all. Not only does the moral law include contingency and particularity, but even the testing of such moral laws is not a purely formal matter of logical consistency alone but is also ineliminably contingent and particular. Interpreting the universalizability procedure prescribed by the categorical imperative exclusively in terms of noncontradiction yields no determinate normative conten:. Any normative content provided it is self-consistent - is compatible with the moral law. l o MacIntyre does not say whether h e considers valid Webers claim regarding an irreducible plurality of values; the absence of a n independent argument against the Weberian plurality of gods and demons, of values and goods, is significant. Why is it an illegitimate feature of modernity? If moral pluralism is incoherent, this should be argued as such directly, not indirectly inferred from an argument from the historical decline of teleology and the assumption that the heterogeneity of moral thought and practice in modernity has n o other source than contingent historical factors. MacIntyre remarks that

the notion of [moral] pluralism is too imprecise. For it may equally well apply to a n ordered dialogue of intersecting viewpoints and to a n unharmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments. The suspicion . . . that it is the latter . . . is heightened when w e recognize that all those various concepts which inform our

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moral discourse were originally at home in larger totalities of theory and practice in which they enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived [lo].

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But this mischaracterizes the sources and kinds of relevant moral pluralism. The history of morality is not only the history of moral fragmentation precipitated by the loss of a teleological ethic (whose economic, scientific, socio-cultural, religious, and other causes he underanalyses, instead treating this loss as the result of internal, autonomous changes in the history of philosophical thought, but cf. 54). It is also a positive accommodation to prevent civil and religious strife - for example, the Thirty Years War - and did not just vanish for contingent, rationality-independent reasons; there are good reasons for its displacement by later, dysteleological forms of thought. If what is needed is not only philosophical acuteness but also the kind of vision which anthropologists . . . bring to the observation of other cultures (lll),such an inquiry into the history of morality would address the particularities of modern culture to show, for example, how forms of liberalism or the doctrine of the heterogeneity of values and goods arise as a result of socio-cultural and historical conditions unique to modernity (such as the rise of the modern state and the distinction between it as a public realm and the private realm of civil society). For MacIntyre moral plurality as such is almost a form of incoherence, yet plurality is precisely what his own thesis regarding the relativization of moral 1an.guage should lead us to expect, especially in socio-historical contexts where social roles and conceptions of reason have changed. Why assume, with MacIntyre, that conflicting moral claims somehow cun be rationally reconciled (e.g., 252)? MacIntyres distinction between a narrative and narrative unity is unclear. In After Virtue narrativity appears to be a property of every human life, whereas in a later article narrative unity is not a property of every human life: [Wlhether there is a narrative context sufficient for intelligibility, let alone the kind and degree that is afforded by the narrative unity of a human life, does not depend upon the agents choices. It is rather the presence or absence of context which determines the significance that the agents choices can possess. Narrative unity is not a property of every human life (what degree and kind of unity is possible varies with social structure), and I cannot give my life such unity simply by an act of choice. It follows that what kind of goodness my life as a whole can possess is not in my power [MacIntyre (1982), 6641. MacIntyre does not distinguish between two conceptions of narrative unity: as necessary forms of human existence and as a goal that individuals strive for (cf. Schneewind (1982), 659). How distinct these two conceptions really are is unclear. Is a narrative not already a unity? To what extent is a fragmented, chaotic narrative still a narrative? Perhaps more importantly, the acknowledgement that narratives are not enough to confer intelligibility on an agents life and that narrative unity too is necessary, means that socio-cultural conditions of unity are now crucial. On this restating of MacIntyres account, narrative unity is not given by narrativity alone or in conjunction with an account of the unity of a life or moral traditions (the second and third stages), but also by socio-cultural conditions whose normative contribution is external to the three-stage argument and which require elucidation. l 2 cf. Bernstein (1984), 26. l3 MacIntyre claims that his historicist epistemology of rational traditions excludes

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epistemological relativism about standards of justification and argumentative adequacy across moral traditions. (It is unclear whether he thinks his historicist epistemology itself excludes ethical as well as epistemological relativism.) He proposes anti-relativistic epistemological considerations via a substantial theory of rationality to adjudicate epistemologically among rival traditions, making it possible for one moral tradition to appeal for a verdict in its favour against its rival to types of consideration which are already accorded weight in both the competing traditions (276). I argue against this in Colby (1995). l4 I wish to thank Isabelle Balot, Graeme Garrard, Michael Inwood, and Bernard Williams for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

REFERENCES
Hannah Arendt (1973), The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richard Bernstein (1984), Nietzsche or Aristotle? Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyres After Virtue, in Soundings, LXVII, 1, pp. 6 2 9 . Mark Colby (1995), Moral Traditions, MacIntyre, and Historicist Practical Reason, in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21, 3, pp. 53-78. G. W. F. Hegel (1977), The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds. (1994), After Maclntyre. Oxford: Polity Press. Alasdair MacIntyre (1982), Intelligibility, Goods, and Rules, in Journal of Philosophy, LXXIX, 11, pp. 66S65. Alasdair MacIntyre (1984), Bernsteins Distorting Mirrors, in Soundings, LXVII, 1, pp. 3041. Alasdair MacIntyre (1985), After Virtue. Second edition. London: Duckworth. First published in 1981. Alasdair MacIntyre (1988), Whose justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth. Alasdair MacIntyre (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. London: Duckworth. Alasdair MacIntyre (1994), A Partial Response to My Critics, in Horton and Mendus (1994), pp. 283-304. J. B. Schneewind (1982), Virtue, Narrative, and Community: MacIntyre and Morality, in journal of Philosophy, LXXIX, 11, pp. 653-63. Charles Taylor (1989), Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate. In Nancy Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Charles Taylor (1990), Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1995