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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this patreon.com philosophizesthis philosophical writing on substack at Philosophizthis on there. I hope you love the show today. So there's a lot of people living in the world today that have learned to hate pieces of themselves because of things they've accepted over the years about what it means to be a good person. A good person, they're told, is someone who is strong, independent. They don't ask for exceptions to be made for them. They stay healthy, they show up to work every day, and they become a rock that is a fixture in everyone's life that endlessly provides for all the people around them. There's obviously much more to this image of a good person that most people accept. And for the rest of the episode, let's call this image the sort of common sense version of what a human being is supposed to be like. Because if the job of a good philosopher is to disrupt our common sense, then reframe something and get us to see the thing in a new, more detailed way, then Alistair McIntyre, in the book we're covering today, does just that when it comes to the assumptions we make about what existing as a human being is even like. If you've listened to the last two episodes, which I highly recommend before this one, then you know he believes that any moral claim about how we should or shouldn't be acting is always rooted in a way of life and a moral tradition that we need to be self aware of. Well, this whole book is written by him, starting from the foundation of Aristotelian Thomism, a sort of late Middle Ages, early Renaissance blend of the work of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. And if the common sense view of what it is to be a person is rooted mostly in assumptions built out of Enlightenment liberalism and how it thinks of the modern subject. We're about to see what happens when these two worlds collide. All throughout this episode, be sure to notice the very different underlying assumptions when it comes to what we've been talking about lately, what human beings are for, what counts as flourishing, etc. Because by the end of this episode, not only will we have a clearer picture of the sorts of attitudes these two approaches produce in people, but we'll also understand why, if there's any validity to this more Aristotelian approach, what specifically about the modern world makes it so easy for us to forget that this side of our experience as human beings even exists? Let's get started though MacIntyre would probably want to begin by just broadly pointing out how obviously incomplete that common sense way of thinking about people is. At its core, the this is essentially a picture of a self made, totally autonomous being that chooses things. An ultra competent, high functioning, emotionally self contained adult who seems to owe little to anyone for anything. They can't be easily interrupted in what they're doing. And this is someone who treats dependence on other people as something that is embarrassing in a way. But MacIntyre might ask, is this actually an accurate description of anyone's life, no matter who they are? First of all, if we're just talking about what it is to be a human being, you are born into a situation where you are completely dependent on the care and education of other people who are around you. Even like two years into your life. The only thing a kid can really do at that point is just let the people around them know what they're going to be obsessed with for the next three seconds. It's like it's their job or something. Anyway, a cliche in conversation we know is to talk about how something like a giraffe is, you know, it drops out of its mom's birth canal onto the dewy grass of the savanna and right away this thing can stand up and go off hunting for a tree to eat so it can feed itself. Wow. Well, you can't do anything like that as a human being. It's amazing. Point is, why do we not see this state of dependence we're born into as a more telling aspect of what is yet to come in a human life? Because the other almost universal occurrence in a life lived for a long enough time is that on the opposite side of life, when you're old and gray, this will also be a time where you have an asymmetrical dependence on the people around you. Not uncommonly at a level where you need near constant care. So this picture of the healthy, high functioning, common sense adult we expect ourselves to be is at best, for MacIntyre, a very narrow picture of a very temporary period in some adult lives. Care ethicists over the years have a name for this period in a person's life. If there are disabled people out there, then these are people who they call temporarily abled. And even within this very high functioning period of their healthiest years, MacIntyre would say, don't these people also live on something like a spectrum of disability themselves? Because people get sick, people get burnt out and can't function properly for a while, People break a leg slipping on A banana peel in their kitchen. What he's saying is that there's this so called clear distinction that many people live under when they live in the common sense view of what a person is. That there's somehow this sea of totally able bodied healthy people that don't need no help from anyone. And then there's this small subclass of disabled people that sadly are dependent upon those around them, but all of us are dependent upon the people around us. All of us at times are disabled. This isn't something to be ashamed of. To MacIntyre, this is a feature of what it is to be a human that is completely unavoidable. Even the CEO that supposedly has everything in their life together, they rely on countless other human beings every day to make their life even possible. And this myth of the self made or totally self sustaining person is something that causes a lot of people out there living today to again learn to hate pieces of themselves, to not ask for help when they need it, because it's my job to