MacIntyre: bring back Aristotle's approach to ethics!

Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that ethical theories such as Bentham's Utilitarianism or Kant's deontological ethics have led Western moral philosophy into a dead-end. Anyone who has taken a course in ethics has probably been presented with dilemmas such as the famous hypothetical scenarios (there are lots of variations on this theme) where you can kill one person in order to save 5 others, or where you must choose between things such as betraying a friend or telling a lie. The thing is, he argues, such dilemmas are unsolvable, because there are so many unknown variables and there is no real context to the scenarios.

However, who cares?
After all, these aren't real cases.

However, anyone who has taken a course in ethics has probably also been presented with real ethical problems too: What should the law be on euthanasia? Is embryo research in order to find cures for diseases justifiable? Western moral philosophers seem just as unable to come up with consistent answers to these debates. After all, where do we start? Which meta-ethical scheme should we start with?

MacIntyre suggests that since the enlightenment, this never-ending argument has led Western ethics towards an impasse. Since there is no agreement on a starting point, the different sides to these debates have become 'incommensurable'. When people get understandably disillusioned, they set out on a road towards a moral relativism (or Nietzschean nihilism) where there are no right answers; where anybody's viewpoint is considered equally valid and there is no such thing as moral truth. Whilst I can sympathize with some of those who have argued that such relativism is rational, I share MacIntyre's distaste for this state of affairs. It is all too easy for people to take the cop-out route of just saying: this is my point of view, that's your view, and that's that.

Aristotle's ethics, however, offers us a starting point. There is a common goal to moral philosophy: to achieve eudaimonia (i.e. to live well). Everybody wants to be good, and everybody wants to be happy. Being virtuous, the Nicomachean Ethics showed us, was not a choice between doing the right thing or being happy. One isn't tied to fixed rules, nor does one have to act as if 'beneficial' consequences are all that matters.

Although I admit that it's not as if everything falls into place once you accept this basis of eudaimonia, I am inclined to agree that this is the way forward. Deciding what the virtues are is the next step. Understanding how to live in accordance with the appropriate virtues is another aspect to develop. However, within a society, I reckon these can be largely agreed upon, and provide a much better launchpad for real moral debates, rather than the formulas (both simplistic and complex) proposed to deal with a hypothetical dilemma-based ethics.

There are many critiques of MacIntyre's ethics that I would generally agree with, however as for his argument for a return to 'virtue ethics' - (which Elizabeth Anscombe and others have done too, I should point out) - I am thoroughly in favour.