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The Rational Authority of Traditions
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14669 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1988 |
4,900 Words |
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Robert Royal
Robert Royal is a vice president at the Center for Ethics and
Public Policy. |
WHOSE JUSTICE? WHICH RATIONALITY?
Alasdair MacIntyre
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988
432 pp., $22.95
Anomie, as Durkheim characterized it, was a form of deprivation, of a loss of membership in those social institutions and modes in which norms, including the norms of tradition-constituted rationality, are embodied. What Durkheim did not foresee was a time when the same condition of anomie would be assigned the status of an achievement by and a reward for a self which had, by separating itself from the social relationships of traditions, succeeded, so it believed, in emancipating itself.
--Alasdair MacIntyre
In the modern would, philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, is for the most part in a bad way. The term philosophy originally meant a "love of wisdom," but anyone seeking wisdom today would not be likely to turn to current philosophy to find it. Philosophy has become a largely academic discipline that, like the academic study of literature, history, and politics, threatens to drain off the vitality of its own subject matter in interminable professional disputes. The disarray of philosophy has joined with the solvents of modern societies to reinforce the assumption that systems of ethics are based on mere personal preference, with no possible appeal to rational authority.
Alasdair MacIntyre is one professional philosopher who has striven successfully against this predicament. His
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