take care of it. To think that being dependent in any way, no matter how small, makes them a burden that someone else has to carry. But again, really pay close attention to what it's actually like to be a human. And McIntyre thinks he'll realize that the best way to describe us if you wanted to, is as dependent rational animals, title of this book we're talking about today in case you wanted to read it. The only way that CEO gets to go to work every day in a nice dry clean suit and present as someone that has everything lined up perfectly in their life is because of many years where he was completely vulnerable, in need, where certain people cared for him and gave him the tools to be able to become someone capable of functioning. The only way the surgeon can save other human lives with her hands is because somebody at some point in a long history of dependence taught her how to use her hands while caring for her. The point this illustrates for MacIntyre is that virtue is something that is massively incomplete when it's viewed simply through the more common sense picture of what a person is. See, morality through the more common sense logic mostly focuses on things like justice, courage, wisdom, temperance. You know, this class of virtues that help guide the actions of these people who are in the high functioning moment moments of their lives. But just as important and often ignored, MacIntyre thinks, are the virtues required to even get people to a place where they can use things like justice, courage, wisdom and temperance in the first place. Remember virtue in the tradition based view we talked about last time is about the formation of a person. And how about the virtues that are required for someone to show up every day for these people who are in need to face the total asymmetry of the whole thing, where you are giving in this scenario far more than you are receiving, sometimes for years, just for the sake of another person's development. One of his big points here in the book is that the common sense view of justice, you know, the Enlightenment liberal view of justice that dominates the way most people think about it, where everything needs to be an equal exchange, everything's fair, where there's contracts and everybody's supposed to get exactly what they're owed all the time. This is not enough for MacIntyre to account for the full range of relationships we need to make a society function well. Some of our relationships require a different virtue to be at the base of them for them to be able to work. And don't get him wrong. He's not saying these virtues are more important than the more common virtues we look at, just that in our modern cultures because of certain inputs people receive that we'll talk more about later. It's so easy to forget how foundational these other ones are to the whole operation we have going on. You couldn't have a society without justice, courage, wisdom and temperance over, okay. But you also could never have a society without the virtues of. And these are his big three terms he features in the book. Just generosity, beneficence, and misericordia. All of these belonging to what MacIntyre calls the virtues of acknowledged dependence. End quote. And that last one, Misericordia, is something lifted straight out of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. Let's do a little philosophy here and break down how he saw this virtue. In one of his most famous books, Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas defines mercy as heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us to succor him if we can. But Aquinas says simply having mercy for someone is not enough for this to be considered a virtue. Mercy can easily become something that comes from a place of unregulated passion, he says. So he thinks that mercy needs to be paired with careful reasoning that makes sure whatever mercy we hand out preserves the cause of justice as well. Now, why is he so worried about all this? Well, you can imagine someone that's on round number 15 of going through the court system because they beat somebody up again and decided to rob them. Well, the judge may want to have mercy for this person. In that moment, they may think they seem genuinely remorseful for what they did, but if the punishment doesn't correspond with a rational judgment about what will truly help this person or what is just, then the judge runs the risk of just being someone who's indulging themselves a bit too much. For Aquinas, Misericordia is going to be this blend between the consideration of the needs of others and the rational judgment required to do something that actually helps. MacIntyre then takes this definition and slightly adjusts it to fit the project of the book. He defines Misericordia as a charitable disposition to supply what a neighbor needs, obviously mediated by a strong rational and practical judgment. Now, this is just one example of these virtues that we often forget about when we're thinking of virtues that is nonetheless critical for a community of people to have, if they ever want to, to flourish and live together. And his point is, if you never considered this whole side to what virtue is, then MacIntyre thinks you will always be misunderstanding it at some level. That said, since we're talking about the formation of a person here and how virtue is always connected to it, seems like the right time to mention that this is also a book that's about the formation of rationality. What's the common sense assumption about our rationality that dominates the way most people think about it? Well, it's something to the effect of human beings are this special kind of animal that are born with the ability to use rationality and make sound judgments about things. An inborn rationality that in many ways is one of the key things that separates us from all the other animals out there. We are special as human beings. It's taught by a lot of people. But MacIntyre would want to call all this into question. No doubt we have a capacity to reason that is potentially