Moses, Aristotle and Sir James Dalrymple : WHOSE JUSTICE? WHICH RATIONALITY?<i> by Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame University Press: $22.95; 432 pp.)</i>

In a previous book, “After Justice,” which came out in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre claimed that the ideas of justice available to us in the modern world were like a pile of ruins, making no coherent sense. They were not the ruins of one building, but the disordered remains of various ethical conceptions that had existed in the past. We now have no such coherent conceptions, and it is because we are trying to solve our social problems with these fragmentary ideas that we are doomed to endlessly inconclusive and conflicting arguments about questions of justice.

His new work sustains the same theme. It is primarily a study in intellectual history, exploring what MacIntyre sees as three different traditions to Western ethical thought: one running from Homer to Aristotle and passing through Arab and Jewish writers to St. Thomas Aquinas; another, biblical, tradition that came to Aquinas from St. Augustine; and a third that informed Scottish thought in the 17th and 18th centuries.

These studies fill out his general thesis with historical detail. The thesis has also become more ambitious than it was. It is not only justice that is relative to a tradition. So is practical reason itself; that is to say, the set of processes by which, socially or personally, we work out what to do. There are, in MacIntyre’s view, no ideas of justice or practical reason that are not relative to some tradition or other, and the attempt to identify and use such ideas independently of any tradition at all is precisely the main cause of our modern confusions, expressed in the ruinous outlook of liberalism.

Although he admits some historical precursors, MacIntyre sees liberalism basically as starting in the Enlightenment, a development that produced, as he puts it, “a new social and cultural artifact, the individual.”

MacIntyre as intellectual historian is very widely informed and tells an interesting story of developments in the traditions that he identifies. By far the most detailed treatment (perhaps because it is the least familiar subject) is given to the Scottish tradition leading up to the Enlightenment, one rooted in Calvinism and in Roman Law. There is a lot to be learned from MacIntyre’s treatment, but it is notably idiosyncratic and, it must be said, very strongly governed by the case he wants to make. He gives special prominence to a figure barely known except to specialists, a judge named Sir James Dalrymple of Stair, whose work “The Institutions of the Law of Scotland” (1681) MacIntyre sees as an instructive example of the development of a tradition. Virtually nothing, on the other hand, is said about Adam Smith. Smith, who must be counted one of the most significant influences on the world of liberal individualism, has been the subject of important recent work, and his inclusion would have surely changed the story.

Like all who see modern life in terms of the collapse of a previous order or orders, MacIntyre tends to exaggerate the coherence of the past, and also the incoherence of the present, to a point at which the outlooks of modernity come out as almost formless. “Liberal individualism” is barely identified at all, except as the utilitarian philosophy of a consumer society. He does, rather contemptuously, admit that we might recognize, by now, another tradition, that of liberalism itself, but he sees this as no more than a tradition of endless disagreement, a self-congratulatory inconclusiveness.

You would scarcely gather from this book that there was a liberal tradition that had tried to make ethical sense of modern society in terms of rights and other notions that go a long way beyond consumerism. MacIntyre would have many sound criticisms of that tradition, but there is no reason why he should not recognize it. Having done so, he might extend to it the methods that he suggestively outlines toward the end of the book, by which one tradition may gain something from another.

The least convincing element is MacIntyre’s account of the ways in which practical reason has been differently understood in different traditions. MacIntyre never offers the philosophical arguments that would be needed to show that there have been basically different forms of practical reasoning, as opposed to a universal form within which various traditions have recognized various kinds of consideration. It would certainly need a lot of philosophy to convince me of some things that he says, for instance, that it is a peculiarity of the modern world that simply wanting to do something should count as a reason for doing it. Indeed, MacIntyre has made it clear earlier in the book that the ancient Greeks, not surprisingly, well understood this basic kind of reason.

At the very end of the book, faced with the problem of carrying forward any of these traditions into the radical incoherence of modern life, MacIntyre comes to a very sudden halt. This happened in “After Justice,” where only some vast disaster seemed able to clear away the rubbish of liberal individualism. Here, he seems to look rather toward Thomism as a tradition that might still have some power to save us. This might seem rather more optimistic, except that MacIntyre’s own searching and sympathetic accounts have brought out the many ways in which that tradition has involved belief in the Christian God and in a thorough-going cosmic order. To get from here to some version of that might still require some vast disaster.