After Virtue, Again

I recently discussed the first sixty pages of After Virtue with a group of students (we're going to go through the whole thing piece by piece this semester), and one fellow brought up an interesting question. MacIntyre carries out his moral-philosophical investigation within a certain historical framework, a narrative which he believes makes the best sense of the history of moral philosophy over the last several centuries. But this student remarked that MacIntyre's historical narrative fails to be credible, as it is yet another "meta-history," an account governed by a certain moral view: in this case, a kind of ethical Aristotelianism. The student's question was whether any meta-history, a story of the past (obviously) arranged in explicit relation to the present, can be trustworthy. Is it not better to try for a (more) objective view, giving an account of each historical period according to its own self-understanding?

MacIntyre himself would answer (and does, in the pages of After Virtue), that this critique can only be made on the basis of Enlightenment presuppositions about our capacity for seeing the truth  objectively, without reference to our own moral positions. And this sort of Enlightenment stance is precisely what MacIntyre is writing to rebutt: we cannot think about the past, or about anything (he says), without making moral judgments. There is no such thing as a perfectly objective standpoint from which to view what has gone before us.

So who's right? I take it (for now) that the truth lies between the two positions: that it must be possible to make some kinds of "objective" judgments sometimes--judgments which are true without respect to our moral stances--but, on the other hand, that we really do this much less than we think. Surely we can, that is, make objective assertions about whether this or that happened in the past, and to whom and with respect to what, just as we might make similar assertions about the chemical structure of certain elements, etc. (MacIntyre, in other places, seems to deny even this sort of claim.) But as soon as we begin to think any larger sorts of thoughts, to make any larger kinds of theories--certainly about history or causality in human affairs, we are necessarily going to have to rely upon our moral understanding: our view of human nature, its ends, its principles, etc. Because we must, it seems, judge human events in terms of what humans are, and "what humans are" cannot be defined without reference to what humans ought to be--without reference to our status as moral beings.

That, at least, is where I find myself just now. Closer to MacIntyre than to the student, I suppose, though I'm still trying to negotiate the space.