different from other animals. But are we really born with a special ability to reason? Or is rational judgment a skill that is earned by people through years of hard work and is something that is only made possible by the caregivers and educators that spend those years doing the work, allowing for someone to feel stable enough to develop those skills. Consider the fact he would say that a kid that grows up in a completely messed up environment, their needs not getting met, that kid will likely grow up with a lot of trauma and be far worse at practical reasoning than a kid that grows up with more of a secure base. Consider that even adults, you know, the ones that don't sit around saying, I don't need help from no one, people that co act with others around them, people who accept help and apprenticeship when it's needed. These are almost always people that have a much more lucid, reasoned picture of their own decision making than people who are isolated. MacIntyre is going to give two big points here. The first one is he says, notice in these examples I just gave that that independence, ironically, is something that is born out of a state of dependence. I mean, you'd think you'd become more independent the more you're forced to be in a state of independence. Parent might think, son, I'm gonna need you to be good and strong, so I'm leaving you out here in the woods with nothing but a beaver pelt and a grapefruit. You find your way home if you know what's good for your brother. But the reality often is, because of the unique way that we mature as human beings, the. The child that's well cared for actually becomes more capable of judgment. Down the road, the person who accepts help is often more clear about their own limitations. So what this means is that for MacIntyre, dependence actually leads to a greater level of independence and the kind of rationality we need to live lives of real flourishing and then build communities that promote the same. This is not something that we are born with. It's something that we only develop while in a state of dependence for decades. And what follows from that for him is that from this angle, dependence isn't something unfortunate that we all eventually, sadly find ourselves in. In some way, states of dependence and independence become things that are co constitutive in a life. The combination between the two becoming a critical dance going on that's part of the kind of creature a human being is. See, the mistake is to hear this and think that this is somehow him saying, the more dependence, the better. In a person. That'd be about as dumb as saying that you should only be independent, or else you're a moral failure. The second big point he wants to make here is that rationality is a transformation of our animal life, not something that allows us to escape from it. Let me explain this one a bit more. Remember, if the common sense view is that our rationality is something that separates us from all the other animals out there, then that line of thinking is not too far from a set of assumptions that a lot of modern liberals operate from, where I am a mind essentially dualistically floating above my animal body, where my ability to reason allows me to transcend my animal nature and enter into some other, more abstract realm where all the real moral conversation is going on. But to MacIntyre, at best, this is along the lines of a narcissistic fantasy this person believes in. He spends multiple chapters in the book talking about dolphins and cats. The point being to show how we're not as different from these animals as we often think we are in the modern world. And then he underscores the fact that, look, we are embodied, vulnerable animals. We just are, right? That is a piece of what we are that yet again, we shouldn't deny or be ashamed of. And not only can we never forget that fact when trying to understand who we are, it really turns out to matter a lot when we're trying to think about morality and how human beings can best live among each other. Because practically every moral question we ask and try to answer, think about it, it comes prefigured by some vulnerability that comes from the limitations of our animal bodies. We can't think of this animal side of us as something that we've escaped from through reason. When 10 million people are hungry and in the middle of a famine, and then we use reason to decide what the correct moral response is to that situation. We aren't in that moment transcending our animal bodies and arriving at an answer to MacIntyre. We are transforming our animal needs into practical reason about the common good. So not denying this animal nature that ultimately lies at the bottom of our societies is going to become one of the most important things for understanding what some commentators call the very species specific way that MacIntyre diagnoses how our societies function. See, at bottom, this book is trying to build what's called a philosophical anthropology, if an after virtue. The claim is that morality is always rooted in the shared practices, communities and the social formation of character. Then this book is trying to understand what kind of creature could ever participate in those kinds of practices in the first place. What sort of communities are created by the dependent rational animals that we are? What species specific needs will those communities always have to be living in consideration of? These become very big questions for MacIntyre. And just so we don't got to interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today. Up first is NordVPN. NordVPN is a service that helps secure your connection by encrypting your Internet traffic, which then makes using the Internet more secure. Yes, this is the case with public Wi fi if you're out in a coffee shop using that. But it also helps protect private data like bank details, passwords. It even shields your Internet activity from monitoring by your Internet service provider or by hackers. Listen to what you get for just the price of a cup of coffee per month. With Threat Protection Pro, a feature of the service, NordVPN can scan files during download and block ads and malicious links. You can also switch your virtual location to access different shows or sporting events, anything that isn't available in your region. 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You download the Salie app, you choose a data plan for your destination, they have over 200 of them, and then you install the ESIM directly onto your phone. It's that simple. Saily works with any iOS or Android device that supports ESIM technology like this. Saily also offers global and regional plans for trips across multiple countries if that's what you want. They have 24.7chat support and not to mention security features that can help block malicious ads, protect your privacy, and reduce your mobile data usage altogether. To get an exclusive 15% discount on saily data plans, download the Saily app and use code Philo this at checkout. Or just go to saily.com philothis Again, download the Salie app and use code Philo this or just go to saily.com philothis and now back to the podcast. And if everything he said so far in this episode is true, then then a moral life starts to take on a very different shape than it does in the more common sense view of things. All of a sudden the basic unit of a moral life is not going to be the individual anymore, freely acting, but instead what Macintyre calls networks of giving and receiving end quote. He thinks this is a much more accurate way of describing what's going on in our communities. Now, when that becomes the premise that you're starting from, Obviously this leaves a ton of room for both types of virtue we've been talking about so far. But what it also does is it makes the needs of people reason enough for us to take action on something. Contrast this with the more enlightenment, liberal, common sense view of things, which always has to validate an action it takes by referencing something else, whether it's a contract, a person's rights, some moral rule that we've reasoned to and come up with. This is a very important change that goes on for MacIntyre. Like if someone's hungry in the process of starving in a community built around this Aristotelian Thomism, he's talking about the fact that person is hungry. The need alone is reason enough for someone to take action on it. But the modern instinct, he would say, is to see a person who's hungry and then to think, what moral reasoning justifies me doing something about this? Maybe I take a utilitarian line here, that the right thing for me to do is to give this person some food because it's ultimately not the greatest good for the greatest number. If we have a ton of people starving in the streets, the fact we need an external reason or a contract to make something right to do is not only a hallmark of many modern societies, but it's interesting. Don't individual people also adopt this assumption and then spend their lives thinking the reason they don't act on the stuff they know is the right thing to be doing is because they just haven't found a good enough reason yet to justify it. To MacIntyre, maybe the most clear example to illustrate how different these two sets of assumptions are is when it comes to parenting. First of all, when you wake up at 3 o' clock in the morning and your kid is wailing, crying in the other room because they're sick or something, is there any part of you in that moment that wonders, hold on, is it really fair that I'm doing so much for this kid right now and they're not doing anything back for me in return? When you console the kid, tell him it's gonna be alright, you go and make him chicken soup to make him feel better, are you doing that because you have a legal obligation and the cops will come and arrest you if you don't do it? No. To McIntyre, the reality is the type of relationship between Parent and child makes the urgent need of the child in that moment reason enough to get out of bed and care for them. You don't need a moral rule that makes it okay to do. There are certain relationships we occupy where it is assumed there will be an asymmetry in this network of giving and receiving. And the fact that there isn't perfect equality administered across the board for all the parties involved. This becomes less of a tragedy to deal with in this kind of relationship. And so too with children who grow up to be adults and take care of their elderly parents. And so too when entire communities are called upon to provide care to people who are genuinely in need. Another very interesting element of all this that can in some people devolve into something like a delusional fantasy is the way a lot of people see altruism. So again, just as a contrast, when there's this asymmetrical relationship going on and someone's showing up a lot for their kids or people in their community, what's a common sense way that people might view that? Well, very tempting to start thinking of yourself as a martyr for the cause. Look at all this sacrifice I'm making. I don't even think about myself anymore. My life is forfeit. So these other people may Otherwise Live. But MacIntyre would want to call this whole frame and into question too. Is it possible, he might ask, that this isn't actually you being a saint, sacrificing your life for these people, but that this is what human life sometimes looks like? Inevitably, when you live in one of these networks of giving and receiving, that you have the kind of relationship with your child, for example, but replace this with many other relationships in your life where that person's well being is attached to your well being in ways that cannot be separated. Would you be just feeling great every day about your individual status if this person needed genuine help and then their needs and education were just not getting met wearing diapers when they're 10 years old? Would you feel great every day if that were the case? Or would that be intrinsically connected to your own well being? Again, the idea that you're this isolated individual and that what morality is to you is just deciding how much of your life you're going to give over to this other life over there? That other life is a piece of your life for MacIntyre. So the question becomes, is this really some heroic sacrifice you're making or is working towards the well being of certain others, ultimately you just working towards your own well being? Again, to MacIntyre we are tied together in these networks of giving and receiving in ways that turn us away from a more egocentric view of our own identity. Now, once we get more comfortable seeing our moral life through the lens of these networks, he thinks, a lot of things start to change about how you see the world, including the very idea of success altogether. Again, what's the more common sense view of success that a lot of people believe in? Well, I'm an individual, I work hard, got a nice house, I attract a partner of equal or better social status. I'm going on a trip to Spain next week to do the running of the bulls. Hope I don't get gored in the process. But what Macintyre would say is that, sure, these are goods at an individual level that our cultures often place a lot of value on, but consider the fact that the best human goods we can ever have access to are goods that are only possible when other people experience those goods along with you. Once again, people in these networks of giving and receiving We're a part of Friendship is a very basic example of this point. It also works well as an example because it only involves two people. But to help make his point, coming from this Aristotelian Thomistic perspective, a couple important details that can help us here when it comes to how Aristotle saw friendship and wrote about it. In his work, Aristotle talks about three different forms that friendship can take. There's friendships of utility, where you're friends as long as there's some benefit between the two of you that you're both receiving. There's friendships built around pleasure, where you're friends only for as long as the fun lasts. And then there's the highest form of friendship, he thinks, where two people wish for the other one's well being simply for the sake of the other person. Meaning again, this isn't about some benefit I'm getting in this kind of friendship. A huge part of why we're even friends in the first place is because I care about you flourishing in your life. So to Aristotle, when we do the things that friends often do together, when we share a common space, when we're around each other and a common language, when we have inside jokes, when we share our own practical reasoning about life for the sake of benefiting the other person, what this will mean for Aristotle and his work is that friendship becomes kind of like a live action test of character. In a way, do you have friendships because they serve some transactional benefit to you? Or do you have friendships because they are genuinely ordered towards the good of the friend and toward a shared life together shaped by virtue. Now, to connect this to the point about success he's making, I think a lot of people would agree that part of any successful life is having real quality friendships that make living on the planet a whole lot better. And a MacIntyre friendship is an example of a good that's available to us that, that is impossible to have unless if someone else is experiencing that good too. This is just one of those cases where two people can do more together than they ever could do on their own. But there are many other examples of these goods that are impossible without other people. And he thinks these are some of the best things that are available to us as human beings. For example, what's the value of having a good school that provides a real education? What's the value of having a neighborhood full of people you can trust, a hospital you can rely on if you get sick? His point is that none of these are things that any one person can create on their own. But if you lived in a world where you didn't have any of these things, it wouldn't matter if you had all the possessions and achievements in the world, it's very likely your life would become miserable. On the other hand, though, if you were in a community that didn't have a ton of economic opportunity for you, but you had truly good friends and all these common goods that people come together to make possible, it's very likely you'd feel great about your life in that place. So this raises a question for MacIntyre of what really constitutes success. Is it just individually having a ton of accomplishments and stuff? Or does any kind of success that lasts require this collaboration with other people towards the common good, where we can just do far greater things together than we can on our own? Now, to expand on this point, maybe one of the best common goods a person can ever hope for. MacIntyre thinks is is a well functioning, healthy political community. It really is one of the most important common goods we can have because it's the common good where people collectively decide things about all the other common goods they want to have. What's the normal way that people typically think about politics in the modern world? Well, politics is mostly about mediating disputes between isolated people who each have their own values. And then it's about making sure that nobody's interest gets trampled on too badly, but by any other person's interests. But again, under the moral tradition MacIntyre is making his argument from. In this book, politics is something that starts to resemble the Friendship we just talked about from the work of Aristotle, see, from the logic of this whole way of life, politics is always something that presupposes this picture of what a human being is that we've been talking about this whole episode. We are dependent, rational animals. So from that set of assumptions, politics becomes something where people, we're bound together into these networks of giving and receiving, then go on to deliberate together and try to create a shared life within a community ordered to the good. His point is that shared orientation towards the good. It's really important for politics because without it, it has no real direction. And it starts becoming something we see in a lot of modern encyclopedic cultures where it's reduced to just administration, you know, the settling of disputes between competing private interests. But to MacIntyre, obviously, communities of human beings living together are just far more than that. He makes one final point that can help us judge a society and determine whether it's really taking into account the full range of what a human being is. He says he should judge a society not based on the quality of life for its strongest members, but instead look at whether the dependents in that society are able to function and live as citizens as well. Classic way in the modern world people like to judge a society is to talk about something like the gdp. Look at the stock market. They'll say the line is going up. This must be the ultimate indicator that human beings are doing well in that society. Maybe they look at tech innovation as a marker of this. Maybe they look for the ultimate success stories a culture has produced and then highlight those as what's possible. To MacIntyre, these things obviously matter. It's just, in his eyes, they're not the best way to test the moral tradition of a society and how well it answers to what human beings really need. I mean, you can easily have a country that's succeeding in the economic space, but then ignores and humiliates certain people in a way that just denies the reality of the dependent, rational animals that we are. A society shouldn't just work for the people in that temporary stage of their life or their high functioning. Consider the fact he says at one point, and I'm paraphrasing here for the sake of a metaphor, but he says a person in a wheelchair is far more disabled when a building they're trying to get into only has stairs to get into it. His point is that what we call disability is relative to the norms of the communities that we build. Building a world, then that factors in for more of the full range of possible human experience that magically makes what we now call disabled people, you know, so unfortunate that they can't take care of themselves. With a slight design shift, this disabled human can become just another fellow person who can exist as a full member of the community. And that, to MacIntyre, is the far more accurate measure of a moral tradition than just whether you can point to certain individuals who have gotten rich. Now, to return back to the beginning of all this, if you see any ounce of legitimacy to this picture of the human being that Alasdair MacIntyre has presented in this book, then the relevant question starts to become how do we ever forget about this entire other side of what it is to be a person? And the answer is something he briefly touches on here, and it's something he'll go into far greater detail in, in his later work. But we forget all this stuff, he says, because we are trained by our education and by our institutions to view human life through the logic of bureaucracy and markets. From the time we are babies, we train people to think in terms of output and efficiency, which aren't in themselves bad. To MacIntyre, it's that when these things become the replacement for how we think of the moral worth of a person, then of course, children, the disabled, the sick, of course, these are people that get swept under the rug. In the process, their existence becomes a drain on our efficiency levels. These people need care at a level that they can't possibly pay back to anyone at a good exchange rate. See, the logic of markets and bureaucracy is always based on calculation like this. But how many of the real relationships we find ourselves in, if you calculated them based on this egalitarian obsession with equality and totally fair exchange, it just misses the whole point. He thinks to McIntyre, he. He's not an enemy of the economy, right? Markets exist, and that is not a problem to him. The problem is that when we're living in a society that claims it doesn't have a fixed moral view of what human beings are? For the encyclopedic viewpoint, markets become the thing we use to determine how useful a person is. And then once that happens, people who are dependent start to be thought of by other people as just burdens that the rest of us have to carry. And when these are the messages that you receive day after day from every institution we have, it becomes very easy to buy into the story and forget about the more full picture of what a human life is actually like. If you are a fan of individual freedom and independence in this world, the networks of giving and receiving like we've been talking about are the real locations where freedom and independence are built for individuals. And this picture he paints of us as dependent, rational animals will become very important for all the points he wants to make in the last couple books he wrote where he digs into the specific institutions of our world today and how they sabotage our ability to have a unified intellectual tradition. Which, by the way, I would love to cover and keep filling in the color scheme of all this that he's writing about. If you as a listener would like to hear about it, let me know if that's something you're interested in. Comments section Wherever you listen is probably a good idea, but if you live more close by locally, just smoke signals on the horizon also work. I can read those patreon.com philosophize this I want to give a huge thanks to the over 200 comments on the post I just posted last week asking what you guys want more of on Patreon. Just incredible information for me to have as your philosophical Sherpa. I'm always trying to do this in your image. Truly. Thank you for taking the time. Anybody that sounded off and told me what you wanted once again could never do this without you. As always though, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.